TL;DR: Anthropomorphic planes aren't humanoid (due to their non-human faces) but aren't allowed under anthro either (because they aren't animals). That's a problem (to my pragmatism).

With the summary out of the way, should we make a new tag for things that are clearly based on something non-human and have then been given human features? Or would it be better to slightly redefine anthro to mean anything that has been given human features?

I don't think changing humanoid is a good idea, as that fits pretty much perfectly a niche of human that has been slightly altered, so that should stay as is.

The reason why we added the humanoid tag in the first place was to separate non-furry content from furry, for blacklisting and such. Re-adding them into anthro seems counterproductive.

The faces have never been the primary factor in tagging anthro/humanoid. The main focus has been on whether something human-like is furry or not. Changing that would mean revamping the whole system, all the way down to not_furry.

As for the human-shaped airplanes, we have the aircraft_humanoid tag specifically for those.

NotMeNotYou said:
I don't think changing humanoid is a good idea, as that fits pretty much perfectly a niche of human that has been slightly altered, so that should stay as is.

It has included those from the start, though.
Creatures such as cow-headed minotaurs, headless humanoids like dullahan, aliens such as yautja, and even object heads (though those were rare before Cuphead) have been tagged as humanoid from the beginning.

I suppose it's also worth mentioning that anthro is already the second-biggest tag on the site. Adding everything anthropomorphic into it would mean that it'd apply to nearly every post on the site, which is hardly useful.

the "humanoid" planes tend to have body and face structure that resembles far more an anthro dragon/dolphin/shark etc with plane traits rather than humanoid with plane traits. it seems really weird for me that they get tagged as humanoid when their body and face structure is not humanoid

Eggplant said:
it seems really weird for me that they get tagged as humanoid when their body and face structure is not humanoid

In most cases, the only non-human feature is the face. And tagging them as anthro based on that seems off, considering that animal_head is a humanoid subtag.

The ones that are clearly based on birds and such should of course go in anthro instead of humanoid, but in that case they should not be tagged as not_furry.

Siral_Exan said:
Someone had previously said that aeromorph was used in this situation, but I don't know how useful it is...

Not very useful, considering that it was aliased away nearly three years ago, in one of the revamps. Wasn't worth keeping because it got tagged for any kind of living aircraft, ranging from human-shaped to aircraft-shaped.

The living airplanes with humanoid figures are clearly anthropomorphized.

The real question: Is Thomas the Tank Engine a feral?

Technically they've always been anthro. Aesthetically and anatomically they have more in common with 'furry' characters than not. Also it leads to situations like post #547175 being tagged as 'humanoid' and similar posts having neither 'humanoid' or 'anthro' tags.

Lance_Armstrong said:
The real question: Is Thomas the Tank Engine a feral?

I'm not sure if this comment completely serious, but this was what I was kind of wondering as well.

Currently characters like this don't fit anywhere inside the five standard form tags. Really, the main problem is if they were considered feral than posts with these characters and characters of other forms would be tagged with X_on_feral which implies bestiality, which I don't think really applies.

Edit: ninja'd by darryus on a couple of these

I have a feeling I'm going to leave this topic with a lot more questions than I started with.

Genjar said:
In most cases, the only non-human feature is the face. And tagging them as anthro based on that seems off, considering that animal_head is a humanoid subtag.

I remember making a joke about feral_aircraft years ago, but now I find it highly amusing that not only is it a valid tag, it's probably the most appropriate wording for the tag describing that body shape.

But there's a whole other can of worms beyond just aircraft
post #31984
these are pretty clearly feral bananas, but is this this a feral sandwich?
The food creature tags aren't really an issue at the moment, there's only 11 pages of them so worse case you just have to flip through a few pages manually.

animate_inanimate on the other hand is fairly extensive. Due to many of them being hyper-stylized, it's difficult to tell anthro from humanoid unless you judge solely by the face.
Then you have Lance's trash bag avatar which is tagged humanoid despite having only two(admittedly large) human-like features.

