This feels our next big project. I don't where to go next, but here's the start - a placeholder.

What looks like related topics, for convenience/reference:
https://e621.net/forum_topics/39564?page=1#forum_post_371839 Request to start this thread.
Tag Implication: shota -> male
[REJECTED] Tag implication: shota -> younger_male Younger != young so this one got rejected
Straight_shota is aliased to, instead of implying shota Again, 'nope'.
Should ''loli'' and ''shota'' be used to tag ''rating:safe'' posts? Part of the point of the topic that started this one.
Hmm locked topic complaining about the blacklist. Nexxxxxxt!
Some weird hack related to CF keyword sandbagging. Meh, I think I'll go find the loli topics next. There don't seem to be much more useful ones for shota search.
Tag Implication: shota -> male
Change straight_shota -> young from Alias to Implication OK, rest of the results don't really look relevant to current situation for shota results.

Loli results:
Should Loli & etc. tags imply their associated gender?
Loli Tag Confusion By this point, it was clear that loli doesn't apply to ferals. Hmm.
Tag Implication: loli -> female
Loli and Shota redirected to Young?
Unalias suggestion: shota and loli
Removal of loli tag?
https://e621.net/forum_topics/9873?page=1#forum_post_165421 LOL, Lance Armstrong's reply.
https://e621.net/forum_topics/6902 Apparently, this is about when loli got added back as a tag.

From the previous thread...

alphamule said:
Annoyingly, shota can be a body type. Like one post I made that the character appears male but is in fact maleherm...

In that case, assuming it can also include andromorph and be allowed to remain as it is: refer to a young character, but add to the wiki that it differs from young_male in that it can also includes young_andromorph and young herm.

Would this be a valid reason to keep shota/loli, and just imply the respective young_x tags to them?

magikarp said:
From the previous thread...

In that case, assuming it can also include andromorph and be allowed to remain as it is: refer to a young character, but add to the wiki that it differs from young_male in that it can also includes young_andromorph and young herm.

Would this be a valid reason to keep shota/loli, and just imply the respective young_x tags to them?

Thanks for next step. I was blanking there, and got distracted, anyways, hehe. Yeah, this is exactly the kind of talk I was wanting to see. Moved it out of that thread because it was definitely off-topic by this point.

Making it an implication like intersex is from all those other tags feels like a move in the right direction. Going through each of them and determining WHICH it was referring to sounds horrible. Shota should be a disambiguation, then?

alphamule said:
Thanks for next step. I was blanking there, and got distracted, anyways, hehe. Yeah, this is exactly the kind of talk I was wanting to see. Moved it out of that thread because it was definitely off-topic by this point.

Making it an implication like intersex is from all those other tags feels like a move in the right direction. Going through each of them and determining WHICH it was referring to sounds horrible. Shota should be a disambiguation, then?

Yes, although more specifically I mean:

shota implied by...
- young_male
- young_andromorph
- young_maleherm

loli implied by...
- young_female
- young_gynomorph
- young_herm

If a character's specific sex is unknown then shota/loli tags alone wouldn't require disambiguation, so I am against adding disambiguation to those tags.

magikarp said:
Yes, although more specifically I mean:

shota implied by...
- young_male
- young_andromorph
- young_maleherm

loli implied by...
- young_female
- young_gynomorph
- young_herm

If a character's specific sex is unknown then shota/loli tags alone wouldn't require disambiguation, so I am against adding disambiguation to those tags.

Actually, that won't work because apparently it doesn't apply to say, ferals. It sucks because otherwise this is the obvious solution.

alphamule said:
Actually, that won't work because apparently it doesn't apply to say, ferals. It sucks because otherwise this is the obvious solution.

Nothing in the wiki for loli and shota says not to use on ferals, it's just that no one uses them that way.

Personally I'd prefer to get rid of loli and shota entirely, just aliasing to young_female/male.

scth said:
Nothing in the wiki for loli and shota says not to use on ferals, it's just that no one uses them that way.

Personally I'd prefer to get rid of loli and shota entirely, just aliasing to young_female/male.

