Now that there is a common serpentine tag that covers the common feature between naga and lamia, I figured this would be a good time to properly codify the distinction between the two subtags. The wiki pages for naga and lamia did a pretty good job at drawing an arbitrary distinction between the two at the time I wrote them, but get too tangled in the whole etymological distinction instead of actually describing what the tags mean.

I was planning to rewrite them to try to get those specific points across more clearly (it's nice to have 7 years of new tag vocabulary to work with):

• "naga" and "lamia" are words with a whole bunch of common meanings, most of them very far removed from their etymology. The words mean very little on their own and the split on e6 is arbitrary.
• naga designates a serpentine snake/scalie.
• lamia designates a split_form serpentine.
• In all cases, the species should be tagged based on the upper body.

These are pretty much the same ideas the current page tries to convey (and and is pretty much what I was going for at the time). The part I find problematic is whether naga should be reserved for snakes alone, or if something like a serpentine dragon should fall under that tag. Both interpretations can be seen in the wild:

Tagged as lamia:
post #1894258 post #2129885 post #1383876

Tagged as naga:
post #1986542 post #1448959 post #696673

I'd personally veer more towards including scalies in the definition, since the split-half nature of lamias tends to be really obvious with pretty much any non-scalie species, but I wouldn't want to change the definiton without some input.

Thoughts?

As someone who's personally used to "naga" referring to full snakes, if I'm looking for nagas, I expect snakes. Not snakes with dragon upper bodies. That's not to say that I disagree with having some sort of distinction for other types of reptile upper-half + snake lower half posts. I just feel like if we're going down that road, maybe they should have their own tag of some sort. That's my opinion, at least. Not sure how it really should be handled.

Edit Now That I have More Time: I don't see why, for dragons at least, it can't just use either naga dragon hybrid or simply serpentine dragon depending on how it's specifically done. But I really don't think naga should be changed to include ALL "scalies," because that tends to include anything from the likes of dragons and crocodilians, all the way to turtles and frogs. While turtle and frog naga/lamias likely wouldn't be that common... that's still far from what I'd be expecting when I search naga.

To which, the only thing I can think of to suggest is to make subtags for nagas to include other scalies, but I'm still not entirely sure if that's overly necessary. Maybe for dragons, don't know about any others.

I can see the rationale for both sides, but I suppose you make a good point, and this would avoid changing the actual definition the tags have been stated to have for the past couple of years.

Something like this, then?

I'm against that change. 'Naga' and 'lamia' are currently in clearly different base categories.
'Lamia' is close to animal humanoid (except for rare lamias that don't have human upper bodies), while 'naga' is clearly close to anthro (minus legs). Moving posts such as post #1986542 into lamia would muddle things too much.

I think we just need some root tag for naga/lamia-like creatures. Serpentoid has been suggested, but it'd be nice if we could include creatures such as primarina into the new tag. Those currently don't fit into existing body type tags.

I see what you're going for, but in my experience Lamia in both mythology and fiction aren't always part snake, although it is the most common in modern depictions. Human female upper body (tits up) is the only thing universal in the depictions I've seen. What I've come across range from "bestial" human female to female shapeshifter to this thing . In fact, my first encounter with Lamia was in AD&D, where they are lion-taurs with human upper bodies.

Usually when I think humanoid upper body (human or not) and serpentine lower body, I just think Naga. Part of that probably comes from the way Naga appear in Shin Megami Tensei . Also the Naga in Corruption of Champions fits that description as well.

Also I do like the idea of adding Serpentoid as a body-type tag.

genjar said:
I'm against that change. 'Naga' and 'lamia' are currently in clearly different base categories.
'Lamia' is close to animal humanoid (except for rare lamias that don't have human upper bodies), while 'naga' is clearly close to anthro (minus legs). Moving posts such as post #1986542 into lamia would muddle things too much.

I think we just need some root tag for naga/lamia-like creatures. Serpentoid has been suggested, but it'd be nice if we could include creatures such as primarina into the new tag. Those currently don't fit into existing body type tags.

