Do you think it would be worthwhile to have lore tags expanded to cover sexualities?

Prime example would be gay_(lore) as a tag. We have a lot of folks that tag characters they know to be gay, but aren't engaging in any male/male action in that particular post.

What would be the pros and cons of this?

I don't see there being a huge demand - or, really, purpose - for orientation lore tags outside of a few niche scenarios. Sexual orientation lore tags don't feel like they'd be needed in posts that don't actively contradict the character's depicted sexuality - a gay character having straight sex or vice versa, orientation_play, etc. Gender lore tags are important on posts where you wouldn't really be able to tell a character is a certain gender through TWYS; if sexuality tags are implemented I imagine the execution should be similar.

maybe? although it feels like it might be hard to try to determine what, like, type they should be.

I wonder whether or not we should have them work kinda like the gender lore tags, where they'd only be applied when the visible contents of the post contracts the character's "reality".

I could see it falling prey to the same issues the gay tag does. It getting misused as "intended for a gay/male audience" or as "gay porn" rather than character sexuality, something like post #5586359 for example. Or posts that are male/ambiguous or ambiguous/ambiguous that's intended to be male/male, like post #5457289.

And perhaps issues with other sexualities where a character may be more commonly depicted in same-sex pairings, but aren't actually homosexual. rune_(wooled), for example, is a female character who has primarily shown interest in another female character, whom she's in a same-sex relationship with. People would probably be tempted to tag lesbian_(lore) when she's showing interest in another female as it would be giving off female/female vibes, even though she's been stated to be bisexual.

This might be useful for orientation_play scenarios -- I've seen several posts where it's tagged based on character lore rather than anything apparent in the image itself. I don't see it having use outside of that, though, and I generally agree with the above posts that it's too muddy a concept.

Having sexuality tags like gay_(lore) along with the general male/male tag could really help better accommodate people who don't feel included with the current tags.
Similar to when gender lore tags were made to accommodate people who felt their gender identity wasn't respected because of the rigid nature of the TWYS policy.
It could help with finding characters of a particular sexuality without them explicitly having to engage in romantic or sexual activity in the image, like post #5602756.
Another thing is that it could also help alleviate the "male/male solo" problem, as mentioned in topic #57395, without dismantling the usability of the male/male tag.
And it would also help settle tag disputes regarding gay_to_straight, straight_to_gay, orientation_play etc. if sexuality were treated more as lore.

slyroon said:
It could help with finding characters of a particular sexuality without them explicitly having to engage in romantic or sexual activity in the image, like post #5602756.

We do have stated_sexuality for posts like that, as well as subtags for specific sexualities.

On a different note, it might be a good idea to rename the current bisexual tag if we go this route.

It feels like ameliorating the gay -> m/m alias problem is the only actual reason to want this tag
That said, I'm not against it either because lore tags being their own category means it doesn't visually clog the other tags and not having cross-category implications/aliases make it rather frictionless to add

Considering the complexity of sexual orientation (e.g., heterosexual, homosexual, etc.) vs. sexual identity (e.g., identifies as straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual, etc.), a high degree of caution and consideration should be used when determining what the new tags are going to be called and how are they defined.

I also agree with @Watsit about gay_(lore) being simply misused as to mean gay in general.
Whatever new tag name that is discussed should not share the same name of a tag that got aliased away already, especially since the idea for invalidating gay got shot down on topic #57395 and the tag is currently locked in to mean male/male.

No, I do not think that we should have orientation lore tags. I understand that gay, lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, etc. are terms to describe sexual attraction in real life, not sex acts, but I find that sexuality lore tags would not provide the same benefit as the trans lore tags for the following reasons:

1. They are not relevant to the viewer. Viewers for the most part are ambivalent about a character's unstated sexuality in artwork.
2. They do not aid in searches. Searching for trans characters lets users find scenarios where those characters are interacting in a way that can aid in their enjoyment and fulfillment. It's also a blacklistable term for people who are not attracted to trans characters. A character's sexuality is less relevant since the visible enjoyment of a character and their stated sexuality already functions for that purpose. We can tag stated_sexuality or orientation_play to go along with those if relevant.
3. Character owners in the majority of cases already do not tag this on other sites that support tags when they post their artwork. If the creator of the character does not care to add these tags, then we probably shouldn't either. Character owners generally state a character's sexuality in their bios or descriptions, and we have analogous post descriptions and profile pages to include that information if you so choose. The character wiki could similarly be used to explain more about your character. Making sexuality a tag would just be duplicating that information on every post for little to no search gain.
4. I think that this change would make uploading more intimidating for some users, who may worry that not including a character's sexuality (or getting it wrong) would get them in trouble. This thankfully hasn't been an issue with trans tags in practice, but every added measure of complexity may cause novice or anxious uploaders to hesitate more about contributing.
5. Defining the limits of how many or what kind of sexuality tags are appropriate on posts could get messy. There are the obvious candidates like what body types and genitals a character is attracted to, but then there are concepts like paraphilias that would need to be considered. Creating an official cut-off point for what sexualities are considered relevant could end up feeling less, rather than more, inclusive to some users.

