Topic: Avali =/= mammals

Posted under Tag Alias and Implication Suggestions

I kinda wanted to bring this up, for some reason Avali are usually tagged as mammals which isnt true because:
1. They are aliens
2. They are covered with feathers
3. they lay eggs
3a. They have cloaca canonically
4. they dont have mammary glands

so i would like to bring this up to change tagging for avali images to either "Alien" or "Avian"

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darqsnoctus said:
I kinda wanted to bring this up, for some reason Avali are usually tagged as mammals which isnt true because:
1. They are aliens
2. They are covered with feathers
3. they lay eggs
3a. They have cloaca canonically

so i would like to bring this up to change tagging for avali images to either "Alien" or "Avian"

...none of those things disqualify them for being mammals. The requirements to be a mammal: 1. The species must be warm-blooded. 2. The females of the species must feed milk to their developing young, through a mammary gland.

...that's literally it. They don't have to lack any of those things.

jacob said:
...none of those things disqualify them for being mammals. The requirements to be a mammal: 1. The species must be warm-blooded. 2. The females of the species must feed milk to their developing young, through a mammary gland.

...that's literally it. They don't have to lack any of those things.

...and that doesn't apply to them

The alien tag should be getting dismantled, since it doesn't work under TWYS, so I'd disapprove of that. But implicating avian can probably work, since they're feathered, winged animals capable of flight.

I don't have a clue what an avali is, but from a TWYS perspective (rather than the biology of a fictional creature) I don't understand why they would be tagged as mammals.

post #2428831 post #2428825 post #2427618

They resemble some sort of dinosaur bird thingy way more than any mammal to me.

watsit said:
But implicating avian can probably work, since they're feathered, winged animals capable of flight.

As far as I know, they can't actually fly. They look more like weird anthro feathered_dinosaurs than avians in my opinion, too. So if they had to be implicated anywhere, I'd sooner say that, but... That's how I see it, in any case.

jacob said:
Which is fine, I wasn't saying it did. I was just saying that none of the things Darqs said, disqualify something for being a mammal.

The feathers arguably do as mammals have hair (when they're wearing anything) instead of feathers, which developed on certain (not all) dinosaurs, some of which became birds. The obvious exceptions to this would be hybrid creatures such as griffins (which avali aren't).

Of course, you're correct about eggs (monotremes), cloacas (monotremes and marsupials), and aliens (for some reason, sapient cats as aliens seem to be popular).

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vulkalu said:
As far as I know, they can't actually fly. They look more like weird anthro feathered_dinosaurs than avians in my opinion, too.

According to their wiki, "Their wing feathers allow full flight on Avalon, with it's low gravity and thick atmosphere, but are far less useful on higher gravity worlds." So they can fly on their home planet, but it's harder/impossible on non-native planets with higher gravity, which would be true of any animal capable of flight (an avian from Earth being sent to a planet with higher gravity than Earth would find it hard/impossible to fly, too).

watsit said:
According to their wiki, "Their wing feathers allow full flight on Avalon, with it's low gravity and thick atmosphere, but are far less useful on higher gravity worlds." So they can fly on their home planet, but it's harder/impossible on non-native planets with higher gravity, which would be true of any animal capable of flight (an avian from Earth being sent to a planet with higher gravity than Earth would find it hard/impossible to fly, too).

Ah. Fair point. I'd still sooner compare them to dinosaurs, though, than birds. Most of their visual traits share more similarities with dinosaurs than birds, particularly the long tails and what looks more like feathered arms than actual wings, added on top of the lack of beaks.

jacob said:
...none of those things disqualify them for being mammals. The requirements to be a mammal: 1. The species must be warm-blooded. 2. The females of the species must feed milk to their developing young, through a mammary gland.

