I've noticed that many species created by the furry fandom, such as rexouium, protogen and synth_(vader-san) do not have tags that indicate their origin. Many real-world animals will implicate their taxonomy (lizard implicating reptile, for example) and species that originate from games, movies, mythology or books implicate their respective origin (tauntaun implicating star_wars), but fandom-made species are not tagged as such, leaving their species name as the only species tag in many cases.

I suggest that species which originate from the fandom be given a tag to unify them and give them a proper category. Personally, I think fandom-made_species or simply fandom_species works well, but I will leave the exact details to the community.

"Fandom" species is rather nebulous. Someone doesn't need to be in the furry fandom to make a species that spreads in the fandom, and it may not be clear whether someone is in the fandom (particularly non-English speaking countries). Whether or not someone was in the fandom when they created some fictional species seems rather irrelevant for tagging purposes; it's not part of their taxonomy, otherwise useful for finding similar types of animals, or what media they're from, for IP-related purposes.

If anything, fictional_species, original_species, or custom_species would fit this niche, but said tags were all aliased away - with original_species being aliased with no discussion forum and the others following suit because of that alias.
I think theoretically fictional_species could have use but it's rife to become a wastebin very easily.

moonlit-comet said:
...with original_species being aliased with no discussion forum ...

Damn, this kinda makes me sad. I'd love an original_species tag to be able to browse through.

emionix said:
Damn, this kinda makes me sad. I'd love an original_species tag to be able to browse through.

If it's anything like original_character, it would be filled with both fan species and wholly "new" species. And given that we don't tag just any species someone makes that's a hybrid of other species, it would be a dumping ground for any non-real species.

Yeah, I know. I might start making a list of interesting species tags to look through, just on my own.

watsit said:
If it's anything like original_character, it would be filled with both fan species and wholly "new" species. And given that we don't tag just any species someone makes that's a hybrid of other species, it would be a dumping ground for any non-real species.

Surely fan species could be given their own classification then? I dunno, it seems pretty easy to moderate what species gets a tag or doesn't around here.
It's just weird we don't have a valid tag to say "a fictional creature that doesn't originate from any media franchise." If someone wants to search for that kind of creature, what are they supposed to type in?

EDIT: I just thought what if we used independent_species to indicate these species were made independently of any media IP. Whether the creator is in the fandom is irrelevant then.

Maybe a way to narrow down the avalanche of potentially "samey" species would be to either have the species be pretty prominent (think protogens or sergals), different enough, or attached to an asset (Like how quite a few VRChat avatars have grown into people's legitimate sonas and gotten materials outside of 3D renders)

proceleon said:
Surely fan species could be given their own classification then? I dunno, it seems pretty easy to moderate what species gets a tag or doesn't around here.

fan_character is a tag some people have argued shouldn't exist either, because it's too easily applicable to anyone that's not an established character in an established setting, and lacks the nuance when dealing with fan works of fan works. And what gets classified as a fan species isn't always obvious: fakemon are specifically not Pokemon (or Digimon), and are not tagged as such unless they have clearly defined traits from an existing pokemon/digimon. So something like faunazon would not be a fan species because it's not a pokemon or clearly based on any specific pokemon, even though the design is intended to be pokemon-like. Something like this zorua/nidoran hybrid could be considered a fan species, while this zorua/jigglypuff/meowth hybrid would not because it's called a Cattiva from Palworld. As the tag would offer nothing about what anything in the image looks like, at best only giving some background info most people won't care about, it doesn't seem worth the trouble.

proceleon said:
It's just weird we don't have a valid tag to say "a fictional creature that doesn't originate from any media franchise." If someone wants to search for that kind of creature, what are they supposed to type in?

EDIT: I just thought what if we used independent_species to indicate these species were made independently of any media IP. Whether the creator is in the fandom is irrelevant then.

That could end up just as confusing or ambiguous, and seemingly arbitrary. PocketPair is an independent studio, but Palworld is a media IP, so despite being made independently, Pals wouldn't be independent species. Some people would think they should be since they're legally distinct from Pokemon and not associated with any big corporation, while others would since they were created for commercial purposes. Sergals have been brought up, which were created by a couple of Japanese artists for their Vilous setting; would that count as a media IP? What about avali, that were created in Spore and later made into a Starbound mod? How would it work for species that were created independently, with the intent to be an official race/species in some (new or preexisting) media IP later? It seems like that kind of search isn't very clear, and would be prone to different people wanting different things from it.

watsit said:
fan_character is a tag some people have argued shouldn't exist either, because it's too easily applicable to anyone that's not an established character in an established setting, and lacks the nuance when dealing with fan works of fan works. And what gets classified as a fan species isn't always obvious: fakemon are specifically not Pokemon (or Digimon), and are not tagged as such unless they have clearly defined traits from an existing pokemon/digimon. So something like faunazon would not be a fan species because it's not a pokemon or clearly based on any specific pokemon, even though the design is intended to be pokemon-like. Something like this zorua/nidoran hybrid could be considered a fan species, while this zorua/jigglypuff/meowth hybrid would not because it's called a Cattiva from Palworld. As the tag would offer nothing about what anything in the image looks like, at best only giving some background info most people won't care about, it doesn't seem worth the trouble.

