Posted under Tag Alias and Implication Suggestions
The tag alias #58751 extraterrestrial -> alien has been approved.
Reason: "Extraterrestrial" is most commonly used to refer to aliens in general. Since we already use alien for non-mythological, non-Earth creatures, this tag is redundant.
EDIT: The tag alias extraterrestrial -> alien (forum #343510) has been approved by @spe.
Updated by auto moderator
May refer to non-Earth environments or objects.
I still think alien should be nuked. It's at best lore information, not TWYS.
watsit said:
I still think alien should be nuked. It's at best lore information, not TWYS.
I mean, it's a species tag for fictional species, so yeah, it's going to be based on lore information. should we also get rid of pokemon_(species)?
darryus said:
I mean, it's a species tag for fictional species, so yeah, it's going to be based on lore information. should we also get rid of pokemon_(species)?
pokemon_(species) at least has a defined set of species. It's objective and can be verified, and has utility in being collected together under an umbrella tag. What constitutes an "alien", though, will be a subjective say-so. It wouldn't be wrong to say Luke Skywalker is an alien, as he's of extraterrestrial origin no different than Yoda or Chewbacca. Various "alien" species are identical to non-alien species. It doesn't have nearly as clear of a definition or have the same utility.
watsit said:
pokemon_(species) at least has a defined set of species. It's objective and can be verified, and has utility in being collected together under an umbrella tag. What constitutes an "alien", though, will be a subjective say-so. It wouldn't be wrong to say Luke Skywalker is an alien, as he's of extraterrestrial origin no different than Yoda or Chewbacca. Various "alien" species are identical to non-alien species. It doesn't have nearly as clear of a definition or have the same utility.
darryus said:
what about demon or deity or monster or cryptid?
demon or deity or monster I wouldn't be sad to see go. Though at least for "demon", you could base it on a character having demonic features (horns, red skin, devil-ish imagery), though when you're tagging "demon" on some characters because they merely have a small set of horns, which is something non-demon anthros have all the time, or solely on the creator's say-so with no visual indication, its utility does come into question.
A deity is a class of being, not even necessarily species related. A completely normal looking character can be a deity, so I see no use to it when it says nothing about how a character looks or anything about the image.
A monster is more ill-defined than alien. Literally every creature in Monster Hunter is a "monster", as well as every Pokemon (as it literally means "Pocket Monster"). A werewolf can be called a monster, as can a plain old dragon. A monster can also refer to a character based on their behavior, like the monster denying chicken nuggets to this fox.
Cryptid I could see working if it's based on actual "modern" folklore. Like Bigfoot, the Jersey Devil, or the Mothman. Creatures that have cultural relevance, and which people maintain exist in the real world, but have not been verified to actually exist.
there are definitely stereotypical-looking aliens. we could theoretically restrict the tag to those, but not alias it away altogether.
cheshire3rd said:
there are definitely stereotypical-looking aliens. we could theoretically restrict the tag to those, but not alias it away altogether.
This is what I’ve suggested before… I don’t believe that “extraterrestrial furries” should count as aliens any more than humans born on another planet do. Like Chewbacca. But there’s still popular stereotypical aliens that can be identified even without any lore information, like Roswell Greys and Yautja and Klingons and so on. The alien tag would still be perfectly useful for grouping all of these species together.
What about the 13 pages of alien kirby
cheshire3rd said:
there are definitely stereotypical-looking aliens. we could theoretically restrict the tag to those, but not alias it away altogether.
That won't likely stop people from manually tagging it on what it shouldn't be. If it keeps getting mistagged, something needs to be done about it.
Without the alien tag how would we tag this?
It makes no sense to nuke a tag just because people are misusing it, looking at the first few pages I could probably count on my hands how many don't belong there. The wiki already says "Keep in mind that this tag should only be added if the creature looks like an alien by twys. Do not tag this by outside information." and people just need to be reminded about this.
faucet said:
Without the alien tag how would we tag this?
faucet said:
It makes no sense to nuke a tag just because people are misusing it
Other tags have been nuked as a result of constant and blatant misuse. If a tag can't serve a purpose due to not having a clear usage pattern, it's not useful.
faucet said:
looking at the first few pages I could probably count on my hands how many don't belong there. The wiki already says "Keep in mind that this tag should only be added if the creature looks like an alien by twys. Do not tag this by outside information." and people just need to be reminded about this.
