Possible *_girl edits

Many tags named *_girl have been aliased to *_ears such as cat_girl -> cat_ears, but some remain. The most obvious problem with those tags is that they aren't gender neutral just like the old girl_in_* tags. demon_girl - demon_boy

I know that some of these are very complex and can't be accurately mapped to feature tags (I don't know a tag for mushroom_girl), but we should at least move the mammals to the ears/tails/horns(?) tags.

Edit:

• Bunny_girl -> bunny_ears, bunny_tail, bunnysuit
• cow_girl -> cow_ears, cow_tail, cow_horns, cow_print
• goat_girl -> goat_ears, goat_tail, goat_horns
• sheep_girl -> sheep_ears, sheep_tail, sheep_horns

Complex tags:

• demon_girl = bat_wings/demon_wings and demon_tail? Skin color and horns? I can't check because the tag is horribly maintained demon_girl -demon_tail -bat_wings -demon_wings 145 pages. Seems to based a lot on metaknowledge (Etna, Morrigan, Astaroth). I guess the tag is for the >10% demon characters?
• dragon_girl: girl with dragon_tail/dragon_wings and antlers/horns. Possible also scales/claws.
• lizard_girl: girls with lizard_tail and features I don't have a name for.
• insect_girl: girl with antennae, insect_wings (except fairies). didn't even know this exists (~200 posts). If this were actively used, we'd have to tag thousands of Wriggle images)
• bee_girl
• spider_girl
• plant_girl
• mushroom_girl
• goo_girl
• monster_girl (the umbrealla), also monster_boy

I'm not sure it is a good idea to try and break some of these tags into individual pieces. Not all of the animal girls/people tags are so easily placed within a major defining feature. Certainly for cat, dogs, rabbits, etc they are really only defined by two features and of which the ears are the most important part. Some though, such as the cow girl or a similar package tag that encompasses this concept, isn't so easily equated to a specific defining feature. It is true that cow_ears are common among cow_girls, it should be noted that it can't be used in a similar manner as with cat girls and cat ears. Not all cow girls actually have cow ears, and while like some cat girls it might simply be because they're not depicted, more likely it is because the character can have normal human ears or because it isn't uncommon to depict a personified cow with elf-like pointy ears (most likely cause they're reminiscent of cow ears). The next major feature that could be used then is cow_horns, but again cow girls don't equate to cow horns either because not all cow girls/people have horns. So to effectively replace the one tag in a search you have to always do a ~cow_ears ~cow_horn search, because neither of these two features encapsulates enough to actually equate to the one single cow_girl tag.

In practice it might be better for mammal girls/characters that if the defining feature is really a single specific feature, that is when we break up the tag, but if there isn't a specific single feature then we shouldn't break them up and instead have a tag to try and encapsulate the concept.

As a side note, cow is not really a gender neutral term.

There's also minigirl / miniboy. Any reason these shouldn't be combined into miniperson?

mermaid implicates monster_girl, so it's a gender specific tag as well. The male tag is merman, which I doubt people remember when they're looking for mermaid images.

I suspect the use of dragon_girl is mainly because there isn't an alternative to dragon_ears, which usually doesn't apply. I added dragon_horns to a few images to see if that would work. It seems most dragon_girl images have at least one of dragon_tail, dragon_wings or dragon_horns, but I did come across a few that don't.
post #1083028 , post #1083027 - scales
post #1083618 - arm/claw
post #1092407 - armor and head fins

NWF_Renim said:
So to effectively replace the one tag in a search you have to always do a ~cow_ears ~cow_horn search, because neither of these two features encapsulates enough to actually equate to the one single cow_girl tag.

You have the exact same problem with ~cat_ears ~cat_tail, or all the images of Yakumo_Ran -no_hat which are only fox_tail. And we don't have a fox_girl tag.

BTW, we have 33 images of deer_ears, 6 deer_tail and of course antlers, but no deer_girl tag.

