Topic: "loli" and "shota" are horrendous tags.

Posted under Tag/Wiki Projects and Questions

Lafcadio

Janitor

Thank you for taking the bait, curious/enraged forumgoer. The cub enjoyers decided to raise hell when their pet tag was removed, so I figured this title was a good way to attract attention before any irreversible changes go through.

loli and shota content is unpopular, but I feel as though there are also issues with how the tags are used in general. Is there a way to rewrite, rename, and/or redesign these tags that makes them distinct from just young female and young male while still fulfilling a useful niche with minimal mistags?

Consider the following:

1. It's all Greek to me

These tags are kind of a linguistic nightmare for a userbase that lacks broad interest in Japanese subculture, unlike sites like Danbooru. They are not mainstream English terms, you are unlikely to find use of them except by people with a certain level of internet brain poisoning.
In one very specific case, there is a small set of users who misspell "shota" as "shorta".

  • There is one instance of "shorta" in #tag-discussions on our Discord.
  • I was just part of a private discussion where the same person spelled it wrong four times.
  • There are two instances (excluding unrelated comments and quotes) where a commenter spells "shota" as "shorta".
  • While the tag is not currently used on active posts, there are 14 instances where somebody has tagged "shorta" in the past.
  • Sister site F-List has 27 character profiles where the "shorta" misspelling is used.
  • While it's hard to get an exact value because of how many comments describe lollipops or "Lolly" the Animal Crossing character, there are various comments where "loli" is misspelled as "lolli".
  • While the tag is not currently used on active posts, there are 49 instances where somebody has tagged "lolli" in the past.
  • On Pixiv.net, which is specifically a Japanese site where I'd expect people to know the word, there are 116 posts tagged as "shorta", and 1,096 "lolli".
  • You could definitely find more on Google if you don't mind these being in your search history.

In theory an alias would fix shorta, but some of the lolli tags on e621 were actually lollipops.

2. Comparing apples and orange apples

These tags are strange in that, despite us having six distinct gender tags (male/female, andromorph/gynomorph, herm/maleherm) and the apparent suggestion that they should fill a blacklisting purpose (sexualized youngs vs. non-sexualized youngs in explicit images), as written the tags completely exclude four of our six genders. A male shota is apparently worthy of being searched/blacklisted in a way that andromorphs and maleherms are not, and ditto for female loli vs. gynomorph/herm loli.

These tags should either follow the girly/manly/tomboy route of combining multiple genders together, or each gender should just have its own shota/loli equivalent. I don't see why a young gynomorph can't be a loli.

3. But I thought it meant...

While popularly people like to say that shota and loli should only be sexualized characters, safe tags often aren't cleaned up (~shota ~loli rating:s isparent:false ischild:false inpool:false), and the wiki only says that the posts should be explicit/suggestive, not necessarily that the posts should be explicit/suggestive because of the young characters. Is it "shota" if Asriel's in the background while his parents are having sex? Probably not, right?

There are a lot of very recent safe additions.

If these tags are only ever going to be treated as substitutes for young female and young male, then they have no utility on this site. Look at the cub thread; the lolicons and shotacons are willing to raise hell if an inconsistent tag gets aliased away, but most of them are simultaneously unwilling to participate when it comes to improving tagging/searching on this site.

Users also generally do not report mistags of loli/shota, so as far as I can tell, poor taggers are simply never corrected. As part of preparing to make this thread, I have checked the edit history for those tags to see if there are any usernames that continuously pop up.

Some of these users have records, but none of them are for loli/shota-related tagging.

  • There is one ban that cites "shota" as a reason.
  • There are zero bans that cite "loli" as a reason.

4. Shape me like one of your french girls

The wiki says that humans, humanoids, and anthros can be shota/loli. Why can't ferals/taurs/sphere creatures/etc. be shota/loli? If a young male feral is being sexualized, why wouldn't we tag it? Is a young male feral unworthy of being blacklisted by people who don't mind young background characters, or young characters doing SFW things?