Yeah, it leads to the opposite way, but then you have to deal with the exceptions going other way. This is going to be a tough nut to crack!

https://e621.net/tags?commit=Search&search%5Bhide_empty%5D=0&search%5Bname_matches%5D=%2Ashota%2A&search%5Border%5D=count Let's at least start here with the adjacent tags. They are far smaller and we need to do them, anyways.

shota_dragon Uhm, split this one. Looks like a typo, anyways.
shota_fox was apparently same way.
one-shota This is probably meant to be onee-shota , not to be confused with Oneshota(2020 anime). It's a pairing tag. It should probably be changed to older_female and shota.
dom_shota/hung_shota/hyper_shota Erm, OK. :D Seems the last one was a typo.
ambiguous_on_shota The only two results didn't have young male tag so replaced them a_o_s with it. They also had a_o_cub on them. Made sure to have cub tag as well.
shota_penetrated
shota_raped
older_on_shota
adult_on_shota

alphamule said:
Actually, that won't work because apparently it doesn't apply to say, ferals. It sucks because otherwise this is the obvious solution.

That is a very good point.

Considering that, the one use that shota/loli actually serves is now dilute since they can't be i.plied by anything and only provide the function of ~young_male ~young_female -feral, but male/female are just appearance based and not tied to actual gender.

Still useful, but they need to have _(disambiguation) tacked on.

magikarp said:
Yes, although more specifically I mean:

shota implied by...
- young_male
- young_andromorph
- young_maleherm

loli implied by...
- young_female
- young_gynomorph
- young_herm

If a character's specific sex is unknown then shota/loli tags alone wouldn't require disambiguation, so I am against adding disambiguation to those tags.

shota and loli are supposed to only be for characters in sexual situations, so implying it from the neutral young_male/female would be potentially problematic. it'd probably be fine for the intersex ones, because how TWYS works.

https://e621.net/posts?tags=shota_penetrated+-young_penetrated Done
https://e621.net/posts?tags=shota_penetrated+-young_male Done
https://e621.net/posts?tags=shota_penetrated+-male_penetrated Done

A quick question: If we have tags implied by an existing tag, then said existing tag gets removed in an alias, do the implied tags stick?
Just working down the tag list, so all we have to worry about is shota, itself. The others will likely go away in later aliases. Shota penetrated can safely be aliased to any of those 3 tags, now.

shota_raped -rape Done
shota_raped -shota Done
shota_raped -young_raped Done
shota_raped -young_male Done

After the older on shota tag, I guess divide and conquer is the rule of the game. Binning them into likely candidates for a given combination of tags seems to have been working well for me, lately. Otherwise, it's just too demoralizing when you see 140 pages of results, and you don't even know what others have already checked.

sipothac said:
shota and loli are supposed to only be for characters in sexual situations...

The wiki is not written in stone, people can filter rating if they want to see sexually explicit posts. Currently there are two and a half pages searching rating:s ~shota ~loli, it is feasible to remove the shota/loli tags from all these, but would it be practical?

Assuming the shota/loli tags are kept, what is the value in restricting them to sexual connotations? I see it as unintuitive as all the other age ratings do not make assumptions of the sexual nature of an image.

...so implying it from the neutral young_male/female would be potentially problematic. it'd probably be fine for the intersex ones, because how TWYS works.

That's already not an option because, as discussed earlier ITT: younger_male/female can refer to a feral character, which shota/loli might not include? (that said, ~shota ~loli feral shows that there many posts with feral characters tagged as shota/loli so maybe the exclusion of feral could be dropped?)

If the requirement for a sexual connotation was removed, then would it still be problematic to have younger_male/female imply shota/loli?

I am still in favour of removing the sexual requirement regardless of the outcome as it seems unnecessary to me.

alphamule said:
A quick question: If we have tags implied by an existing tag, then said existing tag gets removed in an alias, do the implied tags stick?

I believe that it would cascade, aliased tags will never show up in tag lists, but will always work in searches.

Shota/Loli should not be implied from the age_gender tags seeing as their main purpose currently is to filter for explicit young in a way young -rating:safe cannot. Unless it's the intersex tags like sipothac pointed out, where they require visible genitals in order to be tagged. I don't think they're good tags for that purpose, but they're the only ones filling that niche and I personally rely on them a lot as said in the previous thread.
Changing them to be body type tags also seems pointless since ~young_male ~young_andromorph ~young_maleherm ~ambiguous_young would already get the same results.

So are the cub tags about to be aliased away? Should I even bother adding those tags?

magikarp said:
The wiki is not written in stone, people can filter rating if they want to see sexually explicit posts. Currently there are two and a half pages searching rating:s ~shota ~loli, it is feasible to remove the shota/loli tags from all these, but would it be practical?

changing the tag definitions from being only for sexual situations to being just a neutral blanket removes some of the utility the tags would have if it was tagged properly for really no good reason. also, I'm just not super comfortable blanket labeling all young characters with inherently sexualized terms.

oopsitripped said:
Shota/Loli should not be implied from the age_gender tags seeing as their main purpose currently is to filter for explicit young in a way young -rating:safe cannot. Unless it's the intersex tags like sipothac pointed out, where they require visible genitals in order to be tagged. I don't think they're good tags for that purpose, but they're the only ones filling that niche and I personally rely on them a lot as said in the previous thread.
Changing them to be body type tags also seems pointless since ~young_male ~young_andromorph ~young_maleherm ~ambiguous_young would already get the same results.