It's not the same problem though, because cat_girls are defined as really only two major pieces which are ears and tail. They're a much simpler categorization than cow girls, which lacks a single head piece. If you're trying to say that ~cat_ears ~cat_tail is comparable to ~cow_ears ~cow_horns, I would have to say that is inaccurate as the cow character equivalence becomes ~cow_ears ~cow_horns ~cow_tail if you throw in tails. It is inherently more complex than some of the simpler categories.

There are actual differences between deer characters and cow characters. (1) As I pointed out before, cow girls may also have pointy ears as opposed to cow ears. This is something that is somewhat unique to cow girl personifications, most likely because cow girls do appear in serialized series more likely than similar types of animals. (2) antlers is a broader tag than cow_horns, and so isn't comparable as you can not use antlers in the same manner as cow_horns. There are plenty of images tagged antlers that are not deer characters, and cow_horns tend to have a much more standardized appearance than antlers. As such cow_horns can be used to categorize a cow character, but antlers can not be used to categorize a deer character (as evident by the results of a ~antlers ~deer_ears search). (3) Deer characters are more comparable to simpler categorized animal characters and not a more complex type like cow characters, because deer characters are effectively defined by the presence of deer_ears which as I said in point (1) is not the same with cow characters.

It should also be pointed out that the lack of a tag existing does not have bearing on whether such a tag is worthwhile. Furthermore they are different tags and have different populations of images under them, so while one may not be worthwhile, that does directly say that the other tag can't be worthwhile.

Should there be a page for animal suits?

(There's one post already)

One thing about Cow Girls is that the actual required feature is so general as to make distinguishing impossible, absent extra information.

Case in point: Elfleda Mirjasdottir

NWF_Renim said:
(2) antlers is a broader tag than cow_horns, and so isn't comparable as you can not use antlers in the same manner as cow_horns. There are plenty of images tagged antlers that are not deer characters, and cow_horns tend to have a much more standardized appearance than antlers. As such cow_horns can be used to categorize a cow character, but antlers can not be used to categorize a deer character (as evident by the results of a ~antlers ~deer_ears search). (3) Deer characters are more comparable to simpler categorized animal characters and not a more complex type like cow characters, because deer characters are effectively defined by the presence of deer_ears which as I said in point (1) is not the same with cow characters.

It should also be pointed out that the lack of a tag existing does not have bearing on whether such a tag is worthwhile. Furthermore they are different tags and have different populations of images under them, so while one may not be worthwhile, that does directly say that the other tag can't be worthwhile.

The question is whether a cow_horns is useful at all or why do we need it?
Just as the "lack of a tag existing does not have bearing on whether such a tag is worthwhile", the existence of a tag alone doesn't make it worthwhile either.
For cats, dogs, wolfs, foxes, etc., not a single *_ears or *_tail tag has a standardized appearance. We've discussed this before and decided to tag "animal name"_tail simply so you can tell what the artist intended it to be. forum #43158

Therefore, I don't buy that cow_horns have some kind of standardized appearance. I can even create a deer_antlers tag right know, ignoring how useful or useless it would be, assume that a cow_horns tag was never created and reverse your argument:

"horns is a broader tag than deer_antlers, and so isn't comparable as you can not use horns in the same manner as deer_antlers. There are plenty of images tagged horns that are not cow characters"

So cow_horns is just an extra tag we use because the artist said that the character is a cow. Just like that, if a character gives a girl antlers and says she's deer, she's a "deer girl". There isn't a popular deer character yet that is posted on danbooru, but if there were one, and the only deer feature visible are the antlers (because her ears and tail are covered by her clothes), we'd have to create a deer_antlers tag. Why? Because the artist/creator said she's a deer, there is visible evidence in the image and we need to store this information using tags.

Well, anyway. Do you have anything to say about the other tags?

Fencedude said:
One thing about Cow Girls is that the actual required feature is so general as to make distinguishing impossible, absent extra information.