Arrow189

Member

Most loli images involve both a) pronounced secondary sexual development and b) the deformed cat-like facial/head structures common to anime. In other words, while this isn't universally true, most loli artwork isn't drawn to look like a young human child. On the other hand if a western artist is drawing something that would get tagged "young_female rating:e" it's going to look like they used a photo for a reference and I'm not alone in absolutely not wanting to see that. Taking this tag away would reduce people's ability to blacklist extremely contentious material- I fully admit it's imperfect, but it's LESS imperfect than trying to TWYS age ranges of characters, making even MORE subjective chest/hip/thigh/butt size/shape tags nobody will use consistently, and whatever else would be needed to achieve the same shaky compromise that loli creates.

There are also a not insignificant number of people who see all of the above as unambiguously equivalent to IRL CSAM- and how something is tagged shouldn't be decided by people who hate it.

faucet

Member

I've wanted to throw these tags out for ages now, and now we've got young_male and young_female we've finally got viable targets.

I've truly never understood why the loli and shota tags actually exist. We don't have any other tags like explicit_male or explicit_female but these tags effectively equate to the even more overly specific explicit_young_male and explicit_young_female. If there didn't just happen to be a one-word name for these things I'm very sure the tags would've been nuked long ago.

Where did the "must be explicit or suggestive" crap come from anyway? The tags are shota and loli, not shotacon and lolicon. Of course people are going to tag it "wrong" if the tag isn't even named right.

Watsit

Privileged

faucet said:
Where did the "must be explicit or suggestive" crap come from anyway? The tags are shota and loli, not shotacon and lolicon.

In more casual terms, "lolicon" and "shotacon" is used to describe the image/animation itself, while "loli" and "shota" refer to the character of lolicon/shotacon. Someone's lolicon collection is a collection of art that feature loli characters, for instance. As "loli" is a shortened version of "lolita", which gained connotations of a sexualized young female after the book of the same name became popular, and the name Shotaro became used for the male equivalent that got shortened to "shota".

Updated

Veruke Assault

Blocked

arrow189 said:
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.......and how something is tagged shouldn't be decided by people who hate it.

Precisely..... there are people out there who hate the entire concept of "Sonic & Tails" ship art, and Lewd Art of Tails in general... There are people out there who frequently accuse anyone who likes that particular pairing (or simply just lewd art of the Tails character) as being no better than Epstein....

There are also people who hate X-Y-Z artist because they drew such and such comic..... (people on Twitter hate Harmarist for some reason). Giving people with that kind of chip on their shoulder the control over what something gets tagged as just doesn't seem like a good idea....

But on the other hand.... it is e6 after all.... and the policy here is "Tag What You See" -- but the problem is, different people see different things..... Just like with song lyrics, different people interpret them differently.... art is subjective.... visual aesthetic is subjective...

Ask two different people what they think about a Furry Drawing, or a Song Lyric -- and you will most likely get different answers..... Fchan ran into an issue because -- nobody could come to a clear consensus as to what counts and what doesn't count.....

Visual Looks and Canon Age can be completely different..... that's just the caveat of "cute drawings of cartoon furries."

Updated

dba afish

Member

faucet said:
Where did the "must be explicit or suggestive" crap come from anyway? The tags are shota and loli, not shotacon and lolicon. Of course people are going to tag it "wrong" if the tag isn't even named right.

"lolicon" and "shotacon" refer to the person with the sexual complexes, the complexes in general, or a work meant to apeal to people with the complexes, and are not used to refer to the character archetypes.

"loli" and "shota" refer to the character archetypes themselves.

Lafcadio

Janitor

arrow189 said:
Most loli images involve both a) pronounced secondary sexual development and b) the deformed cat-like facial/head structures common to anime. In other words, while this isn't universally true, most loli artwork isn't drawn to look like a young human child.

