The bulk update request #1552 is pending approval.

remove alias lolicon (0) -> loli (30891)
remove implication loli (30891) -> young (236937)
remove implication loli (30891) -> female (2541916)
remove implication oppai_loli (544) -> loli (30891)
remove implication pregnant_loli (0) -> loli (30891)
remove alias shotacon (0) -> shota (36916)
remove alias straight_shota (0) -> shota (36916)
remove implication shota (36916) -> young (236937)
remove implication shota (36916) -> male (2497978)

Reason: While advocating for the removal of the barazoku tag, I remembered the two highest-profile examples of tag names which are in Japanese for no good reason. Unlike barazoku, however, these have only ever meant one thing, which can be both more clearly and more consistently expressed with another name.

young_* is a better tag name for all of the following reasons:

• Although they are probably the most widely-understood jargon employed on this site, "loli" and "shota" are still technically jargon with no hint as to their meaning for an uneducated English speaker. Occasional joke tags aside, we always try to make tag meanings as obvious as possible on their face, to minimise mistags.
• The age_gender form is relatively well-established with tags like mature_female, although old_* is severely undertagged and I suspect users have been mistakenly using older_* instead, which implies age_difference. We really should sort out the mess with that and younger_* at some point, but that's no reason not to fix this problem now.
• Currently there is no commonly-accepted tag for young intersex characters. Admittedly, the intersex definitions tend to rely on secondary sexual characteristics which may not be present on young characters, but I have seen complaints about this before.
• The problem seems to be resolved now, but in the past Cloudflare has been known to directly interfere with searching the term "loli". There is a risk of such problems reoccurring, so changing the tags to something less easily filterable would be a good idea. The fact that the new tag names are also better is just a bonus.

problem is teenagers are associated with the young tag, so young_male young_female type tags could get inadvertently associated with teen type tags which could offend people who aren't interested in characters younger then teen

I'm not sure where I stand on this issue, but you should write the script in a way that minimizes the impact on blacklists.

If "Part 1" is approved and "Part 2" does not immediately follow, many posts will be tagged loli and/or shota and/or young_male and/or young_female without automatically receiving the young tag. To avoid this, add the following lines to the active script above.

update loli -> young_female
update shota -> young_male

imply young_female -> young
imply young_female -> female

imply young_male -> young
imply young_male -> male

Notice that the active relationships of loli and shota do not block updates and that young_female and young_male can have implications because they are not currently aliased to other tags.

My proposed addition does not fix the problem entirely, but it should become more manageable.

versperus said:
problem is teenagers are associated with the young tag, so young_male young_female type tags could get inadvertently associated with teen type tags which could offend people who aren't interested in characters younger then teen

I'm not a fan of the teenager tag, TBH. It encompasses such a wide range of bodily development that it's borderline TWYK, especially since in drawn porn characters are often sexually mature at any age. But if we were to make a serious attempt at fixing this problem, it would require coming up with another term for pre-pubescent characters (and maybe another one for babies/toddlers on top of that?) and setting up two (or three) more series of gender/age combos. Apart from the question of whether this is really a rabbit hole we want to go down, the young implications already exist so it's not like this BUR would introduce any new problems.

wat8548 said:
I'm not a fan of the teenager tag, TBH. It encompasses such a wide range of bodily development that it's borderline TWYK, especially since in drawn porn characters are often sexually mature at any age. But if we were to make a serious attempt at fixing this problem, it would require coming up with another term for pre-pubescent characters (and maybe another one for babies/toddlers on top of that?) and setting up two (or three) more series of gender/age combos. Apart from the question of whether this is really a rabbit hole we want to go down, the young implications already exist so it's not like this BUR would introduce any new problems.

Kinda ironic that someone just added the teenager tag to your profile picture today, which put it on my blacklist.