Overall, I do not think that this would be a good change for the site for the above reasons.

song said:
The character wiki could similarly be used to explain more about your character. Making sexuality a tag would just be duplicating that information on every post for little to no search gain.

Adding onto this point, if just writing "They're gay!" isn't sufficient for character searching, there are some tricks I have that would allow a well-"tagged" wiki to be searchable on the basis of character traits/sexuality without making an absolutely massive wiki-style infobox.
I might be tempted to write a sort of character wiki style guide if there's a lot of interest in that, and if I need to codify some sort of invisible tag system then I wouldn't mind.

lafcadio said:
Adding onto this point, if just writing "They're gay!" isn't sufficient for character searching, there are some tricks I have that would allow a well-"tagged" wiki to be searchable on the basis of character traits/sexuality without making an absolutely massive wiki-style infobox.
I might be tempted to write a sort of character wiki style guide if there's a lot of interest in that, and if I need to codify some sort of invisible tag system then I wouldn't mind.

I actually like this idea a lot
Like a character wiki could list common applicable tags

song said:
No, I do not think that we should have orientation lore tags. I understand that gay, lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, etc. are terms to describe sexual attraction in real life, not sex acts, but I find that sexuality lore tags would not provide the same benefit as the trans lore tags for the following reasons:

1. They are not relevant to the viewer. Viewers for the most part are ambivalent about a character's unstated sexuality in artwork.
2. They do not aid in searches. Searching for trans characters lets users find scenarios where those characters are interacting in a way that can aid in their enjoyment and fulfillment. It's also a blacklistable term for people who are not attracted to trans characters. A character's sexuality is less relevant since the visible enjoyment of a character and their stated sexuality already functions for that purpose. We can tag stated_sexuality or orientation_play to go along with those if relevant.
3. Character owners in the majority of cases already do not tag this on other sites that support tags when they post their artwork. If the creator of the character does not care to add these tags, then we probably shouldn't either. Character owners generally state a character's sexuality in their bios or descriptions, and we have analogous post descriptions and profile pages to include that information if you so choose. The character wiki could similarly be used to explain more about your character. Making sexuality a tag would just be duplicating that information on every post for little to no search gain.
4. I think that this change would make uploading more intimidating for some users, who may worry that not including a character's sexuality (or getting it wrong) would get them in trouble. This thankfully hasn't been an issue with trans tags in practice, but every added measure of complexity may cause novice or anxious uploaders to hesitate more about contributing.
5. Defining the limits of how many or what kind of sexuality tags are appropriate on posts could get messy. There are the obvious candidates like what body types and genitals a character is attracted to, but then there are concepts like paraphilias that would need to be considered. Creating an official cut-off point for what sexualities are considered relevant could end up feeling less, rather than more, inclusive to some users.

Overall, I do not think that this would be a good change for the site for the above reasons.

I do not agree with any of your 5 assertions because they either aren't correct or are just setting a double-standard.

1. Yes, they are. How many gay folk are in the furry community again? I heard almost half of us were gay. Being underrepresented is not an excuse to keep it that way. This also goes to @Moonlit-Comet, that is not up to debate. Even if we assume you both are right, hypothetically, why are there a quadruplets_(lore), a descendant_(lore), an ancestor_(lore) and a stepmother_and_stepdaughter_(lore) tags? Actually nobody uses these. There's even a completely redundant young_(lore) tag. What is it for? Aged-up characters?
2. That's wrong. If a gay character is drawn having sex with someone of the opposite gender then that maybe something people would want to avoid by adding the following into their blacklist "gay_(lore) male/female" or reversely they might be fine with gay or bisexual characters having straight sex due to a rape fetish, orientation play or whatever, but are not strictly interested to look at straight characters having sex, then they'd type this into the search field "gay_(lore) male/female" or "gay_(lore) penetration" whereas male/male would exclusively show 2 male characters. It's that simple.
2.1. I can guarantee there are many transphobes here who blacklisted trans_(lore) period, but regardless that's not why this tag should exist, it should exist simply to help finding and representing gay characters. As it stands you are supporting gay-erasure.
3. This is a problem that affects all the lore tags. I saw many posts on furaffinity with a trans character neither tagged trans nor transgender outside of pride comms. Yet, nobody sane would argue that it'd be better to scrap trans_(lore) and ban any use of it. Adult_(lore) is even more egregious because it only exists to calm down artists who are assmad about their juvenile-looking characters being labeled as such. I have never seen "adult" tagged anywhere else besides e621 and the only way I think I'd ever see it is if the artist tries to tag "adult baby diaper lover", while leaving spaces instead of underscores.
4. Then that's already the case. Is it really that hard for folks to tag sex and gender identities? No? So, it shouldn't be that hard to tag sexual orientations either. People can already get records for improperly tagging gender, if that didn't scare them from posting to the site at all or fixing mistags, then adding sexualities into the mix is not going to make any difference when the default is straight and easy to assume for anyone.
5. There are hundreds of thousands of gender identities, https://mogai.miraheze.org/wiki/MOGAI_Wiki but the site only includes trans_(lore) and nonbinary_(lore). This is an absurd take, just make a few sexuality tags for sexualities that are common and be done with it. We don't need a tag for literally everything.

