Get rid of the character cosplay wildcard autotag implication

This has been brought up several times in the past, with people making solid arguments for why it should be removed, but I still see it happening. So, why not try again to bring it up? If it's a dead horse, it's overdue for a beating.

A reasonable user would expect implications to be always true. For example, 2girls implies multiple_girls, but wouldn't implicate couple, because the image in question may not depict a couple, it just happens to have two women in it. So, why do the cosplay tags have an auto-implication? If that character is not depicted, then they are not depicted, plain and simple.

In general, "tag what you see, or who made it, or with what they made it, or where it came from" is a good rule of thumb for useful tags (and is also common sense.) So if you want to see pictures of a character, and you search for them, the results might include pictures of completely different characters just wearing your desired character's clothes; you're not getting what you asked for, you're getting unnecessary extra stuff. If there were no auto-implication, no one would manually tag the image with the cosplayed character, not if they were following "tag what you see, etc." (To contrast, consider the "meme" tags, like crying_aqua_(meme), which don't get the auto-implication treatment. They do not suffer from this problem.)

Furthermore, it makes searching specifically for pictures where both the original character and someone else cosplaying as the character are depicted. See the excellent arguments laid out here: forum #152245 and forum #152248

Implications exist to save us time without mucking up search results. This implication mucks up the search results and makes some searches impossible. Ergo, it should be removed. The fact that it creates objectively wrong tag mappings is just icing on the cake.

I don't know how to formally petition this. If someone knows the syntax for requesting an unimply with wildcards, please let me know and I'll be glad to do it.

I like how it currently works, it makes it easier to search for both the character and cosplays of them.

I'm not sure this discussion will have much impact, but I have felt at times the way characters are tagged in regard to their outfits was a little backwards. Cases where a character is drawn to physically resemble another character, such that you can unmistakably recognize the character being referenced, are not able to be tagged with the referenced character, when in essence you could argue that visually it's just the referenced character cosplaying as the character making the reference, yet a character's clothes not even being worn by them warrants tagging that character, as if the character's outfit holds more relevance than their own physical appearance, even when it's indistinguishable from their source material.

But then this isn't even applied consistently, as you then have cases like post #3867527 where a character (in this case Castlevania's Dracula) is tagged because of the presence of his signature triple fireball attack, because really how else do you tag this reference? It's not cosplay, and I'm not sure how else you would find this if Dracula wasn't tagged. Maybe you could make some general tag for the attack itself, but then it would just be 99% Dracula himself, and no one would use it.

This is all probably moot, though, as the (cosplay) implication is hard coded into the site. Trying to revert it now would require a considerable amount of work, and I don't just mean the coding.

Unbreakable said:

I like how it currently works, it makes it easier to search for both the character and cosplays of them.

That could be a simple ~Hakurei_Reimu ~Hakurei_Reimu_(cosplay) search. It's the ease of one less tag.

When is that even useful to the average user? Most characters are lucky to be cosplayed more than once, if at all. You would almost never even see the cosplays if you're just searching their character tag. If I want to see someone cosplaying or being cosplayed, I would use the tags created for that express purpose.

blindVigil said:

[...] yet a character's clothes not even being worn by them warrants tagging that character, as if the character's outfit holds more relevance than their own physical appearance, even when it's indistinguishable from their source material.

That is honestly somewhat true, outfit is an important part of the character and it's sometimes even more distinguishable, especially in the alt skin apocalypse we live in. Character tag is currently used many other instances of the character not being present, clothes, hairstyle, accessory, even voicebanks. Well, otherwise, how do you find them?

There's also the practice of tagging the referenced character (and copyright) on a meme post, which is more debatable.

But then this isn't even applied consistently, as you then have cases like post #3867527 where a character (in this case Castlevania's Dracula) is tagged because of the presence of his signature triple fireball attack, because really how else do you tag this reference? It's not cosplay, and I'm not sure how else you would find this if Dracula wasn't tagged. Maybe you could make some general tag for the attack itself, but then it would just be 99% Dracula himself, and no one would use it.

