Topic: Revising age categories

Forgive me if there has been a previous discussion in this vein, but the forum search isn't forthcoming.

I've been trying to tag age categories on young posts that don't have them, but I frequently run into pictures I find ambiguous, especially in the child range. To explain what I mean, let me talk about these three posts currently tagged with child, two of which are examples on the wiki page:

post #1138955 post #4666390 post #5326766

Despite all being tagged the same, these images all look very different. The first has a very stylized, super-deformed look that makes the character look extra-young, to the point they look very similar to posts tagged toddler (such as post #5318726, which, to make things even more confusing, is tagged with both child and toddler). The second I would say looks unambiguously like a prepubescent child, maybe in the age 6-9 range, and is drawn in a relatively realistic style. The character in the third image looks tall and lanky, which I associate with puberty; I'd say they could be either 11, 12, or 13.

Meanwhile, this image is currently tagged with adolescent:

post #5443055

This character to me looks, if anything, younger than the character in the third child image above. They could be 11, 12, 13, maybe 14? It doesn't help that they're sitting down, which makes it harder to judge their size.

Even worse is the boundary between adolescent and adult, because that determines whether a young tag applies at all.

post #5398923

This image is currently tagged adolescent, but I'd say this character could be anywhere from 16 to 20. This is true for a lot of posts drawn in a style that makes characters look more youthful (large eyes and heads, smooth skin, etc.)

Ultimately, I think there are two major problems here:
1. The age ranges for child and adolescent are too broad
2. Defining these categories based on visual age in the first place is misguided, because visual age is extremely subjective

In real life, people can hit puberty and developmental milestones at wildly varying rates. I've met 12-year-olds who are taller than me and college grads who complain about being mistaken for grade schoolers. It's virtually impossible to tell at a glance the difference between a 17-year-old and an 18-year-old. And that's in real life, not in art, which can be drawn in any number of styles that obfuscate common age markers (especially chibi, which can make it unclear whether the character is supposed to be a child or is an adult drawn in a chibi style). Two taggers could look at the same character and, very reasonably, assign them two different ages, entirely due to different experiences with what 3-year-olds, 12-year-olds, and 18-year-olds look like.

We don't need to adopt FurAffinity levels of prescriptiveness on this, but I think it'd be wise to go into more detail in the wiki page descriptions on exactly what visual traits we're using to determine what makes someone a toddler vs. a child vs. an adolescent. I think that, very broadly speaking, those could be delineated as prepubescent / pubescent / postpubescent respectively, but we'd still need to define what those terms mean.

I was hoping someone more knowledgeable than me would pick this up, but given it's been half a year and age groups remain undertagged, I'll try throwing something at the wall. These will be prioritizing user experience rather than physical accuracy, i.e. what I believe people who care about these tags are looking for and the features I use to determine an age group when tagging a character.

I believe a "young" appearance usually comes down to three things: Height, fat distribution, and facial structure. I'll try to build the age category definitions around these.

Child:

Characters who appear to be in the age range of three to nine. This typically manifests visually in the following ways:

• Compared to an adult, characters are between waist and chest height.
• Characters possess baby fat: round cheeks and soft bellies, but not prominent enough to consider the character overweight on its own.
• Their face looks "squished", with their eyes, nose, and mouth closer together compared to an adult or adolescent. Their eyes are also larger relative to the rest of the face.

Adolescent:

Characters who appear to be in the age range of fourteen to seventeen. This typically manifests visually in the following ways:

• Compared to an adult, characters are anywhere from a head shorter to the same height.
• Characters tend to look stringy and lanky, even if they are not otherwise skinny. This is a result of growth spurts during puberty, which elongate bones before fat and muscles have a chance to catch up.
• Their face looks "squished" to a degree in-between that of children and adults, with their eyes, nose, and mouth closer together compared to an adult. Their eyes may also be larger compared to the rest of the face, but this is less common compared to child characters.

I'd also like to propose a "pubescent" or "tween" age category, as it looks visually distinct from the two above:

Characters who appear to be in the age range of ten to thirteen. This typically manifests visually in the following ways:

• Compared to an adult, characters are anywhere from chest height to a head shorter.
• Characters lack the baby fat of prepubescent characters.
• Their face looks "squished", with their eyes, nose, and mouth closer together compared to an adult or adolescent. Their eyes are also larger relative to the rest of the face.

I have trouble defining the difference between child and toddler outside of height. Maybe it would be better to combine them? I struggle to see a difference except with pubescent child characters, and as mentioned in the first post, some posts get tagged as both.