What does it even mean to "look like an alien"? Since most aliens are designed by people based on their past experiences, just like fantasy and other fiction, they're going to come from the same melting pot of culture and imagination. I mean, even Roswell Greys are surprisingly human-like, to the point that some had theorized they could be more evolved humans from the future, rather than extraterrestrial. You could drop a Klingon or Yautja in a medieval fantasy setting, and they wouldn't actually look all that out of place if you weren't familiar with them being from the Star Trek or Predator series.
Updated
stupidmelon said:
What about the 13 pages of alien kirby
would Kirby even be considered an alien in-canon? he's not, like, from any planet. he's more like a force of nature, a being of void incubated in the pure positive emotions of the cosmos. he's closer to a demi-god than an alien.
Other tags have been nuked as a result of constant and blatant misuse. If a tag can't serve a purpose due to not having a clear usage pattern, it's not useful.
What does it even mean to "look like an alien"? Since most aliens are designed by people based on their past experiences, just like fantasy and other fiction, they're going to come from the same melting pot of culture and imagination. I mean, even Roswell Greys are surprisingly human-like, to the point that some had theorized they could be more evolved humans from the future, rather than extraterrestrial. You could drop a Klingon or Yautja in a medieval fantasy setting, and they wouldn't actually look all that out of place if you weren't familiar with them being from the Star Trek or Predator series.
I wholeheartedly agree with you, it should probably be nuked. The tag alien is just not compatible with TWYS. Regardless though, extraterrestrial and alien should definitely be aliased, even if only for both to be invalidated later. Because if they're not aliased and the alien tag gets nuked, everything will just be tagged extraterrestrial instead and we'll be back to square one.
watsit said:
just like fantasy and other fiction, they're going to come from the same melting pot of culture and imagination.
i.e. Without external context this is just a kobold or something
post #3151464
The difference between what's an alien and what's just a fantasy race lies exclusively in non-visual contexts, at least as it's being put into use now. It might be a different story if it were hard-limited to visual traits entirely foreign to real-earth creatures, but I imagine there'd be a lot of friction on how much that excludes. I don't envy anyone whose job it is to police it.
faucet said:
Without the alien tag how would we tag this?
alien_popoy
And if for some reason there's ever more than one, create a specific species tag for it.
darryus said:
would Kirby even be considered an alien in-canon? he's not, like, from any planet. he's more like a force of nature, a being of void incubated in the pure positive emotions of the cosmos. he's closer to a demi-god than an alien.
A Kirby-fiend friend says:
I'd say that calling Kirby an alien isn't exactly accurate. Nobody's entirely clear even in universe on what species he is, and it's implied he's not native to Planet Popstar, but he's also implied to maybe be the same species as Meta Knight... Maybe
Ah, of course, that incredibly useful garbage bin of a tag that totally isn’t just full of anthro mistags. Plus, humanoid (despite being in the species category) is not truly a species, but a form, like anthro, which means that posts tagged only as humanoid are technically lacking an actual species tag. There has to be a species tag for things like that, especially if they don’t fall into one of the established alien species like Roswell Grey, but still have the recognizable characteristics of a stereotypical alien.
Other tags have been nuked as a result of constant and blatant misuse. If a tag can't serve a purpose due to not having a clear usage pattern, it's not useful.
The results for alien currently aren’t that bad in terms of mistags. It’s not bad enough that it couldn’t be cleaned up. However, keep in mind that most of these results are probably added by the 50+ implications to alien, some of which may be disputable. If we consider all the implications to be valid, then there aren’t that many mistags. But do quarians really look like aliens? Maybe you can argue that their hands and feet are distinctly alien, but the implication might just be filling the alien tag with things that don’t really look stereotypically alien, along with some of the other things that currently imply it.
