Mesugaki (brat) tag definition and scope discussion

I think that the definition for the Mesugaki tag may need some clarification. Currently, the wiki page reads:

Literally, "bitch brat". A young girl who acts sassy and provocative towards adults in a sexually charged manner. Often qualifies for loli.

(...) Typical attributes include smug or naughty expressions, a mocking laugh, a single fang / skin fang, twintails, short shorts, miniskirts/microskirts, exposed midriff, calling people "zako", etc. May be an oppai loli.

Not to be confused with erogaki ("erotic brat") who is sexually forward or seductive without being sassy, or kusogaki ("shitty brat") who is sassy without a sexual undertone.

I have a few problems with this definition. First, neither "erogaki" nor "kusogaki" have tags of their own, so there's no strict need to disambiguate between them. There's also just so much overlap between the terms that I've seen them mostly used interchangeably. So here, I might get rid of this line entierly, or just mention them as related terms with some overlap.

The larger problem is that "young" is subjective. Currently, the tag mostly contains posts of characters with childlike appearances, but also includes a decent number of characters with a highschool-age or young-adult appearance, see post #8248253, post #6677257, post #6865290, post #7285775, post #6722979. These characters are certainly young in the sense that they clearly wouldn't remotely qualify for the mature_female tag, that is, they are (or appear to be) well below "middle aged", which makes them, by definition, young. But, on the other hand, they are also without debate well clear of qualifying for the loli tag.

post #9964050 undoubtedly qualifies for the tag. but does post #9952511 qualify? What about post #9919068, or post #8028963? Notably, neither Kitagawa_Marin nor Asuna (Blue Archive) have any posts with the tag, (except post #8456246, which also has the aged_down tag). That's in spite of both being popular, high-school-age (ie, "young") characters, with many, many posts each, and, IMO, subjectively "bratty" dispositions. Mutsuki (Blue Archive), on the other hand, makes up a sizable portion of all of the posts in the mesugaki tag, and I'd argue that the only real differentiator between her and Asuna is height and breast size. So it seems like the default assumption right now is that characters who look highschool-age or older are excluded from the tag, with particular importance being placed on height as a qualifier.

I think that either the tag should explicitly exclude, or explicitly include, characters who look highschool-age or older. I also think that if we decide to exclude higschool-age and older "brats" from the mesugaki tag, it might be important to create a new tag that can include them, since many posts, like post #7383880, post #8444418, post #7235462, and post #7541098 all have a certain "bratty" character that unites them that is currently not (easily) searchable. In this case, because there's not really a good tag, or set of tags, to search for this, I mostly just went looking for particular characters, like Tsona (Nyantcha) and Vanilla_(eden (Shiroki Yuutsu)) that I already knew fit the bill of "big brat energy but also clearly an adult".

In this case, I don't really have a strong opinion or idea what is the best course of action. On the one hand, I wouldn't describe the characters in post #8248253 as "mesugaki", but then again, it might be for the best to just expand the existing tag to be a bit broader, (maybe rename it to just "brat") to avoid needing to introduce a new tag. But, that would destroy some searchable information, for all those looking for bratty little girls in particular, like in post #5369996, for example. What I can say for sure is that current tags do fall a bit short in terms of searching for (highschool age and older) "bratty" characters. instant_loss is maybe the best tag for the job, but it misses anything that isn't, well, an instant loss comic, like post #8581644 or post #9171935, and includes plenty of posts that have nothing particularly bratty about them at all, post #6449925 or post #5711933 for instance.

worth noting that "young" as defined on danbooru typically means "being prepubescent or looking like it", i.e. qualifying for loli, at least that's the impression i get from looking at discussions around the site. the way we name some tags supports this, tags such as Shigure Ui (Vtuber) (Young), Kiss-Shot (Young), Purah (Young) and so on.

i think a lot of people do associate the mesugaki trope strictly with lolis (the very namesake of the tag is a loli), and trying to expand the tag in any way only stands to reduce the searchability of a specifically-defined trope, which would be a step backwards. we have tags like naughty face, smug, seductive smile for adults or teenagers acting naughty.

wingdings said:

worth noting that "young" as defined on danbooru typically means "being prepubescent or looking like it", i.e. qualifying for loli, at least that's the impression i get from looking at discussions around the site. the way we name some tags supports this, tags such as Shigure Ui (Vtuber) (Young), Kiss-Shot (Young), Purah (Young) and so on.

