Danbooru

Shortcomings of the loli and child tags

Posted under Tags

We generally use two different tags for ロリ artwork: loli, child and sometimes wrongly petite

Now in reality both tags are being massively underutilized, at least on the easily examined pixiv uploads of the last 3 years:

favgroup #14723
favgroup #14591
favgroup #14691
Union: favgroup:14723 or favgroup:14591 or favgroup:14691

These favgroups contain the last 20k danbooru uploads of the ロリ pixiv tag and the findings we had were:

  • 50% of the posts are not tagged loli
  • Only 3% percent of favgroups -loli candidates were tagged with the child tag
  • We are interpretative about what is loli because the post wouldn't warrant censorship
  • We can't agree on what child is

This has resulted in about 10k posts from the samples here of completely uncharted loli artwork, specially regarding middle ground suggestive content like rating:s,q as post #5336056 or post #5343358.

on the child tag

As it stands child is not the unisex SFW equivalent of loli due to either misconception, laziness or not having 'ロリ' as translated name. On the misconception case 'child' does not carry the same load and connotation as 'loli' (e.g. post #5351120 is loli yet post #5351119 is not child). For starters 'loli' is more lenient with the age range including JC or early JK while at the same time the word 'child' does not induce the same suspension of disbelief as 'loli' and people may be more reluctant to using it.

on the loli tag

tie-in with forum #213339
The usage of loli is conditional on its task as a R18 designator rather than as genre tag. I and many people judging by these findings have hesitated on tagging loli because I thought the post in question did not warrant censorship.

On discord we have been exchanging two possible courses of action: a superset loli tag or a regardening of the loli and child tags, in addition to a gendered child tag: female child.

[Cue discussion]

Issues involved

This is a dissection of all the variables I imagine. Some of my listed issues have already been resolved.

  • Preteen
    • Ages for characters can vary between an infant, toddler, kindergarten, preteen, teen, young adult, mature adult, past middle-aged and finally old.
    • The ages under preteen are classified as children. Under-aged teens aren't. Preteens are sometimes.
  • Gender
  • Rating
    • Without rating:G this would be a complete mess. Rating:S will continue to contain both the borderline cases and the more evident cases.
  • Childlike
    • Canonically old people can be drawn with completely childlike features. We tag what we see.
    • Children that look older than they are.
    • Halflings and other races where people might have some childlike features, but simultaneously they have many adult features.
    • Adults dressed as children. Or adults treated like children.
    • Characters without adult features and without childlike features. Sometimes the character might be dressed as a child.
    • Children in fiction can do things only an adult could do.
  • Tags missing from source
  • Censorship i.e. help:censored_tags
    • Rating:G should be excluded from censorship, i.e. rating:s,q,e (loli OR shota OR child OR male_child OR female_child OR other_child)
    • Some posts have a child as a notable bystander. A comic strip might have a child in the first panel and sex in the last one. child_focus
    • Some posts would be given rating:q instead of rating:s, if an adult was doing what the child in the picture is doing. E.g. flat chest jokes are sometimes applied to children in kindergarten. Sometimes innocuously and other times not.
    • Some people might wish to blacklist teens. It doesn't make much sense here where anime characters are predominantly teenagers and even the Japanese games with mature characters tend to contain outright loli characters. At least they can consider -mature_female as a blacklist.
  • Understanding
    • What people wish to find.
    • What people wish to blacklist.
    • What the uploaders and taggers presume they are tagging.
    • Some posts have a child as a notable bystander.
    • How other services go about it.
    • History of how it has been done before.
  • Gardening
    • Underpopulated tags.
    • New tags.

lllIllllIllllIll said:

On discord we have been exchanging two possible courses of action: a superset loli tag or a regardening of the loli and child tags, in addition to a gendered child tag: female child.

I would appreciate either. I would prefer a superset, but the name would be important. Subset loliphilia could include some rating:s,q,e posts. Preteen could be a separate tag if age won't be agreed.

I wish for more age ratings between loli and mature female. Distinction wouldn't be easy.