@TheGreatWolfgang @watsit
Let's be fair, even trans_(lore) poses similar problems where it gets tagged frivolously. For example, I've seen it a few times tagged on posts where the character was brandishing a trans pride flag or wearing trans-themed paraphernalia, but nothing told me they were trans, they could have just been an ally. This is another example of encouraging the double-standard, and I think both trans_(lore) and gay_(lore) should coexist instead of supporting the removal of trans_(lore) altogether. I don't believe either of you would support that tag getting removed despite it being misused repeatedly.

nin10dope said:
It feels like ameliorating the gay -> m/m alias problem is the only actual reason to want this tag
That said, I'm not against it either because lore tags being their own category means it doesn't visually clog the other tags and not having cross-category implications/aliases make it rather frictionless to add

Speaking for myself here, while it is the catalyst for openly wanting this tag, I wanted to use this tag (as well as lesbian_(lore)) ever since I signed up. I almost mistagged a post with male/male once (and actually I might've accidentally done it out of habit or maybe not idk). There is really no excuse not to represent 40~50% of the furry community and it'll be almost June, it'd be created just right in time for pride month. It is going to get used a ton.

Is it necessary to benefit the searchability directly? I agree that it probably won't be used a lot for searches/blacklisting. But it would reduce the <gender>/<gender> mistags.

1. The amounts of mistags would be reduced.
2. Users who clean um the mistags can use their time for other tagging projects.
3. I don't see how it would "intimidate" users. It's just one more tag under many. They are either intimidated by the tags anyway, or not.
4. The furry fandom is pretty much all about "expressing yourself as a funny bipedal animal", why shouldn't we give users the possibility to do this?

One more thing:

moonlit-comet said:
Sexual orientation lore tags don't feel like they'd be needed in posts that don't actively contradict the character's depicted sexuality

dba_afish said:
where they'd only be applied when the visible contents of the post contracts the character's "reality".

I couldn't remember that the gender lore tags have to contradict the posts content. And since I am not very active in the forum the last couple of months, and that might have been stated somewhere without me knowing about it, I asked NotMeNotYou for clarification. And his answer was: "The lore tags were initially made with the idea to have it "correct" twys, but I think letting people go wild and apply them even if they just reinforce twys might be more useful, and straightforward, for everyone"

With all that said, I am very pro orientation lore tags.

seems like it's bound to start fights based on personal interpretation or fanon V canon. plus if not limited to gay/lesbian - bi - straight we'll see a shit ton of tags that end up used once or twice, and by a single person.

there's already tags like orientation_play and expressed_heterosexuality ,etc.

lycalopex said:
@TheGreatWolfgang @watsit
Let's be fair, even trans_(lore) poses similar problems where it gets tagged frivolously. For example, I've seen it a few times tagged on posts where the character was brandishing a trans pride flag or wearing trans-themed paraphernalia, but nothing told me they were trans, they could have just been an ally. This is another example of encouraging the double-standard, and I think both trans_(lore) and gay_(lore) should coexist instead of supporting the removal of trans_(lore) altogether. I don't believe either of you would support that tag getting removed despite it being misused repeatedly.

Pointing out problems the trans lore tag has doesn't make them not problems. The difference is, the lack of a trans tag has caused serious problems due to characters regularly appearing different from how they identify, with artists and character owners getting upset (to the point of going DNP) that their trans woman character gets tagged male and no indication their gender identity being different (and vice-versa), thus also leading to comments unknowingly misgendering the character and causing unnecessary stress for people. The trans lore tags are a compromise, something that breaks the usual tagging standard to give pertinent info to better identify characters, to solve significant issues people were having.