I will note that part of that usage stems from the fact that it isn't appropriate to use "child" in those qualifiers, per topic #23992, with "young" being comparatively more ambiguous as it can refer to not just children, but teens and young adults. However;

i think a lot of people do associate the mesugaki trope strictly with lolis (the very namesake of the tag is a loli), and trying to expand the tag in any way only stands to reduce the searchability of a specifically-defined trope, which would be a step backwards. we have tags like naughty face, smug, seductive smile for adults or teenagers acting naughty.

I definitely agree that most people associate the trope with lolis, and that trying to broaden it outside of that age range would just be diluting the tag. As evazion would complain, "the end result [of our entire philosophy of tagging] is every tag gets twisted and diluted into the broadest, most meaningless thing possible," except in this case it'd be worse since you would have it overlapping with the tags winddings mentioned. And even with the potential broadening into just 'brat', I am 100% sure that English still associates brats with children. The broader 'bratty' meanwhile had been nuked before, and replaced with childish, which is currently a deprecated tag, which I think says it all on the odds of a tag broadening happening.

I don't know if there's any terms for highschool-age mesugaki, but if you insist on a tag for bratty highschoolers (because you're not going to be able to push for a tag for bratty highschoolers and adults, it's got to be narrowed down) you'll have to figure out a tag name.

Just to play devil's advocate, I think if a post shows an adult being bratty in such a way that it clearly parodies the mesugaki stereotype, then it should probably apply for the tag. In that case, the tag would be more for the concept than the character.

Blank_User said:

Just to play devil's advocate, I think if a post shows an adult being bratty in such a way that it clearly parodies the mesugaki stereotype, then it should probably apply for the tag. In that case, the tag would be more for the concept than the character.

yeah, i wouldn't really take any issue with that.

According to Pixiv Encyclopedia's メスガキ article, "類似する属性との差異" section,

加えて「メスガキ」は「ロリ」と限定されておらず、ロリではないが「ガキ（子供）」の範疇である中高生ぐらいの世代、場合によっては成人済みの女性も含まれてくる（とはいっても人によって「ガキ」の範囲は異なるが）。

"Mesugaki" is applicable to "中高生" (junior high and high school students) and "場合によっては成人済みの女性" (in some cases, adult women).

My understanding is, a teenager or young adult can be a "kid" to a sufficiently older person, or they can behave in a way younger than they are. And "gaki" can be used in this relative sense.

For tagging purposes, I think it wouldn't cause much trouble to expand the application of mesugaki, because there are age range tags and outfit tags available if one wants to narrow down the search.

8253803 said:

According to Pixiv Encyclopedia's メスガキ article, "類似する属性との差異" section,

"Mesugaki" is applicable to "中高生" (junior high and high school students) and "場合によっては成人済みの女性" (in some cases, adult women).

My understanding is, a teenager or young adult can be a "kid" to a sufficiently older person, or they can behave in a way younger than they are. And "gaki" can be used in this relative sense.

For tagging purposes, I think it wouldn't cause much trouble to expand the application of mesugaki, because there are age range tags and outfit tags available if one wants to narrow down the search.

What age range tags are you referring to? We don't have teenage or adult tags (the former is deprecated and the latter doesn't exist). Broadening this term to include those age ranges just makes it more complicated to find the thing most people associate the tag with. Even if you were to suggest using loli for that, not every mesugaki is going to qualify for loli because we use that term for sexually suggestive/explicit lolis, not just anyone with that bodytype.

8253803 said:

For tagging purposes, I think it wouldn't cause much trouble to expand the application of mesugaki, because there are age range tags and outfit tags available if one wants to narrow down the search.