That could end up just as confusing or ambiguous, and seemingly arbitrary. PocketPair is an independent studio, but Palworld is a media IP, so despite being made independently, Pals wouldn't be independent species. Some people would think they should be since they're legally distinct from Pokemon and not associated with any big corporation, while others would since they were created for commercial purposes. Sergals have been brought up, which were created by a couple of Japanese artists for their Vilous setting; would that count as a media IP? What about avali, that were created in Spore and later made into a Starbound mod? How would it work for species that were created independently, with the intent to be an official race/species in some (new or preexisting) media IP later? It seems like that kind of search isn't very clear, and would be prone to different people wanting different things from it.

Alright, what do you suggest be done to identify species like this?

proceleon said:
Alright, what do you suggest be done to identify species like this?

You'd need to define "like this", some way to clearly describe it that gives a useful distinction. "The fandom" and "independent" aren't clear, since "furry" is a self-applied label (someone is only in the furry fandom if they say they are; interacting with the fandom is different than being in the fandom), and "independent" can mean different things (Palworld is a media IP, it's video game media tied to PocketPair's intellectual property, but as they aren't owned by some big corporation, are typically thought of as independent; why or why wouldn't Pals count?). The primary purpose of tags is to help people find or avoid things, so a tag should be able to distinguish posts in a way that users want. If different people have different concepts for what the tag should or shouldn't apply to, it wouldn't be good at helping people find or avoid things, and thus not useful.

watsit said:
You'd need to define "like this", some way to clearly describe it that gives a useful distinction. "The fandom" and "independent" aren't clear, since "furry" is a self-applied label (someone is only in the furry fandom if they say they are; interacting with the fandom is different than being in the fandom), and "independent" can mean different things (Palworld is a media IP, it's video game media tied to PocketPair's intellectual property, but as they aren't owned by some big corporation, are typically thought of as independent; why or why wouldn't Pals count?). The primary purpose of tags is to help people find or avoid things, so a tag should be able to distinguish posts in a way that users want. If different people have different concepts for what the tag should or shouldn't apply to, it wouldn't be good at helping people find or avoid things, and thus not useful.

It has literally been defined several times through the course of this conversation with examples: rexouium, protogen, synth_(vader-san), "a fictional creature that doesn't originate from any media franchise." You KNOW the types of species being referred to here.

sergal could implicate vilous or vilous_universe, I guess, that's an established manga they originate from, but that doesn't help much for the others.

So I ask again: What do you suggest be done to identify species like this? Help us out here.

proceleon said:
It has literally been defined several times through the course of this conversation with examples: rexouium, protogen, synth_(vader-san), "a fictional creature that doesn't originate from any media franchise." You KNOW the types of species being referred to here.

The definition has been changing. "species which originate from the fandom", "fan species", "a fictional creature that doesn't originate from any media franchise", "independent species", "species were made independently of any media IP". These are all very different things, and three examples don't clarify how to apply such a tag across all possible species.

Different people will have their own ideas of what counts, and trying to define a line ends up pointlessly arbitrary. Would SCPs count as a "media franchise" or "media IP"? Would it matter if a fakemon was created by a furry to count? How do hybrids fit in? Alterations to existing (real or fictional) species? This very thread has people thinking sergals would obviously apply, when they would actually be excluded by most if not all proposed definitions (I don't know if Mick Ono and Kiki-Uma call themselves furries or not, or consider themselves part of the fandom, and I wouldn't be surprised if many younger furries don't know much or anything about where they came from, which raises the question of why that should matter when their use in the fandom is so far divorced from their source media).

watsit said:
The definition has been changing. "species which originate from the fandom", "fan species", "a fictional creature that doesn't originate from any media franchise", "independent species", "species were made independently of any media IP". These are all very different things, and three examples don't clarify how to apply such a tag across all possible species.

A lot of what you're talking about boils down to semantics and a more fitting term can always be applied later. We're looking to group them generally to get the ball rolling.

proceleon said:
A lot of what you're talking about boils down to semantics and a more fitting term can always be applied later. We're looking to group them generally to get the ball rolling.

group what, though? we can't create groups without people agreeing on where the lines should be drawn. is it just "any fictional species which otherwise has no copyright tag attached" or is it more specific than that? because the former does not seem like a coherent enough set of attributes to warrant a tag.

dba_afish said:
group what, though? we can't create groups without people agreeing on where the lines should be drawn. is it just "any fictional species which otherwise has no copyright tag attached" or is it more specific than that? because the former does not seem like a coherent enough set of attributes to warrant a tag.

Could always treat it like NATO lmao
Well established and stable fan species can be the founding members and any further species would have to meet preset guidelines or standards before they can be included
Or at least earn a majority vote from the users here

Kind of sounds like open/closed_species tags might be what you're looking for. I doubt they'd be approved, but they have more-or-less coherent definitions while covering most of what you're referring to.

The only 2 I know of, and would also be easy founding members in this coalition, are Sergals and Protogens
I don't familiarize myself with these creatures

anicebee said:
Kind of sounds like open/closed_species tags might be what you're looking for. I doubt they'd be approved, but they have more-or-less coherent definitions while covering most of what you're referring to.

i believe both os those tags are currently invalidated, but op could always do a bur to revalidate them as an interest check

manitka said:
i believe both os those tags are currently invalidated, but op could always do a bur to revalidate them as an interest check

open_species isn't invalidated yet, but closed_species is.