Posting an artist's works and someone has been adding the "young" tag to some of the posts. I asked the artist and the artist confirms that none of the characters they make art of are under the age of 18. Their older art, with the way they used to make models does make them look young, so I could understand someone making the mistake of thinking the post should be tagged with "young". Is the "young" tag added when the character is confirmed as being under 18, or is the "young" tag added when a character appears to be under 18, given their appearance?
Topic: Young tag valid or invalid?
Posted under General
A blanket tag for characters who are "not adult" — characters who have a clear physical appearance of being under the age of 18, "underage", "minor", etc.
This covers infancy, childhood, and adolescence, but by itself does not describe any specific stage of development other than "pre-adulthood".
Some common traits of characters who appear young include, but are not limited to...
- A large head-to-body ratio (e.g. the head is larger on a young character than an adult)
- Shorter, slightly stubby limbs
- Rounded face, and "soft" facial features
- Less sexually dimorphic figures than adults, lacking broad shoulders, wide hips, or developed breasts.
The vast majority of tags reflect what is visually apparent and not what is intended (Tag What You See). Renamon is supposed to be yellow, but we would never tag posts like post #1353316 with yellow_fur.
If this tag worked solely on a lore basis, then every artist would have an immediate incentive to claim that all of their young-looking characters are adults because it gets them more views.
For cases like what you describe, the combination of young and adult (lore) is sufficient for characters who look underaged but aren't.
Updated
The young tag applies when a character looks young, irrespective of their canonical or intended age. The Tag What You See rule for tagging is only really concerned with what something looks like, not really what was intended (e.g. a 10,000 year old vampire that looks like a prepubescent girl is tagged young even if they're intended to be thousands of years old). There is the adult_(lore) tag that can be used alongside young if the creator intended the character to be over 18.
freakazoid123 said:
Posting an artist's works and someone has been adding the "young" tag to some of the posts. I asked the artist and the artist confirms that none of the characters they make art of are under the age of 18. Their older art, with the way they used to make models does make them look young, so I could understand someone making the mistake of thinking the post should be tagged with "young". Is the "young" tag added when the character is confirmed as being under 18, or is the "young" tag added when a character appears to be under 18, given their appearance?
If the characters look under 18, then the "Young" tag is valid. However if the artist state that they are over 18 despite not looking like it you can add the adult_(lore) tag.
Using Dacad artwork as an example, oof...
But yeah most posts here are enough to clarify about the young tag and adult_(lore) usage, one I checked does look like something that would be tagged as young though...
This does still raise the question of how we determine what counts as "looking" young, an issue I brought up a while ago. Sometimes it's clear-cut but sometimes it isn't, especially for chibi and adolescent characters.
freakazoid123 said:
Posting an artist's works and someone has been adding the "young" tag to some of the posts. I asked the artist and the artist confirms that none of the characters they make art of are under the age of 18. Their older art, with the way they used to make models does make them look young, so I could understand someone making the mistake of thinking the post should be tagged with "young". Is the "young" tag added when the character is confirmed as being under 18, or is the "young" tag added when a character appears to be under 18, given their appearance?
All general tags are subject to the Tag What You See (TWYS) policy, meaning that they are tagged based on visual appearance alone without any regard of canonical lore or artist intent.
This is to avoid all sort of problems when for example, an artist claiming an obviously young character to be a 3000-year-old vampire and neglecting to tag the post as such.
We try to appease any issues caused by the general tags by allowing users to tag lore tags, which are free from the restrictions of TWYS.
Users are allowed to supplement any lore-based information if they are visually different from what is tagged (e.g., adult_(lore), young_(lore), male_(lore), female_(lore), etc.).
In this case, since the post in question visually looks like a young character but is canonically not a young character as claimed by the artist, you would need to tag it as young and adult_(lore).