[SPOILER] [Zombieland Saga Ep8] Regarding Hoshikawa Lily

WARNING: Spoilers below if you haven't watched Episode 8 of Zombieland Saga

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In episode 8 of current ongoing anime series Zombieland Saga the adorable Hoshikawa Lily was revealed to be a boy with the original name of Masao Go

Now the first thought, as mentioned in the comments on post #3325742, would be to swap all Xgirl tags applying to Lily to 1boy, adding the otoko_no_ko tag where applicable, and apply the genderswap_(mtf) tag to all posts where Lily is portrayed as a girl. However I'm fairly certain that would be against the policy of Danbooru regarding spoilers.

One commonly mentioned rule on Danbooru is "Tag what you see" which is mentioned as a rule of thumb in Howto:Tag
But how would that work when compared to for example otoko_no_ko characters.

If we take Watarase Jun from Happiness!; He is drawn as a cute girl, but for all intents and purposes he is considered to be a boy and gets a 1boy tag. What makes Jun different from Lily?

@Keita-Kuhn and @NWSiaCB mentioned in the comments of post #3325166:

NWSiaCB said:

[...]
Also, the tags stay. When fanartists draw girls, they are tagged as girls.

Keita-Kuhn said:

Does the series in question refer to them as a girl by all sources-- character account, official profile, and fanart? Then yes, they would be girls. you don't tag a futanari as a boy, right?

Unless the art, or artist commentary contradict, you default to the official profile. We have the xboy, xgirl, xother and androgynous tags for questionable cases.

Which is a pretty solid rule if you ask me, but referring to outside sources immediately counters the "Tag what you see" rule.

To make a long story short; what is the correct way to proceed?

• Hoshikawa Lily has a male body. Tag as 1boy unless the post explicitly portrays Lily as a girl.
• Hoshikawa Lily is considered a girl by everyone. Tag as 1girl unless the post explicitly portrays Lily as a boy
• Hoshikawa Lily's gender is ambiguous, tag as Xother unless the gender is explicitly revealed in a post.
• Something else ....

Edit: Replaced inappropriate term

Watarase Jun is a transgirl and should have the 1girl tag.

Hoshikawa Lily is a transgirl and should have the 1girl tag.

The entire goddamn point of the episode was that Lily is a girl. Period. End of dicussion.

Edit: I lied. Not done. "Trap" is a slur and should not be used at all.

-editing-

The longstanding policy for 1girl/1boy tagging is that these tags describe biological sex, not expressed gender, and that otoko no ko characters are tagged according to tag-what-you-know and not tag-what-you-see.

I don't agree with it, and I have argued against it in the past, but that's what the policy is. See topic #10990 for the last time this came up.

The entire goddamn point of the episode was that Lily is a girl. Period. End of dicussion.

Please don't think that I do not acknowledge that Lily wishes to be considered a girl. I'm merely trying to approach it from a technical perspective for tagging purposes.

All I'm saying is that if this is approached from a "Tag what you see / A girl is a girl" angle in an incorrect way and Lily gets 1girl tags by default from now on, it could be inconsistent with how other otoko_no_ko characters are handled. Because this could set a precedent that watarase_jun, astolfo_(fate), and felix_argyle would also be able to 1girl tags. And I'm fairly certain that direction would be an unpopular one.

Edit: I lied. Not done. "Trap" is a slur and should not be used at all.

Noted, and corrected. Apolgies.

This is a very tricky one. I don't think I've ever seen a girl being revealed as a male/trap/otokonoko halfway through a series with no foreshadowing or hints. I guess is fine to tag 1girl or 1boy if the image clearly shows Lily's sex (breasts, genitalia, etc).
The real problem, I think, is the spoiler aspect. Tagging Lily as 1other is an instant spoiler, because there at the start of the series there is no doubt about her gender. People would also be spoiled by seeing pics that are tagged 1boy but without genderswap (which might lead to mistagging if the person is not aware of the issue and think the tag is missing).

KeliraTelian said:

Watarase Jun is a transgirl and should have the 1girl tag.

Hoshikawa Lily is a transgirl and should have the 1girl tag.

The entire goddamn point of the episode was that Lily is a girl. Period. End of dicussion.

