Donmai

pokemon_(creature) and how it affects the solo tag

Posted under General

I'm not part of the discord but Obstetrics informed that it was decided there that Pokemon creatures prevent an image from getting a solo tag even when there's only one human character in it. I find this counterintuitive because it goes against how animals are usually tagged. Now, not all Pokemon are animals, humanoid ones like Mewtwo, Gardevoir, etc, are humanoid enought to qualify for at least a 1other tag. But the vast majority are in fact just cartoonish animals, so typically they wouldn't be considered humans for character count tags (unless their genitals are showing, which is a different matter altogether).
If one were, for instance, to search for rosa_(pokemon)+solo, they would expect to find every pic with Rosa as the only human. But if one wanted to search for pics of only a non-humanoid pokemon, they would use no_humans instead of solo (creatures don't have counters so it's hard to search for pics with a single species of Pokemon). Why would a search for rosa_(pokemon)+solo miss posts like post #4486642 because of some lizard?
This is why I think animal Pokemon should not affect a solo tag. Danbooru is overwhelmingly focused on human character art, so it seems silly to me that Pokemon in particular are given special treatment when it comes to counting them as characters.

It wasn't decided there, it's how we've been doing it for years. My understanding was that multiple characters with a chartag count against solo.

I agree however that for things like pokemon or other creature races it starts to make less sense. But how do you decide when to tag a Pikachu + Ash post as solo?

Something like post #3366546 for example.

SSJG said:

Why would a search for rosa_(pokemon)+solo miss posts like post #4486642 because of some lizard?

A similar argument can be made just as easily the other way around. Why should a search for snivy solo include post #4486642 just because Rosa is the main focus? We already have solo_focus for this scenario, so I really don't see the issue here.

Just because the majority of posts feature human characters doesn't mean we should purposefully make it more difficult to search for non-human characters.

AngryZapdos said:

A similar argument can be made just as easily the other way around. Why should a search for snivy solo include post #4486642 just because Rosa is the main focus? We already have solo_focus for this scenario, so I really don't see the issue here.

Just because the majority of posts feature human characters doesn't mean we should purposefully make it more difficult to search for non-human characters.

Snivy is not a humanoid character so the solo tag shouldn't apply to it. I already mentioned that no_humans should ideally be the tag for those searches. If you wouldn't tag a character as 1boy, 1girl, or 1other, it probably shouldn't be tagged as solo.

SSJG said:

Snivy is not a humanoid character so the solo tag shouldn't apply to it. I already mentioned that no_humans should ideally be the tag for those searches. If you wouldn't tag a character as 1boy, 1girl, or 1other, it probably shouldn't be tagged as solo.

The rule has historically been that if there are no humans present, it's ok to tag solo when a creature with a character tag (such as Snivy) is depicted on their own.

SSJG said:

Snivy is not a humanoid character so the solo tag shouldn't apply to it. I already mentioned that no_humans should ideally be the tag for those searches. If you wouldn't tag a character as 1boy, 1girl, or 1other, it probably shouldn't be tagged as solo.

solo is for a single instance of one character, not a single instance of one humanoid character. I would much prefer we didn't remove searchability for non-human posts just to make the human posts fit your personal search preferences.

Additionally, a quick glance at the snivy no_humans search shows that this isn't in any way a substitute for the solo tag, as over half of the results are posts featuring multiple non-human Pokémon.

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