Let's sort things out with the guro tag

There's some confusion over what's considered guro, like in post #1598937.
The guro tag is rather subjective given its importance as a common blacklisted tag. As guro proper is banned according to TOS, the treshold for tagging guro is obviously below what's considered guro outside Danbooru. The wiki says:

Guro does NOT simply refer to violent or bloody imagery, but in fact EXTREME GRAPHIC violence. Do not use this tag for images where the blood tag would suffice.

Unfortunately, "EXTREME GRAPHIC" depends highly on individual basis. Therefore I suggest we create a rule of thumb for what is "non-guro", "Danbooru guro" and "too guro". It will still be subjective, but at least everyone can have generally the same idea of what counts as guro.

Let me start by suggesting:

"Dismemberment, decapitation, disembowelment, impalement or other grievous injury as the focus of an image in a non-comical context."

Any improvements, specifications, opposition?

post #1598937
I don't think this example counts as guro. The only part we see is the blood through the clothes. If actual inner organs were visible through the stab wound, I'd agree, but this isn't the case.

S1eth said:

post #1598937
I don't think this example counts as guro. The only part we see is the blood through the clothes. If actual inner organs were visible through the stab wound, I'd agree, but this isn't the case.

But people still complained, which is exactly why we need a measuring stick for what counts and what doesn't.

This is exactly the post I was asked to make explicit so it wouldn't be on safebooru.

Suzuran_Majere said:

This is exactly the post I was asked to make explicit so it wouldn't be on safebooru.

I assume you're talking about topic #10244

As you know, the safe/questionable/explicit only refers to sexual content. It's not about family friendliness.

Besides, this is rather tame. Definitely near the low end of Danbooru guro treshold and nowhere near actual guro (which is banned).

But there's an important point. A lot of people don't like seeing graphic violence. That's why they blacklist it. It's such an important thing to tag that even howto:tag lists it.

That's why there needs to be some kind of consensus what to tag as guro. It seems like we have a very nice example case on hand here. S1eth already said he doesn't think post #1598937 counts as guro, but Suzuran_Majere (I presume, correct me if I'm wrong) finds it very much guro, while I'm somewhere in between. I'd tag it just to be sure.

TL;DR A concrete guideline on what's guro is obviously required.

I don't know if it really qualifies as "guro" or not, but if there was a tag that meant what OP proposes (wherein comedic violence doesn't qualify) I would tag this as such and probably blacklist that tag. I am unsure where the threshold is for other people, but I myself don't like it. I don't know if it's something the majority of users would object to, but I know it was close enough to the line that several people on IRC objected to it.

budoka_azathoth said:
"Dismemberment, decapitation, disembowelment, impalement or other grievous injury as the focus of an image in a non-comical context."

I assume that's "Danbooru guro", not TOS-violating guro, right? Sounds pretty good, though I'd add something about the depiction of blood and/or internal organs being necessary for the tag to apply. Just to make it more distinct from things like ryona.

Suzuran_Majere said:
(wherein comedic violence doesn't qualify)

This may be a bit off topic, but I thought about taking the violence tag and splitting it into violence (serious) and cartoon_violence (similar to ESRB ratings)

Fred1515 said:

I assume that's "Danbooru guro", not TOS-violating guro, right?

Yes.

Sounds pretty good, though I'd add something about the depiction of blood and/or internal organs being necessary for the tag to apply. Just to make it more distinct from things like ryona.

I was thinking of saying the injury must be obviously life-threatening, but then I thought it would exclude stuff like post #777779, which I'd say falls within the scope of the tag but has neither lots of blood nor internal organs and doesn't look deadly violent although agonizingly painful.

Any ideas for a good wording? Any lawyers on the forum?

budoka_azathoth said:
...but then I thought it would exclude stuff like post #777779, which I'd say falls within the scope of the tag...

It doesn't really look like guro to me, so I'd say it should be excluded. But then again, it's indeed pretty subjective.

To make things even more confusing, if we take a look at the Wikipedia definition of guro:

Ero guro puts its focus on eroticism, sexual corruption and decadence ... The term itself is an example of wasei-eigo, a Japanese combination of English words or abbreviated words: ero from "ero(tic)", guro from "gro(tesque)", and nansensu from "nonsense". In actuality the "grotesqueness" implied in the term refers to things that are malformed, unnatural, or horrific.[1] Items that are pornographic and bloody are not necessarily ero guro, and ero guro is not necessarily pornographic or bloody. The term is often used incorrectly by western audiences to mean "gore"—depictions of horror, blood, and guts.

If we were to say that guro becomes a tag for Grotesque, Unnatural, Malformed, etc...
we could then split the definition of the violent, bloody and dismemberment part of guro into a new tag, let's say graphic_violence.
Guro would become a very subjective tag then, but people that are really put off by the blood and guts can then blacklist graphic_violence instead.

My guess is that the majority of people aren't necessarily put off by blood and guts, but they will be if it's presented in a violent and gruesome manner.
The majority of s_zenith_lee images comes to mind.

To show how it could work, some possible examples:
post #1519939; graphic_violence yes, guro no
post #1340639; graphic_violence no, guro yes
post #1598937; graphic_violence yes, guro no
post #1065370; graphic_violence no, guro yes
post #1012864; graphic_violence yes, guro no
post #1398232; graphic_violence no, guro yes
post #777779; graphic_violence yes, guro no
post #1457902; graphic_violence yes, guro yes
post #1172553; graphic_violence no, guro yes

I'm sure that there are more images on Danbooru that could have both tags. I just can't find any other examples so far.
Only downside, a decent part of images with the what tag can be considered guro (think ao_usagi), so some weeding through the tag might be needed.

Nowadays the "what" definition of guro is outdated. It's not used for just anything weird anymore but specifically for grotesquely violent or bloodily malformed stuff. Ero-guro, more specifically, is this in a sexual context, but sometimes just "guro" is used for Ero-guro. All the aforementioned stuff is mostly banned from Danbooru. By modern definition, none of ao_usagi stuff is guro. Only thing remotely guro I can think of his stuff is post #714453 (Warning: obviously somewhat disturbing) and that is not really what the purpose of the tag is.

We must remember that Danbooru guro is not the same as colloquial guro. If it was, guro wouldn't have a lot of stuff under it because it's banned.

Out of your list, I'd tag all but post #1398232 and post #1172553 as Danbooru guro. S_zenith_lee is mostly also guro-tag stuff.

Not that gore is aliased to guro. I think for the purposes of this site, guro should be virtually same as graphic violence but with things like post #1340639 added. The problem lies in separating it from anything with wounds in it like post #1599432

It has already been clearly defined and is not subjective via the wiki. What this does is just appease people on Safebooru who are overly sensitive. But that wouldn't be the case since Safebooru is about sexually safe for work pictures. There is nothing to be revised and nothing to change. Again Danbooru is about clearly defining works of art and providing a place for that art.