Edit: I lied. Not done. "Trap" is a slur and should not be used at all.

I don't think that applies to Danbooru tagging. Characters have always been tagged by biological sex unless they are futanari or newhalf.

Yes, I know. I've been here a long time. And you know what?

Thats wrong.

Lily is a girl, and for that matter, Jun is a girl. And don't use trap.

I'll reiterate some of what I said in those posts before...

The normal guideline is to just "tag what you see, not what you know", but in cases of gender, there's obviously plenty of cases where you just presume the gender of the character by canon appearance. That said, there are tons of times when a character isn't drawn as their canon gender.

For example, there's tons of Astolfo art where Astolfo is in a bikini or other clothes (or lack thereof) where Astolfo has breasts and clearly doesn't have a penis. That means Astolfo's a girl in that picture. Chevalier d'Aeon clearly represented as a girl is tagged a girl.

Same goes for Kyonko, or any other art of genderswapped characters. It depends on whether or not you can clearly identify that's what the artist intended to draw.

Hence, I'll say that Lily's older art before the reveal is almost certainly intended to be a girl even when it's not obvious that they drew a girl because Lily's naked or in a bikini in a lot of them.

Going forward, I say tag as a boy when the artist draws or makes commentary that make it obvious that it's a reference to Lily as a boy or has "#spoilers" when the only possible spoiler is the gender. post #3325290 and post #3325291 make a pretty clear case for artists drawing the same character in different genders deliberately.

The only real question is whether or not to start defaulting to boy tags going forward when it's utterly ambiguous, and in that case, I'd still say that we should default to a girl tag, if only because it prevents spoilers, and there's no reason to make EVERY image of Lily that doesn't have (spoilerific) "THIS LILY IS TOTES GIRL, YO!" or outright shows vag have a spoiler tag.

As for KeliraTelian's argument about Lily being a transgirl and that should be the end of the discussion, the thing is, we're not dealing with a person who can declare their preferred gender identity, we're dealing with fanart where artist interpretation of characters can warp the character from any one picture to the next, and tags go by what's in that picture, not what the character is supposed to be in canon.

As for KeliraTelian's argument about Lily being a transgirl and that should be the end of the discussion, the thing is, we're not dealing with a person who can declare their preferred gender identity, we're dealing with fanart where artist interpretation of characters can warp the character from any one picture to the next, and tags go by what's in that picture, not what the character is supposed to be.

No, we need to completely revisit this entire procedure (and I was one of the ones who first argued for how things are *now* for the record), because its wrong and transphobic.

Lily is a girl, and should be tagged as a girl, and in fact has affirmatively declared their gender in as clear a way as I've ever seen in anime, or basically anything else.

Yeah, thats an image of Lily naked, with a dick. That doesn't make her suddenly not a girl. We need to completely revise how we tag these things.

KeliraTelian said:

Yes, I know. I've been here a long time. And you know what?

Thats wrong.

Lily is a girl, and for that matter, Jun is a girl. And don't use trap.

Well you can't just say "that's wrong" and expect everyone to agree. Tagging is usually decided based on what's most useful for the site's users and visitors, and I'm quite sure most people who use the site use the xboy and xgirl tags to search for characters of that biological sex, not the character's personal gender identity.
I understand where you are coming from, but you can't expect to change something so firmly established in the site overnight.

KeliraTelian said:

No, we need to completely revisit this entire procedure (and I was one of the ones who first argued for how things are *now* for the record), because its wrong and transphobic.

Lily is a girl, and should be tagged as a girl, and in fact has affirmatively declared their gender in as clear a way as I've ever seen in anime, or basically anything else.

Yeah, thats an image of Lily naked, with a dick. That doesn't make her suddenly not a girl. We need to completely revise how we tag these things.

OK, and what do you do when someone draws a picture or doujin where Lily affirmatively declares in as clear a manner as possible that he's a man? (Before, presumably, making Koutarou his Uke or something...) Are you going to disrespect the gender identity of that fanon interpretation of the character?