I'll reiterate what I had said on Discord here: when it comes to the possible courses of action mentioned, I lean more towards a concentrated tag gardening effort for child and loli (shota arguably applies here too, but loli is used far more widely in contrast to shota).

This stance is informed by one particular belief - the fact that we will eventually get a female child/male child set of tags (other child too). We 'split' the tags for pubic hair, dark skin, muscular, and furry into gendered forms, just to name a few, and we'll almost certainly continue to see this trend develop, because it allows for more granular searching. As it stands right now, one of the reasons why people would want a broadening of loli is to enable them to search for non-sexual depictions of female children, something which would be resolved by doing the same for child. Some would argue this would lead to tagging issues, but as noted in the OP, child and loli right now already have tagging issues (like, post #5336056 and post #5343358 could be considered sexually suggestive and thus applicable for loli).

This becomes especially evident when searching each favgroup with -loli -child, flagrantly so when searching something like favgroup:14591 -loli -child younger. However it also highlights how we perhaps shouldn't also rely on Pixiv as the be-all-end-all in loli (as always with Pixiv tagging, see アリス); post #5351119 has already been brought up, and proportionally, given how East Asian artstyles can be, it's something you'd definitely err on whether it counts in loli. Without translations and post #5351120 as further context of her being a brat, you could easily chalk it up to a Sakurai Izumi or even Igarashi Futaba situation, where we're dealing with someone who's likely a (pre)teen or JK/just looks youthful/is a young adult/is short and petite, and not an actual loli (which folks would associate with preadolescent female children first and foremost). post #5212560 is another err example, but one that also highlights how taggers are more concerned with more immediately taggable things such as color and clothes than figuring out what age someone might be visually (as the post in question floats around the recommended 20 tag minimum for posts). post #5102301 once more highlights Pixiv's questionability, tagging a petite woman as loli. And these are just a couple examples.

A superset could be somewhat problematic as you'd have to deal with just how broadly loli is used (its leniency being as much a detriment as it is a boon in a tagging context), as I imagine there are those who would prefer that their search for childlike bodies not be polluted by girls they deem too old for the search (plus it isn't helped by artstyles and artist preferences, contrast these two as an example; and then consider how someone less informed would call every example in those images underaged). Plus, I imagine someone searching for loli would not want stuff like post #5216195 polluting the tag either (as Pixiv also tags it as loli, when it rightfully counts more as chibi). Hell, there's even the issue of girls too young for the search, as this case from Comic LO highlights! As it stands, the way we use loli stands in a perfectly fine equilibrium - most weebs use loli to refer to R18+ depictions of young girls of a particular age range (or if not so, just call every flat anime girl a loli, and every breasted anime girl an oppai loli), and allows us to avoid having to use a tag name like sexualized_child-like_body or something similarly ludicrous that would result in any payment processor to raise their eyebrow.

Ultimately, making female child/male child would resolve the issue of not being able to search for non-sexual depictions of either group, and, while requiring an intense tagging effort, would ultimately prove beneficial due to allowing for more granular searching, and allowing us to avoid having to use loli/shota in non-sexual and non-relational contexts for longer. And even if we did go with a superset later on, having female child tagged up already would make the job much easier for a superset.

PPP does also highlight some need-be variables to consider too, such as the preteen to young adult range being questionably covered right now with tags (the late shoujo/shounen to josei range, if we wanted to be weeby about it; age ranges in Japan can be odd though), as well a lack of a non-sexual tag solution for characters with legal age but child-like bodies, i.e. Remilia Scarlet (petite seems awkwardly unfit for this, and finds itself at the cross-section of the whole artstyle issue from above). The solution for these though would not be a superset, but rather more granular tagging. By the point you're already able to search for sexualized depictions of child-like bodies on Danbooru, you're already not constrained by the two-tag search limit, so there's nothing stopping you from stacking six tags using ~ or OR to get a broader search.