This still does not address how to distinguish a young character from a chibi one. Can someone more familiar with the chibi art style give some advice?

I won't comment too in-depth into this discussion because I don't use those subtags that often or at all, so here are just a few words.

beholding said:
Forgive me if there has been a previous discussion in this vein, but the forum search isn't forthcoming.

You can always search the implications listing on the related tags to see if there are any relevant discussions.

• baby - implication #2103 @ topic #1385
• toddler - implication #7347 @ topic #14719
• child - implication #2262 @ topic #3429
• adolescent - implication #53152 @ topic #41779

<regarding ambiguity in posts>

You don't have to force a tag to work if it is in a grey zone.

You can simply ignore it for someone else (more knowledgeable) to make a judgement or tag both of the tags at the same time (whenever appropriate since they overlap).
If a post contains a tag that you feel that should not be tagged as such, then edit the tags and change it.

<regarding a solution>

I will give you credit for taking the initiative to try to redefine things. However, always consider whether your solutions would bring problems of its own, which could lead to a bigger problem in the end.

If you are planning to add those definitions into the wiki, I would highly suggest it be on a separate section for use in specific cases.
There are cases where those criteria would not work at all (e.g., ambiguous shapes of feral & monster, "young-looking" Pokemon compared to their adult human trainers, etc.).

If you are looking to further split the age categories, consider if the terms you use are going to be ambiguous by themselves (e.g., pubescent & tween are almost the same in everyday speech) or whether the problem you face now would become even bigger with your solution (e.g., more age subtags = more grey zones = more problems?).

Ngl I don't often use the age categories because I find them too grey and difficult to tag. Aside from just inherent grey-area in the categories, I feel like a number of people drawing these characters have an age class that's just a generic 'cub/shota/loli' that mixes traits and behaviors of pre-pubescent sub categories from those toddlers to tweens.

One change I think might make sense though is removing the 'young' implication from 'adolescent' and allowing it to be a grey area like semi-anthro.

regsmutt said:
One change I think might make sense though is removing the 'young' implication from 'adolescent' and allowing it to be a grey area like semi-anthro.

"Adolescent" was just a word replacement for "teenager", which is intended to be visually young pre-adults or older minors. Since age is already a grey area (especially based visually on cartoon drawings), I don't think a maybe-young tag that questions whether someone is an adult or not would be useful. As it is, with semi-anthro you're supposed to also tag feral or anthro with it based on your best guess, semi-anthro is only a supplement that suggests they may not look completely feral or completely anthro in form, so I don't see what utility a maybe-young tag would have if you still also need to tag young if they're best classed as young.

watsit said:
"Adolescent" was just a word replacement for "teenager", which is intended to be visually young pre-adults or older minors. Since age is already a grey area (especially based visually on cartoon drawings), I don't think a maybe-young tag that questions whether someone is an adult or not would be useful. As it is, with semi-anthro you're supposed to also tag feral or anthro with it based on your best guess, semi-anthro is only a supplement that suggests they may not look completely feral or completely anthro in form, so I don't see what utility a maybe-young tag would have if you still also need to tag young if they're best classed as young.

Some people searching 'young' aren't going to be interested in grey-area stuff (like that second adolescent example) and will want to filter it out. Some people blacklisting 'young' don't mind grey-area things, others do. It would just let people fine-tune their searches/blacklists.

Two initial thoughts -

• Making sure the "young" tag is applied consistently and broadly is important. For blacklist reasons and the very reasonable sensitivities here, it needs to be applied to all non-adults. For that reason, I respectfully disagree with regsmutt's suggestion ("One change I think might make sense though is removing the 'young' implication from 'adolescent' and allowing it to be a grey area like semi-anthro.") I think that's a non-starter.

• Beholding, I agree the wikis should be cleaned up. However, I think adding a "prepubescent" or "tween" category is not a great idea. I think the reason "child" and "adolescent" are not used as tags as commonly as "young" (which is the load-bearing structure here) is because of the subjectivity you acknowledge. Adding a third category, where users would now have to consider the distinction between a "tween" (which is a term invented by marketers to sell things to children) and an "adolescent" (which is a stage of development that starts at the onset of puberty) is not an improvement, IMO.

One more thought, just to illustrate the reasonable subjectivity here:

beholding said:

post #5326766

The character in the third image looks tall and lanky, which I associate with puberty; I'd say they could be either 11, 12, or 13.