What does it even mean to "look like an alien"? Since most aliens are designed by people based on their past experiences, just like fantasy and other fiction, they're going to come from the same melting pot of culture and imagination. I mean, even Roswell Greys are surprisingly human-like, to the point that some had theorized they could be more evolved humans from the future, rather than extraterrestrial. You could drop a Klingon or Yautja in a medieval fantasy setting, and they wouldn't actually look all that out of place if you weren't familiar with them being from the Star Trek or Predator series.
There are still some obviously stereotypically alien characteristics that you see in some of these species, despite there being quite a bit of variation. While defining what “looks like an alien” may be difficult regarding edge cases, that fact alone doesn’t make the tag invalid. There are at least things that we can pretty much all agree fall within one of the major alien stereotypes, so we should at least begin there and maybe remove some of the implications to alien that fall too far outside those stereotypes.
scaliespe said:
The results for alien currently aren’t that bad in terms of mistags.
Given that much of the results could just as well be fantasy creatures, if not standard anthros, I strongly disagree with that. They're only aliens because someone said so, not because there's anything about the way they look.
scaliespe said:
There are still some obviously stereotypically alien characteristics that you see in some of these species, despite there being quite a bit of variation. While defining what “looks like an alien” may be difficult regarding edge cases, that fact alone doesn’t make the tag invalid.
Perhaps not, but the constant misuse of it being on random humanoids, anthros, and feral creatures, rather than some collective agreement on which particular species we consider to be aliens, does strongly lean to making it invalid.
scaliespe said:
Ah, of course, that incredibly useful garbage bin of a tag that totally isn’t just full of anthro mistags.
I want to note this seems to be a more recent phenomenon: The 2020s results fill 130 pages of this search while the remaining 12 or so years fit into the final 24.
It was not always like this; something has changed within tagging attitudes.
Updated
faucet said:
Without the alien tag how would we tag this?It makes no sense to nuke a tag just because people are misusing it, looking at the first few pages I could probably count on my hands how many don't belong there. The wiki already says "Keep in mind that this tag should only be added if the creature looks like an alien by twys. Do not tag this by outside information." and people just need to be reminded about this.
I think something like little_green_men would work for stereotypical aliens, though tags usually aren't plural. They of course, don't have to actually be green, I've seen grey and red ones too.
kyiiel said:
I think something like little_green_men would work for stereotypical aliens, though tags usually aren't plural.
There's Roswell Grey for the typical Area 51 style alien. Not all green humanoids are aliens though, and if that particular video had a different background, it could just as easily pass for a fantasy creature instead of an alien.
watsit said:
There's Roswell Grey for the typical Area 51 style alien. Not all green humanoids are aliens though, and if that particular video had a different background, it could just as easily pass for a fantasy creature instead of an alien.
didn’t know there was a tag for that. that totally invalidates my earlier point. alias away!
Updated
I strongly disagree with nuking alien. I will admit it has a pretty bad mistagging problem, but I've still gotten use out of it before in spite of that. There are lots of tags with fuzzy definitions, but those are often the most useful ones. Something should at least replace it's function before nuking it so it won't be impossible to use the site to find new kinds of aliens or original aliens.
All lot of the state of alien can be blamed on bad implications. All the homestuck implications, and tenno immediately jump out to me. Species that don't have a strong alien look like zerg, xenomorph and roswell_grey should be removed even if they are technically aliens according to lore.
oozeenthusiast said:
Something should at least replace it's function before nuking it so it won't be impossible to use the site to find new kinds of aliens or original aliens.
What exactly is it's function? That's kind of the problem; different people expect different things from it, but it's use is simply "if someone said it's an alien, it's tagged alien", with no visual basis to work from.
watsit said:
What exactly is it's function? That's kind of the problem; different people expect different things from it, but it's use is simply "if someone said it's an alien, it's tagged alien", with no visual basis to work from.
Similar to demons, aliens have a set of reoccurring design tropes. While it isn't as consistent demons, aliens are more likely to have antenna, bright colors, bioluminescence, unusual body layouts, and tentacles than other characters. When I use the alien tag, I am searching for characters that have the traits and associations of aliens. There also are a lot of images of characters that can't really be put into any other species tag, and the alien tag works to keep those characters out of the ambiguous species tag.