Updated

A gender split would not solve the issue of the child tag being underused because a big factor of it is that 2D fantasy detachment causes people to be uncomfortable with using the child label, either consciously or subconsciously. People are attracted to the aesthetics associated with youth and neoteny regardless of whatever a character's fictional age might be or whether the vtuber is actually an adult. We do not have a teen tag despite the abundance of school age characters for similar reasons. This is why I would support changing loli/shota from its current status to a more general tag and perhaps using lolicon/shotacon for NSFW artworks, it would be a bit closer to how it's used in Japan with the "con" designating the "complex" specifically as an active attraction/desire. I believe using 2D subculture terms for this type of art is more appropriate than real world descriptors in general, especially age labels.

Yeah tbh I've never agreed with a tag level distinction between what we arbitrarily consider risque or cute instead of using the tool we already have, which is rating. Ideally current loli should be lolicon as a R18 designator and imply a new loli tag for the whole range of artwork.

Regardening is also a herculean task, we are never going to agree or learn the distinction between petite and loli: both post #5212560 and post #5102301 to me are just lolis; the leniency for the most part is a benefit.

ppp_laivu_stato said:

I wish for more age ratings between loli and mature female. Distinction wouldn't be easy.

If it's of interest I've been compiling the respective JC, JK and JD tags on my favgroups

lllIllllIllllIll said:

Yeah tbh I've never agreed with a tag level distinction between what we arbitrarily consider risque or cute instead of using the tool we already have, which is rating. Ideally current loli should be lolicon as a R18 designator and imply a new loli tag for the whole range of artwork.

Regardening is also a herculean task, we are never going to agree or learn the distinction between petite and loli: both post #5212560 and post #5102301 to me are just lolis; the leniency for the most part is a benefit.

Sorry for the reality check but tagging safe for work underage characters as "loli" or any other variation or derivative of the term is out of the question, especially after all the payment processing troubles as of late.

lllIllllIllllIll said:

Regardening is also a herculean task, we are never going to agree or learn the distinction between petite and loli: both post #5212560 and post #5102301 to me are just lolis; the leniency for the most part is a benefit.

不失者 said:

A ...big factor of it is that 2D fantasy detachment causes people to be uncomfortable with using the child label, either consciously or subconsciously. People are attracted to the aesthetics associated with youth and neoteny regardless of whatever a character's fictional age might be or whether the vtuber is actually an adult. We do not have a teen tag despite the abundance of school age characters for similar reasons. This is why I would support changing loli/shota from its current status to a more general tag and perhaps using lolicon/shotacon for NSFW artworks, it would be a bit closer to how it's used in Japan with the "con" designating the "complex" specifically as an active attraction/desire. I believe using 2D subculture terms for this type of art is more appropriate than real world descriptors in general, especially age labels.

Arguably, one could say that this is reflective of reality - I'm reminded of this one very old and very long image, whose gimmick was "can YOU guess how old these women are??" and then giving you a selection of images, some of them dressed modestly, others not so, with the 'punchline' being that most of the ones that appeared 'older' or perhaps just more sexualized were in fact minors under the age of 18 (and if you found any of those girls 'attractive' that makes you a pedophile, insert Yao Ming rage face here at your expense).

But yeah, as NNT notes and what I personally believed, you are going to have an incredibly hard time arguing that loli as a term by itself should be broadened. And again, even if we were to go that route, for all intents and purposes, tagging-wise the leniency of 'loli' would be just as much a detriment as much as a boon because of its focus on youthful cuteness. Where is the limits of it? At that point, you wouldn't be broadening the loli tag, you'd be broadening the moe tag, since moe is ostensibly the 'mainstream' manifestation of this attitude (and scholars such as Patrick W. Galbraith argue as much in their work). You'd end up at square one in terms of the issue of how arbitrarily the tag's used.

And while I don't disagree that the whole 2D fantasy detachment may cause folks to be uncomfortable with using the child label, I want you to think about it from the context of the average Western weeb using Danbooru. Have you seen how Western lolicons behave online? In contrast to JP lolicons, who may say these things but with a sense of communal privacy, you got weebs left and right screaming about how they want to fuck children, yelling about cunny and uuoooooooohhhhh'ing to an absurdist degree. And even discounting that, have you read any loli doujinshi? Many are not shy about calling the girls getting fucked children.

