Why the bloody heck is "armpits" a invalid tag? It shows 9k images under it and honestly, it's a pretty good tag...
It's so much better to find some that have exactly it in them, plus, many are clearly armpit fetish/kink but not many tag it like that, really sad that the site keeps cutting down some really good tags... Feels like some day there will be only tags for the genders and nothing else at this rate :/

Genders probably also have some weird ass names that make no sense and mixing genders since for whatever the damn reason "Dickgirl" is considered the same as "Futanari" for incredibly massive reasons, but that is other issues...

Don't normally use the forums but come on, invalid tags for once useful tags is really frustrating!

For clarification, the armpit tag doesn't have 9k posts. It's aliased to invalid_tag (along with a bunch of other stuff), and that tag has 9k posts.

There's a forum post that explains why armpit was invalidated.
https://e621.net/forum_topics/17431

I still don't understand why we have tags like fingers and eyebrows but it was decided that armpits is a useless tag

armpit_fetish and raised_arm still exist. I don’t use these tags really, but I’d imagine they serve the same purpose

faucet said:
I still don't understand why we have tags like fingers and eyebrows but it was decided that armpits is a useless tag

Maybe we should toss those tags too 👀

The only one of these anatomy tags I really care about is tail. I’m a furry for god’s sake, I wanna see some tails! So, instead of simply being able to search for tails or, say, for certain kinds of anthros or humanoids that have visible tails, I have to search for things like long_tail or big_tail or whatever, even though that leaves out plenty of good tails. It’s not like it’d be something you can always just assume to be present like armpit, which will be part of any character that has arms at all. Many characters on this site are simply drawn without tails (particularly humanoids… take tohru_(dragon_maid) for example. Sometimes drawn with a tail, sometimes without… no way to reliably separate them, since the size and color and length often vary between depictions! dragon_tail would hypothetically work, except that it’s very underused), or the tail just isn’t visible due to pose or camera angle. And, you know, the main point (just as far as my personal interest goes, anyway) of anthro/tailed humanoid art is because there’s something attractive about a human-shaped body with a tail. And no, tailless isn’t a solution because it can only be applied when a character should have a tail, but the tail is visibly missing. That can’t apply to humanoids or certain poses or angles where the tail or lack thereof cannot be verified.

But if I’m going to argue for tail to make a comeback, I might as well support armpit. Though, I would agree that it should only be tagged when the armpit is actually somewhat prominent. If we do that, however, wouldn’t it be a potentially useful tag? For people who are looking for armpits, I mean? Even if they’re not the focus of the image, it could be one of those details that contributes to someone’s enjoyment of an image. raised_arm doesn’t really cut it, since it’s going to turn up a ton of irrelevant results where the pit is not visible at all despite a raised arm (like, if the character is wearing clothing with sleeves, for example??), which poses a problem for both searching and blacklisting.

The way I see it, any descriptive anatomical tag (long_tail, hairy_armpit, etc.) ought to have some kind of umbrella tag it implicates that includes all the different possible descriptions of that anatomical feature. So if I want to see any kind of tail, not just long or short or red or blue, I can use one tag for them all. If I’m an armpit kinda guy (I’m really really not, just making a point…), perhaps I don’t care if they’re hairy or bald or sweaty or purple, I’d just want to see any images in which they constitute a meaningful part of the image. That doesn’t seem unreasonable.

Last point: what harm do these anatomical tags cause? They don’t even remotely violate TWYS, some people may actually use them, they don’t conflict with anything or get in the way of anything. It can hardly be said to contribute to ‘tag bloat’ when there’s really only a handful of these tags that are currently invalid. Most anatomical tags are still valid and often used, even ones of more questionable utility like fingers. And as far as I’m concerned, horn and other similar tags have the same utility as tail would, except that horns (and most of the others in the non-human anatomy domain, like wings and snout) are still valid. So… why?

scaliespe said:
Last point: what harm do these anatomical tags cause? They don’t even remotely violate TWYS, some people may actually use them, they don’t conflict with anything or get in the way of anything. It can hardly be said to contribute to ‘tag bloat’ when there’s really only a handful of these tags that are currently invalid. Most anatomical tags are still valid and often used, even ones of more questionable utility like fingers. And as far as I’m concerned, horn and other similar tags have the same utility as tail would, except that horns (and most of the others in the non-human anatomy domain, like wings and snout) are still valid. So… why?

Bloat mostly. It's rather pointless to have an eyes tag, for example. Yes you can have a character without eyes, but 99.999% of the time they will, so it would just be extra junk on the tag list... not to mention it makes eyes_closed complicated (if their eyes are closed, can you actually see that they have eyes?). It's better to have a tag for the less-common scenarios than the significantly common scenario. I'd argue it's the same for armpits; every character with arms and a shoulder has them, which is a good 99+% of the images here. Tags like armpit_focus or armpit_hair make more sense in this case, since they're nowhere near as common, and are closer to what people would want to look for or blacklist.

Saying that, I do agree with you on tail. They're not quite as common as one may think. An artist doesn't always include a tail on their anthros, and there are various species that don't have tails (several pokemon, werewolves have a habit of excluding them, including worgen, etc), so being able to search for such things with a tail would be nice. Fluffy tail, thick tail, long tail, dipstick tail, tail tuft, tail fin, and others can implicate it to help fill it in.

watsit said:
Bloat mostly. It's rather pointless to have an eyes tag, for example. Yes you can have a character without eyes, but 99.999% of the time they will, so it would just be extra junk on the tag list... not to mention it makes eyes_closed complicated (if their eyes are closed, can you actually see that they have eyes?). It's better to have a tag for the less-common scenarios than the significantly common scenario. I'd argue it's the same for armpits; every character with arms and a shoulder has them, which is a good 99+% of the images here. Tags like armpit_focus or armpit_hair make more sense in this case, since they're nowhere near as common, and are closer to what people would want to look for or blacklist.

I generally agree, but as I said above:

scaliespe said:
…it should only be tagged when the armpit is actually somewhat prominent.

…and:

scaliespe said:
…I’d just want to see any images in which they constitute a meaningful part of the image.

Yes, it would bloat the tags to use armpit or eyes every time those features exist on any character, but that isn’t what I’m proposing. Rather, I’m proposing something like a prominent_armpit tag, except that I think prominent_armpit is a bit unnecessary when the armpit tag is not currently being used. For the record, I think this is how we should handle humanoid anatomy tags in general, like the aforementioned butt tag. Only use the tag when it constitutes a meaningful part of the image. That is, the image would be quite a bit different if it was missing or not visible. It doesn’t have to be the focus of the image, just a meaningful part of it.

There was some talk above about getting rid of butt, however. I think the tag still has utility as long as it’s a meaningful part of the image and not just tagged on every single character that has even the slightest bit of visible roundness on their rear end. It’s much broader than butt_focus, and is great for people who want to see some butts but don’t require it to be the focus of the image. I mean, there are tons of great butts on this site that don’t qualify for the butt_focus tag. Your PFP is a perfect example of that. The same has to be true of armpits.

But either way, it doesn’t really make sense to have butt as a valid tag, but not armpit. It should be both or neither, I think.