you can cry without tears. i couldnt find any examples with quick searching but crying can be shown through gestures, sound effects and speech bubbles without actual tears being shown in the picture

Hmm, true, but how often does that pop up here on e6? Regardless, you're technically correct.

How did that even happen? I could have sworn there was a discussion about this that realised it wasn't a good idea. Yeah, here it was . It was going the other direction but the consensus was 'nope'.

....Although, now that I look into it, I can't find any images which have crying without any drawn tears. So even though in theory I can see how you can have crying without any visible tears, I can't find any in several searches and several pages of the crying tag. So if this implication is breaking the tag accuracy for any images, apparently it's not very many or very common, even in comics. Even though it's possible to have crying without tears, it is also possible that no one is actually drawing it without tears. I've seen it in cartoons, but I haven't found any images of it here yet. And if we don't have any images like that for the implication to break, then I guess the implication may actually work. The closest I found to an image depicting crying without any tears was stuff like these:

post #518141 post #545524

But in the first one, there are still tears beaded up on the side of the eye even though the eyes are mostly covered and the crying mostly implied, so this implication would surprisingly still work. And in the second one it's debatable without a translation request whether that's sweat or tears, and whether they're crying or just humiliated. But it still has droplets of moisture, so if it does turn out to be crying, the implication would still work. So unless we can find images of crying without tears that isn't just better off tagged with sad then I'm wondering if the implication actually should be kept. I'd be shocked if there aren't any images of this, but I can't justify breaking the implication until its been proven that we actually have images of crying that the tears tag wouldn't belong on.