Case in point: Elfleda Mirjasdottir

I have not watched or read the series, but assuming that she really is cow, Elfleda Mirjasdottir needs some tag gardening. Horns, and tail tags are only on 6 images.

EDIT: This post was prefaced on a misunderstanding of what S1eth was proposing. You can largely skip this post.

S1eth said:

• Bunny_girl -> bunny_ears, bunny_tail, bunnysuit
• cow_girl -> cow_ears, cow_tail, cow_horns, cow_print
• goat_girl -> goat_ears, goat_tail, goat_horns
• sheep_girl -> sheep_ears, sheep_tail, sheep_horns

Bunny girl stands out from the the rest of this pack in that it more often than not describes a girl in a costume rather than a girl with actual anthropomorphic features. Does it apply when a girl isn't wearing a bunny suit (e.g. to Touhou's Tewi)?

The rest, however, are a good example of why not to get too enthusiastic with implications. For example, none of the images under goat girl have a tail, and I see only one image after a quick glance of the first page of sheep girl with a tail. I also see at least three images with no horns, which is sensible since horns are a male feature. I'm sure if I kept looking, I could find one with normal ears.

As for the complex tags, it breaks down even worse.

Demon girl is sort of a big, messy, amorphous, catch-all tag since not all demon girls will have wings, a tail, or horns, but most will have at least one (or some other odd trait like multiple eyes, fangs, claws, etc.).

Insect girl, spider girl, and plant girl should all be reserved for images in which the characters have monstrous features, since all of those tags implicate monster girl. i.e. 90% of Wriggle images should not be tagged insect girl just because she has antennae.

Even goo girl can't be nailed to something like transparent since some are mostly opaque.

alegria said:
There's also minigirl / miniboy. Any reason these shouldn't be combined into miniperson?

They have very different sexual connotations for those into the size difference fetish.

I'm going to go from a different direction now, because Fencedude's response reminded me of something I had noticed and felt awhile ago. We aliased specific animal girls to specific ear tags, but after thinking about it and looking at it, I think what we did was actually a mistake from the get go. For most of these types of animals, what people are doing isn't actually tagging specific items, they're essentially tagging the character things like wolf, dog, cat, fox, etc and then tagging the specifics using that information. The specific items (ears and tails) are only secondary information generated using what the character would primarily be tagged with to begin with (ie wolf person, tiger person, fox person). In short most of these animal ears and tails are not so much the objects that define the whole, but parts that can only be defined by knowing what the whole was to begin with.

A person sees a character, lets use post #134649. Now lets say that all the person can see is the ears of the character and they have no clue who this character is. What is there that defines these ears as "wolf" ears as opposed to cat, dog, or some other general animal? The shape? The color? None of that really provides any information to what type of animal these ears are. Now we throw in the character's tail and now we can see this person is likely some sort of canid personification, perhaps most likely a wolf taking into account the hair color. The point is, the part itself can not be identified as what we're tagging it without having to look at and classify the whole image to begin with. Essentially I've had to tag this character a "wolf girl" before I could turn around and say those are wolf ears.

Perhaps you might argue, well I can use the tail to identify the animal instead. Okay, lets try again. The character has a long slender tail, that should be obvious, so lets use post #1072118. I look at the tail and I'm thinking it's probably a cat? I've seen so many other cats with similar tails. Well lets look at the ears to double check, they're kind of cat like, obviously this character is a cat girl and those are cat ears and a cat tail. Wait, as it turns out this character is a genderswap of the monkey king from Journey to the west. Oh, well since we know the character is a monkey, obviously that is a monkey tail and monkey ears. Again, you end up labeling the character "monkey" before you end up labeling the specific parts. Essentially all these specific tags end up being nothing more than a very bloated replacement for a <animal>_person tail or <animal>_person animal_ears search.

