Danbooru

New name for the IPS cells tag, and creating a tag for the meme

Posted under Tags

BUR #26753 has been rejected.

mass update ips_cells -favgroup:32618 -> same-sex_reproduction -ips_cells
mass update favgroup:32618 -> ips_cells_(meme)
deprecate ips_cells

NOTE: This post was previously worded significantly differently as I was pretending to be two separate people. You can see the original wording for reference in the expandable in the end of this forum post for clarity's sake. Below is a reworked version meant to be less embarrassing.

I don't think "IPS cells" is the best name for images of children of same-sex couples. That Saki reference is extremely obscure in the current day - I have personally never heard of that scene or that manga before coming to Danbooru and hearing of that tag, and yet gay/lesbian couples' fanchildren are everywhere to be found.

Looking back to previous topic #16176, science babies was proposed as an alternative, but I personally believe it's yet another obscure and uncommon term best left as an alias - I've never seen it before Danbooru either, moreover, it's rather inaccurate if taken literally - those fanchildren are often depicted quite a bit older, and the actual method of reproduction doesn't necessarily follow scifi conventions either: anal pregnancy in yaoi, female fertilization in yuri, omegaverse rules, turning one character into a futanari or cuntboy, magic - just to name a few methods. And sometimes it's irrelevant to the story and all we get to see are the children without diving into whatever biological marvel occured to bring them to this world.
"Same-sex reproduction" as a tag name should be a decent alternative as it neither implicates the method or the offspring's age; moreover it's descriptive and doesn't rely on obscure references.

While we're at it - should this tag imply if they mated? ITM is specifically for fanchildren, and same-sex reproduction tends to be limited to the realm of fanworks, but there's no hard rule to prevent original works from featuring that aspect, and in my opinion the current IPS cells wiki is a bit unclear on how to handle it.

Additionally, there are some odd cases, for instance post #140341 with neither the scene reference or visible offspring, but just a lesbian pregnancy. I'm not sure what to do about them, though they'd still be a result of same-sex mating.

Show

i don't think "ips cells" is the best name for images of children of homosexual couples... i've never heard of that scene from that manga before, but i've seen tons and tons of cute artworks of gay (and lesbian) couples with their young xD

i saw "science babies" was previously suggested in topic #16176, but i don't think it's a good name either... i've never seen it either, and a lot of the time there's nothing "scientific" about those children, sometimes it's magic, sometimes it's omegaverse rules, sometimes one partner has different bits down there than one'd expect, sometimes it's something silly like anal pregnancy or female fertilization, and sometimes the story just doesn't bother telling us xD and sometimes they're quite much older than babies, too!

this name should be rather "origin-neutral" and "age-neutral", meaning it should be quite perfect for this task!

also, should this tag imply if they mated? those couples are usually unfortunately going to be non-canon, but i can't see why an established series wouldn't do it, either...

EDIT: there are some odd cases like post #140341, where there's no reference to the scene or offspring in sight, just homosexual pregnancy... but they shouldn't be a problem, right? that'd still be a result of same-sex reproduction...

Updated

Splitting the scene reference and content actually relating to children of same-sex couples is a good concept, but given the aforementioned "odd cases", I have some qualms. Namely, perhaps a further split could be in place to separate couples waiting to be parents and actual (fan)children designs.

In general, our breeding and family-making tags are a little lacking (and that issue would not be all that limited to same sex pairings), I would say. In my opinion there are four main "stages" relating to this kind of content:

While all four present a biological impossibility assuming cisgender perisex same-sex parents and current level of technology, they are often extremely different in terms of what a person would want to search for. Stage 2 will typically be rated E, stage 1 will usually be S+, and stage 4 might as well be G. The first three categories will just involve the parents, while for the fourth you can see the artist's creativity or lack thereof shine through with their fan-child design.

Ergo, my proposal would be to make the following changes to our tagging of the four phases:

  • Wanting to have a family: expanding the impregnation request tag (starting with creating a proper wiki and renaming it, to match with requesting internal cumshot as per topic #24953) for more extreme breeding talk; potentially creating a new one for more SFW instances (there's a difference between someone saying "I want to start a family with you, we should name our first daughter..." versus "Fill me with your seed! Put your babies inside me! Breed me!" or "Plap plap plap get pregnant").
  • Procreating: I'd say we're in a decent enough situation for het and yuri, but yaoi needs a cleaning between male pregnancy and male impregnation if we are to keep the second one; our mpreg tag currently holds instances like post #7314433 and our mpregnation tag holds posts only talking about wanting to get pregnant.
  • Pregnancy: Creating a tag like same-sex pregnancy or even further split between yuri and yaoi might be worthwhile. Some consideration for futanari/cuntboy characters as well, if we want to be pedantic.
  • Children: it kind of depends if we consider the stage split to be worthwhile. If we don't, then probably the BUR above is enough, no further action is needed. If we do, however, I think we'd need a different name - same-sex reproduction sounds like it could encompass all stages from 2 to 4, and not just the fourth.

䨻龘 said:

  • Wanting to have a family: expanding the impregnation request tag (starting with creating a proper wiki and renaming it, to match with requesting internal cumshot as per topic #24953) for more extreme breeding talk; potentially creating a new one for more SFW instances (there's a difference between someone saying "I want to start a family with you, we should name our first daughter..." versus "Fill me with your seed! Put your babies inside me! Breed me!" or "Plap plap plap get pregnant").

