Alias Discussion: Fangs -> Fang

Someone must not have bothered to read the wiki for Fangs when they made this alias. The Fangs tag was being used to tag images with characters with two fangs, as opposed to fang which depicts a character specifically with only one fang.

There's no need to have separate tags for one and two fangs. After all, ribbon is aliased to ribbons, so why not reverse the alias and make fang point to fangs? Unless you think the latter two are more distinct in meaning than the former...

It should probably become an implication instead of being an alias, if it's considered important enough to be kept at all.

I don't see why fang should be limited to exactly one fang, and fangs exactly two instead of any number greater than one. We're not going to add tags for three_fangs or four_fangs, I'm sure, so fang should be a common tag for any number of fangs. If someone is looking for pics with exactly one fang, they can always search "fang -fangs" then. (Of course, one could do a "fang*" search to have both if they're kept separate, but it's not possible to combine that type of search with other ANDed tags.)

In the end, I don't really see the need for two separate tags though.

Fang really goes more with specific type of character personalities, which is why you'll see it on characters with generally similar personalities as well as in general very similar expressions in the images.

*shrug* whatever, I guess I can't express how I see it different.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CuteLittleFangs

But I still don't think there's much difference between 1 and 2.

I can't think rationally at the moment (due exclusively to outside influences). Anyways, if you're going to combine the two, then flip the alias to fang -> fangs.

The sheer volume of images with exclusively only one fang though did outnumber the images with multiple fangs by at least 4 to 1 (from what I remember). So if you were looking for characters with more than one fang depicted it'll be fairly hard to find anything beyond the much more common single fang.

*edit* Ok, thinking more rationally, here is what is wrong with the fangs -> fangs alias. Regardless if they both involved elongated canine teeth, both tags did have a division on what was in one and what was in the other so they were both unique populations of images (I won't deny that there probably was minor overlap). The alias to combine them both effectively made it more difficult to find what you're looking for, since if you only wanted to view images of characters with the commonly depicted one fang you now have images that could have anything with fangs regardless of what it is, such as post #330789. Finally if you wanted to see images of things with more than one fang, you now will have a lot of trouble finding images that have more than one fang, because they're mixed in now with images of characters with one fang.

At this point there is no point in removing the alias, but you do need to acknowledge that this has gone from being a more specific concept to a more general concept and as such has made it more difficult in searching.

They are different things in anime, they shouldn't be aliases or implications of each other. One fang is usually a trademark of Tsuruya-like characters while fangs is generally for vampiric ones. It's just another common case of people aliasing/implicating things that sound alike but couldn't be more different.

Then call one of the tags vampire_fangs maybe (although really the "vampire" tag itself should be quite sufficient for this). Otherwise it's not at all clear to me what the distinction is between having one, two, or more fangs showing.

Single fangs are a distinct and important trait, and whatever is decided, they should really have a tag of their own. They're nearly up there with twintails in terms of physical traits that often convey something of a character's personality as well.

0_o
they should not be bunched together

there are people who have a single Fanged tooth
its consider a funny trait.

when you combine it with Fangs, it pretty much loses that trait, and they can be mixed with Catgirls, Vampires, Demongirls, Monsters etc.

We have antenna_hair and ahoge, for comparison. I'd support distinguishing one fang from two fangs, but having one fang is probably a more important trait to be tagged than is having two fangs. Hopefully the alias can be undone, mostly.

^_^;; ooh is it going to be changed back to how it was
i would like to search for single fang again

I hope it does, it's partially my fault for making it look like they weren't distinct when I made the wiki for fangs.

I can remove the alias, and am entirely inclined to, pending some unexpectedly good argument as to why the change was initially made.

But my concern is whether all the posts will revert back to how they were or if the alias is a one way street and all fangs posts are now stuck as fang. Anyone willing to go through and reclassify all 3000 images if needed? =P

I suppose the good thing is that fang far outnumbered fangs, and the latter was aliased to the former and not vice versa. Only a small number of them would actually need to change back to fangs.

I'll probably undo the alias tomorrow unless told not to.

I've removed the alias. If it's decided that it should be reinstated, that's easy enough to do. As of now, fang refers specifically to one prominent canine tooth, and fangs is for other kinds of images that feature prominent canine teeth. It's generally easy to tell the difference, because they really are distinct visual traits.

The only issue is that the old fangs posts were indeed not restored, and someone will have to do it manually.

The fangs wiki now reads:
"For images of characters featuring a multiple prominent canine teeth, such as with vampires or various animals.

Distinct from fang, which refers to a single visible prominent canine tooth. This is a visual trait often meant to emphasize a specific aspect of a character's personality."

jxh2154, when an alias is created, it does a one-time mass edit of all the posts involved, I'm pretty sure. When I said "Hopefully the alias can be undone, mostly," I meant that I hoped albert could whip up a quick script to restore the fang/fangs tags to the posts in question by briefly scanning the latest db backup before the alias was created. A few posts which were tagged after the alias might still need to be corrected though.

Huh, well I'm really damn bored, so I'm going to have some fun sorting these out.

One thing that bothers me while I do this is that even though I am very much in support of keeping them separated, there are times when characters well known for their fang (Tsuruya, Satoko) are depicted with two instead of one, and it feels wrong grouping them with an image tag that is primarily reserved for bats, vampires, catgirls, and animals.

So is the "fang" tag definitely reserved for one fang only? I'm treating it as such right now, but I'm willing to go back and change some of them depending on what you guys think.

roastbeefy said: So is the "fang" tag definitely reserved for one fang only? I'm treating it as such right now, but I'm willing to go back and change some of them depending on what you guys think.

I can't imagine there are a huge number of discrepancies, so just keep to one.

Well I got through all 140 pages of the fang tag and separated it out. Jesus Christ.

Now I'll just watch the tag to make sure people catch on and hope to god you guys don't decide to alias them back together, because I might have a breakdown.

roastbeefy said: Well I got through all 140 pages of the fang tag and separated it out. Jesus Christ. Now I'll just watch the tag to make sure people catch on and hope to god you guys don't decide to alias them back together, because I might have a breakdown.

Haha, well, *I* don't plan to re-alias them. Thanks for your hard work.