...that's literally it. They don't have to lack any of those things.

you know, thing is that birds are warm blooded too and on top of that avali cant be mammals because they dont have breasts canonically in first place, sure, some characters have them but its considered non canon just like them having dicks

darqsnoctus said:
you know, thing is that birds are warm blooded too and on top of that avali cant be mammals because they dont have breasts canonically in first place, sure, some characters have them but its considered non canon just like them having dicks

Again, I wasn't saying that Avali are mammals, just that the things Darqs said don't automatically disqualify a species for being mammals. The platypus lays eggs, despite being a mammal. As has been pointed out, there are plenty of fictional alien species who are mammals. There are mammalian species on Earth, in our reality, that have cloacas. And I have to disagree with Clawstripe: Considering some of the weird shit we've seen evolution do, I really don't see it all that difficult to believe, that in another reality, there could be one or more species of mammal that evolved to have feathers. Hell, if news came out tomorrow that scientists have found feathered mammals in THIS reality, I wouldn't immediately disbelieve it.

So, yeah, not saying Avali are mammals, just that DarqsNoctus made really weak arguments.

strikerman said:
...and that doesn't apply to them

I'm curious where the threshold for external information/artistic freedom is when determining whether a fictional species is mammalian.
Someone tagged a number of ferrin posts as mammal recently, and I assume that's a result of the species docs being obscure and prone to change, combined with artists (including the creator) frequently drawing them with breasts/nipples. (Although the creator still avoids giving them navels.) But posts that don't show breasts/nipples or navels are still having mammal added and I'm not sure if that's from using other posts as tagging information?

I think my stance at the moment is that for species that aren't real, mammal taggings should require more evidence, as mammalian features could just be anthrofications.

Of course, a big problem here is the majority of taggers aren't going to see these discussions in the first place.

Updated

I checked, and a decent chunk of the avali mammal taggings are by the same tagger as ferrin mammal, though there are a few older ones that might be getting used as a base. I think a line needs to be drawn on what is mammal within site context.
The wiki is just a list of real-world animal families and genera. Does a species have to be or resemble a real-world mammal?
Does a fictional species need to canonically breastfeed to be a mammal?
Does giving mammal-functional breasts to an otherwise non-mammalian species make it species:mammal or is it just anthrofied?

Here's a fun search: reptile mammal solo -nipples -hybrid -transformation -humanoid -snake_penis -snake_tail

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magnuseffect said:
I think a line needs to be drawn on what is mammal within site context.
The wiki is just a list of real-world animal families and genera. Does a species have to be or resemble a real-world mammal?

So much this. As much as I would like to say to reserve mammal purely for real-world species, there are some fictional species already implicated with the tag.
The wiki also does not reveal much on the purpose and proper usage of the tag. I would also like for a clarification to the actual use for the tag.

magnuseffect said:
I think a line needs to be drawn on what is mammal within site context.
The wiki is just a list of real-world animal families and genera. Does a species have to be or resemble a real-world mammal?

This is something I've wondered with dragons at times. Some furred dragons look particularly mammalian. Should they get tagged mammal?
Should all scaled dragons and wyverns count as reptile? I see them tagged that way at times, despite the fact that even scaled dragons share some features with mammals (bat-like wings; quadruped feral dragons are also often drawn with their legs directly underneath the body like a canine or horse, rather than squat outwards like a crocodilian or lizard; some dragons are even drawn with paws/pawpads), and despite the fact that pangolins are real, scaled mammals.

I've never known where the line was drawn, so for the most part, I don't mess with the reptile/mammal tags unless they actually seemed fully wrong to me.

vulkalu said:
Should all scaled dragons and wyverns count as reptile? I see them tagged that way at times, despite the fact that even scaled dragons share some features with mammals (bat-like wings; quadruped feral dragons are also often drawn with their legs directly underneath the body like a canine or horse, rather than squat outwards like a crocodilian or lizard; some dragons are even drawn with paws/pawpads), and despite the fact that pangolins are real, scaled mammals.

Dinosaurs have the traits you've described, and are not mammals.

votp said:
Dinosaurs have the traits you've described, and are not mammals.

I'll admit that I momentarily forgot about dinosaurs as they're not currently living, and was only considering the majority of currently living species (majority, because again, the platypus is weird and also goes against the leg structure I mentioned). So that, I'll concede on. (Except for pawpads. I've never heard of a non-mammal with paws and would be genuinely surprised to hear if there was one).

