Aj looks so fragile and cuddly, and luna is comforting her in such a cute way

“There, there, Applejack. Everyone knows you’re not really a Background Pony. They’ll stop teasing you about it when it stops getting this kind of a reaction out of you.”

@when she felt her wings unfold  
Artist here, the “shipping” and “?” tags were there as a sort of catch-all. The image was not intended as shipping, it was made for someone asking for Luna comforting the mane 6 to indirectly comfort a friend of theirs. After drawing it, I realized many would see it as shippy and I figured it couldn’t hurt to tag it as such, despite it not being intended to be at all.
 
I don’t really care if it’s in the “lesbian” tag.

Upstream tags are “#lunadoodle #mlp #princess luna #darkflame75 #applejack #lunajack #shipping #?”. Looks pretty reasonable to me, though the “?” is probably an “… or is it?”. Tweaking…
 
 

 
I’ve sympathies for that approach because it gets rid of loads of potential disagreement and ambiguity. But no. Easily verifiable context should be tagged too, and information from the source especially counts when doing that. It’s often the only way to gauge an artist’s intent.
 
Broad themes, artistic intent, and subtexts are meaningful even when they’re ambiguous. Perhaps it’s better to tag both/all potential inferences to allow searches and -exclusions to work properly?
 
Then you have simple facts like an OC’s name which may not be present in an image. Quite verifiable, but a really slavish adherence to the rule you suggest might rule that out.
 
(A tagging system where a tag could have a truth value of “maybe” would be interesting.)
 
^{%I might be overthinking all this.%}

Wait… comforting crying friend, with no sexual content in image, or even suggestive content… And people rage this with lesbian…
 
So immature…
 
Even if an artist has a HISTORY of depicting such stuff, if it’s not an apparent part OF THE IMAGE, it should NOT BE TAGGED.

Why do I love this ship so much? I have no idea how it could work.