I do not think this is a realistic way of looking at the tag. Different artists have interest in different levels of development (oppai loli as an obvious example, and there are very small characters like TDM who fill the same "tiny girl" niche but are extremely simplified), and lots of artists draw their characters as very cartoony, regardless of age, because it's moรฉ, because of convenient artistic shorthands, etc.

veruke_assault said:
Precisely..... there are people out there who hate the entire concept of "Sonic & Tails" ship art, and Lewd Art of Tails in general... There are people out there who frequently accuse anyone who likes that particular pairing (or simply just lewd art of the Tails character) as being no better than Epstein....

There are also people who hate X-Y-Z artist because they drew such and such comic..... (people on Twitter hate Harmarist for some reason). Giving people with that kind of chip on their shoulder the control over what something gets tagged as just doesn't seem like a good idea....

But on the other hand.... it is e6 after all.... and the policy here is "Tag What You See" -- but the problem is, different people see different things..... Just like with song lyrics, different people interpret them differently.... art is subjective.... visual aesthetic is subjective...

Ask two different people what they think about a Furry Drawing, or a Song Lyric -- and you will most likely get different answers..... Fchan ran into an issue because -- nobody could come to a clear consensus as to what counts and what doesn't count.....

Visual Looks and Canon Age can be completely different..... that's just the caveat of "cute drawings of cartoon furries."

This is all very fascinating but none of it is relevant to cleaning up or repurposing these tags.

Notknow

Member

I was thinking shota/loli tag were just for young humans but it seems for anthros, humanoids and humans too lol.

And for humans and humanoid young_human and young_humanoid exist already so...its only a problem if someone want to search for "~young_anthro ~young_human ~young_humanoid ~young_male/female" with just one tag but that's probably kinda niche anyway I guess...

lafcadio said:

4. Shape me like one of your french girls

The wiki says that humans, humanoids, and anthros can be shota/loli. Why can't ferals/taurs/sphere creatures/etc. be shota/loli? If a young male feral is being sexualized, why wouldn't we tag it? Is a young male feral unworthy of being blacklisted by people who don't mind young background characters, or young characters doing SFW things?

Maybe the idea was for young bipeds? But like you said that need to include taurs too lol.

spe

Admin

I'll say that I'm in favor of aliasing these to something like sexualized_young at least, if not gender-specific sexualized young tags. That might be somewhat overkill for our purposes, but I can see some utility in it as well. Or maybe even just mass update and invalidate if people do use these tags incorrectly too often. Given how contentious the subject itself is, and how it's actually not particularly rare for young characters to exist in a rating:e or rating:q post where the young characters themselves are completely rating:s, being able to distinguish between posts like that and actual young porn has real blacklisting value. However, you could make a strong case that it would be more reliable to tag the inverse: that is, having a tag for non-safe posts featuring 'safe' young characters. Or even tag both, since those concepts aren't even mutually exclusive.

Tangentially related, I'd also like if we had something like this for ferals. It's really hard to blacklist something like feral equine rating:e without also filtering out nude anthros riding horseback or anthro equines in an outdoor setting with ambient birds. The fact that ambient_(thing) animals often get tagged as feral is especially annoying for blacklisting purposes, and it's even worse when the otherwise non-sexualized background ferals are close enough to not count as ambient.

pleaseletmein

Member

scaliespe said:
I'll say that I'm in favor of aliasing these to something like sexualized_young at least, if not gender-specific sexualized young tags. That might be somewhat overkill for our purposes, but I can see some utility in it as well. Or maybe even just mass update and invalidate if people do use these tags incorrectly too often. Given how contentious the subject itself is, and how it's actually not particularly rare for young characters to exist in a rating:e or rating:q post where the young characters themselves are completely rating:s, being able to distinguish between posts like that and actual young porn has real blacklisting value. However, you could make a strong case that it would be more reliable to tag the inverse: that is, having a tag for non-safe posts featuring 'safe' young characters. Or even tag both, since those concepts aren't even mutually exclusive.

topic #42191

I'm in favor of creating a "non-sexualized young" tag, though I've had trouble coming up with a good name for it, the vast majority of young ~rating:e ~rating:q involve sexualization so it makes more sense to me to tag the exceptions.