But I still want an answer (not necessarily from you, just anyone who can answer) on how fictional species should be handled. Where is the line drawn between tags like reptile and mammal? I only ask for clarification, because there are some ambiguous fictional species out there that look like they could go either way. And knowing how the tags are meant to be used would help for tagging, or fixing some tags.

thegreatwolfgang said:
there are some fictional species already implicated with the tag.

I had to double-check Yinglet, but they do have an official document confirming that females lactate, though it's not an active part of their child-raising process.

As far as things go I've been a fan of "if it doesn't auto-imply from the end-species, it's probably not valid," as that cuts down on things like people tagging hyaenid species as canines.
Right now mammal seems to hold the same kind of weight as tags like alien that have been talked about recently, where the tagging is so wide it might as well not mean anything.

vulkalu said:
But I still want an answer (not necessarily from you, just anyone who can answer) on how fictional species should be handled. Where is the line drawn between tags like reptile and mammal? I only ask for clarification, because there are some ambiguous fictional species out there that look like they could go either way. And knowing how the tags are meant to be used would help for tagging, or fixing some tags.

I think it should require official-source evidence that the species is mammalian. Ambiguous species with no proof shouldn't get it, and realworld mammal bits slapped on should be treated the same way that humanoid_penis does not imply species tags.
Lactation seems to be the most important factor, since the other "scientificaly required" traits (neocortex, hair/fur, three middle-ear bones) are far easier to just abstract-out when we're not bound by reality.

Edit: In-image lactating should not be considered evidence if it's not backed by official statements, for the same reasons that adding human anatomy to a creature doesn't make it human.

Updated

vulkalu said:
I'll admit that I momentarily forgot about dinosaurs as they're not currently living, and was only considering the majority of currently living species (majority, because again, the platypus is weird and also goes against the leg structure I mentioned). So that, I'll concede on. (Except for pawpads. I've never heard of a non-mammal with paws and would be genuinely surprised to hear if there was one).

But I still want an answer (not necessarily from you, just anyone who can answer) on how fictional species should be handled. Where is the line drawn between tags like reptile and mammal? I only ask for clarification, because there are some ambiguous fictional species out there that look like they could go either way. And knowing how the tags are meant to be used would help for tagging, or fixing some tags.

Given TYS, if you look at something and it looks like a mammal/reptile, tag it as such. Avali simply do not look mammalian in any way, and would get the Avian or Dinosaur tags if anything was to be used asides from their species tag by itself. Bit like how you would look at, say, sorlag and tag her as a reptile.

votp said:
Given TYS, if you look at something and it looks like a mammal/reptile, tag it as such. Avali simply do not look mammalian in any way, and would get the Avian or Dinosaur tags if anything was to be used asides from their species tag by itself. Bit like how you would look at, say, sorlag and tag her as a reptile.

I don't know enough specific reptile appearances to judge whether Sorlag should be reptile or just scalie.
What's your boundary between reptile (and friends)/bird and just-scalie/avian? If there are catch-all tags for reptile (and friends)/bird in reptile-(and-friends)-featured/bird-featured then why do mammal-featured fictional species autotag mammal instead of a mammal-featured catch-all?
argonian implies scalie and not reptile, but there's 15 full default (75-count) pages of argonian reptile. Is this a correct tagging?

Edit: Updated to reflect that reptiles aren't the only realworld thing within scalie

Updated

magnuseffect said:
I don't know enough specific reptile appearances to judge whether Sorlag should be reptile or just scalie.
What's your boundary between reptile/bird and just-scalie/avian? If there are catch-all tags for reptile/bird in reptile-featured/bird-featured then why do mammal-featured fictional species autotag mammal instead of a mammal-featured catch-all?
argonian implies scalie and not reptile, but there's 15 full default (75-count) pages of argonian reptile. Is this a correct tagging?

