litphoria

I am not sure I wholly agree. I mean the micro term in DND is purely a size thing. it is unrelated to fetish materiel. And while macro came from a fetish root, I think it can reasonably be used outside of that. The problem with terms like tiny and giant is that people will start splitting hairs about how tiny is tiny, how giant is giant, etc.. .while micro/microscopic (an exaggeration but it gets the point across) and macro.macroscopic both have pretty well established size categories

I agree they have well established sizes, but they have those within what is effectively hardcore or softcore porn. They are porn terms, almost entirely used in situations where someone is getting off over how big/tiny someone is. We shouldn't be using porn terminology here if we're serious about our PG support.

Miicro is an official size category on D&D and has an established size.

tl:dr of chat convo. Many searches, in many formats, came up with a single questionable image.

The term micro is used to indicate pixil figs, chibi drawings, and tiny plastic figures that are unrelated to D&D per a google search.

The term macro is used in reference to economics, large things in science, fonts, 'macros' as a computer term.

Neither one is inherently sexual. They do not invoke sexual thoughts/imagery. They are not used only in fetish works. They are fine words as they are.

I had more written, but my computer crashed and it was not saved for some reason.

Sorry to hear your PC crashed. If there's more we can get to that.

So, here's how it is for me:

I totally agree there's nothing about micro or macro that's inherently sexual. They're totally valid prefixes for lots of words, like microscope, macroeconomics, and so on.

However, when it comes to character size, it is only really used in sexualised contexts where the individual's size is the subject of a fetish:

• Micro isn't commonly used to refer to action figure sized people. Tinkerbell isn't described as micro in kid's books, she's described as tiny enough to stand on your thumb. She's micro when we're doing sexualised size play.
• Macro likewise doesn't get used to refer to giant people.

Now, you're referring to Google and D&D. I'll respond to those.

• Google avoids showing porn. Look up "facial" with the filter off and you'll probably see women getting beauty treatments. You found chibi figures for micro - fair, but not, I'll note, action figure sized people. You found fonts for macro, but not, I'll also note, giant people (except for that one featuring a prominently features a bulging crotch). Google is not going to be our arbiter on how these things get used. Go look at PG books and you won't see much mention of it. Go look at a place that exists for artistic and writing smut, and you'll find them used as the key words for size play-oriented smut.
• D&D, and other similarly meticulous games like GURPS, have to pull out a thesaurus and chop and change arbitrary words to find right-sounding words to fill out their size charts and other similarly detailed lists. I'm not taking its usage of "micro" as an indicator that anyone uses it that way outside a particular classification inside D&D.

So my issue is: we're using terms that are well-defined and used this way for character sizes in smut sources. We're relying on people being familiar with smut or looking up a smut glossary (which is the only place you'll find a definition of macro/micro for character sizes that matches how we use them), or teaching them what they mean in smut and inducting them into smut. If we want to present ourselves as a site that's amenable to maintaining a barrier between PG-rated content and smutty content, we should be keeping smut terminology outside of the PG-rated side of that barrier. Which means we shouldn't use micro/macro as our terms for these character sizes.

Maybe tiny/miniscule and giant aren't the best words and we can do better. I'm open to suggestions. But micro/macro are words we absolutely shouldn't be using here. It's not appropriate.

There seems also to be a logical problem. "Characters who are short for their species or gender". But how big is an average feline, like a cat, a tiger, a neko? A four inches tall pixie is "average" while a human of the same size is "micro". Since there are no fantasy-species , the only way to search for pixies is probably "body height".

I've since had it brought to my attention that Neopets as a service refers to certain pets as micro/macro pets (micropets if I remember right are pets for your pets, maybe macropets are pets for whom your pets are pets?) so this may not actually be a big deal?

Des, that does sound like a bit of a problem for tiny pixies. We should look at that in another feedback where it can get some breathing space separate for this one. Want to post one about it?

separate from this one*

No. Sorry if I was out of topic. :)

Thanks Loki, seems you well and truly get where I'm coming from on this one and you're articulating it better than I am.

Now that I look it up for verification, the neopets wikia turns up nothing for micropet or macropet.

So after a bit of thought--and a look at a thesaurus--I think I have two names that'll satisfy everyone. Replace micro with miniature. Replace macro with giant. Change the description to "Characters who are unrealistically or impossibly short/tall relative to the human species."

That'll get rid of the weird cases where you can be a tall frog that fits in someone's hand and a short dragon that's "only" 30 tons.