If we went the other way vast majority of young ~rating:e ~rating:q posts would need the "sexualized young" tag, which I think people are simply not going to remember to add after already tagging with young and rating explicit/questionable.

IMO young -rating:s -"non-sexualized young" would be a lot more effective and manageable for blacklists than "sexualized young".

Updated

Lafcadio

Janitor

pleaseletmein said:
topic #42191

I'm in favor of creating a "non-sexualized young" tag, though I've had trouble coming up with a good name for it, the vast majority of young ~rating:e ~rating:q involve sexualization so it makes more sense to me to tag the exceptions.

If we went the other way vast majority of young ~rating:e ~rating:q posts would need the "sexualized young" tag, which I think people are simply not going to remember to add after already tagging with young and rating explicit/questionable.

IMO young -"non-sexualized young" would be a lot more effective and manageable for blacklists than "sexualized young".

A single non-sexualized young in the background of a young-on-young post would cause a young rating:e -non-sexualized_young blacklist to fail.

pleaseletmein

Member

lafcadio said:
A single non-sexualized young in the background of a young-on-young post would cause a young rating:e -non-sexualized_young blacklist to fail.

My thought is that it would be for the post as a whole, so if there are sexualized young characters and a few uninvolved young background characters off to the side it wouldn't apply.

hGJ1cwNfgl

Privileged

veruke_assault said:
Precisely..... there are people out there who hate the entire concept of "Sonic & Tails" ship art, and Lewd Art of Tails in general... There are people out there who frequently accuse anyone who likes that particular pairing (or simply just lewd art of the Tails character) as being no better than Epstein....

There are also people who hate X-Y-Z artist because they drew such and such comic..... (people on Twitter hate Harmarist for some reason). Giving people with that kind of chip on their shoulder the control over what something gets tagged as just doesn't seem like a good idea....

But on the other hand.... it is e6 after all.... and the policy here is "Tag What You See" -- but the problem is, different people see different things..... Just like with song lyrics, different people interpret them differently.... art is subjective.... visual aesthetic is subjective...

Ask two different people what they think about a Furry Drawing, or a Song Lyric -- and you will most likely get different answers..... Fchan ran into an issue because -- nobody could come to a clear consensus as to what counts and what doesn't count.....

Visual Looks and Canon Age can be completely different..... that's just the caveat of "cute drawings of cartoon furries."

I don't care about canon age, I just want to blacklist characters that have the proportions of a child. Canon age is what adult_(lore) is for.

pleaseletmein said:
My thought is that it would be for the post as a whole, so if there are sexualized young characters and a few uninvolved young background characters off to the side it wouldn't apply.

This was also my thought in regards to a non-sexualized young tag.

MuonPen

Member

In my opinion the shota and loli tags are fine. They are just inconsistently tagged due to what Lafcadio and others have already mentioned. I see these tags as both explicit and gender specific versions of the young_male and young_female tags.

Knowledge around those tags also comes from being interested in the topic to begin with (and also having been long enough on the internet I guess). People without the knowledge do not tag them on young explicit content, while people that do have the knowledge are probably also searching for these tags on other booru sites, that use them for both safe and explicit content. My hunch is that the mixed usage between other sites leads to people mistagging them here for safe content.

I'm actually in favor of aliasing these tags to the young_<gender> tags and then adding an explicit generalized replacement like sexualized_young (what scaliespe mentioned). This would open up a few problems though, like when someone just adds the loli tag, which then gets aliased to young_female, the system should be smart enough to also add a second sexualized_young tag in this case. Basically having an aliased tag that also adds an implication without having to be present. If having such a system is not possible, the aliasing could lead to problems with blacklists. In that case I would prefer to keep shota and loli around.

