Danbooru

About Interspecies

Posted under Tags

After some talks, it feels that the interspecies tag has lost a lot of its merit. It was already an annoying bugbear to police due to frequent misuse with the bestiality tag. With it almost never being tagged on monster girl images, it's almost exclusively a furry and pokémon tag. During a discussion with Zapdos, every non-furry use case brought up was found to be almost entirely nonexistent.

Alongside the existence of the recent furry on X tags, I'm wondering what should be done about the tag. Should it be nuked? Reworked and redefined as to not be tautological with the furry tags? Ignored and let be a mild mistag magnet?

In theory, it's useful in tandem with bestiality as a way to blacklist all non-human x human posts that don't count as furry, but the tag currently isn't used on a lot of characters that fit this description (such as Midna). If the tag were expanded in its usage (something I'd be in favor of) then it could be rather convenient for blacklists, but as it exists now it only helps a little bit.

I think the tag at least needs a rework. Hard to complain about the tag not being used properly when, by definition, any elf-on-human... catgirl-on-human... etc. artwork falls under the written definition for interspecies.

I personally don't know the purpose of the tag. By blacklisting it, I could be blacklisting far more than I mean to. By searching it, I can be searching for far more than I'd like. It's hard to respect a tag if the purpose isn't understood.

That being said, since furry_with_non-furry is a tag, I don't see why there aren't variations of it to replace interspecies. Goblin_with_non-goblin, hilichurl_with_non-hilichurl, etc. alone would serve more of a purpose than interspecies in my opinion.

Shaula said:

I think the tag at least needs a rework. Hard to complain about the tag not being used properly when, by definition, any elf-on-human... catgirl-on-human... etc. artwork falls under the written definition for interspecies.

This is a bit of unspoken understanding. "Human" on danbooru does not mean literally characters whose species is "human", that would fall under canon tagging. "Human" means anyone who looks human. Elves, catgirls, and similar are all "human" by danbooru's definition. "Non-human" refers to anything that doesn't look human, but is still humanoid.

blindVigil said:

This is a bit of unspoken understanding. "Human" on danbooru does not mean literally characters whose species is "human", that would fall under canon tagging. "Human" means anyone who looks human. Elves, catgirls, and similar are all "human" by danbooru's definition. "Non-human" refers to anything that doesn't look human, but is still humanoid.

The problem, as we see with the tag, is that while furry is definitively into the non-human realm, we're not sure where monster girl sits. Interspecies is a tag with nearly 4k images and furry takes up half of it. It's probably even higher due to not tagging furry on partially off-screen characters. Lotta pokémon and Bowser stuff is lower body only.

Monster girl takes up about 5%, about the same as hilichurl_(genshin_impact). It also doesn't help that NNT has expressed discontentment about it being tagged on monster girl images. In addition, your statement runs directly counter to the current wiki, which calls out orcs, goblins, and hilichurl.

So I definitely feel it's gotta be changed/nuked. But I'm just not sure how.

Veradux said:

The problem, as we see with the tag, is that while furry is definitively into the non-human realm, we're not sure where monster girl sits. Interspecies is a tag with nearly 4k images and furry takes up half of it. It's probably even higher due to not tagging furry on partially off-screen characters. Lotta pokémon and Bowser stuff is lower body only.

Monster girl takes up about 5%, about the same as hilichurl_(genshin_impact). It also doesn't help that NNT has expressed discontentment about it being tagged on monster girl images. In addition, your statement runs directly counter to the current wiki, which calls out orcs, goblins, and hilichurl.

So I definitely feel it's gotta be changed/nuked. But I'm just not sure how.

When I say "looks human" I'm talking standard human features, not just two legs, two arms, and one head. Orcs are usually green, often have "tusks" or sometimes are just bipedal pig people. How often do you look at an orc and think, "human"? Hilichurls are very inhuman looking too, they have clawed feet with three digits and clawed hands at the end of long arms. An argument could probably be made for orcs, at least some if not all, being "human" enough to not qualify for interspecies, but not hilichurls, especially considering there's not just one type of hilichurl and some are significantly more monstrous than others. Goblins are in the same camp.

blindVigil said:

When I say "looks human" I'm talking standard human features, not just two legs, two arms, and one head. Orcs are usually green, often have "tusks" or sometimes are just bipedal pig people. How often do you look at an orc and think, "human"? Hilichurls are very inhuman looking too, they have clawed feet with three digits and clawed hands at the end of long arms. An argument could probably be made for orcs, at least some if not all, being "human" enough to not qualify for interspecies, but not hilichurls, especially considering there's not just one type of hilichurl and some are significantly more monstrous than others. Goblins are in the same camp.