…which makes for a good point. I want to blacklist young -rating:safe, but most teenage characters I see don’t really appear young in the way that I think of it.

scaliespe said:
Kinda ironic that someone just added the teenager tag to your profile picture today, which put it on my blacklist.

…which makes for a good point. I want to blacklist young -rating:safe, but most teenage characters I see don’t really appear young in the way that I think of it.

This is why I blacklist most child and cub content that isn't rated safe, rather than the young tag. I wouldn't be opposed to <gender>_child and <gender>_cub tags, or some variation thereof, so that child could be added onto anthro/humanoid posts alongside the gender, and cub to feral posts alongside the gender. Some people may be more okay with one gender but not the other, after all.

furrin_gok said:
This is why I blacklist most child and cub content that isn't rated safe, rather than the young tag. I wouldn't be opposed to <gender>_child and <gender>_cub tags, or some variation thereof, so that child could be added onto anthro/humanoid posts alongside the gender, and cub to feral posts alongside the gender. Some people may be more okay with one gender but not the other, after all.

I tried that for a while, but I found that way too much stuff slipped through the cracks that way. child seems to be criminally undertagged.

scaliespe said:
I tried that for a while, but I found that way too much stuff slipped through the cracks that way. child seems to be criminally undertagged.

Yeah... I can bare with the occasional slip-through and just tag it myself and move along, but people are jerks and get mad if you ask them to tag child as well. Technically, there's no rule in place that they need to tag their contentious content AFAIK, so it's not something they can be reported for.

scaliespe said:
Kinda ironic that someone just added the teenager tag to your profile picture today, which put it on my blacklist.

…which makes for a good point. I want to blacklist young -rating:safe, but most teenage characters I see don’t really appear young in the way that I think of it.

Eh? I see young, but not teenager. Which is even less defensible. They also left a disambiguation tag on it, so good work all around.

When I see an anime girl and boy.
Imma gonna call them loli and shota.

...that's it, that's my reason. Good luck though.

aren't the loliand shota tags meant specifically for when the characters are in sexual situations? it seems like these new tags would be inherently less useful than the old ones for blacklisting purposes.

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

~loli and shota wiki pages

darryus said:
aren't the loliand shota tags meant specifically for when the characters are in sexual situations? it seems like these new tags would be inherently less useful than the old ones for blacklisting purposes.

~loli and shota wiki pages

Good point.

darryus said:
aren't the loliand shota tags meant specifically for when the characters are in sexual situations? it seems like these new tags would be inherently less useful than the old ones for blacklisting purposes.

~loli and shota wiki pages

Just blacklist child rating:e problem solved. ~loli ~shota rating:s has a bunch of posts.

furrin_gok said:
Just blacklist child rating:e problem solved. ~loli ~shota rating:s has a bunch of posts.

Child is an age group tag, it doesn't apply to all young characters. If we're talking about blacklisting, use young -rating:safe if you want to avoid young characters in sexual situations, or just blacklist young if you're OK with removing all young characters from your search results. Young is the catch-all tag for any character that looks young.

For this BUR, loli and shota are for young characters of any age, that are sexually (etc.) involved in the image. Just a child watching two adults having sex wouldn't get tagged loli or shota, while a child having sex with two adults would get tagged loli or shota. If we choose to take away the "sexual" part of the definition, then there would be no point in having such a tag; shota / young_male would be functionally similar to young male, this song and dance has been done before over other combo tags. If we keep the "sexual" part of the definition, though, young_male (and etc.) would likely get tagged on just any post featuring young males, and people wouldn't try to adhere to some site-enforced definition... but that also happens with loli and shota, mostly off-site but on-site as well. These tags just get thrown around like shotgun tagging, they have very little meaning beyond "a boy" and "a girl", they don't even abide by genders since futa characters get referred to as lolis as well.

So, there's no real solution to this that doesn't involve manual labor. Aliasing the terms would just be calling a rose by another name, and they still would get mistagged (if not get worse). But we'd have to fix the mistags in any case, and that's currently on my backburner as a tag project... if anyone else wants to tackle it, I've written up one tag search in the tag projects IIRC.

