litphoria

Characters that are a member of vulpes.

I am trying to keep some sense of order to it. The main thing I am using to distinguish what gets its own category is:

• Would people have a preference for this to the exclusion of everything else? (such as, do people generally feel different about foxes compared to dogs as a whole? Or would they always end up on the same side of the preference list?)
• Would people want to search for this to the exclusion of everything else? (such as, when people search for dragons, do they want lizards as a whole, and vice versa? It seems very likely that although humans are primates there's no value in having them in there because people searching for primates are likely after the furry stuff and people searching for humans don't likely want the monkeys)

This inherently leaves the categorization somewhat mixed, with it being more specific where the community finds more use in it being more specific, and more general where it does not. But I do not feel going either way (only allowing genus or orders, or only allowing species) will result in a list that is entirely meaningful to use. Being too specific just cripples the entire point of having the category --- you can no longer use it to set a preference or find profiles similar to this without specifying a lot, and being too broad renders it useless in a different way.

This is also why I rejected this, because I personally do not see enough in the furry community that someone would say they like a house dog but would never ever touch a fox or vice versa. But, I'm interested to see where other people see these lines at.

Too many categories starts to look pretty ridiculous honestly, and creates a lot of unnecessary fluff to sort through. Then again I may be biased as I never play with or as furry characters, so to me it's just a matter of choosing "human" and specifying that I am only interested in other humans or near-humans. Having monkeys covered under that would be all kinds of frustrating. Is it really that important to distinguish "foxes" from "canines"? To me, they're basically the same thing.

I think you are getting a bit too caught up on the 'dog' part of it. The 'dog' label is just to make searching easier, it can just as easily be 'canine', as it represents all canines. Whatever people search more for (figures I do not have because people are not searching) will be the category's label. This is the same with others, like 'cat' instead of 'feline', 'bat' instead 'chiroptera' (imagine searching for that one).

There is ultimately going to be a line that has to be drawn for any category for species. Someone could very well make a case that "wolf" should be separate from "dog" for much the same reasons; wolves are generally different character archetypes than your common house dog, particularly werewolves, and people forced to choose "dog" would feel as if the system was pigeon-holing them. Or maybe coyotes. Or whatever race superman is.

That is not what I am saying is incorrect. I agree with you there. I understand that. I don't want people to feel like they have to choose a category that doesn't represent them... but at the end of the day, a fox is a canine, and canines are represented by 'dog' for searching. I am saying, for the purposes of categorization and searching, foxes are better suited to canines. As I outlined earlier, you could not say the same for humans to primates, because a very large majority of people looking for primates wouldn't want humans, and people who want humans wouldn't want other primates. How many people are going to honestly say "I want something that looks exactly like a dog, with a canine dick, but it absolutely cannot be a fox?"

That is ultimately the deciding factor here; not that it may misrepresent your character's archetype, not that it feels incorrect. Is it more useful to everyone else but you that it be separate? Is it more useful for everyone else to be able to specify that yes canines but no foxes? Is it more useful to search only for canines without foxes, or for foxes without other canines? This includes human characters as well. It includes everyone; there is no bias here. There is only what is useful to the community, not specifically furry foxes.

Well, if it was canine it leads to another problem where suddenly only 'canine' is using a more scientific/latin label versus all of them. Would it just be canine and feline? What about the other ones that furries don't use to death? What about the ones that have really awkward-to-type and search-for names? Will people really type "Ursidae" for bear? "Avialae" for bird? "Murinae" for rat? Or is it just the hazily-defined "no this scientific/latin term is totally recognized, but not this one"? That sounds even more arbitrary.

But if you feel canine would a better option, I'd suggest you open up a new suggestion for renaming it so that conversation can be had in an appropriate place.

(also, the entire thing is designed to be self-correcting. You right now are self-correcting it!)

This bugged me quite a bit too. This character is in no way a rat, and I dislike how off that is. I don't know if this would work, but I was thinking it might be nice to be "all inclusive" - use the scientific names primarily, but then allow searches for words like "dog" "wolf" "fox" to point to the scientific name in some way.

Hmm. Tyne, the ability to have search aliases might be useful, though would have to be presented clearly and obviously to not be confusing.

Michael Cern: You lost me somewhere in that rant. I was never arguing for an umbrella term of "dog." I was arguing for "canine," which doesn't seem like much of a stretch. I understand everyone's desire to be a special snowflake and get a box to check for their "rainbow gem water dragon" species, but there's a point where you've gotta draw the line. If you add fox you also have to add wolf, coyote, jackal, dingo, etc. Then you may also have to differentiate between Arctic fox, North American red fox, Fennec fox, etc. God forbid we have to list off every domesticated dog breed, too. When you start splitting hairs it seems manageable at first, but if you expand this to all possible subtypes of all possible animals on the planet, it get ridiculous.

But back to the topic at hand... What if there were just bare basic selections (canine, feline, human, etc) and a field to type in the specific subtype if desired, rather than a list to choose from?

The way I intended categories to work were for them to be broad strokes with which you fill in the finer details with the value. But, much like primate to human, too broad a categorization leads to unhelpful categories that no one feels like truly represents them and they don't want to use it, defeating the point of having them in the first place.

We've yet to find where the balance between broadness and specialization lies. I personally feel the line is still not permissive of fox, but evidently everyone else is saying that they feel otherwise, that foxes are evidently not even remotely similar to canines and shouldn't be grouped with them.

I think it's an issue of the fact that while preference towards a particular specific species is generally broader and based more on physicality (if you like the way foxes look, you probably like the way wolves look, etc), character creation favors treating species as a personality archetype as often as it is treated as a physical descriptor. In that sense, a fox is very different than a wolf, because wolves are known for being protective, pack-oriented creatures, while foxes are famous for being solitary tricksters. Those are two very different personality types, and authors of one likely wouldn't want their characters lumped in with the other.

It should totally be pointed out Avent that even you keep saying "canine" instead of "dog" where canine is not a category. That's what the problem is; nobody calls foxes dogs and will probably never search for foxes as dogs.

It is called canine now, though, since apparently that was confusing people.

Oh, I'm late to the party then...

It's a very recent change. But it still changes the game of this suggestion a bit, I think.

Now foxes are most definitely a kind of canine and are represented in the system as canine. The only difference is if they have their own category (becoming distinctly separate from canine) or stay as they are. And unfortunately all of the arguments I've heard in favor of splitting it could also be used for just about any other specific species you want. We need some way to ensure that if we do split this into fox we keep only the important distinctions made; we don't want to just add a different category for every species there is, or we'd end up with a huge confusing mess really quickly.

Personally, I'm comfortable with the way it is now. In the search results, an image is displayed for each character, and this can help show their specific species. So you can search for canines, and see the foxes very quickly.

Oh, to add - I'm also finding that almost all furry profiles name their species in the descriptive blurb which also appears in search results, as it is. Try a search "find anthro profiles" or "find furry profiles".