To be honest, I don't think dragons (or other scalies) should be lumped into either lamia or naga unless they seem clearly defined as one or the other. Excuse my rough descriptions, but I always saw it like this:

• Human, humanoid, or non-snake anthro upper-half with no clear hybridization with the lower snake half:
• lamia split_form (+ whatever required tag for the upper-half's species)

• Snake anthro upper-half with feral snake lower-half:
• naga

• Non-snake anthro upper-half with hybridized snake lower-half:
• naga hybrid (+ relevant species for the hybrid)

Meaning something like, say, a crocodilian "naga" with croc attributes clearly hybridized into the lower snake half (such as the distinctive bony scutes on their backs), would still be naga hybrid. Not just naga.

Despite my horrible attempt at explaining my thoughts earlier, my problem was with other scalies being included inherently into naga without the hybrid tag. Obviously, with the exception of times where it's clearly a split_form instance, not hybrid (in which case it should probably be tagged lamia, not naga). post #1986542 is one I'd probably tag as a naga hybrid, due to the lack of a distinct split form, and also because of the tail tuft at the end (which would indicate, to me at least, that the tail is also eastern dragon).

So in all of my rambling explanations, I guess I'm just saying that I see the divide being based on whether or not it's split_form or hybrid. That said, new tags to place them in (besides serpentine, because it also includes normal feral snakes among other things) would be nice as well.

Would it be worth having any *_lamia tags? Specifically to differentiate the upper-half (between humanoid/anthro) which would still imply lamia? Kind of like how taurs have humanoid_taur. As far as instances like the above post, the only things I can think of is something along the lines of dragon_naga (with western/eastern or whatever else needing to be manually added on), or with the above mentioned "serpentoid": dragon_serpentoid. ("Serpentoid" second to follow the pattern of *_humanoid tags I generally see).

As far as Primarina goes... I'm not entirely sure how you could fit that in. But it is very late and thinking about all of this is frying my brain, so I'll leave the matter for now.

Apologies for my tired nonsense.

genjar said:
I'm against that change. 'Naga' and 'lamia' are currently in clearly different base categories.
'Lamia' is close to animal humanoid (except for rare lamias that don't have human upper bodies), while 'naga' is clearly close to anthro (minus legs). Moving posts such as post #1986542 into lamia would muddle things too much.

My previous post follows the same definitons as what the wiki pages have suggested for 7 years now, it's the status quo. The embedded draft merely rewords those pages to make the "naga really only means snakes" part clearer. My initial question is whether that should be changed to include other scalies. Also, lamias with non-human bodies aren't that rare.

genjar said:
I think we just need some root tag for naga/lamia-like creatures. Serpentoid has been suggested, but it'd be nice if we could include creatures such as primarina into the new tag. Those currently don't fit into existing body type tags.

Broadly speaking, primarina would qualify as a generic split-form (which is meant to encompass lamias, mermaids and most taurs).Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but I understood serpentine to be the sort of tag you're looking for by serpentoid, given the definition goes "anything with a snake-like (lower?) body".

nromrore said:
I see what you're going for, but in my experience Lamia in both mythology and fiction aren't always part snake, although it is the most common in modern depictions. Human female upper body (tits up) is the only thing universal in the depictions I've seen. What I've come across range from "bestial" human female to female shapeshifter to this thing . In fact, my first encounter with Lamia was in AD&D, where they are lion-taurs with human upper bodies.

Yeah, nagas in indian mythology don't fare much better in terms of having an appearance that's even the tinyest bit consistant across depictions (or even individuals).

nromrore said:
Usually when I think humanoid upper body (human or not) and serpentine lower body, I just think Naga. Part of that probably comes from the way Naga appear in Shin Megami Tensei . Also the Naga in Corruption of Champions fits that description as well.

