Per discussion at topic #56226, manipulation is considered an overly broad tag, and should be either redefined or retired.

The current wiki description is as follows:

post #3194840
Manipulation refers to the act of exploiting physical, social, or emotional leverage over someone for personal advantage, often unfairly or dishonestly.

Not to be confused with:

• physical/energy manipulation - to handle or control (a tool, mechanism, power source, etc.), typically in a skillful manner.
• photo manipulation

I think the last part can be easily solved by changing the name to "social manipulation", but I don't know what should be done for the definition itself.

I'm coming here from trying to find a tag that generalizes mind control, brainwashing, intelligence loss, and stuff like that. Right now, there are no tag implications that let me use a single tag to refer to all of those, which I could describe as 'mental manipulation'.

Instead, I'm finding discussions about a tag that's about all forms of manipulation in general, which isn't something I even knew existed until now. And while there are times where I would like such a generalized tag, it's not all the time.

What I would propose is to keep the tag, but also to split up the tag into various types of manipulation. The way I see it, you could have, for example, 'mind_control' imply 'mental_manipulation', which in turn implies 'manipulation'.

If it's desired to more clearly disambiguate between things like 'energy_manipulation', perhaps 'interpersonal_manipulation' could be used; things like brainwashing aren't really social manipulation, but are still mental manipulation, and both mental and social manipulation are between two people. If that's too long, then I'm sure there are other possible ways to arrange it.

I'm not going to weigh in on whether the viewer can be one of those two people or not, because honestly I don't think that matters much. Whichever way you guys go with that would be fine with me.

I think that all sounds reasonable.

Thinking about this further, there's another tag that sorta mixes weirdly with all of this: corruption.

Especially since it can be either through mind control/brainwashing, or through social manipulation and conditioning. I'd say that it's 'manipulation' either way, but can't easily fall under either social manipulation or mental manipulation, as it can be either one of those.

That's one reason why I do support an overall 'manipulation' tag existing, because sometimes it's good to search for everything in a broad category, and then use hyphens to remove subcategories that one isn't currently interested in. Right now, a lot of my searches have long chains of '~tag1 ~tag2 ~tag3' just to cover all the bases, and I suspect that such searches aren't quite as efficient within the database. If I want all sorts of manipulation except where the end result is a willing participant, it'd be nice if I could search for 'manipulation -corruption', instead of '~mind_control ~coercion ~brainwashing ~intelligence_loss ~blackmail ~questionable_consent -corruption'. And I'm sure I'm missing quite a few related tags in that list.

tynach said:
I'm coming here from trying to find a tag that generalizes mind control, brainwashing, intelligence loss, and stuff like that. Right now, there are no tag implications that let me use a single tag to refer to all of those, which I could describe as 'mental manipulation'.

Instead, I'm finding discussions about a tag that's about all forms of manipulation in general, which isn't something I even knew existed until now. And while there are times where I would like such a generalized tag, it's not all the time.

What I would propose is to keep the tag, but also to split up the tag into various types of manipulation. The way I see it, you could have, for example, 'mind_control' imply 'mental_manipulation', which in turn implies 'manipulation'.

If it's desired to more clearly disambiguate between things like 'energy_manipulation', perhaps 'interpersonal_manipulation' could be used; things like brainwashing aren't really social manipulation, but are still mental manipulation, and both mental and social manipulation are between two people. If that's too long, then I'm sure there are other possible ways to arrange it.

I'm not going to weigh in on whether the viewer can be one of those two people or not, because honestly I don't think that matters much. Whichever way you guys go with that would be fine with me.

I like your brain and your suggestions
Umbrella terms don't need to be retired or aliased away, they can benefit from disambiguation and smaller umbrellas.
I will unfortunately also say that intelligence_loss cannot fit into manipulation because there are too many ways that this can be self inflicted and/or unintentional (see drugs lol)
But I'm happy to see a fresh mind joining the topic with tactile first-person knowledge as a consumer of the art these tags go to

nin10dope said:
I will unfortunately also say that intelligence_loss cannot fit into manipulation because there are too many ways that this can be self inflicted and/or unintentional (see drugs lol)

I should clarify 'intelligence_loss' then. When it's used as a fetish, usually it's through some form of hypnosis or mind control, magically or technologically making a person dumber. It is essentially bimbofication, but with the physical transformation and increased libido considered optional.

