Androgynous

I'm getting to disagree with the current use of this tag, so I thought of bringing it up here to see what opinions there are on it. Frankly I would prefer androgynous to be completely "tag what you see" in usage. I don't think it should apply simply because a character canonically doesn't have a gender or it's unknown. I've found androgynous to be quite useful, for instance, in identifying depictions of effeminate otoko no ko characters that are a bit more masculine than usual. The intersection of those usages causes problematic dilution in cases like Fate/Grand Order. Should it really be "androgynous" for something like post #2777709 when they both look very girly? The tag is also getting filled up lately with the gems from Houseki no Kuni who are genderless but also including instances where they don't really look particularly androgynous like post #2946774. The ambiguous gender tag exists, but it also has a bit of "tag what you see" element to it in that it's often been used when people are too indistinct (covered in armor, too far out of view, etc.) to make out a gender. Whether it should overlap with people who are of canonically ambiguous gender is another question, but I do think it would be less problematic than using androgynous for that purpose. It's not technically true for Houseki no Kuni, but maybe we could create a tag like genderless or no gender?

And it's come up in other discussions too, but I also really think (particularly with Houseki no Kuni being unsearchable compared to other franchises in this regard) that there should be counters for humanoids of unidentified or no gender. I feel like 1person, 2people, 3people, etc. would be the least awkward-sounding solution but also unintuitive in that it might look applicable to characters of known gender.

Besides the gems, there is also frisk_(undertale) to consider since the situation is pretty similar.
To be honest, I wasn't aware of the ambiguous gender tag but it sounds much more what we look for, since in my opinion an androgynous character should still be tagged with 1girl/1boy.

I'm in favor of using androgynous as a tag only for characters who are visibly androgynous, whether they have an official gender or not.

For the counter: 1other, 2others, 3others, etc.?

Not entirely relevant, but I've noticed nanachi (made in abyss) is regularly tagged as 1girl despite having no known gender, so that should be updated no matter what solution we end up at.

I never knew the ambiguous gender tag exists. The androgynous tag is gonna need some cleanup then because I've always used androgynous for original characters that I am unable to identity the gender of.

feline_lump said:

For the counter: 1other, 2others, 3others, etc.?

Those sound like good tags for characters that don't fit the count for 1boy/1girl like animals and Pokemon.

tapnek said:

Those sound like good tags for characters that don't fit the count for 1boy/1girl like animals and Pokemon.

I wouldn't be opposed to counters for them too, though I don't think the counters should be the same as genderless humanoids.

tapnek said:

I never knew the ambiguous gender tag exists. The androgynous tag is gonna need some cleanup then because I've always used androgynous for original characters that I am unable to identity the gender of.

Those sound like good tags for characters that don't fit the count for 1boy/1girl like animals and Pokemon.

We have a pokemon_(creature) tag...Could be combined with a chartag:>2 etc. search.

I've used the ambiguous gender tag several times in the past for scenery pictures where te character was too small for its gender to be determined.

+1 for a counter for them and androgynous, as it's information that is impossible to show and search for (beyond solo/-solo) with the current tags otherwise.

Chiera said:

We have a pokemon_(creature) tag...Could be combined with a chartag:>2 etc. search.

What if there was more than one of the same kind of Pokemon in an image that contains only that kind? That's where the 2others and such tags come in.

tapnek said:

What if there was more than one of the same kind of Pokemon in an image that contains only that kind? That's where the 2others and such tags come in.

Is there one searh query that can'T be covered with the help of the chartag metatag...?
As far as I'm aware the only copyright this could apply to is something like Pokémon or Digimon where you have a huge amount of non-human characters but there we have the pokemon_(creature) tag and we can adjust the amount of chars being covered by a chartag:>2 search (number is adjustable of course). This seems to cover nearly everything and wouldn't justify the creation of a new tag group with # others.

Just throwing in my two cents.

• genderless: characters are confirmed they have no gender/neither man nor woman.
• ambiguous gender: there're no confirmation of their gender or it's up to the user/player/fan to decide what they will be ( Frisk and the first human from undertale ) or it's too indistinct to make out their gender (in costume/too far to tell)
• androgynous: confirmed gender but they have the look mixing of masculine and feminine characteristics.

atm, androgynous wiki cover all three concepts above. I have no problem with using androgynous to all three of them but separate them is fine too.

Regards the headcount, we could use solo, duo, trio, quartet, quintet, sextet combine with *_girl(s), *_boy(s) and futanari tags we already have (and genderless if we're going to use it).

yelite said:

• genderless: characters are confirmed they have no gender/neither man nor woman.
• ambiguous gender: there're no confirmation of their gender or it's up to the user/player/fan to decide what they will be ( Frisk and the first human from undertale ) or it's too indistinct to make out their gender (in costume/too far to tell)
• androgynous: confirmed gender but they have the look mixing of masculine and feminine characteristics.

What about original characters that the artist hasn't specified their gender (and where it isn't obvious from looking)? Under this definition androgynous should never be used for such characters?

And then if they get confirmed later they have to be switched to androgynous?