Sexuality tags don't face those same issues. We don't regularly have people complaining that their gay character isn't tagged gay because they look and get misidentified as straight. Artists aren't going DNP because they can't tag their character as gay to avoid the stress and headaches with people regularly assuming they're straight. If anything, it's the opposite problem, I have actually seen artists get annoyed by people assuming they're gay or bi when they're actually straight and have no desire to produce male/male art (something lore tags wouldn't address since the lore tags would be about the characters, not the artist or character owner).

There's a further issue that everyone has a sexuality, be it straight, gay, bi, ace, etc. Which would mean every post should have one or more sexuality tags. That seems a bit much to me for posts to encourage always having characters' sexualities tagged when known, as unlike trans tags, there's too much prevalence of gay and bi people/characters in the fandom to assume straightness like we can assume characters being cis unless identified otherwise.

dubsthefox said:
1. The amounts of mistags would be reduced.

The amount of male/male and female/female mistags would be reduced, but the amount of gay_(lore) mistags will be high. And something to keep in mind is that lore mistags are less likely or able to be fixed as they rely on external knowledge many people won't have and won't bother looking into, compared to general mistags where all the info we need is in the image itself. If male/male is tagged on a post that doesn't have two males being close with each other, it's relatively easy for anyone to see that and remove the tag. But if that same post has gay_(lore) on a post that doesn't have a gay character? Who's going to know that none of the characters in the image isn't gay? That the artist didn't intend for a normally straight or bi character to be gay in that specific depiction?

As it is, I rarely touch lore tags even if I suspect something is missing or wrong, because I can't be sure I'm not the one missing something. Even if I know something is generally the case about a character, I can't be sure the artist didn't intend something different for that particular image. So I'm less likely to fix misused or missing lore tags compared to misused or missing general tags, and I'm likely not the only one.

Sexuality tags would give more context to the image, but doesn't describe the image itself.
I don't understand why male/male would be considered homosexual, because male/male describes the action of the people in the image, not the sexuality of the people involved.

cadynn said:
I don't understand why male/male would be considered homosexual, because male/male describes the action of the people in the image, not the sexuality of the people involved.

gay is aliased to male/male because it's often used for male/male sex or other situations where male/male would be applicable, but sometimes people use it to mean a character is gay or for a show of gay pride when there aren't two males doing anything together, which causes a mistag. So some uploaders would add gay to the tag list when uploading, not realizing it's getting replaced and sometimes it results in male/male being tagged when it shouldn't be that needs to be fixed.

Not sure what the benefit is, other than for orientation_play posts. And even then, the sexuality of the character should be apparent. And really, I'm not sure how much people care about a character's sexuality: Bowser canonically wanting to marry Princess_Peach does not make anyone even hesitate to depict him as gay...

It could also get messy knowing which sexualities need tags... Straight, gay, bi, pan, and ace, I guess. But then suddenly there's a nonbinary character that's only into men and we suddenly need a tag for... umm, "androsexual"(?) Is that the word? It could get confusing.

wwwwwwwww said:
seems like it's bound to start fights based on personal interpretation or fanon V canon. plus if not limited to gay/lesbian - bi - straight we'll see a shit ton of tags that end up used once or twice, and by a single person.

there's already tags like orientation_play and expressed_heterosexuality ,etc.

This ^ is the sexuality equivalent of the gender_(lore) tags.

dubsthefox said:
Is it necessary to benefit the searchability directly? I agree that it probably won't be used a lot for searches/blacklisting. But it would reduce the <gender>/<gender> mistags.

1. The amounts of mistags would be reduced.
2. Users who clean um the mistags can use their time for other tagging projects.
3. I don't see how it would "intimidate" users. It's just one more tag under many. They are either intimidated by the tags anyway, or not.
4. The furry fandom is pretty much all about "expressing yourself as a funny bipedal animal", why shouldn't we give users the possibility to do this?

One more thing:

I couldn't remember that the gender lore tags have to contradict the posts content. And since I am not very active in the forum the last couple of months, and that might have been stated somewhere without me knowing about it, I asked NotMeNotYou for clarification. And his answer was: "The lore tags were initially made with the idea to have it "correct" twys, but I think letting people go wild and apply them even if they just reinforce twys might be more useful, and straightforward, for everyone"

It will (most likely) not reduce the mistags by a notable metric because the people who add gay incorrectly to posts are most likely not going to see the (lore) version because if they cared about making that mistake, they would only do it one or a few times when they first started uploading before it got caught and changed with the reason explained in the changelog. 2 is assuming 1's already assumed validity so that's not a good argument. If you don't see how the fear of mislabeling a characters lore might be intimidating by any amount, you should see the backlash that people get when they do. 4 is just begging the question. And yes, the gender lore tags are specifically to counter twys contradicting headcanon of the artist. NMNY even says so in that reply before voicing the opinion that allowing more freedom in the lore tags use might be beneficial.