The only age range tags we have are old man/old woman, mature male/mature female, child, toddler, and baby. Teenage was deprecated because of the ambiguity in art between teenagers and younger adults (forum #219922), and younger adults are considered the default ala comment #2541862 so they don't get a tag (meanwhile child is one bad day away from being deprecated), so the age range between children and middle-aged adults can only be narrowed down in a search using clothes tags (or like, tags like onee-shota, but even that's a crapshoot of age range).

MysteriousLounger said:

I think that the definition for the Mesugaki tag may need some clarification. Currently, the wiki page reads:

I have a few problems with this definition. First, neither "erogaki" nor "kusogaki" have tags of their own, so there's no strict need to disambiguate between them. There's also just so much overlap between the terms that I've seen them mostly used interchangeably. So here, I might get rid of this line entierly, or just mention them as related terms with some overlap.

The larger problem is that "young" is subjective. Currently, the tag mostly contains posts of characters with childlike appearances, but also includes a decent number of characters with a highschool-age or young-adult appearance, see post #8248253, post #6677257, post #6865290, post #7285775, post #6722979. These characters are certainly young in the sense that they clearly wouldn't remotely qualify for the mature_female tag, that is, they are (or appear to be) well below "middle aged", which makes them, by definition, young. But, on the other hand, they are also without debate well clear of qualifying for the loli tag.

post #9964050 undoubtedly qualifies for the tag. but does post #9952511 qualify? What about post #9919068, or post #8028963? Notably, neither Kitagawa_Marin nor Asuna (Blue Archive) have any posts with the tag, (except post #8456246, which also has the aged_down tag). That's in spite of both being popular, high-school-age (ie, "young") characters, with many, many posts each, and, IMO, subjectively "bratty" dispositions. Mutsuki (Blue Archive), on the other hand, makes up a sizable portion of all of the posts in the mesugaki tag, and I'd argue that the only real differentiator between her and Asuna is height and breast size. So it seems like the default assumption right now is that characters who look highschool-age or older are excluded from the tag, with particular importance being placed on height as a qualifier.

I think that either the tag should explicitly exclude, or explicitly include, characters who look highschool-age or older. I also think that if we decide to exclude higschool-age and older "brats" from the mesugaki tag, it might be important to create a new tag that can include them, since many posts, like post #7383880, post #8444418, post #7235462, and post #7541098 all have a certain "bratty" character that unites them that is currently not (easily) searchable. In this case, because there's not really a good tag, or set of tags, to search for this, I mostly just went looking for particular characters, like Tsona (Nyantcha) and Vanilla_(eden (Shiroki Yuutsu)) that I already knew fit the bill of "big brat energy but also clearly an adult".

In this case, I don't really have a strong opinion or idea what is the best course of action. On the one hand, I wouldn't describe the characters in post #8248253 as "mesugaki", but then again, it might be for the best to just expand the existing tag to be a bit broader, (maybe rename it to just "brat") to avoid needing to introduce a new tag. But, that would destroy some searchable information, for all those looking for bratty little girls in particular, like in post #5369996, for example. What I can say for sure is that current tags do fall a bit short in terms of searching for (highschool age and older) "bratty" characters. instant_loss is maybe the best tag for the job, but it misses anything that isn't, well, an instant loss comic, like post #8581644 or post #9171935, and includes plenty of posts that have nothing particularly bratty about them at all, post #6449925 or post #5711933 for instance.

yeah that tag is kind of a mess. basically

mesugaki is loli and osugaki is shota just because of the gaki part. but ofc on the booru loli/shota tags have specific meaning so it can't be implied

mesugaki is the "wakarase" type of loli that "needs correction" but like this could be for a dozen reasons. it could be a loli that is making fun of adults by laughing at them / mocking them. or it could be a loli dressing slutty to mock lolicons. and on top of that you have lolicons drawing just random lolis in sexually suggestive poses and calling them mesugakis. in jp they use the word more liberally. like if you think of "loli" like "girl" and "mesugaki" like "slut" then just like you can say all girls are sluts you can say all lolis are mesugakis.

problem is otakus are masochists so we also got femdom-type mesugakis. so this is like gyaru or assertive female messing with virgins with verbal abuse.