Besides, gender politics really isn't what tags are for. Tags are for "what you see, not what you know" because tags are for people searching for a specific trait in an image (presumably without having to know anything about the series) first and foremost. I.E. when I am playing an RPG with custom character portraits, I'll search Danbooru for something like Original, Solo, 1girl, Witch Hat, Wand. I'm not looking for what that girl identifies as in any capacity other than "as a witch".

And trying to make tags about gender identity is just BEGGING for bringing a massive gender politics shitstorm into Danbooru... which I don't think you'll be on the winning side of, anyway. (This is where someone got shouted down for trying to relabel "pussy juice"...)

Besides, if anything, you'll do better letting un-spoilered images of Lily float around Danbooru and get people interested in watching the show, and seeing the message the show has about the character where she can make that affirmative declaration of gender in her own words than trying to do it with tagging wars with people who aren't familiar with the show won't understand.

I mean, we still have trouble trying to get people to understand that guro can have the "Safe" tag because it only applies to sex.

NWSiaCB said:
Are you going to disrespect the gender identity of that fanon interpretation of the character?

I don't have to give transphobes my respect.

And trying to make tags about gender identity is just BEGGING for bringing a massive gender politics shitstorm into Danbooru... which I don't think you'll be on the winning side of, anyway. (This is where someone got shouted down for trying to relabel "pussy juice"...)

Like, we eliminated the trap-slur a while back, which is good. But that doesn't change that its worth tagging respectfully and you know not playing into the hands of people who think its more important to clutch pearls about people who just want proper resepct.

Also I'm serious that Watarase Jun should be tagged as a girl. Some others as well. Not all of them. Felix is 100% otoko no ko, for example.

KeliraTelian said:

I don't have to give transphobes my respect.

They don't have to be transphobes, they can be anyone who wants to write any sort of genderswap-related story.

I mean, how should we label Kyonko? That's a transgendered Kyon, where in some stories, the character goes through a marked transition on how he/she feels about the transformation. Do we need to have a vote on where in the gender spectrum or Futch scale Kyonko is on a page-by-page basis?

(Plus, hey, everything about Saotome Ranma, who's all but literally gender-fluid.)

You can't just blanket label any arbitrary story "transphobic" before even looking at what it has to say.

KeliraTelian said:

Like, we eliminated the trap-slur a while back, which is good. But that doesn't change that its worth tagging respectfully and you know not playing into the hands of people who think its more important to clutch pearls about people who just want proper resepct.

Also I'm serious that Watarase Jun should be tagged as a girl. Some others as well. Not all of them. Felix is 100% otoko no ko, for example.

But changing trap to otoko no ko is literally just using the Japanese word for the Japanese concept when tagging a Japanese fanart tagged with "otoko no ko". Looking at a picture where the artist says they drew a boy, show a boy with a penis who identifies as a boy, then saying, no, it's transphobic, they were supposed to have been drawn identifying as a girl because you agree with the canon interpretation more than what's in the image you're tagging is forcing your own gender politics over the intent of the creator of that particular work.

Trap and Otoko no Ko are not identical concepts, they have some overlap but are very distinctly different.

Regardless, Lily is not an Otoko no Ko. And stop bringing up Kyonko, they are a completely different situation and it is muddying the waters.

Alright, I hate these kinds of conversations, but I feel like I should chime in here as a transperson who grew up with imageboard culture, which I guess lets me at least understand where both sides are coming from.

Lily is a girl, canonically. This is probably one of most forward representations of a trans person in anime I've ever seen, actually, which...surprised me greatly given Japan's track record. Typically such a person is presented much differently and a lot more emphasis put on the "haha x is really a boy" angle, mostly for fetish reasons. Unfortunately, these kinds of representations are new to this kind of media, so yes, we're going to need to re-evaluate how we handle it going forward.

Here's some of my personal views here:
- Lily should be tagged as a girl in all images in which she is not explicitly depicted otherwise (which *IS* possible; no doubt some artists are going to use this information to draw her from an "otoko no ko" angle, even if that isn't what she is meant to be). "Depicted otherwise" here should refer to artists who draw her with male clothing, as her "former self", or have explicitly tagged their own uploads with otoko no ko or some similar tag used for male-depicted-as-feminine persons.

