Danbooru

Interracial is a mess

Posted under Tags

The tag interracial gets stuck on any image involving sex between people with noticeably different skin tones. This is a problem because East Asian populations have a considerable degree of variance in skin tone. Moreover, East Asian cultures ascribe a certain meaning to skin tone that Western cultures typically do not: pale skin is associated with high class, since it is historically correlated with being indoors and out of the sun. Skin tone differences are thus often exaggerated in certain kinds of hentai even when both partners are supposed to be native, ethnic Japanese.

This is confusion is understandable, as ambiguities in art styles can even make it impossible to tell what the artist intended from the image alone. Per the "tag what you see" rule, I'd suggest replacing the interracial tag with something like skin color difference, which is impossible to get wrong. I hesitate to request an alias because of the possibility of that tag being applied to a few images with (e.g.) an Asian and a European whose skin tones happen to be the same. After making the change, we could possible reintroduce the interracial tag with stricter guidelines for its use, but given the current epidemic of wikiphobia I'm not sure that would be a good idea.

ljhkhjkghjybtvhyt said:

You are overthinking this... I also don't fancy renaming commonly known terms to unnatural idioms because of a slight margin for ambiguity.

The margin for ambiguity is not slight. Whether a couple is interracial is very often a matter of canontagging. In the case where one or more of the partners is a one-off original character or a generic faceless male, there isn't even a canon to tag.

The tag is also often misused even in places where it's unambiguous. A pale-skinned Japanese girl paired with an anonymous olive-skinned faceless male should generally not be tagged interracial because it in all likelihood the man is supposed to be Japanese as well, but the tag gets used that way all the time. Skin color difference would be preferable because while people very evidently cannot be trusted to use interracial correctly, a purely objective statement about the character's physical appearance is foolproof to tag.

This change is about as likely to happen as me finding 100$ under my bed. "Skin color difference" is something nobody is going to think of when they are searching for something like that, and at best you just end up with people ignoring it anyway. If people are misusing the tag, the tag just needs to be given more scrutiny, not making a brand new tag.

1