Loli, Shota and Cub are redundant since young already exists + younger_[gender] are tags.

These are prone to mistags as well as I've heard only posts with a rating of questionable minimum can have them, but safe posts would be tagged loli, shota, cub, by folks who are none-the-wiser.

wolfmanfur said:
Loli, Shota and Cub are redundant since young already exists + younger_[gender] are tags.

These are prone to mistags as well as I've heard only posts with a rating of questionable minimum can have them, but safe posts will be tagged loli, shota, cub, by folks who are none-the-wiser.

the youger_* tags are age difference it does not mean any characters are young.
the potential need for young_* tags for general situations does not necessarily mean that the loli and shota tags for sexualized sotuations aren't also valid.
mistags are rarely, if ever, a good reason to nix a tag entirely.

siral_exan said:
If we're talking about blacklisting, use young -rating:safe if you want to avoid young characters in sexual situations

That will also catch non-safe situations that aren't sexual (blood, violence, horror) that a young character happens to appear along side. It would also catch images that have something sexual going on, that the young character isn't involved in.

wolfmanfur said:
Cub [is] redundant since young already exists

Again, cub exists because human/oid young characters can be site-valid.
Cub is not an age-group tag, it's the add-on tag that differentiates animal young characters from non-animal ones.

magnuseffect said:
Again, cub exists because human/oid young characters can be site-valid.
Cub is not an age-group tag, it's the add-on tag that differentiates animal young characters from non-animal ones.

This is the same argument for tags like 'overweight_anthro' 'overweight_feral' which are debatably problematic or so I heard from some folks here, but to stay on topic; I do not like cub as a tag because it is unnecessary: cub can't be used on safe rated posts which younger_[thing] can, and most of the time it isn't used to differenciate a species.

There can be 2 animal anthro characters of different ages having sex and folks will still add this tag to the post. Or worse, thee can be no adult character, only an underage character having sex with another underage character and this woud be added to the post anyway. I don't reckon a tag like young_anthro would be tagged this way nearly as much as cub is. As a tag, cub is functionally identical to blacklisting this -human -humanoid young -rating:s.

Trere is also a conflict in definition, irl a cub is a baby or infant animal, here, as you said yourself, it is supposed to be added to posts featuring anthro minors. Sometimes, it is added and locked, sometimes it is not, and that seems to be done entirely arbitrarily.

wolfmanfur said:
This is the same argument for tags like 'overweight_anthro' 'overweight_feral' which are debatably problematic or so I heard from some folks here, but to stay on topic; I do not like cub as a tag because it is unnecessary: cub can't be used on safe rated posts which younger_[thing] can, and most of the time it isn't used to differenciate a species.

cub is a general purpose tag, it's not only for sexualized situations.

cub said:
This tag also applies to all ratings, including safe artwork.

also, again, the younger_* tags have nothing to do with a character's absolute age, it's a relative tag, for age_difference posts. younger_* can be applied to posts that contain only adults. in the same way that smaller_* can be tagged on a post without any character being micro.

watsit said:
It would also catch images that have something sexual going on, that the young character isn't involved in.

People shouldn't be tagging young in those posts then.

But again, I still advocate for the creation/add on of a sexualized_cub/young tag for the global blacklist.

wolfmanfur said:
This is the same argument for tags like 'overweight_anthro' 'overweight_feral' which are debatably problematic or so I heard from some folks here, but to stay on topic; I do not like cub as a tag because it is unnecessary: cub can't be used on safe rated posts which younger_[thing] can, and most of the time it isn't used to differenciate a species.

I don't think you've internalised this point yet, so once more with emphasis: younger_* is not the same thing as young_*. If you've been tagging it that way, you've added age_difference to a lot of invalid posts.

