Deprecating Mascot

BUR #55893 has been approved by @nonamethanks.

deprecate mascot

Mascot to me is a bad tag. It either becomes too broad and includes too many concepts or too narrow that it becomes close to other prexisting tags. I'm unsure if we need a broader tag for more traditional mascots like Ronald Mcdonald or pixiv-tan.

We already have mascot costume for characters dressing up as a mascot. We have familiar and creature respectively for most of everything else, the former I imagine being a good place for vtuber "mascots" (topic #34068 related). If there's any examples that might need addressing then feel free to drop them below.

There's also Yuru-Chara, which was made into a copyright tag as they didn't have one before and were just getting tagged as original incorrectly. I never realized it wasn't mentioned in that wiki.

I do generally agree with mascot being way too broad. There are advertising mascots like Super Sonico that rarely if ever get the tag, and as of recent it's mostly used for VTuber fandom mascots.

Japan sometimes calls more traditional advertising mascots, especially anime-styled ones, "image characters", which might work if we want a tag for them specifically. Ecoco is a famous example and was the face of image character-specific doujin events, but other examples include Dejiko, Hatena Yousei, Barusamiko, Wonda-chan and Reset-chan of Wonder Festival, Madobe Nanami, etc.

(...I'm a little biased because I really like image characters.)

I wish we had a tag for the kind of nondescript small anthropomorphic creature like post #10945515 that is common in japanese media, but mascot is full of random stuff and if we are even putting Ronald Mcdonald in it, it's got no hope.

annoying companion creature

Maybe for the small anthropomorphic creatures, we could use a genre such as fantasy or sci-fi (ex: fantasy_mascot) to narrow it down considering that those creatures do not actually exist and it would not apply to Ronald Mcdonald.

nonamethanks said in forum #423815:

I wish we had a tag for the kind of nondescript small anthropomorphic creature like post #10945515 that is common in japanese media, but mascot is full of random stuff and if we are even putting Ronald Mcdonald in it, it's got no hope.

This is chibikemo (チビケモ)

I was not aware that we had a tag for that. That's good, it means we can safely get rid of mascot unless someone objects. It might help to suggest utility aliases to make it more easily searchable.

Confetto said in forum #423945:

This is chibikemo (チビケモ)

I don't know if I'd fully agree with them being chibikemo (broadly speaking, post #10945515 is deffo chibikemo). As mascot's wiki says, chibikemo is a common design trope for mascot characters, but not all mascot characters are chibikemo. Is Moop from PreCure (post #6036782) chibikemo? What about Fuu-chan from Precure (post #1620306)? Fans typically call them fairies, ala 妖精(プリキュア), but that's neither officially universal nor what the fairies we typically tag look like. Pixpedia just straight up calls them マスコットキャラ (mascot-chara), linking to マスコットキャラクター (mascot character), which, just like here, is used extremely broadly, even counting Mario as a mascot character.

Honestly, if it weren't for the fact that the term has been taken up by local mascot characters (gotouchi-chara), yuru-chara would literally be the best term we could use. Otherwise, we might just have to make up a term, like マスコキャラ (masco-chara).

I think the rest that are nondescript critters can just fall under creature. We could make a mascot creature alias to it so people searching for "mascot" can find it.

If there's distinct subcategories like precure "fairies" (is there any other beside fuu-chan_(precure)?) they can get their own subtag.

nonamethanks said in forum #423976:

If there's distinct subcategories like precure "fairies" (is there any other beside fuu-chan_(precure)?) they can get their own subtag.

"Fairies", last I checked, were what Western Precure fans called all of them.

Visually speaking, I think just plain old "creature" is fine though.

Are wada_don and wada_katsu creatures?

eromelon said in forum #424020:

Are wada_don and wada_katsu creatures?

Yes. Our creature tag is basically for nondescript creatures you wouldn't even know how to start describing.

The bulk update request #55893 (forum #422157) has been approved by @nonamethanks.

BUR #56380 has been approved by @nonamethanks.

create alias mascot_creature -> creature

Utility alias. I updated the mascot wiki with alternatives.

The bulk update request #56380 (forum #424099) has been approved by @nonamethanks.