I think that my interpretation of these tags would be:

ambiguous gender: the character's gender cannot be determined from the image alone, regardless of whether or not the character(s) have a gender in canon.

androgynous: before the creation of the above tag, this tag covered that category as well, in addition to any characters that have a mix of male/female characteristics, even if the gender of those characters could be discerned visually.

In the advent of ambiguous gender being a tag, I would say that, for clarity's sake, androgynous should either be used only for characters that mix male and female characteristics but whose genders can still be discerned, or it should be removed altogether. I think that at current, images in this tag, or at least those that actually belong there (sick of seeing people tag every single trap as androgynous), could be divided into ambiguous gender, crossdressing (otoko no ko and/or reverse trap), and genderless/no gender. Whether or not we still need androgynous following a tag cleanup is something open to debate.

On that note, I am in favor of genderless/no gender being a tag (slight preference for genderless), and the implementation of some kind of counter tag for characters that are neither male nor female. I think out of all the suggestions for far, I like "other" as the qualifier (1other, 2others, etc). This could also give us a solution for futanari images, which iirc are still being tagged as *girl at the irritation of some users.

edit: cleaned up/expanded my wording a bit

Since we now know that ambiguous gender is a tag, the androgynous tag is gonna require some cleanup.

I think it's a mistake to assume the proposed tags should be mutually exclusive. There's going to be a good amount of overlap. If a characters looks to have both masculine and feminine qualities, and their canon gender isn't stated, then they could get both the androgynous and ambiguous gender/genderless tag.

Fair point.

One thing I think is important though, is that we determine what out of these tags functions only off a visual cues before we start changing anything. Right now it seems like we're factoring in canon information in some cases but not others.

I much prefer a tag-what-you-see approach when it comes to gender expression, so I think that androgynous and ambiguous gender both should be used solely based off of what is visible in the image, disregarding any canon confirmation of the character's gender or lack thereof. We have counter tags to detail the canon genders of the subjects outside of their appearance.

Meanwhile, genderless would be the tag for canonically genderless characters, or original characters that have no canon but are drawn to be so (no primary or secondary sex characteristics).

This is what I would consider the most intuitive approach from a user's perspective. If I'm going into the androgynous or ambiguous gender tags, I'm usually not going to care about what the canon of a character is - I just want to look at characters that match a certain appearance.

Yeah, you do have a point about the counters possibly making the need for a "canon" tag redundant, though only if we have (as proposed above) counters for humanoids of no specific gender. To allow for easier tag searching, there would also need to be an implication to a multiple_* tag as we have with the "boys" and "girls" tags currently: a hypothetical ~1other ~multiple_others search would cover it all.

I completely agree. Since I assume we're going to include genderless/agender and nonbinary characters under the same umbrella, I think "1other" and "multiple others" is sufficient. "Other" is a neutral and inclusive enough word, and it's fitting for what we're using it for, but one slight hangup I have is that in some contexts, "other" does have a slight negative connotation to it. I don't think that's going to be a problem, because it's not being used that way, but I'm not NB, so my perspective is insufficient.

If someone on the NB spectrum would like to weigh in, your perspective on the matter would help a lot. Given what we have, though, I'm in favor of "other" being the noun we use.

Vid-szhite said:

I completely agree. Since I assume we're going to include genderless/agender and nonbinary characters under the same umbrella, I think "1other" and "multiple others" is sufficient. "Other" is a neutral and inclusive enough word, and it's fitting for what we're using it for, but one slight hangup I have is that in some contexts, "other" does have a slight negative connotation to it. I don't think that's going to be a problem, because it's not being used that way, but I'm not NB, so my perspective is insufficient.

If someone on the NB spectrum would like to weigh in, your perspective on the matter would help a lot. Given what we have, though, I'm in favor of "other" being the noun we use.

I'm a nonbinary person, and I don't see anything wrong with using 'other' as a qualifier here. It only has a negative connotation if it's being used that way, as you said, which it isn't here. The only thing that could perhaps be seen as negative about it would be its use for newhalf and/or futanari characters that are seen by some people as transgender (even when this isn't explicitly stated by the author/canon) and therefore in theory should be referred to by their preferred sex. That said, that sort of tagging procedure would go against "tag what you see" in a lot of cases, so for now, I think including characters of obviously mixed physical sex under "other" would be fine. It's not like intersex people don't exist, after all, and that's pretty much what's being described here (albeit in a very idealized context).

While I agree with the usage of 1other, etc. tags for non binary reasons, I would also like to reiterate by stance on using them for characters that aren’t human or humanoid. It would make tagging the number of animals and other creatures in an image easier.

tapnek said:

While I agree with the usage of 1other, etc. tags for non binary reasons, I would also like to reiterate by stance on using them for characters that aren’t human or humanoid. It would make tagging the number of animals and other creatures in an image easier.

While I agree that having a counter for non-humanoid characters would be useful, I don't think that we should have counter tags that combine them with humanoid characters.

Something like 1creature/multiple_creatures would be better, in my opinion.