Snake Girl

I was recently curious about the tagging around Snake Girls and Lamia, which was brought up by post #4883326

Veradux responded to me. I think they have fair points on how it might get abused, and it might be an extra padding tag that is covered by "snake tail". The main thing I'm curious about here is the consistency of tags with how there's various specific ones for many different types of creature (X) boy/girl tags. Veradux mentions that with Eunectes her main visually shown feature is her snake tail, however we have cases of characters with only cat ears or dog ears being tagged as cat/dog boy/girl.

From what I know of Dobermann in Arknights we never see a tail in official art, we only see that she has dog ears. So in fanart she's sometimes drawn without a tail and sometimes with one. Regardless of if she has a tail in art or not she's been tagged as a "dog girl", her having dog ears seems to be enough of a visual qualifier. Which why I wonder about Eunectes. I know there's a "reptile girl" tag, but that seems somewhat overly vague to me since there's many different kinds of reptiles. I know various types of cat girls like the lynx girl tag was consolidated into just the general "cat girl" tag recently, but I think at least that makes more sense than consolidating snakes, lizards, turtles, and so fourth into a single tag that is just "reptile girl/boy". Especially as the definition of the tag on Danbooru states "A girl with lizard characteristics such as lizard tail and scales".

So are (X) Boy/Girl creature tags redundant filler? Or helpful clarifiers that help better define characters as a specific creature?

I've just been going with "if the character has two traits (e.g. ears + tail, horns + wings, etc.) they get the x_girl tag, otherwise they don't". I know they are very inconsistent used, however—some people add them in all cases, some people never add them. As for usefulness, they do assist in filtering. Good luck trying to find any cat boys in 1boy cat_ears. It's almost entirely cat girls getting railed.

MisterJuice said:

From what I know of Dobermann in Arknights we never see a tail in official art, we only see that she has dog ears. So in fanart she's sometimes drawn without a tail and sometimes with one. Regardless of if she has a tail in art or not she's been tagged as a "dog girl", her having dog ears seems to be enough of a visual qualifier.

This is fairly uncommon though, most of the time people won't tag dog_girl even if she has both traits. There are 169 images of her, and only 31 are tagged dog_girl.

I think it would just be better to include them all the time but others may feel differently.

Talulah said:

I've just been going with "if the character has two traits (e.g. ears + tail, horns + wings, etc.) they get the x_girl tag, otherwise they don't". I know they are very inconsistent used, however—some people add them in all cases, some people never add them. As for usefulness, they do assist in filtering. Good luck trying to find any cat boys in 1boy cat_ears. It's almost entirely cat girls getting railed.

This is fairly uncommon though, most of the time people won't tag dog_girl even if she has both traits. There are 169 images of her, and only 31 are tagged dog_girl.

I think it would just be better to include them all the time but others may feel differently.

I wonder about the two or more traits aspect since some characters are canonically a different race in their lore, but only have one trait shown at least visually. Eunectes for example as noted has mainly the snake tail showing, she also has pointy ears like an elf to further signify she's not human. So I think a snake girl or at least reptile girl tag is apt for a character like her, especially as she is canonically a snake girl and that's why she has the tail. Dobermann as you noted is definitely all over the place with the tagging, I personally think she should be tagged consistently as a "dog girl", since she has dog ears and her being a dog girl is why she has them.

Another aspect I ponder about 2+ tags that's confusing to me, and may lead to confusion for others, with the two or more trait tagging you mentioned there's sometimes art where only one trait is shown even if the character has more. Say an angle where you can't see a tail, or an image that focuses on the bottom half where you only see the tail. I think the character should be consistently tagged as x_girl/boy if they normally are.

So it's overall pretty confusing to me.

Canonical tags are something we try to avoid. We don't want to tag things that aren't visible in the picture just because you know that's what they have. If we go by 2+ traits then some posts won't get it while some others will. Pointy ears are not a great indicator because they apply to so many fantasy races. Snake girls are fairly niche overall so I'm not sure we'd care so much for having split boy/girl tags.

Talulah said:

Canonical tags are something we try to avoid. We don't want to tag things that aren't visible in the picture just because you know that's what they have. If we go by 2+ traits then some posts won't get it while some others will. Pointy ears are not a great indicator because they apply to so many fantasy races. Snake girls are fairly niche overall so I'm not sure we'd care so much for having split boy/girl tags.

Sorry I should have said this before, I do understand the "tag what you see" rule, but in cases of say some animals and especially fantasy races I feel like certain aspects of tagging have to rely on canonical logic. Say comparing dragon horns to demon horns, humanoid characters with different horns often get tagged with the correct ones based on their canonical roots. In the case of someone having a certain aspect or even a single trait I feel like you can also still apply the "tag what you see" logic the site uses. If a person sees dog ears on say a character like Dobermann you can logically determine from visual context that she is a dog girl. Yes the pointy ears on Eunectes are vague, but I was saying they are a further signifier that she's not human, and you can use visual logical of "tag what you see" with her tail to determine that she's a snake girl. So in my opinion she should at the very least be tagged as a reptile girl.