That last one is actually the one that had me look up if there was actually any concensus on the distinction between naga and lamia. The concensus on the Fenoxo forums at the time was that they were kind of interchangeable (I hadn't even heard the word "lamia" before encountering it there), but when the character got released some people started being confused at the name and description not matching what they understood "naga" to mean. On e6, you just had anything with a snake tail getting tagged as either or both based on how the uploader felt that day and naga didn't even have a wiki page yet. "Lamia" ended up being the one with a human (and by extension any other anthro) top-half because it was the more popular tag of the two due to "Lamia" being pretty firmly established in the Monster Girl genre. As for Naga meaning "snake with arms", I just felt like the "all-snake" variant deserved its own tag.

Like I said, the split is super arbitrary because both those words have been used to describe so many different things. People just understand them to vaguely mean "snake-ish" thing to varying degrees based on if they first heard the word playing DnD, Monster Girl Quest or Corruption of Champions.

vulkalu said:

• Non-snake anthro upper-half with hybridized snake lower-half:
• naga hybrid (+ relevant species for the hybrid)

Meaning something like, say, a crocodilian "naga" with croc attributes clearly hybridized into the lower snake half (such as the distinctive bony scutes on their backs), would still be naga hybrid. Not just naga.

Despite my horrible attempt at explaining my thoughts earlier, my problem was with other scalies being included inherently into naga without the hybrid tag. Obviously, with the exception of times where it's clearly a split_form instance, not hybrid (in which case it should probably be tagged lamia, not naga). post #1986542 is one I'd probably tag as a naga hybrid, due to the lack of a distinct split form, and also because of the tail tuft at the end (which would indicate, to me at least, that the tail is also eastern dragon).

Using hybrid like this is certainly interesting, even though I'm sure some would argue that the tag has been so overloaded that tagging it alone would hardly be very helpful while searching.

vulkalu said:
Would it be worth having any *_lamia tags? Specifically to differentiate the upper-half (between humanoid/anthro) which would still imply lamia? Kind of like how taurs have humanoid_taur. As far as instances like the above post, the only things I can think of is something along the lines of dragon_naga (with western/eastern or whatever else needing to be manually added on), or with the above mentioned "serpentoid": dragon_serpentoid. ("Serpentoid" second to follow the pattern of *_humanoid tags I generally see).

A *_lamia tag group (and possibly *_naga for hybrids? I'm not so sure on that one, the more this goes on, the less I feel like overloading naga would be such a good idea) could be interesting. Given how ambiguous *_taur tags tend to be ("Does equine_taur mean the top half is equine or is it the bottom half?"), I'm usually so-so on these, but lamia pretty much cements the snake part (hopefully) to make it clear that the other part of the tag designates the species of the top half. I'm not arguing in favor of such a tag group, I'm just saying it could be an interesting addition.

Though I'm sure someone would then argue that naga would then need to be aliased to snake_lamia or something.

fifteen said:
Broadly speaking, primarina would qualify as a generic split-form (which is meant to encompass lamias, mermaids and most taurs).Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but I understood serpentine to be the sort of tag you're looking for by serpentoid, given the definition goes "anything with a snake-like (lower?) body".

Primarina honestly just looks like a seal / sea lion anthro with a merfolk-like setup, yeah.

And that depends on what serpentoid is meant to even mean. If it were in some way a useful subtag for serpentine, it could get use that way. Considering serpentine covers anything from feral snakes, to noodle-y eastern dragons, as well as lamias and nagas. But I don't want to assume what the full intentions would be, so I'll leave it at that.

fifteen said:
Using hybrid like this is certainly interesting, even though I'm sure some would argue that the tag has been so overloaded that tagging it alone would hardly be very helpful while searching.

Honestly, in my opinion, hybrid could probably do with some subtags, but I don't know how everyone feels about that sort of thing (and it isn't exactly this forum's subject, so).

fifteen said:
A *_lamia tag group (and possibly *_naga for hybrids? I'm not so sure on that one, the more this goes on, the less I feel like overloading naga would be such a good idea) could be interesting. Given how ambiguous *_taur tags tend to be ("Does equine_taur mean the top half is equine or is it the bottom half?"), I'm usually so-so on these, but lamia pretty much cements the snake part (hopefully) to make it clear that the other part of the tag designates the species of the top half. I'm not arguing in favor of such a tag group, I'm just saying it could be an interesting addition.