That character is Britz from the Fuga games, who is 8 years old in the first game, and 10 years old in the second and third game. To me, that looks like a child. That said, if someone uploaded that image and used the "adolescent" tag instead, I would not remove the adolescent tag (especially if the artist added it themselves). I would just check to make sure the "young" tag was added.

thegreatwolfgang said:
You can always search the implications listing on the related tags to see if there are any relevant discussions.

• baby - implication #2103 @ topic #1385
• toddler - implication #7347 @ topic #14719
• child - implication #2262 @ topic #3429
• adolescent - implication #53152 @ topic #41779

Except for the adolescent topic, all of those are just debating whether they should imply young, which I agree with, and most of them are ancient. I don't see the relevance to this discussion. The adolescent topic is somewhat relevant in that it discusses the difficulty of tagging characters who are on the border, but it was mostly about renaming the tag to something more appropriate (which I also agree with).

You don't have to force a tag to work if it is in a grey zone.

You can simply ignore it for someone else (more knowledgeable) to make a judgement or tag both of the tags at the same time (whenever appropriate since they overlap).

I strongly disagree. Young characters are an understandably contentious area, and users need to be able to rely on their blacklists to avoid the content they don't want. I figure there are probably users who are okay with seeing adolescents in sexual situations, but not anyone younger (as regsmutt says here, that's much more of a grey area); and contrariwise, there are almost certainly users who want to blacklist sexual content for anyone younger than 18, and whether a grey-area character is adolescent or adult matters a lot to those people. Age groups need to be tagged.

And I waited for someone more knowledgeable to deal with this for six months and nothing happened. Your solution demonstrably has not worked.

However, always consider whether your solutions would bring problems of its own, which could lead to a bigger problem in the end.

I'm well aware, which is why I repeatedly said this was just me brainstorming ideas and not anything definitive. I'm not going to add anything to the wiki until there's consensus, I'm not an idiot.

There are cases where those criteria would not work at all (e.g., ambiguous shapes of feral & monster, "young-looking" Pokemon compared to their adult human trainers, etc.).

Yes, that is a whole other can of worms, but I don't look at much feral art so I have no idea what standards people use for tagging young on those characters. Someone who's more familiar with feral art will have to weigh in.

If you are looking to further split the age categories, consider if the terms you use are going to be ambiguous by themselves (e.g., pubescent & tween are almost the same in everyday speech)

I think "pubescent" would work, honestly. Do you have a suggestion for better names?

the problem you face now would become even bigger with your solution (e.g., more age subtags = more grey zones = more problems?)

I disagree. The current problem is that pubescent characters are intrinsically a grey zone; they don't clearly fit into either child or adolescent as they look different from each. Providing a dedicated category for them would allow us to define the surrounding categories with more detail and narrow the age ranges.

post #5331456

I also maintain that it is a valid age category that looks visually distinct from younger children, as this post demonstrates.

That character is Britz from the Fuga games, who is 8 years old in the first game, and 10 years old in the second and third game. To me, that looks like a child. That said, if someone uploaded that image and used the "adolescent" tag instead, I would not remove the adolescent tag (especially if the artist added it themselves).

See, this is what I'm talking about. I believe this character would fit neatly into the "pubescent" category, but trying to force them into either "child" or "adolescent" creates confusion and subjectivity.

beholding said:
I think "pubescent" would work, honestly. Do you have a suggestion for better names?

That's no better than "adolescent".

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pubescent
1a: arriving at or having reached puberty
b: of or relating to puberty

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/adolescence
1: the period of life when a child develops into an adult : the period from puberty to maturity terminating legally at the age of majority

They both start at puberty. If anything, adolescent is clearer as it specifically ends "at the age of majority", compared to the more vague "having reached puberty" or "having recently reached puberty" definition depending on where exactly you read it.

beholding said:
I disagree. The current problem is that pubescent characters are intrinsically a grey zone; they don't clearly fit into either child or adolescent as they look different from each. Providing a dedicated category for them would allow us to define the surrounding categories with more detail and narrow the age ranges.

Pubescent is adolescent, so if a character is on the older end of the range that you're debating whether young applies, you're effectively debating whether adolescent applies (and if you're debating whether a character can be described as adolescent, you would also need to debate whether they can be described as pubescent).

beholding said:
See, this is what I'm talking about. I believe this character would fit neatly into the "pubescent" category, but trying to force them into either "child" or "adolescent" creates confusion and subjectivity.

