Posted under Tag Alias and Implication Suggestions
The bulk update request #11658 is pending approval.
remove implication wyvern (7987) -> western_dragon (50603)
Reason: wyverns are dragons, it is also a unique type of dragon in it own right, wyverns may have some qualities of western dragons, but they are no more western then they are eastern. They should imply to dragon directly not to western_dragon.
+1, "Western dragon" has essentially become synonymous with "at least two wings and at least four legs", the same way "eastern dragons" are synonymous with "noodle dragon with four legs" on this site. It was also an implication made with no discussion.
Updated
Wyverns are from European/western mythology, aren't they? They're as much western as any other western-derived dragon types.
watsit said:
Wyverns are from European/western mythology, aren't they? They're as much western as any other western-derived dragon types.
Wyrm_(dragon) implicates to dragon and european_myrhology rather then western dragon...
ryu_deacon said:
The bulk update request #11658 is pending approval.remove implication wyvern (7987) -> western_dragon (50603)
Reason: wyverns are dragons, it is also a unique type of dragon in it own right, wyverns may have some qualities of western dragons, but they are no more western then they are eastern. They should imply to dragon directly not to western_dragon.
The uniqueness of the wyvern was apparently born in the United Kingdom area
thegreatwolfgang said:
https://e621.net/forum_topics/31466?page=1#forum_post_321029
wiki definitions are not always taken literal or we would not be treating humanoid and anthro as completely different things even through they stand for the same thing on wikipedia and every dictionary. Also under the historical precedent/derivative argument dragon itself would have to imply to Wyrm or Serpent(~snake) as that is the ancient form that the modern stereotypical dragon is based on.
Il add also given the thread, hydra which is a type of dragon of European myth was briefly implicated to western_dragon but was later de-implicated in the same thread...
ryu_deacon said:
The bulk update request #11658 is pending approval.remove implication wyvern (7987) -> western_dragon (50603)
Reason: wyverns are dragons, it is also a unique type of dragon in it own right, wyverns may have some qualities of western dragons, but they are no more western then they are eastern. They should imply to dragon directly not to western_dragon.
Disagree, this would decouple dragons like Smaug (as depicted in the Hobbit films) or the dragons from GOT from the 'western dragon' tags. There are a number of properties where the dragons are portrayed with two legs and two wings (thus qualifying as a wyvern for the purposes of tagging on e6) but otherwise conform entirely to the typical portrayal of a western dragon.
Alias wyvern to western_dragon ngl.
As far as I've ever been able to tell 'wyvern' is either a term a piece of media will use because 'dragon' is too mundane or a classification used by anal nerds. It's a western dragon, usually (but not always) with two legs.
doesnotexist said:
Disagree, this would decouple dragons like Smaug (as depicted in the Hobbit films) or the dragons from GOT from the 'western dragon' tags. There are a number of properties where the dragons are portrayed with two legs and two wings (thus qualifying as a wyvern for the purposes of tagging on e6) but otherwise conform entirely to the typical portrayal of a western dragon.
similarities do not justify the implication to western dragon rather then dragon directly, for all the similarities, nether wyrm, kirin nor hydra implicate to western dragon or eastern dragon.
Wyvern is the sole outlier that implicates to another dragon type, every single other type ether implicates to dragon directly or has no implication at all. I have not seen a reason to keep this singular outlier.
Case in point species from fictional groups such as pokemon or digimon resembling other species do not get implications even thru they might resemble the thing in every way(e.g. Charizard being basically a western dragon)
or in the case of real life animals such as the Tuatara being almost indistinguishable from a lizard yet not a lizard, instead its properly implicated to the parent tag that is reptile rather the one of the sub groups such as lizard and snake.
regsmutt said:
Alias wyvern to western_dragon ngl.
As far as I've ever been able to tell 'wyvern' is either a term a piece of media will use because 'dragon' is too mundane or a classification used by anal nerds. It's a western dragon, usually (but not always) with two legs.
From what I've seen, wyvern has been pretty well consistently applied to four-limbed dragons (two legs, two wings), as opposed to six-limbed dragons (four legs, two_wings).
regsmutt said:
Alias wyvern to western_dragon ngl.
As far as I've ever been able to tell 'wyvern' is either a term a piece of media will use because 'dragon' is too mundane or a classification used by anal nerds. It's a western dragon, usually (but not always) with two legs.
So wyrm, amphithere, lindwurm, and leviathan should all be aliased away too, because it's a classification used by anal nerds or terms that are used in place of the mundane "dragon"?
[big aimless ramble coming on]
Wyrm is a word used to describe dragons in general in several pieces of media, "leviathan" is a word used to describe big sea monsters in general not just dragons, amphitheres are classically winged snakes but the term is used to apply to any sort of dragon with wings but no legs... What I'm getting at is just because media misuses the terms doesn't mean they don't mean anything here. There is a pretty important distinction between wyverns and four-legged western dragons because maybe someone will want to look for wyverns specifically.
The terms e621 uses are the way they are because these different dragon body types exist and people like and dislike different dragon shapes. It'd be like aliasing unicorn and pegasus to horse because functionally they are just horses with a horn or some wings.
I think overall "western dragon" and "eastern dragon" are poorly named terms for these dragon types which is what causes the confusion - Western dragons are European, but so are lindwurms, wyrms, amphitheres and wyverns, meaning all four should imply western_dragon if we're getting that specific with it. "Western dragons" as we know them [four legs, two wings], don't have their own tag, because they're considered to be the "default dragon shape" on this website. Maybe we're thinking about this all wrong and should make more dragons implicate their place of origin [west or east], but then we get into weird stuff that doesn't really implicate anything from either part of the eastern hemisphere, and even stuff from the americas.
Nāga from Indonesia is typically a wyrm [European] with multiple heads or a crown-like horn, but Indonesia is in southeast Asia.
Ouroboros is a thing [most likely] originally from Egypt and is depicted as anything from a snake, [Real Animal] to noodle dragon, [East Asian] to lindwyrm/wyvern, [European]
We have Tiamat from Mesopotamia, which here is depicted as a western dragon/griffon-like creature with feathery wings
Quetzalcoatl and Boitatá are from the western hemisphere [Mesoamerica and Brazil respectively], and typically resemble an amphithere or wyrm which are from the eastern hemisphere [Europe].
So in the end maybe all dragon classifications as they currently are, are meaningless on this site because wyverns and wyrms and such came from specific parts of the world and the more specific dragons of mythology have names aside from "wyvern" and "wyrm" to call their guys. Peluda, Nāga, Ouroboros, Leviathan, Boitatá, Quetzalcoatl, etc are not classified by their body shape but by what they do and how they are connected to their mythos, meaning this site applying our basic dragon body types to these mythological dragons would likely misidentify them as European or Asian based solely on the shape they are drawn as.
My final verdict:
Maybe the right thing to do is to abolish western_dragon and eastern_dragon entirely and just implicate all dragon body types directly to dragon, or maybe the right thing to do is nothing at all. Who knows. I don't know where I was going with this aside from the fact that dragon classification is a mess.
From what I remember from a Time-Life book on dragons and seems to be corroborated somewhat by Wikipedia*, the four-legged dragons with wings are heraldic dragons, due to often being used in heraldry. Would it be of any use to tag the bog-standard six-limbed dragons as heraldic_dragon?
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* From Dragon (Wikipedia):
Dragons are prominent in medieval heraldry... Originally, heraldic dragons could have any number of legs, but, by the late Middle Ages, due to the widespread proliferation of bestiaries, heraldry began to distinguish between a "dragon" (which could only have exactly four legs) and a "wyvern" (which could only have exactly two).