Argonians are a highly-morphic species, unfortunately, so that's not the best comparison. Even in-setting although the "stock" argonian is quite literally just a non-anthropomorphic non-sapient lizard (no joke on that, by the way), dependant on how much of their magic tree sap they eat they become anything from digitigrade lizard-people to repto-mammals.
The real question is, do you follow tag what you see, or do you tag for the lore for that sort of thing?

The Avali case is irrelevant to this, slapping tits on a species that simply does not have that feature does not change them. If we want to create what I view as pointless tag bloat, make tags for "looks like" for each of the main branches of animalia such as "reptiliform" or "pisciform" or such, up to staff what to name that cancer if they go with that, though. I'm personally in favour of "Alien" and "Avian" for Avali in particular given that's what they are, and what most folks I imagine would think upon looking at them at a glance ("Hee hoo, bird alien"), but from what I know we're not really supposed to use the former tag.

votp said:

The Avali case is irrelevant to this, slapping tits on a species that simply does not have that feature does not change them.

Okay I understand things getting muddled because I was talking about breasts earlier(?), but breastless Avali are still being tagged mammal, and two possible assumptions I take for that are:

  • Because other posts have the tag
  • Because they look like they have fur sometimes

I'm not trying to nullify the latter option when I talk about breasts. Breasts are potentially not the only reason people are overtagging mammal.

What I'm getting at: Are some people tagging mammal just because something has fur? Are some people tagging reptile just because something has scales?
I'm not advocating for tag bloat here by adding a separator-tag at every level, and I wasn't trying to imply that reptile-like is the only thing under scalie. I just didn't want to have to bog my post down with over-explanation.

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votp said:
I'm personally in favour of "Alien" and "Avian" for Avali in particular given that's what they are, and what most folks I imagine would think upon looking at them at a glance ("Hee hoo, bird alien")

I... still don't see where people are getting "avian" from with avali. They don't look particularly avian to me, unless we're suddenly tagging all feathered creatures with avian, in which case feathered_dragon and feathered_dinosaur should imply avian which... doesn't make much sense to me. To me, they still look 100% like chibi feathered dinosaurs with ear-like things on their heads, rather than anything remotely bird-like. Or a weird mix of feathered dinosaurs and the guardian spirits from Ori. What is explicitly more avian about them, visually, rather than dinosaur-like?

magnuseffect said:
If there are catch-all tags for reptile/bird in reptile-featured/bird-featured then why do mammal-featured fictional species autotag mammal instead of a mammal-featured catch-all?

Huh. I never noticed until you pointed it out, that there's no mammal-based equivalent of avian/scalie. I wonder why that is?

vulkalu said:
I... still don't see where people are getting "avian" from with avali. They don't look particularly avian to me, unless we're suddenly tagging all feathered creatures with avian, in which case feathered_dragon and feathered_dinosaur should imply avian which... doesn't make much sense to me. To me, they still look 100% like chibi feathered dinosaurs with ear-like things on their heads, rather than anything remotely bird-like. Or a weird mix of feathered dinosaurs and the guardian spirits from Ori. What is explicitly more avian about them, visually, rather than dinosaur-like?

Avians are feathered dinosaurs. Specifically, theropods.

votp said:
Avians are feathered dinosaurs. Specifically, theropods.

I am aware of what birds are. But that's not how tagging works here, and does not answer my question. Not to mention: Just because avians are dinosaurs, does not mean all dinosaurs are avians. There's a reason they're specifically called "non-avian dinosaurs".

vulkalu said:
I am aware of what birds are. But that's not how tagging works here, and does not answer my question. Not to mention: Just because avians are dinosaurs, does not mean all dinosaurs are avians. There's a reason they're specifically called "non-avian dinosaurs".

I suppose we could tag them as maniraptorans.

Looking at the design of the species their tails appear more like those of a pheasant on the avian side of things, or eudimorphodon to reference something more ancient... although pterosaurs are distinctly not dinosaurs and lack feathers. It really does seem to just be a mix of random things, considering this, chimera may be a valid tag option just to avoid the headache.

votp said:
I suppose we could tag them as maniraptorans.