I really want to make sure this is well-understood, because the age_difference solo search (which should be empty, and currently has 9 pages) is probably the biggest ongoing mistagging problem on the site. I've actually been toying with the idea of a BUR to make the younger_* and older_* tags ambiguous, and mass update to younger_male_partner or something along those lines. But that still requires a lot of manual cleanup to be done first.

watsit said:
That will also catch non-safe situations that aren't sexual (blood, violence, horror) that a young character happens to appear along side. It would also catch images that have something sexual going on, that the young character isn't involved in.

Serious question for those who blacklist these tags: would you want to see E-rated posts that contain young characters in any context?

benjiboyo said:
People shouldn't be tagging young in those posts then.

Yes they should, young has no rating requirement. It simply describes a character's (apparent) age.

benjiboyo said:
People shouldn't be tagging young in those posts then.

I mean the young character isn't involved in the sexual behavior, but still visible in the image.

watsit said:
I mean the young character isn't involved in the sexual behavior, but still visible in the image.

I'd also be curious if you could produce an example of such a post. young rating:e -loli -shota maxes out the result limit, and at least the first page appears to be 100% sexualised young characters.

EDIT: Tried again with order:id. post #4264 looks like it might count? Still a drop in an ocean of counterexamples though.

wat8548 said:
I'd also be curious if you could produce an example of such a post. young rating:e -loli -shota maxes out the result limit, and at least the first page appears to be 100% sexualised young characters.

EDIT: Tried again with order:id. post #4264 looks like it might count? Still a drop in an ocean of counterexamples though.

post #4047264 and post #3957753 also. As you say, there are a lot of results here, and being something that doesn't happen often, it's like trying to find a needle in a haystack. But we see with these examples, they do exist.

Incidentally, I'm seeing a fair number of results here that I don't think should even be tagged young.

undertagging and mistagging really shouldn't be a factor of whether a tag is valid or not. mistagging could be a reason to change a tagname, sure, but we're also talking about changing the tag's definition. in a perfect world loli and shota would actually be very useful tags, but unfortunately we live in a world where stuff is super undertagged.

if we get rid of the "in a sexual situation" part of the "the child in sexual situation" through these aliases of this tag we would be losing some amount of (potential) utility. also I'm not sure it'd solve either of the problems we're seeing with the existing tags.

if we didn't want to lose the ultilty I think it'd be better to have both the general use child gender tags and the sexualized ones... or maybe like, inverted loli and shota tags, for when the young character isn't being sexualized, something in the vein of like an ambient_child tag but with a bit of a broader definition than other ambient_* tags. having a tag for both potential binary states would be useful if someone wanted to do a tag project.

darryus said:
if we didn't want to lose the ultilty I think it'd be better to have both the general use child gender tags and the sexualized ones... or maybe like, inverted loli and shota tags, for when the young character isn't being sexualized, something in the vein of like an ambient_child tag but with a bit of a broader definition than other ambient_* tags. having a tag for both potential binary states would be useful if someone wanted to do a tag project.

An ambient_child tag might be a good idea, following the general e621 rule of "tag the exceptions". Following the same rule, I'd like to see that in conjunction with my proposed changes. Let's face it, those millions of untagged loli/shota posts are never gonna get tagged. At some point you have to sacrifice theoretical purity on the altar of practical reality.

wat8548 said:
I don't think you've internalised this point yet, so once more with emphasis: younger_* is not the same thing as young_*. If you've been tagging it that way, you've added age_difference to a lot of invalid posts.

I really want to make sure this is well-understood, because the age_difference solo search (which should be empty, and currently has 9 pages) is probably the biggest ongoing mistagging problem on the site. I've actually been toying with the idea of a BUR to make the younger_* and older_* tags ambiguous, and mass update to younger_male_partner or something along those lines. But that still requires a lot of manual cleanup to be done first.