Unrelated: does a human/anthro paired with a feral living_machine count as bestiality?

Ijerk said:
Unrelated: does a human/anthro paired with a feral living_machine count as bestiality?

I think it'd kinda depend on the situation? Ones that are stylized to resemble/act like feral animals (like what's pictured in post #36011, post #548620, and arguably post #708180) would probably fit in more cases than not. Ones that are less animal-like can fit into a grey area.

Lance_Armstrong said:
The living airplanes with humanoid figures are clearly anthropomorphized.

Yes, but the anthro tag has always been specifically for 'anthropomorphic animals', aka 'furries'. Not for anthros in general. Just like feral has been for animals only.

Those two are the core tags of the site, since this is a furry site and the users need to be able to search specifically for furry content.

We already had to split off non-furries from anthro a few years ago, because pretty much everyone was complaining about it getting cluttered with non-furry. And that's why those were moved into tags such as animate_inanimate and aircraft_humanoid. Let's not fuck it up again by tossing everything back into anthro.

darryus said:
Currently characters like this don't fit anywhere inside the five standard form tags.

This is true. When the categories were made, some of the rarer stuff got excluded from the main five. Among other reasons, this was done because having more categories would've caused problems with the tag search limit. With five, you can still search for something and exclude the categories you don't want to see.

And we couldn't think of any category that'd cover the 'everything else' that doesn't fit in the main five, such as non-anthropomorphic plants and living objects, goo-blobs, penis creatures, etc.

Really, the main problem is if they were considered feral than posts with these characters and characters of other forms would be tagged with X_on_feral which implies bestiality, which I don't think really applies.

Basically, the main concern is that pretty much nobody wants to see stuff like thomas_the_tank_engine, rotom, or a sandwich when they search for feral or bestiality.

How about a tag like “other_anthro” or something like that for those sorts of things.

BlackLicorice said:
How about a tag like “other_anthro” or something like that for those sorts of things.

Good concept, but dunno about the name. 'Anthro' is currently used synonymously for 'furry' everywhere in the wiki, so much of it would need to be rewritten if we add any *_anthro tags that are for things that aren't furry.

One option to completely revamp the whole thing would be to name the current anthro tag to something like anthro_animal, then add tags for anthro_object, anthro_vehicle, anthro_plant, etc. But again, this would require massive reorganization, rewriting the wiki, and figuring out what to do with all the related tags.

planethro... jethro

I'll defer to Genjar. It seems we should keep it as aircraft_humanoid for now.

Anthro isn't "Animal with human body," it's "Given human traits." Here, we use it to speficially refer to "Given a humanoid body," but what reason is there to apply that to animals only? If you don't want not_furry anthro, then blacklist or exclude not_furry.

Furrin_Gok said:
Anthro isn't "Animal with human body," it's "Given human traits." Here, we use it to speficially refer to "Given a humanoid body,"

It's been used as a short for 'anthropomorphic animal' for as long as I remember. The only form tags that existed originally were anthro (for anthro animals) and non-anthro (which was, confusingly, for feral animals). No other form tags existed back then, because non-furry content was rare and simply tagged as not_furry.

but what reason is there to apply that to animals only? If you don't want not_furry anthro, then blacklist or exclude not_furry.

Like I already said, if you make anthro that broad, it can be applied to nearly every post on the site. Tags such as anthro_on_anthro would include everything from furries to anthropomorphized shyguys and almost-human MLP characters. Which would make it worthless for searches.

The whole system is built on the basis that furry tags are separate from non_furry, because that makes categorizing them far simpler. Get them mixed up, and we'd need to start adding dumb tags such as furry_only just to keep things searchable.

And -not_furry wouldn't help, even if it were tagged consistently. Because any post that features any furry character, even on the background, doesn't get that tag. It wouldn't help differentiate between, let's say, anthro wolf x anthro wolf and anthro wolf x cuphead. Whereas tagging the latter as humanoid_on_anthro does the job.