In these sorts of discussions, I'd always be the first to note how Japan does have two understanding on lolicon - the conventional one and the subcultural 'cute'/neoteny-focused one (the latter giving us lolita fashion, the attitude we associate today with moe, etc) - and how it is important to remember. But as NNT notes, it's important to not forget the normal people who use lolicon normally; after all, why do you think lolicon child predator jokes became so normalized in these circles if the otaku know the subcultural meaning and always advocate the distinction between fiction and reality? Because newer people came in, whose base understanding of the term was the actual conventional meaning, and the otaku, eternally bullied, rolled with the punches. If not even they can avoid this problem (and continue to deal with it, with Japanese politicians advocating for the banning of lolicon and authors such as Yamikawa Kou attempting to highlight otaku ethics in this context via works such as the brutal U12), how the hell are you going to explain this to a payment processor? I mean, shit, Good Smile Company has been receiving hit-pieces the last couple of months after an alleged connection to 4chan was found, and in most pieces, they speak of how they sell 'figurines depicting underage anime girls in various states of undress', clearly attempting to damage Good Smile's status in the States by leveraging their sale of lolicon merch. The conventional understanding of lolicon reigns supreme.

A gender split would not solve the issue of child being undertagged - I don't disagree with this - but I never argued this in the first place. I'm arguing for that split for more granular searching and tagging in general, because as I said, right now safe for work depictions of male, female and other underaged characters cannot be searched individually. That's my only reason, nothing more, nothing less. And if we're already going through with such a tagging effort, may as well take the opportunity to figure out what posts are missing child or loli/shota in general.

Updated

Child, per its wiki, simply says it is for images containing children, so traditionally it has been applied to posts with children regardless of relevance. Additionally, pouncing on your example, you may not want to find something like this, but there's likely someone who may want to search child walk-in or child caught in these sorts of contexts, and would expect the same for the gendered equivalents. After all, the highest scored child post on this website is quite literally that, post #3410029, and quite frankly, they are a relevant part of the image.

Not to say that your concern isn't valid though, but that could easily be resolved with the creation of something like, say, child focus. We've got *_focus tags for less relevant things, and there would be use for a tag like it.

lllIllllIllllIll said:

These are my early post candidates: favgroup #14800

Can we consider relevance when applying this tag? I'm iffy about finding stuff like post #5387353 when searching this tag

I still see several things that look way too old to be tagged child:

post #2368563 post #4351269 post #4022907 post #2936164 post #3556924

I'm iffy on some others, but these are a definite no. I agree with Damian, also, relevance shouldn't affect tagging unless it's an insignificant background element.

I feel that we should expand loli into the new sensitive rating. Previously, many pantyshot images would be tagged child rating:s but get corrected to loli rating:q, despite an identical image being left as safe. Now that safe is sensitive, I think it's fair to tag many of the images found in things like child pantyshot solo, lifted_by_self solo child, and all other manner of inherently lewd tags applied to solo child images. Cameltoe, lingerie, ass, tons of foot focus, etc.

I've even been informed of a few oddities of a clothed character clearly getting reamed from behind being tagged child but displace her shirt at the end of the image set and it's loli.

I know there's resistance to allowing this specifically because of the years of rating:safe issues, but to resist it now is silly and is causing odd issues like post #2956822 and post #2712718 being tagged child instead of loli purely because "loli can't be rating:safe".

Updated

I'll let y'all argue on whether to expand loli or not, that's above my pay grade (of 0).

The only thing that I can say is that, after spending the last while tagging male child and female child, the inconsistencies with child's tagging has been nothing short of palpable. It's somewhat absurd what does and doesn't get tagged as child, and if nothing else, the new child tags should help in making gardening stuff like this easier (though it would be nice if BUR #10523 and BUR #10525 were approved already).

1 2