Also the other problem and confusion with your two or more traits logic is that certain characters might have more traits shown than others. Jackie and Ceobe from Arknights for example have both dog ears and a dog tail in official art. Depending on the angle and so fourth they are sometimes drawn with tails, but again certain angles can make the tail impossible to see, especially in the case of Jackie who has a small tail. From what I gather of the tagging logic you're using they should still be consistently tagged as dog girls. Then as we previously discussed with Dobermann in official art she isn't seen with a tail so she sometimes randomly gets drawn as having a tail by fans. By this logic she should only be tagged as a dog girl in art that she's shown as a having both a tail and ears, but she shouldn't be tagged as a dog girl in art where she only has dog ears? Also Jackie and Ceobe in their official arts uploaded on here have tails and ears, but Dobermann only has ears, so it sounds like only two of these three dog girls should be tagged as dog girls. Which is very confusing and doesn't make sense to me.

Would it be alright if I add to the discussion?

Arknights just got the newest character Corroserum who is a "snake boy". Perhaps what MisterJuice is suggesting can be a tag for him too?

Or is it too niche as Talulah mentioned?

Most of the animal_gender tags are in a bit of a flux right now. We could nuked the really stupid ones that only existed in kemono friends, but the large ones are pretty much untouchable, but left in a limbo. The issue is that cat_girl is really some amalgamation of cat_ears cat_tail ~1girl ~multiple_girls -male_focus. There's pretty much 0 chance of the big ones (cat, dog, bunny, etc) EVER getting nuked.

So sometimes people remember to tag the animal_gender, but it runs into weird wall. Chen is a cat girl, probably one of the most famous. Does she need her tails in the image to be tagged cat girl? We do do some canon tagging, like with siblings so it's not totally off the table.

This is not to mention furries, who also use the animal_gender tags.

Just did a quick check and well I think snake girl = lamia might be the best for what we have cause of arts like these: Corroserium and Eunectes where their supposed snake parts are not shown. Unless the tag is only when the snake part is shown in which case, just snake tail would be enough. Sorry if I just repeated; I just realized this.

I think this isn't really a matter of canonical tagging to begin with, it's just a matter of whether we care for the animal girl/boy tags and what to do with them. A snake_boy tag would have maybe one page of images at best. How niche is too niche? On the other hand, there are 151k cat_ears images, 66k fox_ears, 38k wolf_ears, 110k bunny_ears. Most aren't tagged with cat_girl/boy etc., but they're popular enough that perhaps people would want to search for females or non-females.

Well what about reptile/gender tags that exist already? Small amounts are tagged currently since they would need to be applied to more characters. However there are probably numerous of those characters that the reptile tag could apply to, as it's more vague and expansive to various characters. Corroserum like Myrrhimdon mentioned would be a reptile boy, Ethan is a lizard boy so he could be tagged as reptile boy. Eunectes is a snake girl, there's other reptile characters. So they could be in theory tagged with reptile/gender, and the tag definitions updated.

I think though that all 3 dog girls, Ceobe, Jackie, and Dobermann should be consistently tagged as dog girls personally.

I assume they'd be used for scalies more like post #4826678. reptile_boy also only has 3 posts so I don't know if we care so much. The problem arises when a tag like this consists almost entirely of one character which makes it of questionable utility. The various KF tags had this problem where we'd end up with specific ear/tail tags for each Friend which were exclusively used for them. I don't necessarily think a more vague concept like snake would necessarily have that problem, though, so I'd more lean toward being in favor of doing it for all of them.

MisterJuice said:

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If someone searches dog girl and gets, say, post #4183370, the tag is a failure and not useful. It's why I've been consistently against a lot of race tagging in general. Take a look at Fire Emblem's manakete. That tag is not so much searching for the race as it is searching for a specific handful of characters, even then it's virtually useless. It's basically just an extremely bad search for ~dragon_girl ~pointy_ears.

That's very much a mirror of the animal_girl tags. No matter what we establish as the use case, we've got over a decade of people not following any use case. I don't think introducing another such tag into the wild is a good idea.

Talulah said:

I assume they'd be used for scalies more like post #4826678. reptile_boy also only has 3 posts so I don't know if we care so much. The problem arises when a tag like this consists almost entirely of one character which makes it of questionable utility. The various KF tags had this problem where we'd end up with specific ear/tail tags for each Friend which were exclusively used for them. I don't necessarily think a more vague concept like snake would necessarily have that problem, though, so I'd more lean toward being in favor of doing it for all of them.

I guess it brings in the question if we need a scalies tag, since we have a furry one. At least I think tagging a character like Eunectes with reptile girl makes a fair amount of sense, and then the tail/horns/other aspects tags could define them better. Such as snake tail, crocodilian tail, so fourth.