Not that a character's lore age is relevant to tagging, but 10 years old would still be prepubescent, as it's before the typical age of puberty, not pubescent.

beholding said:
I strongly disagree. Young characters are an understandably contentious area, and users need to be able to rely on their blacklists to avoid the content they don't want. I figure there are probably users who are okay with seeing adolescents in sexual situations, but not anyone younger (as regsmutt says here, that's much more of a grey area); and contrariwise, there are almost certainly users who want to blacklist sexual content for anyone younger than 18, and whether a grey-area character is adolescent or adult matters a lot to those people. Age groups need to be tagged.

I made that comment mostly in reference to the grey zone between the young subcategories (such as between child and adolescent).
Leaving it tagged as young only would be more than sufficient for blacklisting purposes, and leaving it tagged with more than one of the mentioned subcategories would not cause that much of a fuss.

On another note, if the character is already at the fringes of what can be classified as adolescent and adult, then their apparent age would be too visibly ambiguous to be determined.
This means that those who want to blacklist them would not be able to notice the difference anyways.

If they do notice the differences, then they are more than welcome to add in the appropriate tags themselves.
Alternatively, if you really care about their blacklists and it missing potential grey zones, you can also tag it preemptively as adolescent if you feel it strays a little too close to being young.

And I waited for someone more knowledgeable to deal with this for six months and nothing happened. Your solution demonstrably has not worked.

That's because nobody else seems to have that big of a problem as you have with how the age categories currently work, or they don't really care enough about the small inconsistencies to comment about it.

The "solution" I provided is by no means a permanent solution to your problems.
It is meant to be something temporary so that you can move on with tagging the more clearcut posts while waiting for a potential solution.

I think "pubescent" would work, honestly. Do you have a suggestion for better names?

I do not, though it wouldn't be fair for me to comment since I'm against the idea of creating more young subtags that could be misinterpreted as being the same.

I disagree. The current problem is that pubescent characters are intrinsically a grey zone; they don't clearly fit into either child or adolescent as they look different from each. Providing a dedicated category for them would allow us to define the surrounding categories with more detail and narrow the age ranges.

post #5331456

I also maintain that it is a valid age category that looks visually distinct from younger children, as this post demonstrates.

Alright, let's see if something could be reached that is agreeable to everyone.

It can be pretty ambiguous so I just tag it young/young_male/young_female and call it a day welp...

watsit said:
They both start at puberty. If anything, adolescent is clearer as it specifically ends "at the age of majority", compared to the more vague "having reached puberty" or "having recently reached puberty" definition depending on where exactly you read it.

That's a fair point. The 10-12 range is really more "early puberty". It is probably best to decouple the tag names from real developmental stages anyway, for the same reason we retired "teenager". Unfortunately, to my knowledge that only leaves "tween" as an alternative, which others seem to dislike.

On another note, if the character is already at the fringes of what can be classified as adolescent and adult, then their apparent age would be too visibly ambiguous to be determined.
This means that those who want to blacklist them would not be able to notice the difference anyways.

I really strongly disagree with this. All this means is that some people won't notice the difference. If a character is ambiguously underage, people who want to avoid underage are going to be very upset if a character slips through who they see as underage. This is, in fact, important.

Alternatively, if you really care about their blacklists and it missing potential grey zones, you can also tag it preemptively as adolescent if you feel it strays a little too close to being young.

I do, in fact, skew towards the younger age category when in doubt, but the fact remains that I am one person and there are tens of thousands of young posts with no age category. A fix needs to be codified as regular practice, not depend on the whims of a few obsessive users who will inevitably get burnt out long before finishing.

(Though on that topic, most of the underuse is probably simply because users don't know the tags exist. Some way of suggesting them on a post upload if the young tag is detected might help.)

Not that a character's lore age is relevant to tagging, but 10 years old would still be prepubescent, as it's before the typical age of puberty, not pubescent.

Only for boys; 10 is the average age for girls. The point of this is to move away from exact numbers, though, so it can be tweaked as necessary.

beholding said:
Yes, that is a whole other can of worms, but I don't look at much feral art so I have no idea what standards people use for tagging young on those characters. Someone who's more familiar with feral art will have to weigh in.

What qualifies as young for ferals is almost impossible to codify solidly across all species and can really boil to 'vibes' in a lot of cases, unfortunately. Relying on human-based signals can lead to mistagging, both false positives and negatives. Proportionally large eyes and heads are very common in smaller birds and mammals. On the flipside, baby ungulates are often quite leggy with small heads and eyes, but that doesn't mean that someone blacklisting 'young' is okay with seeing foals and fawns.

Honestly, the system we have now is probably the best its going to get.

kyiiel said:
Honestly, the system we have now is probably the best its going to get.

I see no reason to believe this. If you think my proposals would make it worse, please explain.