Here are a few examples of images and characters that would be very difficult to search for without the alien tag.
post #3234301 post #2151784 post #2205269 post #3127387 post #2944273 post #3232936 post #2215118
I agree that a purely visual definition will be better, and that the current definition is a mess, but I think we should try to fix or replace it instead of invalidating it.
oozeenthusiast said:
Here are a few examples of images and characters that would be very difficult to search for without the alien tag.
post #3234301 ... post #2205269 ... post #2215118
How are these "alien"? That last one in particular looks to me like a fantasy insect type of creature with a dragon, while the first seems like some kind of slug/anthropod creature. None of those three say "alien" to me.
watsit said:
How are these "alien"? That last one in particular looks to me like a fantasy insect type of creature with a dragon, while the first seems like some kind of slug/arthropod creature. None of those three say "alien" to me.
First one is mostly based on their weird body layout. They have a pussy and a pair of arms on their forehead, that ain't normal. They also have angled eyes like roswell greys. They don't resemble any animal, the closest they get is having an ovipositor, but it's still very different from a slug or arthropod's. Their markings also feel alien, though I will give that's even more subjective than the rest of this.
Second one is green, has antennas, and weird growths on her ears. It's a parody showing what happens if you cross a little green man with a cow. Two tails and extra arms also give extra points towards being an alien by further separating her from natural anatomy.
Third one, yeah, I'll give you that one. It has some things that separate it from a normal arthropod like only having three eyes and having a sail, but on second thought I don't think that's enough.
oozeenthusiast said:
First one is mostly based on their weird body layout. They have a pussy and a pair of arms on their forehead, that ain't normal. They also have angled eyes like roswell greys. They don't resemble any animal, the closest they get is having an ovipositor, but it's still very different from a slug or arthropod's. Their markings also feel alien, though I will give that's even more subjective than the rest of this.
The arms on the head reminded me more of a terriermon than an alien, and a pussy on their forehead is like a penis on a forehead. Granted I didn't catch on the the missing arms, but still, it looks like a fantasy creature with some arthropod and gastropod features and a porn-y twist.
oozeenthusiast said:
Second one is green, has antennas, and weird growths on her ears. It's a parody showing what happens if you cross a little green man with a cow. Two tails and extra arms also give extra points towards being an alien by further separating her from natural anatomy.
Or radiation. Fantastical depictions of radiation effects can include turning green and gaining extra limbs. Antennae are a feature common to insects.
watsit said:
The arms on the head reminded me more of a terriermon than an alien, and a pussy on their forehead is like a penis on a forehead. Granted I didn't catch on the the missing arms, but still, it looks like a fantasy creature with some arthropod and gastropod features and a porn-y twist.
When I want aliens I don't want to see other species with unusual_pussy_placement, and searching unusual_pussy_placement misses a lot of aliens. As far as I know there isn't a tag for all possible unusual body configurations anyways. Also what is a fantasy creature? A tag for species that would fit into a jrpg or fantasy novel would face the same problems as alien, and a tag for all fictional species would near worthless due to how many things would need to tagged to it.
watsit said:
Or radiation. Fantastical depictions of radiation effects can include turning green and gaining extra limbs. Antennae are a feature common to insects.
While these traits are still present on other species or in other tags, it's the combination of them that makes the alien. A paw doesn't make a wolf and an antenna doesn't make an ant. Both of those characters have bug traits, but to tag them with arthropod would be as ridiculous as udder implying mammal.
it should be both a lore and twys tag AS THAT IS HOW IT'S USED AND IS OPTIMAL FOR SEARCHING, ALSO EVERYONE SAYING IT SHOULD BE NUKED, SCREW YOU AND YOUR ANTI-SEARCH EFFICENCY YOU UTTER SCUM.
I DISAGREE
I like the Alien tag and just cause it's "common" doesn't equel to 100% of the time.
If there is a reason alien tag is being misused as a blanket tag for other creatures there are other tags to use for it.
this is not a 1 to 1 thing. NUFF SAID.
The tag alias extraterrestrial -> alien (forum #343510) has been approved by @spe.
