So, in an ideal world, alternate_skin_color pale_skin and alternate_skin_color dark_skin would be fully sufficient, but alternate human skin tones tend to be a sensitive subject for many people for many reasons and those searches don’t cover very dark skin characters being drawn a significantly lighter shade of dark skin or pale characters being drawn darker, but not enough to warrants the dark_skin tag. Sensitivity around skin tone changes is why blacktober art that reimagines characters with dark skin gets downvoted and dark-skinned characters drawn lighter than canon gets backlash. I think most alternate skin tones don’t need more specific tags than just alternate_skin_color *_skin, but I want to propose creating specific tags for lightened skin and darkened skin. I think many people would want to filter one or both out, and others might actively seek them out. I won’t really mind if this idea gets shot down, but I thought it was worth discussing.
you can blacklist multiple tags in one line. if someone gets in that much of a twist over alternate skin color/"raceswapped" art, tell them to add alternate_skin_color dark_skin to the blacklist.
you can blacklist multiple tags in one line. if someone gets in that much of a twist over alternate skin color/"raceswapped" art, tell them to add alternate_skin_color dark_skin to the blacklist.
Again, that doesn’t cover the inverse situation of dark skin characters being lightened, and neither does alternate_skin_color pale_skin because a lot of lightened skin doesn’t qualify for the pale_skin tag. I don’t personally have a problem with characters being drawn darker (I actively look for it sometimes, so I’d still find a darkened skin tag helpful lol), but I’m not a fan of characters drawn lighter and would like to have a tag to blacklist it if possible. (I’m not interested in starting discourse about raceswapping, just explaining why I thought creating new tags could be useful)
my post may have read like i was brushing off the topic entirely, my bad. i just put it out there to illustrate that there's already a semi-complete solution in place.
i do agree with you that, because we don't have a tag for characters with a light skin tone (only pale skin, which only covers very light skin), searching for (/excluding) lightened skin tones is not as easy as plugging in an alternate_skin_color -dark_skin search. that search has you wading through a ton of "character with skin outside the natural human range is drawn with skin within the range, or vice versa". in that sense, the existence of darkened/lightened skin tone tags could be justified, if only for enhanced searchability.
With the recent push for splitting alternate breast size in topic #32481, I think a split here in this regard would also make sense under the same logic.
I would support this, and on a related note I really don't like grouping unnatural -> natural and natural -> unnatural and unnatural -> different unnatural skin with lighter/darker skin. They're very different things and the latter two are more of a sensitive issue for some and more likely to be blacklisted than the former.
The first group seems like it would just be humanization, but that doesn't really work when you have characters like Kris and the My Little Pony: Equestria Girls characters who are already human and instead have an unnatural skintone as an artistic choice.
I do think humanization should be mutually exclusive with this tag, barring specific outliers like Cocoa Cookie, who's intentionally designed with a darker skintone than the default for that series. But that doesn't do much for the aforementioned weirdly colored humans.
The unnatural skin tones all imply colored skin, which is presumably there to prevent this from happening. But I don't really know how helpful the tag is for your search purposes.
I would support this, and on a related note I really don't like grouping unnatural -> natural and natural -> unnatural and unnatural -> different unnatural skin with lighter/darker skin. They're very different things and the latter two are more of a sensitive issue for some and more likely to be blacklisted than the former.
The first group seems like it would just be humanization, but that doesn't really work when you have characters like Kris and the My Little Pony: Equestria Girls characters who are already human and instead have an unnatural skintone as an artistic choice.
I do think humanization should be mutually exclusive with this tag, barring specific outliers like Cocoa Cookie, who's intentionally designed with a darker skintone than the default for that series. But that doesn't do much for the aforementioned weirdly colored humans.
I think many people would want to filter one or both out, and others might actively seek them out
I like your idea, but I also think some people like being upset about this and so I'm not sure how much it would be used. Topically, it wasn't on my radar until today when I uploaded a picture of a new Genshin Impact character and didn't even notice her skin colour was different, I very was confused about why it kept getting downvoted until I investigated / checked similar posts under the tag. In a perfect world, those people would just blacklist it, but it seems like they don't. I feel like there may be a different but similar problem with a lightened_skin tag, so I'm honestly not sure what the solution is.
I would like to propose personifications and the like be exempt from this tag, it doesn't make much sense to me that stuff like post #9780232 or post #8893098 are in it when the characters in question were never human in the first place. Not familiar with the copyright in question I know Cocoa Cookie is a darker shade of cookie, but just in general most of this tag is something that was never human in the first place and therefore has not been "lightened" the companion tag darkened skin does not have this problem.
Yeah, I don't think Cookie Run humanizations should qualify, as artists have a tendency to draw them with lighter skin tones by default (not familiar with the copyright however). Ideally, lightened skin should be used for "human characters with a dark skin tone being drawn with a lighter tone".
I'm not against submitting implication BURs to alternate skin color, ideally to avoid atrocious panty twisting when I scroll the blacktober tag on a whim in the future, but it sounds like these tags need some clean-up be done in order to make that doable. Ideally, less Cookie Run and more copyrights not composed mainly of non-humanoids being personified.
There has been a discussion in topic #22109, regarding My Little Pony. In short, no, it wouldn't work, because there are also different degrees of presence/absence of horns, wings, animal ears, etc. And it also depends on context, for example the MLP humans originated from ponies, so humanization can't apply. What we need is something like sub categories of personification and humanization.
Fo those with only a change from human with colored skin -> human with realistic skin, humanization might work.
Yeah, I don't think Cookie Run humanizations should qualify, as artists have a tendency to draw them with lighter skin tones by default (not familiar with the copyright however). Ideally, lightened skin should be used for "human characters with a dark skin tone being drawn with a lighter tone".
I'm not against submitting implication BURs to alternate skin color, ideally to avoid atrocious panty twisting when I scroll the blacktober tag on a whim in the future, but it sounds like these tags need some clean-up be done in order to make that doable. Ideally, less Cookie Run and more copyrights not composed mainly of non-humanoids being personified.
To me, the only characters I would tag with this are the aforementioned Cocoa Cookie and other very dark-skinned characters like Mint Choco Cookie. I agree that it makes little sense to tag it on the others, since the tan-ish color is the default for nearly all of the characters.
That being said the BUR is fine since it's meant to catch the majority and not the exceptions. The unusual cases can always be retagged later. And of course, it shouldn't apply at all to characters with unnatural skin tones.
Also, is something like post #7484921 really in the spirit of the tag? She's clearly still intended to be dark-skinned. Some other strange inclusions are human Darwin (post #5880429) because official social media art of human Darwin portrays him as black - which most of the posts predate, post #9787100 (it's fur?? she's a furry???), and post #9428896 which I'm going to assume is a mistake.
How about another tag for raceswap? This is for when artists change the racial features of characters, in addition to skin color. We can imply blacktober to it. It could be separated into lighter->darker and darker->lighter, or it could be all-encomposing. This is differentiated from tan and it could be useful.