So are the cub tags about to be aliased away? Should I even bother adding those tags?

sipothac said:
changing the tag definitions from being only for sexual situations to being just a neutral blanket removes some of the utility the tags would have if it was tagged properly for really no good reason. also, I'm just not super comfortable blanket labeling all young characters with inherently sexualized terms.

I see your point, the word doesn't really carry much meaning for me as I am used to seeing Safe posts with that tag on gelbooru. The wording on the wiki is "...should only be tagged for explicit and sexually suggestive content.", ie. it is high objective rather than subjective.

There should be no images that are both Safe and also containing the shota/loli tags, so the tagging on the site needs some work.

magikarp said:
I see your point, the word doesn't really care much meaning for me as I am used to seeing Safe posts with that tag on gelbooru. The wording on the wiki is "...should only be tagged for explicit and sexually suggestive content.", ie. it is high objective rather than subjective.

There should be no images that are both Safe and also containing the shota/loli tags, so the tagging on the site needs some work.

I really think this is a losing battle. We should just accept that the vast majority of times a young character appears in a non-Safe post at all, it's because they're the main subject. e621 tags generally follow the philosophy of "don't tag the defaults", which is part of the reason why to this day we do not have an adult tag, and the perpetually undertagged nature of shota and loli demonstrates why.

The exceptional case of an S-rated young character incidentally appearing in an E-rated post should instead have its own tag, which could be excluded from blacklists for people who don't mind that, instead of the current situation where not hiding such posts depends on the infallibility of a much larger portion of the site (which has repeatedly proved very fallible).

wat8548 said:
I really think this is a losing battle. We should just accept that the vast majority of times a young character appears in a non-Safe post at all, it's because they're the main subject. e621 tags generally follow the philosophy of "don't tag the defaults", which is part of the reason why to this day we do not have an adult tag, and the perpetually undertagged nature of shota and loli demonstrates why.

The exceptional case of an S-rated young character incidentally appearing in an E-rated post should instead have its own tag, which could be excluded from blacklists for people who don't mind that, instead of the current situation where not hiding such posts depends on the infallibility of a much larger portion of the site (which has repeatedly proved very fallible).

The vast majority of shota/loli posts are NSFW, there's less than 2.5 pages for ~shota ~loli rating:safe. So that specific issue could be fixed by one person in an hour or two.

Shota/loli are somewhat undertagged, but there's still significant usage: there's over 200k young posts and of those, 35k shota and 35k loli (idk how kuch overlap there is, but overall it would range from 15%~30%).

I'm unsure if this data is helpful or not.

wat8548 said:
The exceptional case of an S-rated young character incidentally appearing in an E-rated post should instead have its own tag, which could be excluded from blacklists for people who don't mind that, instead of the current situation where not hiding such posts depends on the infallibility of a much larger portion of the site (which has repeatedly proved very fallible).

Here are a couple fledgling tags I've added a few posts to, adult_focus and adult_on_adult, they could be helpful for Q or E rated posts where young characters are in the background, barely on screen, in a different scene or in a separate panel of a comic, and the post is clearly focused on one (or more) adult character(s), or in the case of adult_on_adult features two adults having sex, while the young character isn't a part of it.

maplebytes said:
Here are a couple fledgling tags I've added a few posts to, adult_focus and adult_on_adult, they could be helpful for Q or E rated posts where young characters are in the background, barely on screen, in a different scene or in a separate panel of a comic, and the post is clearly focused on one (or more) adult character(s), or in the case of adult_on_adult features two adults having sex, while the young character isn't a part of it.

The tag counts for those would be quite high, although I assume they're 100% redundant for posts without the young tag and is directly complementary to that?

I dunno what ya'll are on rn, but i just wanna say, i did a bit of clean up last night (for me) on some safe ~shota ~loli stuff.

I left out some stuff i think could/should be Q.
It used to be 5-6 pages, i've dropped it to 2.5 pages.

benjiboyo said:
I dunno what ya'll are on rn, but i just wanna say, i did a bit of clean up last night (for me) on some safe ~shota ~loli stuff.