Those both sound fine and great, Griz. I'll update the suggestion with those.

I'd vote for tiny and huge but giant also sounds good. Miniature sounds very small for me, could a hobbit be described as miniature?

@Griz: Problem is not so much the short dragon but the average dragon since most dragons, giants and dwarves are of average size for their spezies. Your idea sounds good. Tall and short for human size chars and tiny/giant for small and big species or micro/macro play. I had no idea myself how it could work but this makes sense.

I don't think "unrealistic or impossible" is a good expression since unrealistic means almost the same as impossible. I'd suggest something simple like: "Chars who are smaller than a human." and "Chars who are small for a human".

When we're talking tiny pixies and enormous behemoths, unrealistically huge compared to humans is probably workable. Short/tall is not so unrealistic/impossible.

We could just add "Miniature" and "giant" Rather than remove Macro/Micro and perhaps add 'scopic' to them so it wouldn't seem fetishized? For all I know there might be characters that are actually microscopic or macroscopic, and honestly I don't think anything with 'scopic' at the end would at all be seen as a fetish or change the PG rating.

Microscopic and macroscopic don't actually mean much helpful here: they mean "small enough they can't be seen with the naked eye", and "can be seen with the naked eye." (Well, some people might appreciate "microscopic", but that's a pretty different deal from "micro".)

Another possibility would be to use "small" instead of "micro" and "large" instead of "macro".

As a note, because I do feel this relates. The words micro and macro have definitions of their own that are wholly nonsexual. Just because the words are not commonly used elsewhere does not make them strictly sexual. They are recognized on a variety of role playing sites as defining size. Those definitions are:

mi·cro
adjective
1.
extremely small.
"a micro dining area

and

mac·ro
adjective
1.
large-scale; overall.
"the analysis of social events at the macro level"

They are, when used in reference to characters, somewhat hyperbolic. That is wonderful, though. I do feel the definitions should be reworked in comparison to human sizes. That said, there is nothing inherently wrong with the current words, and no reason to get rid of a familiar standard for may players.

The words micro and macro have definitions of their own that are wholly nonsexual.

I don't think anyone contests that.

That said, there is nothing inherently wrong with the current words, and no reason to get rid of a familiar standard for may players.

Ok, I get you feel that way.

Loki, we are not looking for the term play though. It was stated pretty clearly that what we are looking for is how these words relate to character size so attempt the same searches using macro and micro character and you will get even less sexual content and a minimum of relevant content.

Also as per

'That means I can't create a Tinkerbell or an Iron Giant profile right now which is PG rated, without inherently fetishizing their size. That's a big mismatch.

The core of the issue is about whether the words are inherently fetish terms or not.

Hm, there might be a way around this. Like have Microscopic, Tiny, and Giant as size types. the word "microscopic" doesn't at all sound like a fetish term and more scientific which should help with making things PG. I say we keep a "micro" category because there are characters that are extremely tiny that would require a microscope

Also as per

'That means I can't create a Tinkerbell or an Iron Giant profile right now which is PG rated, without inherently fetishizing their size. That's a big mismatch.

The core of the issue is about whether the words are inherently fetish terms or not.

No it is not. Context is important here. If you think saying "micro and macro have proper non-fetish definitions" has any relevance here then you are somehow completely missing or ignoring everything here about context.

But, look: we spoke in circles about this for two hours in PM after this feedback came up. It was an enormous waste of time for both of us. Let's not repeat that again here. Yasu: you've misunderstood, you're fighting against things nobody's saying, you're just arguing against a massive straw man and it's disruptive at best right now.

Miicro is an official size category on D&D and has an established size.

By the way I searched with google for "micro" as a D&D size category but I couldn't find it, it's not in the size table.

@Alex: That would only work with adding more buttons, if there is only one size below "short", micropscopic is too special.

Before I joined F-List I didn't know about micro/macro play. If I would read something about character size "micro" on a "normal" roleplay site I wouldn't think anything special about it. On a site which offers sexual/fetish RP I will think it refers to micro/macro-play. The expression "Character size: micro" is safe for all ages. This is my opinion, we could discuss, if this is how the average player sees it. This is not very productive, though, from my point of view this discussion is to find a better alternative and we got good ideas already. I see two problems still: "miniature" maybe seems to refer to very little chars and the sentence: "Characters who are unrealistically or impossibly short/tall relative to the human species." The combination "unrealistic relative to" makes no sense I think.

@Loki: Since there is no reference to an official D&D rule book (like usually in a wiki article) I assume it's no official D&D rule.