People often use these tags for meaning a person who is young, a person who is teenage, or a person who is old. And if you don't read the wiki for these tags, then it isn't obvious that such a usage is incorrect.
I'd personally prefer a follow-up BUR that removes these aliases (so as to functionally rename these tags), but I'm starting with this so it won't get hooked up on that detail.
I would suggest aged up and aged down. These are common terms used elsewhere and harder to misinterpret.
I would argue teenage is a bad tag because it includes both aged up and aged down characters, and because teenage-to-young-adult is basically the default in anime. It's hard to tell whether a character is meant to be teenage or young adult outside of specific cues like school uniforms. And frankly because explicitly saying that characters in sexual situations are under 18 is problematic for various reasons.
How often is teenage searched for anyway? I imagine the above-mentioned ambiguity would actually lessen the amount of searches it would receive, since folks would typically go more for the extremes of aged up and aged down.
I imagine that, for the use cases that teenage (questionably) has outside of canon-tagging and guesswork, i.e. the specific cues, we could easily get new non-age-based tags going (though thinking about stuff like secondary education/high school, I imagine there'd be some vagueness there that'd still make it hard to tag).
Those are much better names, I've rejected my BUR. I agree that maybe we don't need to functionally rename the tags as they are quite big and have been around for a while, though I think we should remove the adult -> older and young -> younger aliases.
ditto. Dunno if a dealias is really needed though.
Going with the use of aged in the naming, may possibly want to have a utility alias of de-aged -> aged_down given the real usage of the term in CGI and similar for making people look like younger versions of themselves. Wiktionary uses "deaged," but a google search suggests that "de-aged" is more commonly used (including on wikipedia).
The words adult and young have a much different meaning from the older/aged_up and younger/aged_down tags and could very easily lead to confusion/mistags.
Both tags will need to be gardened a bit and/or the wiki edited. Probably needed that ages ago, though.
Currently, the wikis seem to imply that it's for unusual depictions, but the tag gets used for canon age ups and post-time skip designs. older fire_emblem, for example, is full of Tiki and Three Houses characters, including some official art. The tag definition could be made more clear.
The words adult and young have a much different meaning from the older/aged_up and younger/aged_down tags and could very easily lead to confusion/mistags.
Could maybe deprecate those (like teenage above) or alias young to child Probably wouldn't be a good idea to alias adult male/female to mature male/female
Could maybe deprecate those (like teenage above) or alias young to child Probably wouldn't be a good idea to alias adult male/female to mature male/female
Adult and mature arent synonymous though. Mature is generally somewhere between adult and elderly.
Personally, I dislike the terms "aged up" and "aged down". I've never heard them used, both sound ungrammatical, and the second additionally sounds like an oxymoron. I would have preferred "older/younger than usual". Just my 2 cents.
EDIT: This didn't occur to me until I started browsing: aged up and aged down imply a magical or pseudo-magical effect, not a chronological one. Posts which portray characters as younger due to taking place at an earlier time being tagged "aged down" seems straight-up counterfactual and wrong to me. For example, see most posts in pool #19177
@Omo_Fan says, essentially, that "older" and "younger" were being used as if they were synonymous with "old" and "young", respectively. If people didn't understand that distinction, why should we expect them to understand "aged up" and "aged down"?
Arcana55 said: @Omo_Fan says, essentially, that "older" and "younger" were being used as if they were synonymous with "old" and "young", respectively. If people didn't understand that distinction, why should we expect them to understand "aged up" and "aged down"?
In my experience, the words "young"/"old" and "younger"/"older" are often used interchangeably when used to describe people, but I've never heard the terms "aged up"/aged down" used in a similar way. For example, a google search for "activities for ___" gives the following results: young (9,190,000) younger (1,400,000) aged down (0) old (625,000) older (3,730,000) aged up (0)
I wouldn't necessarily be opposed to different names for the tags, but the words "younger" and "older" are very misleading.
EDIT: This didn't occur to me until I started browsing: aged up and aged down imply a magical or pseudo-magical effect, not a chronological one.
I feel like it more-so implies that the subject's age has been changed artificially, whether by magical effects or by being changed by the artist to suit their artistic vision.
EDIT: This didn't occur to me until I started browsing: aged up and aged down imply a magical or pseudo-magical effect, not a chronological one. Posts which portray characters as younger due to taking place at an earlier time being tagged "aged down" seems straight-up counterfactual and wrong to me. For example, see most posts in pool #19177
I'm not sure how you even came to that conclusion. "Aged up" and "Aged down" are common use terms all over the internet and are used to denote a fan work depicting a character as younger or older than in their official appearances. There's no distinction regarding why they're depicted this way.