Bunch of other examples:
post #1051341 is a cow tail, because given the visual information we can label this character a cow person. As opposed to it being a lion tail, such as in post #973092 which has little in the way of a visual difference.
post #1084015 which we label cat ears due to background information labeling this character as a cat person, as opposed to post #1025803 which is labeled fox ears because we can label this person a fox girl again due to the artist.
post #30166 which we label mouse ears due to visual cues beyond the ears, as opposed to bear ears like in post #451197.
post #1080621 which is tagged cat ears, probably because there is no other information and by assumption we label these "cat ears." They could just as well be wolf ears.
post #199100 labeled wolf ears and wolf tail, but only because we would label the character a wolf girl, despite visually being more similar to what we commonly see with a fox person with their fox ears and fox tail.
post #1068927 which is label fox_ears because background information and visual cues (tails), but more importantly we don't label them dog ears, wolf ears, dog tail, or wolf tail because only the background information (either knowledge of the character or knowledge of the 9 tailed fox concept) that labels this character a fox person.

In short, the direction we should have gone was trying to classify the characters by types to begin with (much like classifying specific monster types), as opposed to trying to classify their parts. Encapsulation of the entire concept with a tag, as opposed to breaking down the concept into parts which rely on the whole to be identified in the first place.

NWF_Renim said:
...

+1 to this, it makes more sense to go in this direction for the reasons listed. In essence it might make sense to alias (not implicate) all the random types of ears into animal ears, since in most cases they are visually ambiguous enough to fall under multiple tags given no extraneous information to disambiguate with (Unless there is some worthwhile reason to separate the pointy ears from the round ones from the floppy ones).

The disambiguated whole (which can only be determined by a constellation of features, and perhaps background knowlege, as NWF Renim notes) can be tagged with *_girl or an equivalent.

This leaves the problem that *_girl is not gender neutral, and it's not a real good idea to unnecessarily conflate these features into a combo tag with gender (and thus require the concept to be fragmented across two tags).

Perhaps we could do something like cat person, cow person, deer person (these sound a bit strange to me, as the idiom gets a bit broken when you don't use boy or girl). Maybe it'd be better to use a qualifier -- animal person (cat), animal person (wolf), etc.

Shinjidude said:
This leaves the problem that *_girl is not gender neutral, and it's not a real good idea to unnecessarily conflate these features into a combo tag with gender (and thus require the concept to be fragmented across two tags).

I consider this a feature, not a problem. Most people who like non-furry animal girls and monster girls do have a gender preference when searching. Admittedly, male equivalents are usually hard to find, so I guess the clutter wouldn't be too bad. *shrug*

Maybe it'd be better to use a qualifier -- animal person (cat), animal person (wolf), etc.

Do you want to type out that long prefix every time you're tagging such a character? I sure as heck don't.

I'm glad to hear that others are saying they want tags like cat girl back. I think NWF Renim put it best when he said that you only search for cat ears and dog tails because you want to find cat girls and dog boys, and likewise with tagging.

So I think all that's left to discuss, is how do we combine cat girl and cat boy?

Edit: But then, as NWF Renim just said too, is it really that bad that the tags are gender dependant? As far as awkward tags go, searching yawning cat_girl and yawning cat_boy isn't nearly as bad as searching for all the hand-to-breast tags (breast hold, breast suppress, breast grab, groping, self fondle, etc)

BCI_Temp said:
Bunny girl stands out from the the rest of this pack in that it more often than not describes a girl in a costume rather than a girl with actual anthropomorphic features.

This is because until a year ago, bunnysuit implicated bunny_ears, so you could not use bunnysuit if only the bunny_tail was visible, but not the ears. So in order to bypass this, those images were tagged bunny_girl instead because that one does no implicate bunny_ears. Also note that bunnygirl without _ is aliased to bunnysuit.

The old wiki of bunnysuit:

Usually, a "bunny suit" refers to the leotard/bathing suit/corset like costume typically worn by Playboy bunnies, also known as bunny girls.