Though I'm sure someone would then argue that naga would then need to be aliased to snake_lamia or something.

I'm still not sure if there should be as many *_lamia tags as there are *_taur ones. But at the very least, a distinction between human/humanoid/anthro would probably be good, for people who want to blacklist/search one or the other. I don't know what would be best for that, though, I just figured I'd ask if it'd be worth it.

Yeah, *_taur tags confused me for a long while. My only problem with adding *_lamia tags like that is if it confuses people going between those and taurs. But if lamias got subtags, I'm not sure how else to handle the tags. I agree that *_lamia would probably be easier to pick up on though, given the commonality of having a snake lower half.

I wouldn't be surprised if naga got aliased with snake_lamia or vice versa. Although that makes me wonder, if snake_lamia became a thing, would naga simply be aliased away, or would it then be used to designate lamias that have matching top and bottom halves? (Which would make it easier to search compared to adding/negating split_form or hybrid.) That might be confusing after so long of it being used for one thing, but it'd still fit for the current use of being all-snake.

The only reason I say about having naga its own thing even if snake_lamia became a tag is due to situations like post #1986542 where it seems like the lower half is still eastern dragon, not just snake. But the top and bottom match, so it's not split_form. Or for the incredibly rare situation that someone might draw a legless lizard naga (both top and bottom being that of a legless lizard, not snake) that didn't just look like a lizard lamia.

But, again, I don't know what's for the best for a lot of this. I'm just mostly mentioning any ideas I have, good or bad. All I know is that I still want naga, in some form (even if aliased), to work still after all of this to search for essentially what it can now, and not too many extra things clogging it.

vulkalu said:
Primarina honestly just looks like a seal / sea lion anthro with a merfolk-like setup, yeah.

The lack of legs makes it problematic as an anthro. Though that's preferable to tagging Primarina as feral, since they're evidently based on sea lions -- but so anthropomorphized that they don't much resemble feral sea lions.

I do think that we need a body type tag category for creatures that have arms, but no legs. There's too much confusion about how those should currently be tagged.

And that depends on what serpentoid is meant to even mean. If it were in some way a useful subtag for serpentine, it could get use that way.

Serpentoid would be an umbrella tag (similar to taur) for any creature that has serpentine lower torso (no legs), and human/humanoid/anthro upper torso. Both lamia and naga would be in that category. The word isn't frequently used, but image searching for it does find some matches.

genjar said:
The lack of legs makes it problematic as an anthro. Though that's preferable to tagging Primarina as feral, since they're evidently based on sea lions -- but so anthropomorphized that they don't much resemble feral sea lions.

I do think that we need a body type tag category for creatures that have arms, but no legs. There's too much confusion about how those should currently be tagged.

Serpentoid would be an umbrella tag (similar to taur) for any creature that has serpentine lower torso (no legs), and human/humanoid/anthro upper torso. Both lamia and naga would be in that category. The word isn't frequently used, but image searching for it does find some matches.

Yeah, I didn't think Primarina would fit under feral or anthro. Like I said, looks like it has a merfolk-like setup, just with weird cartoony flipper-hands instead of proper arms and hands. If it were up to me, I'd probably just fit it under merfolk (or whatever merfolk would fit into), at least, where applicable per picture.

A form tag for those sorts of creatures would be nice though, yeah. Once you've put it that way, now it makes more sense to me why you brought up Primarina. Although, that makes me curious if things like snail "taurs" would count under that, since they don't really have legs either.

As far as serpentoid... I had a feeling, but I wasn't sure. My only problem with it (if it got used for more than just lamias and nagas), is that it sounds like it'd be used solely on snakes. Which is fine, if it were used solely on nagas/lamias, but outside of them, I'd be concerned about it being misused, or not well understood. But... I certainly can't think of a better tag name, and I'd take it over nothing. If a better name came up, it could always be aliased anyways.