I left out some stuff i think could/should be Q.
It used to be 5-6 pages, i've dropped it to 2.5 pages.

thank you for your service o7

magikarp said:
The tag counts for those would be quite high, although I assume they're 100% redundant for posts without the young tag and is directly complementary to that?

Ideally they'd only be used in entirely non-redundant circumstances, I don't know what those tags could be named to be more specific, but the concepts seem useful enough to be tagged, I can imagine there are a number of posts with scenarios that feature adult characters in explicit scenarios, or being nude/in skimpy clothing, along with unsexualized young characters in the background or separate from any explicit activities. I'd assume there are many people filtering young rating:e or young rating:q who probably aren't intending to filter something like this post #3039053

maplebytes said:
Ideally they'd only be used in entirely non-redundant circumstances, I don't know what those tags could be named to be more specific, but the concepts seem useful enough to be tagged, I can imagine there are a number of posts with scenarios that feature adult characters in explicit scenarios, or being nude/in skimpy clothing, along with unsexualized young characters in the background or separate from any explicit activities. I'd assume there are many people filtering young rating:e or young rating:q who probably aren't intending to filter something like this post #3039053

Yeah exactly, and there are more posts exactly like that that are tagged with young even though they're a background character and are unaware or unable to see the action.

maplebytes said:
Ideally they'd only be used in entirely non-redundant circumstances, I don't know what those tags could be named to be more specific, but the concepts seem useful enough to be tagged, I can imagine there are a number of posts with scenarios that feature adult characters in explicit scenarios, or being nude/in skimpy clothing, along with unsexualized young characters in the background or separate from any explicit activities. I'd assume there are many people filtering young rating:e or young rating:q who probably aren't intending to filter something like this post #3039053

What about something like safe_young? That way it's one simple tag instead of adult_focus and adult_on_adult. Although the word safe implies that it would also exclude the non-sexual content that questionable and explicit covers, like graphic violence and vore.

magikarp said:
The wiki is not written in stone, people can filter rating if they want to see sexually explicit posts. Currently there are two and a half pages searching rating:s ~shota ~loli, it is feasible to remove the shota/loli tags from all these, but would it be practical?

Assuming the shota/loli tags are kept, what is the value in restricting them to sexual connotations? I see it as unintuitive as all the other age ratings do not make assumptions of the sexual nature of an image.

That's already not an option because, as discussed earlier ITT: younger_male/female can refer to a feral character, which shota/loli might not include? (that said, ~shota ~loli feral shows that there many posts with feral characters tagged as shota/loli so maybe the exclusion of feral could be dropped?)

If the requirement for a sexual connotation was removed, then would it still be problematic to have younger_male/female imply shota/loli?

I am still in favour of removing the sexual requirement regardless of the outcome as it seems unnecessary to me.

I believe that it would cascade, aliased tags will never show up in tag lists, but will always work in searches.

So, if say, someone had gotten an implication for a tag A, and then it got aliased to B, then B wouldn't implicate A's old implications, but they'd act like someone did a manual update? Or would it make tagging B cause the implications to 'cascade' as you put it? I can see how this could get messy if the wrong things got aliased! :facepalm:

oopsitripped said:
What about something like safe_young? That way it's one simple tag instead of adult_focus and adult_on_adult. Although the word safe implies that it would also exclude the non-sexual content that questionable and explicit covers, like graphic violence and vore.

Hmm... Interesting.

Gonna go get started on more cleanup. We're steadily moving on this - yay!

older_on_shota -shota Done
older_on_shota -young_male Done
older_on_shota -younger_male Done
older_on_shota -older_male male/male Done
older_on_shota -older_female male/female Done
older_on_shota herm There was 0 results. Done
older_on_shota intersex -older_gynomorph Done
older_on_shota -older_gynomorph -older_male -older_female Done

grandfather_penetrating_grandson Lore or GTFO? Yeah, that is for a later project. Would have to take time to make sure that the related lore tags are accurate, and not just blindly slapping them on alongside the age/gender/penetration tags.

OK, on to the loli_*/*_loli tags, then on to shota and loli. The rating:safe stuff is being done in parallel, apparently. Cool!
loli_with_tits This should probably be aliased to oppai_loli. loli_with_tits -oppai_loli Done
loli_penetrated -penetrated Done
loli_penetrated -vaginal -anal -ambiguous_penetration -oral Done
loli_penetrated -young_penetrated
loli_penetrated -female_penetrated
loli_penetrated -loli

For later: older_woman_and_teenage_boy There's only 11 of them, so it's easy to tag. It should probably be aliased to older_female.

I wish there was a sexualized_young umbrella tag that covers what loli/shota is supposed to be. Would be great for blacklisting. Loli and shota could imply it and it might make their purpose more clear. What do you guys think?