Objectively speaking, Dracula is not in the image, and should not be tagged in it. If there's a general tag for the attack itself and no one uses it, so be it. People searching for Dracula are not searching for his fireball attack. If someone is looking specifically for that, they should search for that. If they don't know what the tag's name is and can't find it on the wiki for some reason, then they can use wildcards.

magcolo said:

That is honestly somewhat true, outfit is an important part of the character and it's sometimes even more distinguishable, especially in the alt skin apocalypse we live in. Character tag is currently used many other instances of the character not being present, clothes, hairstyle, accessory, even voicebanks. Well, otherwise, how do you find them?

It's not "somewhat true", your perspective is skewed by the deranged tagging people are doing on this site, which is why you point to a bunch of other examples and say "how else [would] you find them?" The last one is the only image where the actual characters (the mascots of the voicebanks) are depicted in any way (i.e., they're on the box art of the objects in the scene.) While they're not present in the scene as subjects, they are depicted and I think it would be reasonable to keep the character tag. Otherwise, everything else you listed seems, to me, to be objectively falsely tagged.

Outfits may be more distinguishable in some cases, especially for gacha characters with sameface and samemodel, but anyone who's ever been a big fan of a character would innately understand that the sentiment expressed here–that the clothes are enough to tag the image as if the character is present–has the undesirable conclusion of having characters you don't care about crap up your search results.

Personally, I don't think this really needs to be discussed so much as the mods/admins need to see this thread, look at the referenced past arguments I linked that have solidly proven that it's creating a worse search experience and is also objectively incorrect, and take rightful action to remove the auto-implication. This is the only rebuttal I will make to another user playing apologetics for an absurd status quo, even if they are well-intentioned and are making a good faith argument like you are, because I do not have the time nor the energy for it.

djbubbles said:

Objectively speaking, Dracula is not in the image, and should not be tagged in it. If there's a general tag for the attack itself and no one uses it, so be it. People searching for Dracula are not searching for his fireball attack. If someone is looking specifically for that, they should search for that. If they don't know what the tag's name is and can't find it on the wiki for some reason, then they can use wildcards.

It's not "somewhat true", your perspective is skewed by the deranged tagging people are doing on this site, which is why you point to a bunch of other examples and say "how else [would] you find them?" The last one is the only image where the actual characters (the mascots of the voicebanks) are depicted in any way (i.e., they're on the box art of the objects in the scene.) While they're not present in the scene as subjects, they are depicted and I think it would be reasonable to keep the character tag. Otherwise, everything else you listed seems, to me, to be objectively falsely tagged.

Except that half of the point of this site is being able to find the art it hosts. There is, to my knowledge, no tag for Castlevania Dracula's iconic triple fireball attack, and frankly there shouldn't be. It would almost certainly be 99% just Dracula. It's not even about finding Dracula, or the attack, it's about finding the reference. "How else would you find this?" is a very pertinent question when tagging. It's why we have a million tags for gacha character alts and skins and what have you. Artists are making art of them, and people will want to find them. They serve a very relevant purpose, and deserve to be tagged.

Magcolo's examples are extremely relevant to this discussion. Borrowed hairstyle is a completely useless tag without an accompanying character tag. The fact he's right is all the more reason the cosplay>character implication doesn't make sense. You can't find some things without a relevant character tag, even if the character isn't physically present, and you can't solve every problem by just making more tags.

That's not at all the case for cosplays. Cosplays have their own tags. The implication doesn't allow you to do anything existing tags can't already easily do, while even making some searches more complicated. Cosplays don't need to have the cosplayed character tagged. If someone wants to find Shimakaze porn, they're probably not looking for Kongou dressed like Shimakaze. But if that is what they were looking for, it's extremely easy to find, whether Shimakaze is tagged or not.