Backtracking to put them in a realworld biological group we don't even tag currently sounds like a worse idea than leaving them with just their species. (Which is an option. They don't have to be connected to something else.)
Chimera feels like it's for mixes of more distinct features.

magnuseffect said:
Backtracking to put them in a realworld biological group we don't even tag currently sounds like a worse idea than leaving them with just their species. (Which is an option. They don't have to be connected to something else.)
Chimera feels like it's for mixes of more distinct features.

The problem is that you get the issue originally raised where people just guess, and you wind up with the bird/raptor/feathered-alien getting tagged with mammal. I suppose I can keep an eye out and just remove that whenever it pops up, if nothing else.

I think there's a clear settling to this issue. The creator of the race specifically states that they are not mammals. I've repeatedly gone through and manually removed the mammal tag from every 'solo avali -hybrid' post, and every day the mammal tag reappears. it should not.

if anyone wonders where i'm getting the info that avali are not mammals, or if anyone is unsure whether or not they are mammals (which shouldn't be the case) the link has already been posted, and here it is again: https://avali.fandom.com/wiki/Biology

Quote: "Avali are not mammals, but instead more similar to prehistoric Earth dromaeosauridae."

there's no point in disscussion on this, when the creator specifically states the answer to these questions.

halycon_fluff said:
I think there's a clear settling to this issue. The creator of the race specifically states that they are not mammals. I've repeatedly gone through and manually removed the mammal tag from every 'solo avali -hybrid' post, and every day the mammal tag reappears. it should not.

if anyone wonders where i'm getting the info that avali are not mammals, or if anyone is unsure whether or not they are mammals (which shouldn't be the case) the link has already been posted, and here it is again: https://avali.fandom.com/wiki/Biology

Quote: "Avali are not mammals, but instead more similar to prehistoric Earth dromaeosauridae."

there's no point in disscussion on this, when the creator specifically states the answer to these questions.

What the creator says is completely irrelevant to the posts tagged with Avali. It would be a nice addition to the tags wiki, if not already present, but TWYS cares for what is present in the image and only that. A person needs to know what an Avali is and know that the creator said they aren't mammals, which not everyone will know... which is why we use TWYS.

Now, I don't know whether or not an Avali should be tagged mammal based on visual information, but I do know we don't use outside information when tagging species. Therefore, there is a point in a discussion for that topic.

siral_exan said:
What the creator says is completely irrelevant to the posts tagged with Avali. It would be a nice addition to the tags wiki, if not already present, but TWYS cares for what is present in the image and only that. A person needs to know what an Avali is and know that the creator said they aren't mammals, which not everyone will know... which is why we use TWYS.

Now, I don't know whether or not an Avali should be tagged mammal based on visual information, but I do know we don't use outside information when tagging species. Therefore, there is a point in a discussion for that topic.

Based on visual information, they are Avali, nothing else. There's nothing to imply that they are mammal, and the way you're supposed to tag things is inclusive, not exclusive. you tag what you see, not what you 'don't not' see.

strikerman said:
Would you happen to know if it's a single user who's re-adding the tag?

I don't know. I just know i've done it multiple times, and the day afterwards, multiple, if not all the posts i had edited, would have the mammal tag re-added.

halycon_fluff said:
Based on visual information, they are Avali, nothing else. There's nothing to imply that they are mammal, and the way you're supposed to tag things is inclusive, not exclusive. you tag what you see, not what you 'don't not' see.

Again, I don't know whether or not they should or should not be tagged mammal. I'm saying "e6 does not follow word of god, there's still a point in discussing", nothing else.

siral_exan said:
Again, I don't know whether or not they should or should not be tagged mammal. I'm saying "e6 does not follow word of god, there's still a point in discussing", nothing else.

That's fine. but i am still trying to make a point. I argue that any pic, with the avali tag, and solo tag, that does not have the hybrid tag, should exclude the mammal tag. it is both visually, and factually correct to do so. i see no reason for avali to be listed as mammal, in any situation, with the exception of hybrids. they simply cannot be mistaken for mammals.