I have seen one, maybe 2 images over time where this is achieved through actual physical head trauma (not counting the images I've seen of someone's brain literally being fucked through ear sex), and in the one I remember most clearly, it was someone who was tired of being smart, and begged another person to purposefully bash their head against a wall to give them a concussion, so it would probably count. As for when drugs are used, it's either implied to be temporary, or the drug is just used as an excuse for the effect to happen, and isn't actually explained beyond 'oh it was drugs', as an alternative to 'oh it was magic' or 'oh it was technology'.

Because when it's part of fetish art, it's not accidental. Even if it's accidental to the character ("Oh no the vial of hypno stupification gas was broken and now I need everyone's dick inside me!"), it's not accidental for the artist to include it. It's very much on purpose, and I'd say the tag still fits the category of mental manipulation.

I will admit it's a stretch to consider it interpersonal manipulation when it's accidental to the character, but I still think it fits. You could view it as the drug being a pseudo-character that is doing the manipulation, or you could see it as the people who benefit from the character being dumber (by being able to have sex with them, or by taking their job, or whatever) taking advantage of it and doing further manipulation. Because, again, it's not accidental: it's a setup for horny fun times, and because one character is now operating at a lower capacity, that inherently causes power imbalance in favor of any other characters in the scene. Since horny fun times are the objective of the plot, that means these newly-advantaged characters will certainly make use of their new advantage.

Edit: Though, all of this could also just be used to justify calling it 'manipulation' instead of 'interpersonal manipulation'. The subset of 'mental manipulation' then would not need to be between two characters, and could apply to any time a person's mind is manipulated - either by another person, or by themselves on purpose, or by accident.

That doesn't help distinguish it from 'energy manipulation', but it's not been clearly established whether or not that's desired anyway. I imagine over time, people will realize that 'manipulation' is used in the fetish sort of way, and stop tagging 'energy_manipulation' as also 'energy manipulation'. Maybe that's naïvely optimistic of me, though.

Regarding intelligence_loss, I do think it's too broad to always imply manipulation. Just within the first 5 posts of a search I found:

post #5505331

No indication intelligence loss was caused by another person.

post #5496262 post #5496255

Solo intelligence loss.

post #5503916

This is a creature preying on someone's intelligence; I wouldn't consider that manipulation, as they're not trying to make the victim stupider for some ulterior motive, it's just a side-effect of what they're doing.

I guess if you want to be pedantic, any change in a character's mental state could be considered "manipulation", but I would call these posts something more like "mental alteration". Manipulation generally implies a perpetrator doing the manipulation.

Sometimes it's also caused just by sex

So, any ideas for a revised description?

beholding said:
So, any ideas for a revised description?

Disambiguate it

nin10dope said:
Disambiguate it

I don't think that's necessary unless there are a significant amount of energy manipulation posts tagged with it.

beholding said:
I don't think that's necessary unless there are a significant amount of energy manipulation posts tagged with it.

It's too general and vague, and should use more specific tags rather than a generic term that can be applied to almost anything.

Mental, Social, Emotional
I think that's a fair trifecta
How does one differentiate social and emotional? Social requiring more than just the manipulator and the victim to be in the post (i.e. a crowd or group).
Mental would be for what was suggested above, an umbrella for hypnosis/mind_control/intelligence_loss/brainwashing-esque stuff

I don't see a clear difference between social and emotional manipulation, but I'm willing to put the disambiguation proposal to a vote.

The bulk update request #11071 is pending approval.

create alias manipulation (153) -> manipulation_(disambiguation) (0)
change category manipulation_(disambiguation) (0) -> invalid

Reason: As suggested.