I'm really not sure about serpentoid for a subset of serpentine with only 2 good use cases (naga and lamia, and whatever gray area exists between the current definition of those two for some hybrids).

vulkalu said:
The only reason I say about having naga its own thing even if snake_lamia became a tag is due to situations like post #1986542 where it seems like the lower half is still eastern dragon, not just snake. But the top and bottom match, so it's not split_form. Or for the incredibly rare situation that someone might draw a legless lizard naga (both top and bottom being that of a legless lizard, not snake) that didn't just look like a lizard lamia.

You make a good point with the leggless lizard/glass lizard part, those probably would probably be very hard to tell appart from a "real" naga, since most nagas can be seen as a mix between one of those (eyelids, short chest with long tail) and an actual snake. I'm guessing you can draw the line at "whether that animal would be expected to only have a tail if not anthropomorphized" though that would again make things blurry around (eastern) dragons, who often don't have legs either.

genjar said:
I do think that we need a body type tag category for creatures that have arms, but no legs. There's too much confusion about how those should currently be tagged.

Yeah, ok, that's fair. I'll second Vulkaru on that one that it can't be called that, otherwise it would look weird on merfolk-like creatures. I remember seeing you bring that up in topic #17140 and forum #236391 (I looked up forum history on the matter before opening that thread). Some of this but not all can be resolved using split-form, uniped is inaccurate when describing the movement of snakes (unless you describe their standing position). "apode"/"apodal" would seem more appropriate.

fifteen said:
I remember seeing you bring that up in topic #17140 and forum #236391 (I looked up forum history on the matter before opening that thread).

There's not much point in bringing up outdated topics. Too much has changed in that many years: the whole chimera tag has been repurposed, we've added split_form, uniped is now part of the biped/quadruped group, and so on.

Apode might potential, though apodal means that the animal has no limbs. 'semi-apodal', maybe?

genjar said:
There's not much point in bringing up outdated topics. Too much has changed in that many years: the whole chimera tag has been repurposed, we've added split_form, uniped is now part of the biped/quadruped group, and so on.

I know, but the discussion is still somewhat relevent in the way it highlights the rationale behind some of those choices.

genjar said:
Apode might potential, though apodal means that the animal has no limbs. 'semi-apodal', maybe?

It technically just means 'no feet', just like you can be bipedal and still have arms alongside your legs. You'll usually see it used for animals with no distal limbs, but I don't think there's anything wrong with reporpusing it for characters that have no feet but may have arms.

fifteen said:
It technically just means 'no feet', just like you can be bipedal and still have arms alongside your legs. You'll usually see it used for animals with no distal limbs, but I don't think there's anything wrong with reporpusing it for characters that have no feet but may have arms.

Good. I was worried that someone might start tagging it for feral eels and such, but that's likely not worth worrying about. Since nobody's tagged it for those so far.

Apode would be fine with me, it'd be great to finally have some tag for these. It's been under debate for too many years..

The examples seem to be instances of mistagging, rather than people trying to make it seem like 'naga' should involve snake-bodied characters with scalie upper-halves. For some people, the 'naga' tag in general is very misunderstood as I haunt that tag semi-often and usually have to retag pictures that are of humans with snake lower bodies. Outside of e621 the word 'naga' seems to mean 'anything with a snake lower half'.

I like the tags as they are. They just need a little cleaning up.

genjar said:
Good. I was worried that someone might start tagging it for feral eels and such, but that's likely not worth worrying about. Since nobody's tagged it for those so far.

Apode would be fine with me, it'd be great to finally have some tag for these. It's been under debate for too many years..

That's great to hear! I just wonder if it would be a good idea to setup tag implications with it, such as from merfolk (the wiki hints that it can refer to a names species rather than a body type) or naga/lamia. Doing that for serpentine might be wrong according to some interpretations of the current wiki, which says that a character may have limbs. I'm guessing like so:

post #1181973 post #1458604

misschu said:
The examples seem to be instances of mistagging, rather than people trying to make it seem like 'naga' should involve snake-bodied characters with scalie upper-halves. For some people, the 'naga' tag in general is very misunderstood as I haunt that tag semi-often and usually have to retag pictures that are of humans with snake lower bodies. Outside of e621 the word 'naga' seems to mean 'anything with a snake lower half'.