basically the problem with the tag is that the WORD "mesugaki" means multiple things

imo the only way to fix this is to deprecate the tag and use something more specific instead like mesugaki smile just like ojou-sama isn't really a tag but ojou-sama pose is. but idk if u can really define mesugaki as just the smile. i think the smile is a pretty strong tag tho

like post #9582255 it kind of looks like a mesugaki because the eye shape. like it's curved at the bottom

post #6074950 is a mesugaki and the pic doesn't even have a girl in it

maybe it should be mesugaki laugh for the laugh and then a separate tag for the brattiness or the eyes? it's like half-closed eyes but arced. but what if it's like a giggle with tho? idk if we can imply laugh later.

probably the only "reasonable" way to settle this is with mesugaki face so if the face looks like a mesugaki then it's a mesugaki face and age/gender doesn't matter

2nd problem... what about posts like post #8615452 which is a "mesugaki" but doesn't have a "mesugaki face"? and like post #9724571 that are just sexually suggestive? i would assume revealing clothes is the right tag in this case so you could just search for loli plus that. problem is i don't have a gold account so i shouldn't be able to see posts that are "sexually suggestive" with loli in this site which means it isn't tagged loli. do you need a separate like mesugaki clothes or assertive skimpy or bratty skimpy or something like that? how do you define mesugaki clothes?

imo mesugaki face would be a great tag because right now osugaki has literally the same face but for the other gender. see post #6462229 and post #7953617

actually osugaki is even in a worse state than mesugaki because it's just random shotas and traps

srsly guys you can't just be like "uohhhhh ToT so erotic" and tag it mesugaki / osugaki that's too subjective

idk what should be done but i think we can start by separating the images that have hand to own mouth / laugh / furrowed brow or raised inner eyebrows into its own mesugaki laugh tag since this one is at least very easy to tag and then we figure out the rest later?

not really sure if mesugaki laugh or mesugaki pose is better. i'm partial to laugh because of the "emotion" but imo it needs a hand up/raised like ojou-sama pose because if not it's just a generic smug laugh

I ended up tagging the images mesugaki pose but I really think it should be "laugh" or something else now. maybe mocking mesugaki? idk what it should be called but imo whatever the tag is called it SHOULD imply raised inner eyebrows (or furrowed brow idk the difference btw) either by the booru or just by the name being obvious, because if it doesn't it gets too generic

basically this is the "look" i think belongs in its own tag

it overlaps with zako (phrase) a lot

while i was tagging i also decided to start tagging these with zako pose (probably needs a better name too, maybe "zako shouting" because it implies shouting with hands? does anyone know the source of this meme btw?). so the problem is one of these probably counts as the mesugaki pose i made up while the other doesn't based on whether it has raised inner eyebrows or not

this should count

this shouldn't

maybe i'm being too pedantic about this but without this constraint basically any girl laughing with her hand on her mouth would count for this hypothetical tag and then the tag is pointless.

You really shouldn't be going ahead and creating multiple new tags before anyone else has weighed in. You made these the same day as your previous reply. Did we really need a zako pose tag?

blindVigil said:

You really shouldn't be going ahead and creating multiple new tags before anyone else has weighed in. You made these the same day as your previous reply. Did we really need a zako pose tag?

Someone asked in the tag thread what it should be tagged so I went ahead and made it since I had found multiple posts like that already.

It's just a tag so I feel like it's easier to make the tag first to collect examples and then consider if it's worth keeping/nuking the tag than trying to figure out what to tag without any examples. Was I supposed to use favgroups for this instead?

Yes, it's usually better to make favgroups first.

BUR #48242 has been rejected.

nuke mesugaki_pose
nuke zako_pose

The mesugaki tag seems pretty consistently used to me. There are a couple posts with older characters but it's mostly just smug (petite OR child OR loli) but in a form that non-builders can search. I don't think we need the mesugaki pose or zako pose tags. They're just hand_to_own_mouth mesugaki and hand_to_own_mouth zako_(phrase)

This bulk update request is pending automatic rejection in 5 days.

This bulk update request has been rejected because it was not approved within 45 days.

The bulk update request #48242 (forum #389197) has been rejected by @DanbooruBot.