- Lily is, by japan's standards, actually a newhalf, even though she does not have a developed chest. That's probably the most accurate tag we have to use for images in which she is depicted canonically (as a girl), but with her genitalia visible. I suggest we use this tag for such images, in conjunction with spoilers. Given that we already use this tag for some non-sexual images of transgender characters, it's the least offensive option while still maintaining a tag-what-you-see approach.

- Finally, I believe it's important to note that "tag what you see" exists as a policy specifically because the majority of our database is fanart, in which artists can and will completely ignore canon as it suits them, or images of one-off characters that have no canon information beyond what can be observed. We already make plenty of allowances for prioritizing canon over visual cues in cases where it would better serve the userbase to do so (such as, ironically, many cases of otoko no ko). As such, I don't think it's unreasonable to do so here, especially since we already have tags in place that we can use.

KeliraTelian said:

Trap and Otoko no Ko are not identical concepts, they have some overlap but are very distinctly different.

"Trap" is a neologism whose definition isn't even settled, so we could argue entirely different meanings and both be right...

But regardless, that's far from the main point, you're effectively arguing that what users mean when they search for "1girl" should be different only SOME of the time, only for SOME characters that have been sufficiently identified as transgender as subjectively determined by you in the CANON of a work, only.

Don't you see how that gets REALLY confusing for someone who isn't familiar with a given work?

KeliraTelian said:

Regardless, Lily is not an Otoko no Ko. And stop bringing up Kyonko, they are a completely different situation and it is muddying the waters.

HOW are they different? Kyonko isn't canon, but we'll respect the fan artist intent of a fanon interpretation of a character, but if a fan artist wants to draw a fanon interpretation of the character you, personally made your mind up about, that doesn't count, because it's now "transphobic" if someone else wants to write fanfiction that you didn't approve?

Again, fanfiction and canon characters can be different people. Fanfiction ROUTINELY disregards canon when it needs to in order to tell the story they want to tell. (The canon also doesn't necessarily behave like a real person by any stretch, as per most Otoko no Ko examples.)

You're basically asking for exceptions to the rules for very specific characters because you happen to identify with them and want to deny any fanon reinterpretation of those characters, which is a massively difficult precedent to reconcile.

Kayako's pretty much laid out the best path forward. Artists drawing Lily as a boy is unfortunate but not something we can control, but like the image linked earlier, just because a transgirl is naked doesn't make them not a transgirl. (same with trans boys, of course.)

Oh, while we're here.

We probably should discuss this series and the use of the necrophilia tag....

>"Trap" is a neologism whose definition isn't even settled, so we could argue entirely different meanings and both be right...

Trap is a transphobic slur.

>Don't you see how that gets REALLY confusing for someone who isn't familiar with a given work?

I don't care? Like, really. I don't. At all? Since when does that matter? Also this is why wiki entries exist.

The actual issue is that people don't want to see a penis when they search for porn of girls, and again, I don't care if that bothers them.

>You're basically asking for exceptions to the rules for very specific characters because you happen to identify with them and want to deny any fanon reinterpretation of those characters, which is a massively difficult precedent to reconcile.

I'm trying to keep this site as the one place like this on the internet that has managed to not be massively transphobic.

KeliraTelian said:

Kayako's pretty much laid out the best path forward.

Which is also what I was recommending...

KeliraTelian said:

Artists drawing Lily as a boy is unfortunate

No it isn't, it's freedom of expression. The same thing that lets Lily actually being a fairly realistically (you know, minus the zombie bit) transgender character is also something that lets someone else genderswap the transgender character in a fanwork.

Besides, tagging a character "1girl" on a different website the artist doesn't visit isn't showing them up, it's just going to confuse viewers and cause tagging wars.

KeliraTelian said:

just because a transgirl is naked doesn't make them not a transgirl. (same with trans boys, of course.)

No, artist intent is what makes them a transgirl, and artist intent can change from artist to artist.

KeliraTelian said:

We probably should discuss this series and the use of the necrophilia tag....

Considering as there are zero Zombie Land Saga images with necrophilia tagged, I'd say it's not much of an issue, but since I've already had this discussion, I'll go ahead and quote myself here:

KeliraTelian said:

Trap is a transphobic slur.

