Danbooru

Combining Personification and Humanization

Posted under Tags

BUR #8486 has been rejected.

create alias humanization -> personification

Currently, the whole of Animal Crossing, a series where virtually every character is an anthropomorphic animal, has flat out zero images under Humanization and several hundred under Personification. This is the exact opposite of the tags' definitions. Although it would be easy to swap them over, this is only one such example of misuse of both tags.

Given the fact that nobody reads wikis, I think it would be better to alias it rather than policing every upload and copyright. Especially when you consider the distinct possibility of weird fringe cases from copyrights like Pokémon and Digimon.

I don't think the tag was necessarily intended to be mutually exclusive from personification, but it was at least intended to cover characters that were already very near human and turning them outright human. For example animal girls/boys (i.e. human with animal ears and tail), elves/other pointy eared races, dolls (like the Rozen Maiden girls), androids, etc. Such transformations could be extremely minor, such as simply removing a character's pointy ears or removing a few lines on the skin of an android, so I can't say all cases of humanization inherently were personification, at least as I had understood it (which doesn't have to be correct).

Personification as a tag is rather broad on the type of transformation involved, covering anything from a cat turning into a cat on their hindlegs legs wearing human cloths all the way to a spaceship turning into a full fledged human wearing sci-fi gear on. Humanization on the other-hand was intended to be a specific transformation where you take a character that was already human-ish and strip them of anything that made them non-human, and thus becoming full human. (Going by that kind of definition for humanization, you could alternatively look at it that the character being transformed had to be human enough to be viewed as essentially a human with some additional traits.)

The issue Veradux brings up is really how the site has changed and grown, especially the increase in ESL users and perhaps also simply newcomers who may be more inclined to judge tags off of their name alone. That's not something that can be easily resolved for very niche and specific concepts, outside of trying to keep them into consideration when naming things. In this case the tag being named humanization is likely misleading as it doesn't cover all cases of "becoming human" or it's easily being misinterpreted as to mean "becoming human-like." In this case the current humanization tag would be more accurately named something like humanoid-to-human_transformation.

The way I understand it, neither tag is a subset of the other. humanization is for beings that were already persons (i.e. talking and generally behaving like people), but non-human, including (for example) androids like Aegis and furries like Fox McCloud. personification is for beings and objects that do not qualify as people in their original form, like the Falcon 9 rocket (post #4507151) or your average koala (post #4864198).

Retsuko drawn as a human instead of an anthropomorphic red panda (post #4077809) is a humanization, but not a personification. A moth drawn as a humanoid robot (post #4864168) is a personification, but not a humanization. Some cat from a meme picture drawn as a non-furry catgirl (post #4984435) might be both, depending on how narrow we want our definition of "human" to be. I'd support editing the wiki pages to remove the implication that the two tags are mutually exclusive.

I have also noticed the regrettable mistagging of humanizations as personifications, but I don't think that is reason enough to eliminate the distinction.

Edit: Basically, I agree with NWF Renim. However, "humanoid-to-human_transformation" is a severely inelegant tag name. I'd rather stick with the tags as currently named and do the occasional correction.

Updated

Hillside_Moose said:

I don't really get humanization, but trying to band-aid it with an implication to personification doesn't fix the mistagging issue either.

Nor did I, hence why I started with an alias. But when overwhelming negative votes popped up in a matter of minutes I offered an alternative based on feedback.

But seems that pure gardening is the solution chosen.

1