Linking this post in the requesting internal cumshot thread as I think the name is an issue. forum #252397

Not sure on a better one, but it sounds a lot like our meta tags. Family_Planning would be the phrase I associate with it, but that sounds very broad.

Alright, now that the farce is over and I can stop roleplaying as two separate people:

While I went out of my way to bring up my point as cringily as possible as "GAYte", and "Gate" represents my opinions more closely, I mostly spoke from my opinions as "GAYte" too.

That being said, another semi-related thing came up in the meanwhile, that I brought up in forum #284391: namely fanmade geneaologies that consist entirely of pre-existing characters, rather than fan-children. Aforementioned post #7674138 is an example, asset #21764046 would be another. I think it's also relevant to the IPS Cells/If They Mated topic.

I was asked in discord to explain my downvote so I'll say it again here:

I agree that ips_cells is outdated and was never an ideal name for this tag, but I'd prefer science_babies as an alternative. That's the term that's been used for this concept on various sites for years and that's the name I've always known it by.

Also, I was hesitant about all the different scenarios and "phases" Shining brought up since a lot of those are not at all the same thing as the original concept of this tag. Either all that anal_pregnancy or whatever could be easily mistagged as same-sex reproduction (since that term sounds like it includes sex and impregnation), or maybe are intended to actually fall under the new tag. The second post she made left me uncertain about was actually intended since she brought up that same concern. The current ips_cells tag is intended to cover only the fourth, and sometimes the third "phase". It's about children, not reproduction.

That said, science_babies has it's own problems, as it's not 100% accurate and as NNT pointed out could potentially be mistagged for fetuses in vats. My preference is still for that though.

nonamethanks said:

The more I think about same-sex reproduction and the less I like it. My primary concerns are futanari/cuntboy, and the fact that we're creating this tag for posts that primarily depict babies or toddlers, so we should be very careful about the naming. Do we really want same-sex reproduction in the tag list for those posts?

True, it's also a name I actually ain't a fan of. Same-sex child sounds stupid and also negates that sensitivity regarding child tagging, same-sex couple's child is clunky.

CoreMack said:

I was asked in discord to explain my downvote so I'll say it again here:

I agree that ips_cells is outdated and was never an ideal name for this tag, but I'd prefer science_babies as an alternative. That's the term that's been used for this concept on various sites for years and that's the name I've always known it by.

Also, I was hesitant about all the different scenarios and "phases" Shining brought up since a lot of those are not at all the same thing as the original concept of this tag. Either all that anal_pregnancy or whatever could be easily mistagged as same-sex reproduction (since that term sounds like it includes sex and impregnation), or maybe are intended to actually fall under the new tag. The second post she made left me uncertain about was actually intended since she brought up that same concern. The current ips_cells tag is intended to cover only the fourth, and sometimes the third "phase". It's about children, not reproduction.

That said, science_babies has it's own problems, as it's not 100% accurate and as NNT pointed out could potentially be mistagged for fetuses in vats. My preference is still for that though.

As outlined in the Discord, for someone who has never heard of the term before (like me), a likelier interpretation would be some kind of in-vitro procedure or fetuses/babies in vats rather than offspring of same-sex couples. I don't think this term is that popular anymore, I am a fan of both yuri and BL, mostly focusing on fanworks for non-romantic series, rather than series that focus on romance from the get-go, yet I haven't encountered it before checking that old thread on Danbooru at all. I've seen jokes about using some kind of scifi-esque methods for impregnation ("I will defy biology and get you pregnant" is currently a decently popular joke in western BL circles; post #7730262 is a different kind of joke but still in the same vein, etc), but never the term "science babies". As of right now, it seems we have 0 commentaries mentioning the term either. Looking at outside sites, there seem to be about 50 tags that mention "science babies" on Archive Of Our Own, with their Science Babies tag being for some Marvel friendship (and trust me when I say that AO3 tags are *extremely* freeform). And thanks to this AO3 search I found out of a The Sims 4 mechanic that allows two Sims to have a child together, without requiring them to have a romantic relationship or their reproductive status to mismatch ("Can get other Sims pregnant" vs "Can get pregnant" options, which are not gender-locked in the game). Nowhere does that option require the pair to be same gender or same reproductive status, implying that to The Sims 4 devs, this phrase likely had little to no same-sex shipping connotations.

As for the phases - I brought them up not because I think we should dunk them all under whatever we decide to call our homo baby tag (because trust me, I don't - I specifically called for further splits), but because I think we should work out a solution to actually have ways to tag those concepts. While "if they mated, but only yuri and yaoi" (phase 4) is most of our current ips cells tag, it's not the only kind of content. I have personally found posts that would fall under phase 3 (pregnancy) and the more-scene-referencey posts would be phase 1 (baby talk) while gardening for that BUR favgroup, there are some posts under this search that would fall under phase 2 (mating), like post #6151015. I was bringing the phases up because I think we are lacking in that sector, and not only for homosexual content. post #7570150 and its children were a huge pain for me due to not having any idea how to tag M/M breeding kink talk.

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