SCTH

Member

muonpen said:
If having such a system is not possible, the aliasing could lead to problems with blacklists. In that case I would prefer to keep shota and loli around.

The thing is, it already doesn't work. The vast majority of young rating:e -loli -shota is sexualized young; it is basically the default state. The alternative that has been suggested, adding a nonsexualized_young tag or similar, seems far more doable.

abadbird

Janitor

Re:title, anthro, humanoid, and [gender tagging] are worse than loli and shota by leaps and bounds :^)

I said far more than I needed to in topic #42259, but I can only lead a horse to water... If you don't go all the way and implement my plan in full, then you're only eliminating these tags and substituting them with crappy alternatives. If you don't go for 1:1 aliases, then you will wreck the aliased searches for these tags (see: all the complaints about the pollution of cub), which might be an acceptable loss.

young_sexualized as the only replacement is extremely redundant with young -rating:s. nonsexualized_young_on_sexual_post is one of those things that sounds good as a blacklist subtraction, but (1) finding posts to tag it with is hard, (2) having people know about the tag is hard, (3) bringing those people to the correct posts to tag them is even harder, and (4) bringing awareness to everyone about this tiny blacklist carve-out tag is also hard. (4.5) If that tag's name does not make clear that it's not for safe-rated posts, then it is also for safe-rated posts, where it is a pointless spam tag, no matter what you say in the wiki. Like, I don't care too too much about this whole thing, but let's not kid ourselves that these half-measure solutions accomplish much other than sweeping these tags under the rug.

I was gonna say that slightly above 4% mistag rate on loli rating:s (mistags + current) is actually pretty good compared to the mistag rate on other popular tags, but then I looked at the real battleground of loli removals and was reminded that I loathe sharing young tagging with randos on this site. Of course, young is the problem there, not loli/shota.

This topic is exasperating.

lafcadio said:
These tags should either follow the girly/manly/tomboy route of combining multiple genders together

Speaking of bad tags that need to die... This idea of tags "appropriate for masculine/feminine bodies" became a lost cause when e621 grew beyond an underground group of enthusiasts who read the site's wikis and forums. Need to let it go and instead use a full suite of awkward, descriptive, neatly divided tags.

MuonPen

Member

As abadbird already said:

abadbird said:
This topic is exasperating.

If anyone is still willing to brainstorm about the currently proposed solutions, here is what I think about the current 2 solutions. Prepare to read ๐Ÿ˜‚

First to clear something up:

scth said:
The vast majority of young rating:e -loli -shota is sexualized young; it is basically the default state.

I'm right behind you. What you are saying is 100% correct! Young with rating:explicit does basically describe loli, shota and other content like any young sexualized intersex tags. By that logic simply aliasing loli and shota would make sense. My concern is that searches that try to negate only the sexualized version of young would be hard to do then (not saying that the current state is better, but with the existance of loli and shota it's arguably better than not having them at all).

These are my pros and cons of the 2 solutions so far:

Using sexualized_young:

Pros:

  • Blacklisting sexualized_young is easy.
  • Searching rating:explicit -sexualized_young would discard sexualized young content. (Assuming posts are tagged correctly.)
  • Searching sexualized_young would focus specifically on sexualized young content. (Assuming posts are tagged correctly.)
    • No need to add rating:explicit since it would imply it (similar to current loli and shota tags).
    • Adding young_male or young_female to the search could reproduce what loli and shota were commonly used for before.
  • Less confusion when tagging sexualized young + intersex content.
  • Easy to spot the need for adding this tag.