I like the tags as they are. They just need a little cleaning up.

To be honest, I've seen first-hand how much tag names and implications (where applicable) will do a lot better at getting people to tag things properly than even the best written wiki entry if the tag name is ambiguous. One could argue that there would be a lot less confusion if, say, naga has been made to describe "anything with a snake(ish) lower half" with lamia being a subtag of it for the monster girl "naga-humanoids" and have snake_naga/dragon_naga/cat_naga and the like for everything else. Like I said in my original post, the distinction has always been arbitrary, it's just that now we're "stuck" with their current meaning as people understand them.

As for changing naga to include dragons and such, the more I look at what's tagged under serpentine, the more I understand why adjusting the definiton would raise a whole bunch of additional questions regarding these:
post #545282 post #1314291 post #1281251 post #858870 post #805798

It might be wise to just leave the semantics of those tags as they are, yeah.

fifteen said:
As for changing naga to include dragons and such, the more I look at what's tagged under serpentine, the more I understand why adjusting the definiton would raise a whole bunch of additional questions regarding these:

It might be wise to just leave the semantics of those tags as they are, yeah.

The neat thing about serpentine is that it can apply to all of those images well even when naga OR lamia don't fit, as it's literally a tag for when a character is depicted with a snake or snake-like lower body. But people don't regularly use it, so it ends up just being implicated on to images whose parent tag isn't applicable.

fifteen said:
That's great to hear! I just wonder if it would be a good idea to setup tag implications with it, such as from merfolk (the wiki hints that it can refer to a names species rather than a body type) or naga/lamia. Doing that for serpentine might be wrong according to some interpretations of the current wiki, which says that a character may have limbs.

Yeah, serpentine shouldn't be the thing that would implicate apode for exactly that reason. If apode is going to be used for the whole "arms but no feet" setup, then it wouldn't make sense for feral snakes and noodle-y eastern dragons popping up in that search. Although it might be a good idea to have each tags' wiki mention and link to the other.

misschu said:
The neat thing about serpentine is that it can apply to all of those images well even when naga OR lamia don't fit, as it's literally a tag for when a character is depicted with a snake or snake-like lower body. But people don't regularly use it, so it ends up just being implicated on to images whose parent tag isn't applicable.

Admittedly, I never actually thought of simply using serpentine for edge cases like that. Which would also be more easily searched if apode was added. To which, I'd have to ask (for clarity's sake, of everyone, not just you), should naga (and I guess snake, since it's implicated) be removed from posts that don't have actual snakes in them? Such as with the examples above, with the Pokemon, leech, and slug. Granted, after apode (or if the name gets changed, whatever its equivalent is) is added, so they can get that put in properly first.

I feel like that question's what I really want answered at this point, if only to get some definitive answer on how to handle posts like those in the future.

Also relevant: Would apode be fully treated as its own body type? Like... Would it get its own set of tags in the vein of *_on_apode, larger/smaller_apode, apode_focus, etc.? Just double checking, because it sounded that way. (Also as a side note, while typing this, it's occurred to me that there doesn't seem to be a taur_focus tag despite other forms having their own. Not sure what's up with that).

vulkalu said:
Also relevant: Would apode be fully treated as its own body type? Like... Would it get its own set of tags in the vein of *_on_apode, larger/smaller_apode, apode_focus, etc.?

Not sure if it's large enough to warrant that, but it might be. We already have many smaller body tags in addition to the top five, and the smaller ones don't get the combo tags. Such as waddling_head, sphere_creature, dire_machine, etc.

