I've used this site for like, a decade and I made an account because this specifically has been bothering me for a while now, and Im not sure what the proper channels are to direct this to, so here goes.
Same as title, is it possible to swap the places of the "oviposition" and "egg_laying" tags?
I get that its the right technical term, but its just not the same thing connotatively. Every creature that lays eggs engages in the act of egg laying, but not every creature that lays eggs has an ovipositor.
And I'm willing to bet that when you think of the word "oviposition" you're not thinking of a dragon laying eggs, you're thinking of a giant bug using an ovipositor.

Oviposition is almost universally the term used to describe the fetish of egg laying, no matter the source or method of laying them, even to the point that sites like Tumblr automatically flag the word as NSFW in searches despite it also being a largely innocuous scientific term.
Oviposition also, for example, has about 10x more results on furaffinity than "egglaying" or "egg_laying" both do.
This word is also how I was introduced to the fetish over a decade ago. I think due to its near universal usage it's sensible to keep this term as the tag.

Either way, I'm not sure why Egg_Laying is subordinate to Oviposition.

eggmanstaresatyou said:
Either way, I'm not sure why Egg_Laying is subordinate to Oviposition.

Honestly as someone who is into oviposition, I’ve always known the fetish, even on other sites, to be referred to as oviposition. Seems weird to change it, when oviposition just means egg laying anyways. It’s not just insects, birds, reptiles, and amphibians too.

manitka said:
Honestly as someone who is into oviposition, I’ve always known the fetish, even on other sites, to be referred to as oviposition. Seems weird to change it, when oviposition just means egg laying anyways. It’s not just insects, birds, reptiles, and amphibians too.

I will say that I feel like we should ought to have a tag to denote open-air egg laying/spawning that most birds, reptiles, amphibians, and arthropods do from the more parasitic _{(or sexy)} internal oviposition that some insects and fish (and a bunch of fictional stuff) are known to do.

While oviposition is absolutely the dominant fetish term, e621 is not exclusively a porn site, so imo egg_laying may be better as it's a more neutral term. Admittedly I couldn't find any good examples (although maybe they just aren't tagged oviposition?) but I'm thinking of like, how chickens are often depicted laying eggs in a totally nonsexual manner, or how yoshis pop out eggs
Oviposition also seems to confuse taggers sometimes as I've seen it used a lot on eggs being inserted.

As I've said the last two times this has come up:

Egg laying and oviposition are synonyms, oviposition is just the fancy scientific word. Egg laying is the more easily understandable term, so I think it makes since to use that.

Also, in fetish contexts oviposition often refers specifically to laying/inserting eggs inside of another, so that can also lead to confusion.

manitka said:
Honestly as someone who is into oviposition, I’ve always known the fetish, even on other sites, to be referred to as oviposition. Seems weird to change it, when oviposition just means egg laying anyways. It’s not just insects, birds, reptiles, and amphibians too.

Same
I've always assumed oviposition being the egg-insertion and egg-laying being the natural chicken stuff

Yeah, I feel like, how a few people mentioned, oviposition seems slightly more common but I've seen pics that are just a dragon or a yoshi pooping out a egg and an horrifying bug using an ovipositor to put 394 eggs inside a furry that's a quarter his size both tagged as oviposition

I feel like separating them might be the best solution so that people who just want to see softer egg laying can do so, and people who seek eldritch horrors can have their cake, too.
Maybe lock oviposition into tagging ovipositor and egg insertion if we wanna be specific, instead of the squatting down way that is commonly associated with egg laying

devourer_ita said:
I feel like separating them might be the best solution so that people who just want to see softer egg laying can do so, and people who seek eldritch horrors can have their cake, too.
Maybe lock oviposition into tagging ovipositor and egg insertion if we wanna be specific, instead of the squatting down way that is commonly associated with egg laying

I do not think this is a good idea. They're basically already separated by additional tags such as egg_insertion and ovipositor, and oviposition's vast use as an umbrella tag for all egg laying art [insertion or not] in and outside of this website will lead to so many mistags in the future.
egg_insertion already largely consists of ovipositor usage and would make the tag nearly redundant, and any images that do not contain an ovipositor can be filtered out by including ovipositor in the search/blacklist.
If you want to see egg laying without parasitism/insertion, you can omit egg_insertion and ovipositors from your search. Other implication trees like this exist on e621 - such as if you want to see fat characters, but not hyper fat characters, there are tags you can omit to narrow your search. That's how this website works.

The more reasonable option would be to enforce people using the ovipositor and egg_insertion tags so it's easier to separate them from open-air egg laying than doing that.

I agree that open-air egg laying should have its own tag, but oviposition [or some other tag as it's being argued] should remain as an umbrella tag for all egg laying-related artwork. Egg fetish artwork is already a nightmare to search for because the implication trees are nonexistent at best and there's no single agreed-upon tag to search for all of it; egg alone catches a LOT of false positives due to ambient eggs in the image [such as for Easter] or egg imagery such as for impregnation_request.

moonlit-comet said:

The more reasonable option would be to enforce people using the ovipositor and egg_insertion tags so it's easier to separate them from open-air egg laying than doing that.

I agree that open-air egg laying should have its own tag, but oviposition [or some other tag as it's being argued] should remain as an umbrella tag for all egg laying-related artwork. Egg fetish artwork is already a nightmare to search for because the implication trees are nonexistent at best and there's no single agreed-upon tag to search for all of it; egg alone catches a LOT of false positives due to ambient eggs in the image [such as for Easter] or egg imagery such as for impregnation_request.

Yeah that's actually fairly reasonable, I'll have to check my blacklist because I think I do blacklist some of that stuff so they might be legit mistags to fix
Wonder what tag could work to make it clear it's open-air egg laying, though, in order to avoid mistags

moonlit-comet said:
-snip-

honestly, I feel like egg_insertion should be split. I didn't even realize that it was used for both the more impregn-y and infest-y situations in addition to the more mundane "take egg, push in" situations. all of the other *_insertion tags have definitions that are more in-line with the latter, so it'd make sense to me to try to shif the tag more in that direction.

to me:
post #5510612 is egg_insertion
post #5110747 is egg_transfer
post #5293018 is something else
maybe oviposition_while_penetrating or oviposition_inside

(also, egg_insertion's a mess. from what I'm seeing, a whole lotta it's just characters pushing eggs out, and there's rarely indication that the eggs being layed are, like, foreign objects.)

I'm in the camp to use egg_laying instead of oviposition. To me, oviposition is either too clinical (if we're taking it as a "scientifically accurate" term) or too fetishy (if taking it as a fetish term). Fetish terms are usually reserved for when the act is being actively fetishized (e.g. watersports isn't merely peeing, even if it's meant to entice the viewer, but when the act of peeing is being visibly fetishized in the image by someone). Egg laying is the more neutral term and what people are likely to think of at first, while oviposition just seems oddly out of place for the act of simply laying eggs.

Oviposition being the tag for someone getting penetrated by an ovipositor which then inserts eggs inside of their body makes the most sense to me.