Cons:

  • Without implications to it (from loli and shota, which are heavily used tags), people might forget to tag it, resulting in above searches to fail.
    • I'd say this is a big negative point. Only way to make it less bad is if the site adds sexualized_young when trying to tag loli or shota, even though both get aliased away.
  • It's a new tag concept that hasn't been seen on e621 before. People will see this tag and probably go overboard with sexualized_<age>, sexualized_<form>, etc. Prepare for sexualized-apocalypse. ๐Ÿ˜‚

Using non-sexualized_young:

Pros:

Cons:

  • Blacklisting sexualized young content is not easy, you'd have to really think about what results the blacklisted tag combination delivers, which are then filtered out.
  • I don't think this tag adds any value to searches focused on sexualized young content or excluding sexualized young content.
  • People would have to know such a tag exists (very unlikely, since the naming is not intuitive and no other site uses such a tag).
  • Only good for blacklists in my opinion.
    • With an exception, as Lafcadio already said: A single non-sexualized young in the background of a young-on-young post would cause a young rating:e -non-sexualized_young blacklist to fail.
  • Difficult to spot the need for adding this tag. Especially for animated content that features young characters. (Assuming that you would only tag it when all of the image / video does not contain sexualized young content.)
  • Has the same "new concept" problems as sexualized_young where people will start adding a bunch of other forms and ages with this tag.

I find that the sexualized_young solution would be good if the cons could be negated or lessened somehow. Otherwise I'm just for sticking with loli and shota. The non-sexualized_young solution has too many downsides in my opinion (unless someone could correct me on my cons list).

clovertea

Member

Why not just use those tags on images that at least look like anime/japanese art? IMO it's really weird seeing them on very westernized cub art.

dba afish

Member

clovertea said:
Why not just use those tags on images that at least look like anime/japanese art? IMO it's really weird seeing them on very westernized cub art.

I'm not sure how that'd solve a anything brought up in this thread. also, restricting a general tag to a type of art style seems really weird.

Watsit

Privileged

clovertea said:
Why not just use those tags on images that at least look like anime/japanese art? IMO it's really weird seeing them on very westernized cub art.

Determining what "looks like anime/japanese art" is going to end up being continuously debated. Different people have different ideas for what defines the style, and different ideas for when it looks "close enough".

Donovan DMC

Former Staff

dba_afish said:
I'm not sure how that'd solve a anything brought up in this thread. also, restricting a general tag to a type of art style seems really weird.

Not to mention that would restrict them more, lessening any perceived usefulness they currently have even more

clovertea

Member

Would it be more useful as a tag if it only applies to art drawn by a Japanese artist?

The people who most commonly use the tag are weebs anyway so it only seems like a relevant tag in that space where the furry and otaku community intersect.

regsmutt

Member

Honestly the fact that the definition in this very discussion is so inconsistent (is it sexualized young characters of specific sexes? Is it Japanese art of sexualized young characters?) is a great demonstration of why these tags suck.

MuonPen

Member

regsmutt said:
Honestly the fact that the definition in this very discussion is so inconsistent (is it sexualized young characters of specific sexes? Is it Japanese art of sexualized young characters?) is a great demonstration of why these tags suck.

I agree. I have changed my mind on this topic after giving it more thought. I think just aliasing them to young_male and young_female should suffice. We'd lose the implicit rating:e on those tags and also some niche blacklisting capabilities, but I think it doesn't matter that much. Most young art is explicit anyways and I bet most people that don't want to see it have young in their blacklist, defeating the purpose of having fine grained tags for filtering out just the sexualized part of it. Do we really need this fine grained control for blacklists?

hGJ1cwNfgl

Privileged

muonpen said:
I agree. I have changed my mind on this topic after giving it more thought. I think just aliasing them to young_male and young_female should suffice. We'd lose the implicit rating:e on those tags and also some niche blacklisting capabilities, but I think it doesn't matter that much. Most young art is explicit anyways and I bet most people that don't want to see it have young in their blacklist, defeating the purpose of having fine grained tags for filtering out just the sexualized part of it. Do we really need this fine grained control for blacklists?

There's young -rating:s which is what's on the default blacklist and what I use. It catches nearly everything I'd expect and want it to, with the only exceptions being characters whose canon age doesn't match their appearance and certain Pokemon/Digimon/etc. art, but that's an issue of people refusing to use the tag system as intended, not a flaw with the blacklist.

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