Just double checking, because it sounded that way. (Also as a side note, while typing this, it's occurred to me that there doesn't seem to be a taur_focus tag despite other forms having their own. Not sure what's up with that).

human_focus and non_furry_focus were supposed to be a special usage cases, on the basis that those are useful for filtering out 'mostly site-irrelevant' content. The other <form>_focus tag weren't really approved for use, but that doesn't stop users from tagging those. (taur_focus for instance is basically identical to taur -solo: if artists draw taurs, they're almost always in focus. So that's not something that I'd consider worth tagging.)

genjar said:
Not sure if it's large enough to warrant that, but it might be. We already have many smaller body tags in addition to the top five, and the smaller ones don't get the combo tags. Such as waddling_head, sphere_creature, dire_machine, etc.

human_focus and non_furry_focus were supposed to be a special usage cases, on the basis that those are useful for filtering out 'mostly site-irrelevant' content. The other <form>_focus tag weren't really approved for use, but that doesn't stop users from tagging those. (taur_focus for instance is basically identical to taur -solo: if artists draw taurs, they're almost always in focus. So that's not something that I'd consider worth tagging.)

Ah, okay. I sometimes forget about those other body tags. Personally, in this case, I'd say it might be useful, but... I don't know the numbers nor when something's considered large enough for those tag sets.

I honestly wasn't aware that was the case. I don't generally know the history behind how or why a lot of tags are the way they are, I just thought it kind of odd that taurs were the only ones without that tag. Thank you for answering those, though.

vulkalu said:
Yeah, serpentine shouldn't be the thing that would implicate apode for exactly that reason. If apode is going to be used for the whole "arms but no feet" setup, then it wouldn't make sense for feral snakes and noodle-y eastern dragons popping up in that search. Although it might be a good idea to have each tags' wiki mention and link to the other.

[...]

Also relevant: Would apode be fully treated as its own body type? Like... Would it get its own set of tags in the vein of *_on_apode, larger/smaller_apode, apode_focus, etc.? Just double checking, because it sounded that way. (Also as a side note, while typing this, it's occurred to me that there doesn't seem to be a taur_focus tag despite other forms having their own. Not sure what's up with that).

Well, the way I see it, apode would merely describe bodies that don't use legs to move, but there's no indication from the name that arms are a requirement. It would still apply to feral snakes just like serpentine does, but it would also cover mermaids and the like, which is what Genjar seemed to be looking for. Like I said above (forum #293363), we don't really have a tag for "anything with a snake lower body". In hindsight, naga could have occupied this role, with lamia being reserved for those with a human-looking top-half, but we're about 6 years too late to change the meaning of those tags and I don't really have any alternative word that could be used to mean "with a snake tail".

Ok, I'm re-reading the thread just to make sense of all the questions we're trying to solve, here. Let me know if I missed any.

• Is a dragon with a snake tail a naga (becuase it's not split-form) or a lamia (because it's not a snake)?
• As per current semantics, not a naga per se, possibly a hybrid, but lamia would be the more correct tag.
• People so far seem to agree that changing the meaning of those tags would be a bad idea.
• What is the role of serpentine?
• To describe "noodle-y" creatures, by the looks of it, be it nagas, lamias, eastern dragons (with or without feet), sea serpents, regular snakes, draconcopedes, slugs/worms/leeches/etc. (feral or nagaified), eels, amphithere and basically anything on the left of that diagram:
• post #1526077
• Jury's still out on how much of a sausage dog a feral lizard has to be to qualify.
• Do we have a common tag for only nagas and lamias?
• Not right now.
• Do we have a common tag for nagas, lamias and other creatures with no legs (mermaids and whatever primarina is)?
• apode sounds like a good fit, though it would also apply to snakes and does not imply the presence of arms.
• What of creatures with similar builds but a non-snake tail ("nagaified" slugs and serpentine pokémon)?
• There's nothing more precise than serpentine for those, for the time being.

Regarding a supertag for only naga and lamia, I'm half-tempted to just propose sarpa (a synonym of naga, from what I'm reading, cognate to "serpent") to fill that role. Just something we could use to specifically describe "something with a snake (and only snake, thus the name) lower body", which would in turn imply apode and serpentine.

(EDIT: I guess "draconcopede" or "dracontopode" could also work, diven the clear etymology ["drakon" means serpent in greek and "podos" means foot, hence "snake-footed"] of the word and it not describing any clearly defined creature either, much like naga and lamia)

As for creatures with a naga-like, not split_form build but not meant to be a snake, nagafication or something similar could be an option.

fifteen said:

• Jury's still out on how much of a sausage dog a feral lizard has to be to qualify.