Veradux said:

If someone searches dog girl and gets, say, post #4183370, the tag is a failure and not useful. It's why I've been consistently against a lot of race tagging in general. Take a look at Fire Emblem's manakete. That tag is not so much searching for the race as it is searching for a specific handful of characters, even then it's virtually useless. It's basically just an extremely bad search for ~dragon_girl ~pointy_ears.

That's very much a mirror of the animal_girl tags. No matter what we establish as the use case, we've got over a decade of people not following any use case. I don't think introducing another such tag into the wild is a good idea.

I can see why tagging post #4183370 as dog girl would be seen as a failure and not useful, but on the other hand I think it's actually helpful since it lets you know the character is a dog girl, and then you can go to other images of the character where you can find her with dog ears pretty consistently when her head is more shown, and in some cases a dog tail.

Veradux said:

If someone searches dog girl and gets, say, post #4183370, the tag is a failure and not useful. It's why I've been consistently against a lot of race tagging in general. Take a look at Fire Emblem's manakete. That tag is not so much searching for the race as it is searching for a specific handful of characters, even then it's virtually useless. It's basically just an extremely bad search for ~dragon_girl ~pointy_ears.

That's very much a mirror of the animal_girl tags. No matter what we establish as the use case, we've got over a decade of people not following any use case. I don't think introducing another such tag into the wild is a good idea.

Yes, if they have no animal-like traits they should not be tagged with animal tags. These are also not made-up races we discuss, snakes exist in real life, surprisingly. We're not tagging them as perro_girls or whatever the name of the snake race is.

Talulah said:

Yes, if they have no animal-like traits they should not be tagged with animal tags. These are also not made-up races we discuss, snakes exist in real life, surprisingly. We're not tagging them as perro_girls or whatever the name of the snake race is.

Well Perro is another word for a dog, notably the Spanish word for dog from what I know. This is a site using generally English or Japanese wording and tagging so we're using dog girl. It's not a fictional word.

Also you say snakes exist "surprisingly" with what sounds like a bit of sarcasm, but I've seen some cases of Eunectes being tagged with the crocodilian tail tag, though I believe I removed them all, or at least did so previously awhile ago. So my logic of using canonical reasoning to determine animals as I previously mentioned still applies. As I said previously "but in cases of say some animals and especially fantasy races I feel like certain aspects of tagging have to rely on canonical logic", sometimes animals parts can be tricky to tag without any context other than pure visual.

MisterJuice said:

Well Perro is another word for a dog, notably the Spanish word for dog from what I know. This is a site using generally English or Japanese wording and tagging so we're using dog girl. It's not a fictional word.

I guess Perro was a bad example but my point stands nonetheless. I don't think it should be an issue to tag with their closest representation to avoid having floods of "not-technically-cat-but-definitely-cat_ears" tags. manakete on the other hand is utterly meaningless to anyone who doesn't play FE.

Also you say snakes exist "surprisingly" with what sounds like a bit of sarcasm, but I've seen some cases of Eunectes being tagged with the crocodilian tail tag, but I believe I removed them all, or at least did awhile ago. So my logic of using canonical reasoning to determine animals as I previously mentioned still applies. As I said previously "but in cases of say some animals and especially fantasy races I feel like certain aspects of tagging have to rely on canonical logic", sometimes animals parts can be tricky to tag without any context other than pure visual.
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I think if you think Eunectes has a crocodilian tail you need your eyes checked. There are definitely cases where it's hard or impossible to tell (demon horns vs dragon horns or wolf ears vs fox ears are often difficult) so there'll alwas be some level of canon tagging for that. We can't really do anything about it at this point. We just don't want to make it worse—for example, by tagging dog_girl on a photo where you cannot see any dog traits. I don't think it should be an issue as long as it's semi-tied to ears/tail (or other traits if applicable), but if you can't tag it with either then you can't tag it with dog_girl.

Talulah said:

I guess Perro was a bad example but my point stands nonetheless. I don't think it should be an issue to tag with their closest representation to avoid having floods of "not-technically-cat-but-definitely-cat_ears" tags. manakete on the other hand is utterly meaningless to anyone who doesn't play FE.

I think if you think Eunectes has a crocodilian tail you need your eyes checked. There are definitely cases where it's hard or impossible to tell (demon horns vs dragon horns or wolf ears vs fox ears are often difficult) so there'll alwas be some level of canon tagging for that. We can't really do anything about it at this point. We just don't want to make it worse—for example, by tagging dog_girl on a photo where you cannot see any dog traits. I don't think it should be an issue as long as it's semi-tied to ears/tail (or other traits if applicable), but if you can't tag it with either then you can't tag it with dog_girl.

Well I wasn't the one tagging crocodilian tail so I don't have an explanation there. The logic on not tagging a character with "species/gender" if you can't tag any of their creature parts makes sense, I understand that's the common logic with this site and will tag it accordingly. I think at least in pictures we can at least see Dobermann's ears we should tag her as a dog girl though, but maybe that's also something that would get mixed opinions.

Edit: I need to focus on other things for awhile and sleep after, so if I don't respond for sometime that's why.