WingbeatPony
Tag horse
Having no official say in the matter, I’d go with them being unnecessary. The existence of “futa character x” tags is in and of itself a bit of a compromise, as they’re aliases of the futa pun tags that were most commonly used for main characters. That the tags started spreading to background and minor characters is part of what lead to them being aliased into a standardized format, since they weren’t seen as being any more useful than the two tags separately.
In fact, the whole point of tags is to identify common elements that, combined, can be used to find or filter specific things. Single-use tags exist and serve that purpose well if there truly aren’t that many instances of something, and joke tags are fine by me. The difference here is that I think these futa oc tags started cropping up because of users simply following a pattern without understanding the justification behind it. Unless there’s some famous OC that’s known for being drawn as a futa nearly as often as they aren’t, I see no reason why OCs should have a tag for this specific purpose when even tagging canon background ponies this way has been seen as going too far.
tl;dr: Futa oc tags are so niche as to be counterproductive, just use two tags.
In fact, the whole point of tags is to identify common elements that, combined, can be used to find or filter specific things. Single-use tags exist and serve that purpose well if there truly aren’t that many instances of something, and joke tags are fine by me. The difference here is that I think these futa oc tags started cropping up because of users simply following a pattern without understanding the justification behind it. Unless there’s some famous OC that’s known for being drawn as a futa nearly as often as they aren’t, I see no reason why OCs should have a tag for this specific purpose when even tagging canon background ponies this way has been seen as going too far.
tl;dr: Futa oc tags are so niche as to be counterproductive, just use two tags.