Danbooru

Guro tag and grotesque art

Posted under General

Can we get a consensus on whether grotesque art should receive the guro tag or not?

Here's what the ToS state about that kind of art:

Grotesque: Any depiction of extreme mutilation, extreme bodily distension, feces, or bodies that are far outside the realm of normal human proportion (for example, breasts that are larger than three heads in size or penises that are larger than two heads in size). Please use the guro tag.

Yet the tag is either never applied to that type of picture, or it gets applied then removed by someone else because it seems like in practice guro is only used for extreme violence, even though the Terms of Service flat out say it should be used for all grotesque art.

If not guro, then another tag should be used to refer to all grotesque art in general.

I say it's best to edit the guro wiki and the ToS to clearly state that the tag should only be used for extreme violence, reflecting the current practice. Extreme violence is a relatively objective concept, while grotesque is highly subjective and likely to become a slush tag for posts that the taggers don't like. There are already more specific tags (e.g. gigantic_breasts, huge_penis, bad_anatomy) to use on things that are out of the ordinary.

I'd say grotesque art is a pretty objective concept actually, regardless of taste or distaste - and especially so if clearly defined in the ToS and tag definition (much like guro is currently.)
ie. whether I like "bodies that are far outside the realm of normal human proportion" or not, I can pretty objectively say whether a piece of art in front of me falls under such a criterion.

A tag is only as subjective as its definition. If you define it correctly, then you can call a tag what you like and under grotesque, one has a certein imagination what the tag could mean. If unsure, then read the wiki.
We can also use Flopsy's advice. Both is fine. But if you have huge penisses and gigantic breasts, then it might be useful to have a (well defined) umbrella tag.

Flandre5carlet said:

whether I like "bodies that are far outside the realm of normal human proportion" or not, I can pretty objectively say whether a piece of art in front of me falls under such a criterion.

But how far outside? And should it be "normal human proportions" or "normal anime proportions"? And in the latter case, which art style should be used to define "normal anime proportions"?

Well, the ToS give you a clear and objectively observable example of something that could be considered grotesque, proportions wise, by saying "breasts that are larger than three heads in size or penises that are larger than two heads in size." One could argue about making these smaller or bigger but the point is that you can fairly easily define whether something would fall under the tag or not.

A same kind of scale could then be applied to other body parts to judge whether something is grotesque or not.

It does raise the question of whether such a tag should be reserved exclusively for such "abnormal proportions" pictures or whether it should also be applied to art that is grotesque in general (say, post #1071733 for example), which would be harder to define objectively.

guro isn't extreme proportions. It's an artistic movement and genre that is focused on extreme violence, gore, and disfiguration among other things. Extreme proportions =/= disfiguration. To a loose extent, some artists also consider scat guro, but that's mostly through the rating system on both pixiv and nicoseiga. The ToS needs to be revised soon because the way it's written is incredibly misleading.

buehbueh did post this in forum #126163

anatomical_distortion for situations where individual body parts either are cartoonishly formed or shifted beyond a natural form, and as per feline lump's suggestion, use cartoon_anatomy when it's obvious that the artist intended not to go by natural human proportions, or animal proportions but specific deformations common in cartoon art.

And I'm for that suggestion.

Ahh yes, the annual guro tag discussion. I was wondering when it would pop up again. It was long overdue.
There, have, been, so, many, topics, about, this tag already, so I really hope that this time we are able to finally gain some consensus about this. Fingers crossed...

The issue is that the guro tag is currently being (ab)used as a catch-all tag for very different things. Some example posts that are all tagged with guro at the moment are: murder, torture, dead birds, guts, artistic anatomy, monster girls, deformed humans and skeletons
Because guro has been used for so many things, cleaning everything up will take several steps and will need some manual weeding afterwards.

The first thing that imho needs to be done is to seperate guro into two groups; the bloody, dismembery, amputatey, deathy and bloody part and the grotesque/weird part. A possible tag for the first part could be mutilated or graphic_violence, and I'm fairly certain that this is the part that people take the most offense to. Note that grotesque and graphic_violence are NOT mutually exclusive. Images can contain both.

Grotesque can then be further detailed by implementing the tags mentioned before like extreme_proportions, anatomical_distortion, and other things that might pop up. In other words:

graphic_violencegrotesque
decapitationextreme_proportions
amputeeanatomical_distortion
death...
intestines...
......

Do note that most of the tags listed in the columns should NOT implicate automatically graphic_violence or grotesque. if we take post #2386633 and post #2505873 for example; These two both feature decapitations, but they are absolutely not graphic_violence.

I realise that this will most likely shift the discussion from the "definition of guro" to the "definition of grotesque". But by having a clear and seperate tag for all the blood-guts-amputee-death images, they will be easy to filter out by adding the tag to the default blacklist, and it should make the further filtering of the grotesque tag a lot more manageable because of the decreased collection size.

evazion said:

https://yande.re/ has an extreme content tag they use for this, and IIRC it's part of their default blacklist. I think it would be useful if we did something similar.

Yande.re's definition of extreme_content is:

  • Any depiction of mutilation, bodily distension, feces, or bodies that are far outside the realm of normal human proportion.
  • Any images depicting humans having explicit sex with other non-human creatures.

Which is pretty much the current definition of guro, but including bestiality and tentacles.

An umbrella tag for all extreme things that people might not like would certainly be nice, hoewever you will have the inevitable discussion on the definition of "extreme"

It most likely will end up like the discussion of the contents of the default blacklist as discussed here where opinions varied between only scat and guro, all the way to anything that is not a male an a female having consensual vanilla sex in the missionary position on a bed with white bedsheets.

All sound ideas. I don't know if we'd need a catchall "extreme_content" tag on top of both a guro and potential new grotesque tag - except maybe one that both those tags would imply, but that seems a bit superfluous if it's nothing more thatn that.

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