Genjar said:
It's been used as a short for 'anthropomorphic animal' for as long as I remember. The only form tags that existed originally were anthro (for anthro animals) and non-anthro (which was, confusingly, for feral animals). No other form tags existed back then, because non-furry content was rare and simply tagged as not_furry.

What a dumb system. We clearly host things that are not furry, we need to make sure the system works for it.

Like I already said, if you make anthro that broad, it can be applied to nearly every post on the site. Tags such as anthro_on_anthro would include everything from furries to anthropomorphized shyguys and almost-human MLP characters. Which would make it worthless for searches.

That exageration doesn't even make sense. If you look at it as some sort of graph, you'd have humans and humanoids at top, then anthro animals and anthro machines in the middle, then feral animals and dire machines at the bottom. The broadening would be "horizontal" by this description, not vertical.

The whole system is built on the basis that furry tags are separate from non_furry, because that makes categorizing them far simpler. Get them mixed up, and we'd need to start adding dumb tags such as furry_only just to keep things searchable.

So? That doesn't sound like a bad thing. To me, whether a character is an anthro aircraft, anthro car, or anthro wolf makes zero difference.

Furrin_Gok said:
That exageration doesn't even make sense.

How does it not make sense, and how is it an exaggeration?

If you turn this post #386121 into this post #321693...
...then it has been 'given a humanoid body'. Why would it not count as 'anthro' if 'anthro' is changed to include 'anything anthropomorphic'?

Genjar said:
How does it not make sense, and how is it an exaggeration?

If you turn this post #386121 into this post #321693...
...then it has been 'given a humanoid body'. Why would it not count as 'anthro' if 'anthro' is changed to include 'anything anthropomorphic'?

I said body, not face. That second one is obviously human-faced and thus humanoid.

Furrin_Gok said:
I said body, not face. That second one is obviously human-faced and thus humanoid.

As per the op, this thread about whether anthro should be redefined so that it includes anything that has been given human features. That pony has been given human features. Quite a lot of them, actually. It is unarguably anthropomorphized.

So why would it not fall in that definition of anthro? Because it has 'a human face'? Anthropomorphic means giving human traits to non-humans, so it makes no sense that it'd stop being anthro when it starts to look more human.

I could go into detail as to why trying to set some arbitrary cut-off point for what is 'anthro enough' won't work, and it'd involve posts such as post #1683 and post #58100 as examples. But for now I'm just going to say that sticking to the current 'is it furry or not' standard is far easier than trying to work out something else.

Genjar said:
As per the op, this thread about whether anthro should be redefined so that it includes anything that has been given human features. That pony has been given human features. Quite a lot of them, actually. It is unarguably anthropomorphized.

So why would it not fall in that definition of anthro? Because it has 'a human face'? Anthropomorphic means giving human traits to non-humans, so it makes no sense that it'd stop being anthro when it starts to look more human.

I could go into detail as to why trying to set some arbitrary cut-off point for what is 'anthro enough', and why trying to define it by the face doesn't work (it'd involve posts such as post #1683 and post #58100 as examples), but for now I'm just going to say that sticking to the current 'is it furry or not' standard is far simpler than trying to work out something else.

Sticking to the current system, that is proven to be broken, is bad. Obviously there's a point where things are too human, but the typical aeromorph is nowhere near that point. If you can't include something like that anywhere on the grid that is supposed to contain it, then you need to redefine the grid to fit it.

...And yeah, regarding those examples, it's hard to really define things myself but that first one is definitely anthro, I agree. The whole "human with animal head" of the second one is another debate we've had while we were discussing the living aircraft thing.

Furrin_Gok said:
Sticking to the current system, that is proven to be broken, is bad. Obviously there's a point where things are too human, but the typical aeromorph is nowhere near that point. If you can't include something like that anywhere on the grid that is supposed to contain it, then you need to redefine the grid to fit it.