This tag is currently implicated with "bunny ears," so use the following tags instead if the rabbit ears aren't actually in the picture:

• 'bunny girl' if the bunny tail can explicitly be seen, since this tag is not implicated with "bunny ears" as "bunnysuit" does
• 'kittysuit' if one is wearing cat ears
• 'leotard' and other appropriate tags for those wearing other animal ears or none at all.

I requested the removal of the implication to bunny_ears in forum #53653.

BCI_Temp said:
The rest, however, are a good example of why not to get too enthusiastic with implications.

I wasn't talking about implications at all.

BCI_Temp said:
Insect girl, spider girl, and plant girl should all be reserved for images in which the characters have monstrous features, since all of those tags implicate monster girl. i.e. 90% of Wriggle images should not be tagged insect girl just because she has antennae.

The only tag that implicates monster_girl is mermaid.
The spider_girl -> monster_girl implication was requested in forum #65242.

BCI_Temp said about minigirl/miniboy:
They have very different sexual connotations for those into the size difference fetish.

Danbooru is not a porn site, so I think we shouldn't choose our tags based on sexual preferences. minigirl is 84% rating:s

NWF_Renim said:

That's another way of doing it, but would your suggestion mean nuking the specific *_ears and *_tail tags?
What about chimera/nue and fusion character which have features of mutliple animals?
post #301877
post #128815
post #827435

S1eth said:
That's another way of doing it, but would your suggestion mean nuking the specific *_ears and *_tail tags?
What about chimera/nue and fusion character which have features of mutliple animals?
post #301877
post #128815
post #827435

To be honest, I'm not fully sure myself. There are some features that can contain within them information that self classifies what they are. Notably things like bunny_ears which as far as I'm aware have a fairly unique shape. A fox_tail can be self identifying, if it was restricted to those that have that specific white/dark tip pattern (something that is not being done in practice). So while we can easily identify and classify the fox tail and the bunny ears in post #301877, something like Chen's ear doesn't actually contain any information that really identifies what they are.

As for something like post #827435, what we could label is that the ear's on the character's head are animal_ears but again there lacks information saying what animal they really belong to (all we know is they're triangular animal ears). The tail in the image as well, could be one of many different spotted cats (but only because I'm assuming it belongs to a cat because all I'm aware is such spotted patterns are on cats). If we labeled it leopard_tail, it's not because we know the tail belongs to a leopard, it's because we're using the term leopard in reference to a pattern and shape, and not a specific animal. The same is with that "zebra leg." I'm labeling it zebra, but there is no way I know that leg is a zebra's leg. The term zebra is only being used to classify the white with black strip pattern and the equine leg shape (the leg could be from a African Wild Ass for all I know).

I guess where I'm going is that we probably could have specific parts tags, but really only those that are self-defining. Naming-wise, if we do use terms like "fox_ears," it isn't to classify the character as a fox person, but classify the specific part with a unique shape and/or pattern. So for example, due to background information we end up putting Holo as a wolf-person, her tail though (due to specific shape and pattern) would end up still labeled a "fox_tail" because the item identifies itself under that category without influence from whatever animal-person category the character goes under.

Tags like cat_ears or wolf_ears will probably end up being tossed, because they visually lack features that identify themselves from other animal ears. They would be more suited being classified by shape if need be.

S1eth said:
I wasn't talking about implications at all.

Rereads... Edit: Misread the intent twice somehow.

Personally, I like the gender specificity because it helps separate chaff from wheat when searching.

On the other hand, I'll admit that usually the chaff isn't so bad if you're searching for women, but this'll cause nightmares for people searching for men (for the same reason).

And yes, Danbooru is not a porn site, but it does contain porn, and that is (inevitably) a draw for some readers to the board. Tags should be useful for everyone.

(Personally, I'd prefer if we split off the "reorganizing the ear tags" discussion into another thread since it's not really related to the gender issue here. It's worthy of full discussion.)