DB WORKSHOP: Tag discussion

1. Does it apply to expressing opinions on in-universe reactions and relations? If I were to upload, say, a picture of Rarity professing her love for Applejack, would that be a “mouthpiece”? What about Dinky calling Derpy the best mother ever, or Twilight stating that she’s straight? I see plenty of potential for abuse there.  
2. Who judges which opinions a character “would never in a canon setting hold”? Some images of the kind that the “mouthpiece” tag gets placed on do actually make sense in-character. Would it apply to a picture of Fluttershy promoting non-violence, which actually fits her characterization as a gentle pony? Who knows what opinions background ponies with very little canonical personality might hold? The tag itself is a matter of opinion in some cases.
    
   The first issue could be settled easily enough by simply stating in the description whether in-universe reactions count. The second issue, however, requires some kind of objective standard to resolve.
    
   Fortunately, I have come up with a possible solution to both. It could be defined as “Artist uses a canon character to express their opinion on a real-world issue”. That would allow it to remain on most of the images that have it, but also make it clearer and less of an expression of an agenda itself.

1. That first one’s open to debate on a pic-by-pic basis. Pics like this:  
    
   would get it because it’s clearly just OP bawling about ships they don’t like.
    
2. It’s a subjective tag, but one that was mainly invented to label (and by extention allow the filtering) of extreme duckery like these:  
    
   with the biggest deciding factors being if it’s just an artist trying to shoehorn their opinion via ponies, and if it’s done in that “text over portrait staring at you” kind of style. It does get abused to a degree, but since the tags main purpose is to hide content people don’t want to see, there does need to be some level of lenience with when it’s applied to an image.
    
   Ones that are actually positive and in-character should be labelled as Positive Ponies rather than Mouthpiece
    
   Your description change kind of doesn’t work though, since lots of them aren’t about real world issues. There’s a good number of them that bawl about shipping, memes they don’t like, down with Molestia, Tumblr drama, or are just brainless attacks against the fandom in general.

but this topic definitely has to be discussed more in-depth. (And with more than 3 people…)

@NostalgiaSchmaltz
I’unno.