Very few artists draw Hilichurl like that. Taking a quick look, virtually none of them have any of the traits you bring up. The same goes for orc. The most recent pig-nosed orc to be tagged interspecies was six months ago and the second is two years ago. The vast majority are big green dudes, sometimes with tusks. Hell, some aren't even green. And there are elf-on-human pictures tagged interspecies.

Again, this just to reinforce my now-digging-in stance that interspecies is a crap tag.

I love post #113417 for briging a very clear differenciation between all these humans and non-humans. Based on this, I would consider "Non-Monster Girl Type C and D" what would fall more into non-human in this matter, and thefore interspecies. I don't see much use in tagging all monster girls as interspecies as 99% of the questionable/explicit posts would fall into that. What really cames to mind with interspecies are furries, aliens, and humanoid creatures, things like that. Virtually all monster girls are already paired with humans by default. Of course I don't mean this applies to literally all monster girls, because some of them look more monstruous (like "Non-Monster Girl Type D") or fall into both categories of monster girls and furries.

Veradux said:

And there are elf-on-human pictures tagged interspecies.

I found exactly five. Out of 4000. That's not sufficient evidence of elves being classified as "non-human", that’s exactly five examples of the tag being misused. Every other example of elf interspecies is with an orc, goblin, or some other fantasy race or monster.

The two questions that need to be answered are where the line is between "human" and "non-human", and whether or not we want to strictly adhere to the current "human × non-human" criteria the wiki currently claims, as there are plenty of posts featuring non-humans of different species together.

I don't think anyone searching interspecies is looking for cat girls that are 99% human with tacked on cat ears and maybe a tail getting gangbanged by generic faceless males, and I don't think the common caucasion skinned elf with pointy ears and blonde hair is very far behind in that regard.

I don't have a solution to the issues with this tag, but I think that the real problem is that it's simply a very niche and very obscure tag. Few people know it exist, and when it's used by someone outside of the usual suspects it's often used canonically. Stuff like post #5006878 should not be tagged interspecies, but coom-brained taggers don't bother to check.

Monster girls are a case-by-case basis, and as blindVigil said you shouldn't tag a random kemonomimi broad with interspecies, but consider this example: even for something as alien as slime girls, almost nobody uses interspecies. Compare slime_girl interspecies with slime_girl 1boy rating:e -interspecies.

I think creating furry with non-furry and implicating it to interspecies has helped its usage a bit, but I don't think we should create more granular versions. I expect that if we did that people would just not use them like they already not use interspecies. It's one thing to do it for furry, it's another to do it with random subgenres that at best would be gardened once a month by a single user.

That said, I think it's fine to use the tag on sufficiently inhuman characters like robots (think darling in the franxx, not "I'm actually a 3000 years old android") or lamias/centaurs, but the issue is that certain users are just going to be pedantic and tag those canonically if we spell it out in the wiki. Does someone searching for interspecies want to see a Centorea paizuri where the horse parts are not visible (post #3534591, currently tagged interspecies)?

mongirlfan said:

I love post #113417 for briging a very clear differenciation between all these humans and non-humans. Based on this, I would consider "Non-Monster Girl Type C and D" what would fall more into non-human in this matter, and thefore interspecies. I don't see much use in tagging all monster girls as interspecies as 99% of the questionable/explicit posts would fall into that. What really cames to mind with interspecies are furries, aliens, and humanoid creatures, things like that. Virtually all monster girls are already paired with humans by default. Of course I don't mean this applies to literally all monster girls, because some of them look more monstruous (like "Non-Monster Girl Type D") or fall into both categories of monster girls and furries.

In this case it doesn't really matter if something is the default. ~monster_girl ~interspecies is not an acceptable solution (just look at the results), so it has to be tagged on monster girl posts where the girls are sufficiently inhuman, otherwise you might as well just nuke the tag, because you'd be removing a large portion of it for no reason.

blindVigil said:
I don't think anyone searching interspecies is looking for cat girls that are 99% human with tacked on cat ears and maybe a tail getting gangbanged by generic faceless males, and I don't think the common caucasion skinned elf with pointy ears and blonde hair is very far behind in that regard.

I think you're misunderstanding me. I am not arguing for mass tagging of every single possible image. I'm saying that the tag's own definition and usage don't line up and the de facto usage is mostly made up of mistags and an implication. (and pokémon)

And that, in turn, it feels like some gardening or something is in order. Just what direct I dunno.

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