I'd say that as a rule of thumb, any torso long and flexible enough to be capable of coiling should count as serpentine.

genjar said:
I'd say that as a rule of thumb, any torso long and flexible enough to be capable of coiling should count as serpentine.

Yeah, that sounds fair enough.

The more I think about it, the more dracontopode for something along the lines of "an apode creature (excluding feral snakes?) with a part-snake body such that it uses the snake bottom part to move on land." is growing on me. Granted, it's a lot more of a mouthful than "taur" or "naga" (dracontopode_on_anthro doesn't sound great), but it at least means something that fits the definition (and isn't coming out of thin air, either). If nothing else, those dragon-naga hybrids would still qualify for that tag.

I've edited the wiki pages for both naga and lamia to reflect the conclusions from this discussion so far. Without a tag for "snake-tail", though, it's going to be difficult to cleanly fit "dragon-nagas" anywhere, given they are usually neither split-form nor completely snakes. Using draconcopode to mean "who hs a snake lower body instead of legs", here is how I would adjust the tag topology.

unimply naga -> serpentine
unimply lamia -> serpentine
imply naga -> draconcopode
imply lamia -> draconcopode
imply lamia -> split_form
imply draconcopode -> serpentine
imply draconcopode -> apode
alias dracontopode -> draconcopode
alias draconcopedes -> draconcopode

# EDIT:
alias draconcopedis -> draconcopode

Dragons could then be tagged as draconcopode + dragon instead of just serpentine, given the tail actually does look like a snake tail. post #550361 would also not qualify as draconcopode, merely serpentine + apode.

fifteen said:
I've edited the wiki pages for both naga and lamia to reflect the conclusions from this discussion so far. Without a tag for "snake-tail", though, it's going to be difficult to cleanly fit "dragon-nagas" anywhere, given they are usually neither split-form nor completely snakes. Using draconcopode to mean "who hs a snake lower body instead of legs", here is how I would adjust the tag topology.

unimply naga -> serpentine
unimply lamia -> serpentine
imply naga -> draconcopode
imply lamia -> draconcopode
imply lamia -> split_form
imply draconcopode -> serpentine
imply draconcopode -> apode
alias dracontopode -> draconcopode
alias draconcopedes -> draconcopode

Dragons could then be tagged as draconcopode + dragon instead of just serpentine, given the tail actually does look like a snake tail. post #550361 would also not qualify as draconcopode, merely serpentine + apode.

If draconcopode goes through, I'd probably alias draconcopodal and dracontopodal to it too. Just because people tend to misspell things all the time, and "pode" is similar to "ped"--so people might get it confused with things like bipedal. Although I'm not sure how often anyone would actually manually add the tag, as opposed to just using naga or lamia to imply it, but... I guess I'm just saying I wouldn't be surprised to see misspellings of it, even considering everything there is to keep people from doing that.

vulkalu said:
If draconcopode goes through, I'd probably alias draconcopodal and dracontopodal to it too. Just because people tend to misspell things all the time, and "pode" is similar to "ped"--so people might get it confused with things like bipedal. Although I'm not sure how often anyone would actually manually add the tag, as opposed to just using naga or lamia to imply it, but... I guess I'm just saying I wouldn't be surprised to see misspellings of it, even considering everything there is to keep people from doing that.

Yeah, that one would definitely need a bunch of aliases, I keep reading "draconcopode" and thinking it's a typo, but it's just the medieval latin spelling. As for having it tagged manually, I suppose that'd be a neccessary evil for dragon-nagas, unless we can find anything better, like a new tag specifically for that.

Speaking of aliases: Latin draconcopedis should be added to the list. (That might even work better as the main tag. since it would be consistent with *ped tags...)

genjar said:
Speaking of aliases: Latin draconcopedis should be added to the list. (That might even work better as the main tag. since it would be consistent with *ped tags...)

But apode isn't *ped yet it's the closest semantically, and -pedis doesn't actually match biped/quadruped the other ones. I'll add it to the aliases, though.