How would that differ from simply blacklisting "young -rating:s"?

novusuna said:
How would that differ from simply blacklisting "young -rating:s"?

first off: a child character can be in a rating:q or rating:e post without having any involvement with what caused the rating, second: rating =/= how sexual a post is, gratuitous, violence, gore, as well as some other generally objectible themes are able to push a post's rating outside of safe.

cloudpie said:
I wish there was a sexualized_young umbrella tag that covers what loli/shota is supposed to be. Would be great for blacklisting. Loli and shota could imply it and it might make their purpose more clear. What do you guys think?

sipothac said:
first off: a child character can be in a rating:q or rating:e post without having any involvement with what caused the rating, second: rating =/= how sexual a post is, gratuitous, violence, gore, as well as some other generally objectible themes are able to push a post's rating outside of safe.

*ahem*

benjiboyo said:
*ahem*

*double ahem*

cloudpie said:
I wish there was a sexualized_young umbrella tag that covers what loli/shota is supposed to be. Would be great for blacklisting. Loli and shota could imply it and it might make their purpose more clear. What do you guys think?

Tag the exceptions. We should introduce a tag for non-sexualised young characters in otherwise sexualised posts, since they are a tiny minority of explicit young posts.

wat8548 said:
Tag the exceptions. We should introduce a tag for non-sexualised young characters in otherwise sexualised posts, since they are a tiny minority of explicit young posts.

Then by that logic shouldn't loli and shota be aliased to young, and we replace it with what you're suggesting? That's what loli and shota are supposed to mean: sexualized female/gynomorph/herm young characters and sexualized male/andromorph/maleherm young characters

Edit: i seemed to remember that the issue with aliasing loli/shota to young_<gender> was that currently loli and shota cover multiple genders each. But if they could be cleaned up then i'd 100% agree with you

cloudpie said:
Edit: i seemed to remember that the issue with aliasing loli/shota to young_<gender> was that currently loli and shota cover multiple genders each. But if they could be cleaned up then i'd 100% agree with you

well, they're currently in kind of a limbo state, loli implies female, which would mean it's definitively not aplicable to herm or gynomorph characters, while shota does not imply male meaning that it could be applied to maleherm and andromorph without it technically causing any problems, although that might contradict the wiki definition.

these are honestly kinda weird tags, you'd kinda expect them to be applied more similar to a body shape tag like shortstack and teapot, which apply to any of the 3 feminine genders or any of the 3 masculine genders, respectively. the loli -> female implication, however, would mean that these are only meant to be use for male and female characters specifically, making them one of if not the only pair of tags that can be applied to solely males or females and have no intersex equivalents. (see topic #40890)

Bringing this back. I think it's relevant again with the recent removal of the cub tag.
At this point I think shota and loli should just be aliased to a "sexualized young" tag. They have almost no utility. Even if they were standardized and cleaned up, the same effect could be better accomplished by combining a theoretical "sexualised young" tag with the specific young_gender or young_form tags. Plus, there is demand for a such a tag and shota/loli are a good place to begin populating it. Just look at the cub apocalypse thread where multiple people were upset to see the cub tag go because they (mistakenly) thought they could use it to filter explicit depictions of young characters.

oopsitripped said:
Bringing this back. I think it's relevant again with the recent removal of the cub tag.
At this point I think shota and loli should just be aliased to a "sexualized young" tag. They have almost no utility. Even if they were standardized and cleaned up, the same effect could be better accomplished by combining a theoretical "sexualised young" tag with the specific young_gender or young_form tags. Plus, there is demand for a such a tag and shota/loli are a good place to begin populating it. Just look at the cub apocalypse thread where multiple people were upset to see the cub tag go because they (mistakenly) thought they could use it to filter explicit depictions of young characters.

One project at a time. ;)
Yeah, I suspect that'll be 2024's ending season theme: "Shotalypse and Lolicalypse"

I see there's already the fashion style tags related to loli/shota. This one could possibly be far more of mess than cub. Shota and loli does NOT imply male or female. I've seen it tagged on intersex individuals. We've been wanting a more generic tag for intersex like that, for a while. I bet it'll end up getting consolidated/split just like cub did. I mean seriously, the same tag for anthro/humanoid/taur/feral? People not using it for young posts consistently? FA disaster? At very least, I'd like to edit the ambiguous and intersex gender posts with loli/shota, to make sure we'll not get a bunch of mistagged genders with an update script.

An example where we could make a distinction between body/clothing/etc. styles: post #2223756