Trap can be used as a transphobic slur, and has bled from referring almost exclusively to Otoko no Ko (and hence, having no difference in definition) to being used as a transphobic slur rather recently. "Gay" and "queer" were homophobic slurs, but aren't any longer because of reclaiming. Language is malleable and often dependent upon context.

KeliraTelian said:

I don't care? Like, really. I don't. At all? Since when does that matter? Also this is why wiki entries exist.

"I don't care how much it will be misused, cause arguments, and screw everything up" is a really poor way to get people onboard with an idea.

The tagging system is not for gender politics, it is for ease of use in finding specific images or types of images by a very, very large number of people, even those who do not read through every forum argument (which is everyone), and those who read every tag's wiki entry, especially if that entry was changed out from underneath them. One of the characters from Catherine is a fully transitioned transwoman but you don't mention her while mentioning Lily and Jun and distinguishing them from more standard "identify as a male" Otoko no Ko... presumably because you're not read up on every possible reference to transgendered characters in all of Japanese culture, which this "I am the final arbiter of who is or isn't trans enough" argument would require to have any degree of consistency when applied past these two arbitrary special exceptions.

Danbooru is inherently decentralized and functionally run (at least in terms of uploads and tagging) by a very large number of people who don't necessarily communicate with one another regularly. Clear, simple guidelines are necessary for generating the consensus such a place needs if this website will run at all. If a tag is repeatedly being misued by every person who comes across it even when it has a wiki article, then it's often time to just change the tag for being unclear.

If anything, it makes more sense to just change the wiki to say that the *girl and *boy tags refer to sex, not gender, (which is ambiguous at this point) since that's how they've been used up until now.

KeliraTelian said:

The actual issue is that people don't want to see a penis when they search for porn of girls, and again, I don't care if that bothers them.

Then you're not someone we should listen to when setting up the rules, because we'd be throwing a spanner directly into the works with that one, which would also mandate the creation of other tags or repurposing of existing tags.

KeliraTelian said:

I'm trying to keep this site as the one place like this on the internet that has managed to not be massively transphobic.

You're REEEEAAAALLY cherry-picking what you've been reading on Danbooru, then. Because believe me, there are people from all political stripes here, including people shouting incel slurs like "roastie" in recent memory.

I can accept Lily being tagged as a girl by default, if only because that's what she's referred to in the show and in things like promotional material, but any indication of her being male in a pic (bulge, penis, jokes about deadly body hair, etc) should result in a xboy tag. But I don't think newhalf is appropiate because Lily is a prepubescent child, and therefore she doesn't have any of the secondary sexual characteristics that distinguish a newhalf from an otoko no ko (breasts, basically). I don't think the matter of a character being trans or not is something tags should ever touch, the newhalf tag is merely a visual indicator of a character's body (female body and male genitals, but 9 times out of 10 otokonokos also have "female" bodies, so breasts make all difference).

As for necrophilia, I don't think it should be used. Necrophilia is only for actual dead bodies, or people who are obviously rotting zombies. The Franchouchou girls, even their zombie forms, don't look a lot like zombies.

With regards to how the fanartists are treating Lily, I checked the posts made after the reveal and could not find one enthusiastically affirming that the artist believes Lily is a girl. Some are choosing not to address it, and a few are saying "it doesn't matter/Lily is Lily", which is roughly the same tone as the conversation in the show. On the contrary, there's a lot of "otoko no ko" tagging and a couple references to the "daga otoko da" meme.

There's not a terrible lot of ambiguity in Japan about whether the writers meant to invoke the otoko no ko trope. Most of the dissent is coming from a Western perspective on gender and language. The idea that we should update tags to reflect this dissent isn't 100% without merit - we are a Western board, after all - but we should keep in mind that we are dealing with Japanese artists and all the conflicting cultural biases that entails.

As for the spoiler question - every time this happens, it seems to turn into an "everybody knows" deal at some point or another, so I don't know that we're going to have to keep a spoiler moratorium on the tags forever. In fact, even on non-spoiler images, the comments are already so full of discussion about this spoiler that it's difficult to hide that there's something going on. Might very well depend on how long-lasting the fandom is, though.