Making a mono-colored or heavily-color-themed background is a common thing in art. It is not universally achieved by the lazy method of using a flat tone or wash/gradient as a background. Either this set of implications is incredibly obtuse, or the meaning of plain_background is somehow supposed to be loose enough to include simple_background and detailed_background within itself.

[EDIT]
... Sorry, wrong category at first. I've only posted in the forums like twice since categories were implemented (and I think they still do nothing?), so I forgot they existed.

Using flat tone and gradient backgrounds looks lazy? I didn't realise people thought of it that way. I only use them to avoid posting work with no background at all. I'll have to start practicing doing some actual background art from now on. :)

DragonFox69 said:
Using flat tone and gradient backgrounds looks lazy? I didn't realise people thought of it that way. I only use them to avoid posting work with no background at all. I'll have to start practicing doing some actual background art from now on. :)

Depends on the picture. Not every picture looks better with a detailed background. There's artistic reasons for both.

Art commentary aside, the [color]_background tags all implicating plain_background has been tag mess for awhile now. Simple_background, pattern_background, abstract_background and gradient_background can all have one dominant color throughout most of the background (and therefore make sense to tag the [color]_background) but still be inappropriate for the plain_background tag.

Those implications landed the plain_background tag onto an enormous amount of images that do not have plain backgrounds, and actually may already have other more appropriate background tags on them. The implication makes it impossible to correct that. And it also made it impossible to use "plain_background" as intended, functionally turning it into far less useful tag. I'd love to see those implications undone so that plain_background can actually be useful again when it comes to searching.

Yep, it's a mess; and not one that can be easily fixed.

Even rainbow_background is implicated to plain_background, despite being anything but plain. Fixing those implications would be a good start.

But there's an another problem: various other imageboards use those tags in different ways. For instance, Danbooru uses simple_background in the same way as we use plain_background. So whenever anyone copies images and tags over from there, it gets mistagged..

acct0283476 said:
Image-describing colors are now invalid tags

No, we still have *_theme tags.

Genjar said:
Even rainbow_background is implicated to plain_background, despite being anything but plain.

According to the background wiki, plain_background is not simply defined as a background that is plain. What separates a plain_background from a detailed_background is the definition of a location.