Humanoid (subtag aircraft_humanoid) + living_aircraft + not_furry for the ones that are mostly human (minimal or no animal features, mostly human body).

Anthro + living_aircraft for the ones that look like anthro animals.

And feral + living_aircraft for the rare ones that look like feral animals.

How are those not on the grid? There's some posts in aircraft_humanoid that are in the wrong place (for instance, post #782497 is anthro, not humanoid), but that's just a matter of some clean-up.

I agree with Genjar. Broadening the definition of anthro at this point would make the tag meaningless. Almost every character on the site has some amount of anthropomorphism. There's no perfect solution here but I think living machines should be tagged as either humanoid or just not. (And of course anthro/feral if they resemble animals.)

Lance_Armstrong said:
The real question: Is Thomas the Tank Engine a feral?

I think Thomas the Tank Engine is not feral. That is a surprisingly good question, and also something I never thought I'd write.

Furrin_Gok said:
If you don't want not_furry anthro, then blacklist or exclude not_furry.

not_furry isn't tagged anywhere near well enough for that to work.

Would it be appropriate to have a semi-humanoid tag to cover cases where the precise body form is borderline or subjective?
We already have semi-feral. It wouldn't replace an existing tag, just augment it.

Genjar said:
Humanoid (subtag aircraft_humanoid) + living_aircraft + not_furry for the ones that are mostly human (minimal or no animal features, mostly human body).

Anthro + living_aircraft for the ones that look like anthro animals.

And feral + living_aircraft for the rare ones that look like feral animals.

How are those not on the grid? There's some posts in aircraft_humanoid that are in the wrong place (for instance, post #782497 is anthro, not humanoid), but that's just a matter of some clean-up.

post #1469989 post #1571657
What exactly makes the aircraft here humanoid, when it's got the same shape as the fox? If the fox gets tagged as anthro for being too non-human, then so too should the aircraft.
post #1514156 post #1338219
Conversely, these are humanoid. If we're tagging the obviously anthro aircraft as humanoid (which we are doing), we suddenly can't find the actually humanoid aircraft, outside of searching for a franchise that specifically contains humanoid aircraft such as transformers (post #1137142)

Furrin_Gok said:
post #1469989 post #1571657
What exactly makes the aircraft here humanoid, when it's got the same shape as the fox? If the fox gets tagged as anthro for being too non-human, then so too should the aircraft.

Is it closer to a human, or closer to a furry?
I don't see what's even remotely furry about the left one. There's no animal features, just an metallic human body and an aircraft head.

There's some posts in aircraft_humanoid that might fit better in anthro (the ones with tails, clawed feet, obviously shark-like head, etc), but that doesn't look like one of them. That's just a humanoid airplane.

Genjar said:
Is it closer to a human, or closer to a furry?
I don't see what's even remotely furry about the left one. There's no animal features, just an metallic human body and an aircraft head.

It doesn't look close to human whatsoever. Therefore, anthro. Further from human, not closer to animal. That's what the proposed change is for.

Genjar said:
Is it closer to a human, or closer to a furry?
I don't see what's even remotely furry about the left one. There's no animal features, just an metallic human body and an aircraft head.

There's some posts in aircraft_humanoid that might fit better in anthro (the ones with tails, clawed feet, obviously shark-like head, etc), but that doesn't look like one of them. That's just a humanoid airplane.

It absolutely looks like a typical furry character. It looks like a smooth sergal. It's the generic furry bodyplan, sylization, and aesthetic applied to a plane. In a line up of 'typical furries' and 'generic humanoids' it'd look significantly more out of place in the latter.

regsmutt said:
It absolutely looks like a typical furry character. It looks like a smooth sergal.

Well, I don't what to say about that. It looks like an airplane to me, or rather, an android with a plane-for-a-head. Not a sergal, or anything furry. The head shape is cylindrical and lacks any kind of bone structure, it's clearly based on a plane instead of anything organic.

Though it kind of reminds me of human caricatures that I've seen recently.