I used younger_* as an example because young_* does not exist, (excpet for young_male young_female surprisingly, but they are undertagged) but I never tag younger_*, only age_difference, see for yourself here: https://e621.net/post_versions?commit=Search&search%5Bexclude_uploads%5D=0&search%5Btags_added%5D=younger_%2A&search%5Bupdater_id%5D=1278809
In general, I hate tags that are gender+thing or sentience+thing. It can be useful when tagged in groups to denote different body types, but neither cub nor these tags are used this way a good number of times they are fluff added to expand the tag count on any given post. They are almost as bad as umbrella tags

The point I was trying to make is that cub is poorly defined, can be searched without being used in the search query, see example above, and one point I forgot to mention is the collateral damage it does. Cub has the same connotation as loli and shota within the furry fandom and all this manages to create conflicts, tag wars and mass takedowns + dnp when the artist gets involved. Young is gonna upset some, but it is a frankly much more neutral term. This argument has been used to alias dickgirl to gynomorph, so I don't understand why this very same argument wouldn't apply here. Notwithstanding that it is not all that distinct from young. At this point it's a surprise there is no loop where cub implies young which would imply cub back, it would be the logical step forward.

darryus said:
cub is a general purpose tag, it's not only for sexualized situations.

And if cub can be added to safe posts, why not loli and shota? They are used in a similar manner and they are understood all the same by anime fans. The unique difference is the gender, a shota is a boy whereas a loli is a girl.

• Loli: A young or young-looking girl character in Japanese anime and manga; subjects of the lolicon genre

darryus said:
undertagging and mistagging really shouldn't be a factor of whether a tag is valid or not. mistagging could be a reason to change a tagname, sure, but we're also talking about changing the tag's definition. in a perfect world loli and shota would actually be very useful tags, but unfortunately we live in a world where stuff is super undertagged.

Here's another factor to account for: young -rating:s is in the global blacklist and Im assuming the standalones loli and shota are as well given this discussion topic #37906. So, whenever a giant ignoramus mistags posts using these tags it annoys me to no end because I am not always signed in. I browse the website anonymously sometimes. I won't get into details why, but as time flew by this problem has only exasperated me.

So, unlike other tags like scat, vore, etc which I can choose to hide or view them. I have no choice with those tags, so any mistag is bound to tick me off. I already hae to go the extra mile and download images I really like which I hate, I hate to do it with furaffinity, I hate to do it with deviantart now that you are required to have an account to view adult content and I deactivated mine's long ago and while this site gives me some respite to this particular issue, I hate that because anybody can add those tags they can be addederroneously and I won't be able to see an image that I should be able to see logged off.

I fully understand the imperative of the global blacklist and why it is set up this way, I heard drawn art of furry minors is illegal in some countries. I reckon danbooru has a similar global blacklist, maybe derpibooru too. So, while it annoys me I don't wanna reform that blacklist, what I do wanna see enforced is the way these tags are used because it is one thing to tag a drawing with no ferals as feral, but it is another to cut me off art I might like while I'm not connected because a drawing with a no minors is tagged young because of lore information in the description post #4044997 or a very small rule affecting loli and shota tags are not seen by the uploader, so they are added to safe posts where they shouldn't be in the first place.

wolfmanfur said:
*snip*

I'm not sure how getting rid of the loli, shota, or I guess cub tags would really solve any of the problems you're having...

wolfmanfur said:
And if cub can be added to safe posts, why not loli and shota? They are used in a similar manner and they are understood all the same by anime fans. The unique difference is the gender, a shota is a boy whereas a loli is a girl.

are you saying that "loli" and "shota" are used as general terms for child characters? I don't know where you got that idea because it's pretty much entirely untrue; "loli" is short for "lolicon" which is short for for "lolita complex", or a complex for sexualized young girls. "shotacon" is a similar portmanteau using the name of a young boy manga character.
source: Lolicon on Wikipedia
Shotacon on Wikipedia