I don't think any new tags or anything complicated is needed. If an image would get the crowd or people tag, you don't need gender count tags for every single person in the image. Just the clearly visible ones that are important and/or actually involved in the image.
Again, we don't tag crowds as 6+others. I think a vast majority of people are already ok with this. But, like many of the tagging futzes we have, it stems from a small handful of oddly dedicated people hardlining on the letter of the wiki/guideline/"law" a little too much.
These make sense to me, so long as "tag solo_focus" here means "if and only if there is a single character that is obviously being focused on and moreso than any other characters", which I assume it has to.
What should be the guideline for who "counts" to be counted in gender tags vs consigned to people? (crowd feels kind of obvious for a group of faceless background people). Should we count people if they are interacting with whoever is being focused on (NNT's "gangbang of faceless men") or look like they might easily do so (an identifiable character in the scene standing off to the side, but presumably aware of what's going on in focus?.
I was thinking of this topic when tagging the video at post #4792533. Since there's only one re-occurring character who is the obvious focus, and no one else is of particularly great important, it makes sense to me that this be solo focus. By the naive system of counting everyone that shows up (including background people), I think the video would be something like 5girls and 6+boys. If i only counted people the focus character actually interacted with (counting the teacher she sees and the boss), and ignored everyone (the random girl outside the window, the folks on the train, the background teachers and co-workers) conflating them into people it'd be more like 1girl and 2boys. Since the boss and the teacher are also kind of faceless and fleeting should it just be 1girl alone (that feels like it might be too far to me).
Does that latter approach sit right with people here, or is the old naive system better? I kind of like the nuance, but it's not the way we've typically done things in the past. The people on the train have more or less the same apparent "focus" of main character visually (they aren't specks in the distance), but narratively it's obvious they are unimportant.
This whole idea seems to me to be replacing something that's easy to tag and unintuitive to search for with one that is difficult to tag (and will almost certainly lead to more disputes in the future) but if got right somewhat more intuitive to search for.
What should you tag something like post #4744967 (nsfw) with under the proposal? Under the current system it's obvious - each character is distinct and identifiable as either male or female. But other than one they're all either faceless or obscured in some way, and that one is clearly the image's focus. Perhaps it's not what you'd expect if you searched 6+girls, but it sure isn't what you'd expect to find if you searched for say 1girl classroom either. Are they interacting? Well, sort of? But not really.
This whole idea seems to me to be replacing something that's easy to tag and unintuitive to search for with one that is difficult to tag (and will almost certainly lead to more disputes in the future) but if got right somewhat more intuitive to search for.
What should you tag something like post #4744967 (nsfw) with under the proposal? Under the current system it's obvious - each character is distinct and identifiable as either male or female. But other than one they're all either faceless or obscured in some way, and that one is clearly the image's focus. Perhaps it's not what you'd expect if you searched 6+girls, but it sure isn't what you'd expect to find if you searched for say 1girl classroom either. Are they interacting? Well, sort of? But not really.
I think with that case and with any case for that matter we just have to ask ourselves "who is the subject of this image?" Then to me it becomes easy to say that she is the solo focus of the image and the other people are just there for composition sake.
If they're recognizable as characters, they should be tagged with the gendercount tags. I thought that was the whole point of solo focus. If I see 1girl as the solo but 2girls in the background, that's 3girls total. So that would be 3girls + solo_focus. What if its a duo as the focus and some background characters? Would that just be tagged with the duo's genders and not the other characters? How much do the background characters have to be part of the image? Would post #4438212 not be tagged with the 2girls since they're not the focus?
My point is not tagging the gender of the background characters (especially named ones) gets into territory of "oh well the character is only taking up 5.63% of the image so they don't get tagged with their gender". The gender tags work best as simple "count the number of humanoid characters in the image". We already have enough trouble tagging dolls and such that blur the line of being characters in their own right. Also, we use character tags when there are non-living versions of that character like paintings and photos in the image. post #4548403 has three character tags, two living characters in the image, and one of them as the focus. Tagging that as 1girl wouldn't be accurate to the koishi under the bed.
I tagged post #4333765 as 6+others not as a counter to people, but as a counter to no humans. The gendercount tags and people/crowd don't have to be mutually exclusive. We have the faceless tags to show characters that don't really matter. Also, original pictures will have people arguing whether or not the boy right in front of big tiddy girl counts (god forbid the boys in the background) even though none of them have character tags.
There's a real problem with distant background characters though in that the gender is sometimes ambiguous and meaningless. For that sort of thing, simply counting the crowd of mobs they're part of as crowd or people has an appeal. Would you suggest just tagging ambigous meaningless people as *other? or assume and lump them in with *boys or *girls?
If they're identifiable as named characters and/or notable enough to be part of the scene, including their genders in the count still probably makes sense, but for random non-characters not meaningfully interacting with anything, I think it might be better to exclude them. I think the idea of the thread has merit, but there are obviously going to be a lot more subjective decisions in drawing a threshold between what's meaningful and what's not here, for better and worse.
Would you suggest just tagging ambigous meaningless people as *other? or assume and lump them in with *boys or *girls?
I think the idea of the thread has merit, but there are obviously going to be a lot more subjective decisions in drawing a threshold between what's meaningful and what's not here, for better and worse.
I have been tagging background characters with their genders or Xothers if I don't know. But yeah I'm guessing this thread probably isn't gonna go anywhere concrete.
