Topic: What does loli/shota mean to you?

Posted under Tag/Wiki Projects and Questions

I'm looking to create a general tag to use for sexualized underaged characters (sexualized_minor). To help the transition to using it, both loli and shota should imply it.

The wiki for both tags are currently written as follows:

A (Loli/Shota) is an underaged (female/male) character. This phrase is used to refer to humans and cubs alike.

[...]

Note: This should only be tagged for explicit and sexually suggestive content.

However, the paragraph between them seems to say something slightly different, referring to a style instead of an age.

Admittedly, not every loli will actually be underage, as the phrase is also used to describe a certain youthful appearance, but the majority are, or should be underaged.

To me, this implies that all underaged male/female characters portrayed sexually should be tagged shota/loli respectively. However, I think some people might see them differently, and that they could only apply to human/anthro characters, a certain style of character, or only Japanese art.

Note that the second part of the first quote currently excludes tagging loli/shota based on artistic style alone, unless it also happens to be explicit or suggestive.

Do you agree? Would you like to have every underaged character (feral/anthro cubs and human children) portrayed sexually to use these tags? Or do you have some other idea of what loli/shota should mean? Maybe you think the sexual/explicit rule should be lifted from the tags?

Also as a side note, do you think sexualized_minor is a good tag idea? It would be a single tag to allow blacklisting of content that is illegal in a number of countries. Would people remember to use it (it would only have to be written explicitly if loli/shota were not tagged)? Is just blacklisting "young rating:e" instead good enough?

Please note that loli and shota are both short for (and aliased from) lolicon and shotacon, which roughly mean "little girl love" and "little boy love". It is different from the "lolita" which refers to either a style or young girls.

Updated by Roxasthedude

i hate loli/shota because they count as child porn in the UK and can subsequently get someone arrested

Updated by anonymous

Ryuzaki_Izawa said:
i hate loli/shota because they count as child porn in the UK and can subsequently get someone arrested

wouldn't it make more sense to hate the british porn laws instead of the porn?

Updated by anonymous

Munkelzahn said:
wouldn't it make more sense to hate the british porn laws instead of the porn?

well no because the porn looks horrible anyway

Updated by anonymous

Please discuss your taste in porn and law elsewhere. I'm trying to get opinions about tagging.

Updated by anonymous

I think it would be better if we used something other than young for the main tag. Depending on how old the tagger is and their perception, "young" could easily mean 25.

cub is better but it has it's own baggage, namely it doesn't get tagged for humans/humanoids for the most part (whether it should or not is another story). Oh, and it gets tagged for safe posts, which is kind of silly considering the tag's main purpsoe.

underaged

or sexualized_minor would definitely be better choices here.

Updated by anonymous

Context for anyone wondering about the origin of these ideas, I'm continuing a discussion that started in forum #168268 that never went anywhere.

I actually think the tagging for "young" is pretty good, and with the possibility to blacklist all non-safe pictures tagged as young, I'm kind of thinking sexualized_minor wouldn't really be that beneficial after all. Where it's a bit iffy is teenager extending to 19, but implying young which is stated to be for underaged characters. I had the idea that people would have really complicated blacklists to create to block this stuff when I saw the idea originally suggested, but it doesn't seem that way after all.

Worst case is there's a few dozen pictures mistakenly tagged as young, while it could take years to get decent coverage of a newly added tag.

The point of this topic though was primarily to get an idea of what people think about loli/shota tags. Should they be exclusive for anime-style characters or japanese artwork, or given the context of the site and the instructions on the wiki, refer to all underage characters.

I've been tagging most underage artwork I see (okay, upload) with loli/shota, mostly with the idea that the sexualized_minor tag might be added, but I don't really know what people expect when searching these tags.

Updated by anonymous

Personally I always saw it/used it in the same light as "cub" when referring to underage characters, whether they're sexualized or not. But usually leaning more towards the non sexual route, as I initially discovered the phrase when it was being used solely to label artwork underage males and females in a general sense, and not necessarily porn, but that's just me.

Updated by anonymous

SirBrownBear said:
Personally I always saw it/used it in the same light as "cub" when referring to underage characters, whether they're sexualized or not. But usually leaning more towards the non sexual route.

This is a reasonable view too, I'm not sure why it has a sexual-only clause. I'm starting to lean towards it being used for young, heavily anthropomorphic furry characters and humanoids, regardless of sexual content, and leave it up to the rating to decide if it's sexual or not.

Edit: Found this topic from when the loli/shota tags were re-added: forum #100787 - after being removed years ago as seen in forum #38123 (a reasonably justified decision). It doesn't quite specify what exactly "by hentai standards" is, or how anthropomorphised a cub should be to qualify, but it does make the sexual-only intention pretty clear, as well as not mentioning any Japanese-like style requirements.

Updated by anonymous

fox_whisper85 said:
I never liked it, I never will, I hate the style, I hate what it can depict. And I hate the fact people try to defend it.

The point of the thread isn't whether you like it or not, but alright, someone else already did that, I guess we're doing "this".

Same could be said for countless other themes in art, does that mean none of them deserve to "exist"? Because "you" happen to not like it? So what? Plenty of people loath macro and SFM "art", yet you defend it, so why should people not be able to defend underage art? Because "it's wrong" and "laws prevent it in places"? News flash, there are laws against rape, murder, bigotry, and many other themes, but in the realm of art all of those are free game. Those "laws" apply to, and are meant for actual humans, just because ass backwards governments decide to police the internet and people's personal interests, trying to dictate what they can and can't do doesn't mean they're justified.

"Actual child porn is bad" No kidding it's bad, it's horrible. But hey, so's murder, sexualized murder none the less, so's rape, but there's a plethora of that all over the place, and people rarely lift a finger to say otherwise, why? BECAUSE THEY'RE DRAWINGS. Scratches of graphite/wax on a paper, strokes of paint on an paper, or lines of pixels on the screen, nothing more, nothing less. So please, someone tell me what exactly is the difference when said lines happen to show one taboo act over another?

If people are gonna stand on a soapbox and start comparing themes in art to real life, then you better nut up and go all the way, and not just solely focus on a subject "you" in particular happen to not like out of the bunch.

Updated by anonymous

SirBrownBear said:

+1

If people didn't consistently confuse their personal preferences for moral imperatives, the world would be so different I can hardly imagine it.

Many people seem to have the intuition that depicting things that are bad to do IRL, in art, is harmful. But the reality seems to be far more uncertain than that (for example, the correlation of increasing amounts of porn with decreasing frequency of sex crimes).

I feel uncomfortable with seeing some of these topics depicted, but that doesn't actually make the depiction a bad thing. Determining what is really destructive/harmful is hard, and relying on personal feelings to judge is simply a common way to fail at it. Judging fiction as if it were reality, or vice versa, is another way to fail at it.

Updated by anonymous

i would alias young (and teenager) to child. Sexualized minor is way too general and wouldn't fix anything. Loli/shota is supposed to be a specific tag for japanese art IMO

also every time I see someone knocking it because it involves kids makes me lol. The internet makes fun of furries in that some people think furry porn incites people to fuck animals and furries make fun of cub porn because.....you get the idea.

we could also use a 'human_child' tag, too

Updated by anonymous

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