Danbooru

Tag suggestion: use actual generation tags for Pokémon species, not game tags

Posted under Tags

Provence said:

One should also notice that the implication request "alolan_pokemon -> pokemon" was rejected and I agree with that.

I see the previous discussion about implying Alolan Pokémon -> Pokémon was the topic #13044.

So are we going to use Gen7 for Alolan forms? If you guys really think this way is best... I'll help with whatever is decided here even if it goes against what I suggested doing.

Using Gen7 for Alolan forms still sounds very wrong to me, for one. But at least it's a consistent system, which can be implemented and used in a meaningful way, and explained in the wikis. In my opinion, it's a nice step forward in comparison with the older system where basically pokemon_rgby has been used for Gen1 Pokémon.

There may be confusion or mistagging one way or another, but fortunately it seems that if needed the generation tags could be quickly fixed/populated automatically in all posts, based on the existing character tags.

I guess it's going to be weird to use Gen7 for an Alolan Marowak and NOT Gen2 for Shiny Caterpie or Gen6 for Mega Gardevoir. But maybe few people remember that Shiny Pokémon got introduced in Gen2 in the first place. We might, as a working hypothesis, more or less feel like Shiny Pokémon have existed since forever and hence don't need any special tagging considerations (so a Shiny Caterpie would be tagged Gen1 anyway). We could still choose to use Gen6 for all current Mega and Primal Pokémon, which would be consistent with the idea of using Gen7 for all Alolan ones. (even though the games don't have any separate Pokédex flavor texts for Mega and Primal Pokémon)

Shadow Lugia is another can of worms (Gen3 variant of a Gen2 Pokémon). 132 Shadow Pokémon exist in Pokémon Colosseum and XD, but we only seem to have a few posts with Shadow Lugia at this time so that's not a big problem.

Maybe in a few years, when we have Generations 8, 9, 10... of Pokémon, depending on what happens in the games, I would like to suggest revisiting this decision and see if changing things again would be a good idea, still for the purpose of using the Gen1 tag for Alolan forms of Generation 1 Pokémon. I wonder if the next games (presumably in a new region) will still have separate flavor texts for Diglett and Alolan Diglett and maybe other possible variants from other regions.

AngryZapdos said:

Compared to their counterparts from other regions, Alolan Pokémon differ in type, appearance, behaviour and biology, often dramatically. They are regional variants, yes, but they're very different - enough so to be called their own species. Compare this to Pokémon such as Shellos/Gastrodon and Basculin whose regional differences are only skin-deep. They merely look different and are literally identical under the hood.

Provence said:

Those Pokémon are visually extremely distinct from their Kanto counterparts, even more than Mega Pokémon.

Whatever you guys say... I see two people here saying the Alolan are very distinct from their normal counterparts. Again, I do disagree with that, but it's noted that I'm currently in the minority.

Whatever the outcome of this discussion, it seems an Alolan Pokémon is still a variant of the same Pokémon. It's a canon thing. The Pokédex entry for Alolan Ninetales says it's a regional variant of Ninetales. The Pokédex entries for Alolan Meowth and Grimer say they were brought from somewhere else. The Alolan Pokémon are often referred to without "Alolan" in their names -- for example in the Pokédex entries of Alolan Persian and Geodude.

"If you accidentally step on a Geodude sleeping on the ground, you'll hear a crunching sound and feel a shock ripple through your entire body." (flavor text of Alolan Geodude, using just the word "Geodude" to refer to it)

Alolan Pokémon have separate flavor texts, but they are still the same number -- Rattata is #015 in the Alolan Pokédex, no matter whether the creature is normal or Alolan.

I also disagree that the changes between normal/Alolan are so big. Alolan Dugtrio is just Dugtrio with hair, not to mention Alolan Diglett which is a Diglett with just three additional hairs. Alolan Muk is just a Muk with multiple colors and "crystallized poison" shards. In my opinion, basically all but Alolan Exeggutor are pretty much the same Pokémon in appearance, and even that one is still not that much different.

If type is a consideration, let us remember that Shaymin, Castform, Wormadam, Rotom, Arceus, Meloetta, Darmanitan, Hoopa, Oricorio, Silvally and Necrozma too have separate variants with different types. Perhaps many of those variants are basically more of the same, but so are the Alolan Pokémon. (Again, just my opinion.) Some Pokémon like Castform, Shaymin, Rotom and Zygarde have the most variation in appearance, more so than the Mega and Alolan Pokémon. Naturally, most of those are of the same generation (except Fairy Arceus) and therefore are not in question as to the use of gen tags.

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I think more than anything it's the fact that the Pokémon franchise itself has made such a big deal about Alolan Pokémon being different to their regular counterparts. With Mega Pokémon, the focus was about how it was an exciting new form change for existing Pokémon. With Shiny Pokémon, every mon got a shiny version so it doesn't really matter what generation that was introduced. (I don't know how big a deal they made of Shiny Pokémon though, I wasn't even old enough to attend school when they added them.)

With the exception of Zygarde, I don't think they really talked up any of the regional variants like Shellos/Gastrodon at all - although even then, Zygarde's new designs are really form changes rather than regional variants.

If regular Pokémon reverted to their Alolan counterparts when you transferred them into SM/USUM and changed back when you pulled them out again, then I'd probably agree with tagging then as gen 1. But they don't; it's a permanent aspect of each creature.

I'd argue that since Mega Pokémon are forced temporary forms (they will always revert back to their normal forms after battle no matter what) they should be tagged as whatever generation the original version was introduced in, but something like the new Zygardes that you can keep as the new forms for as long as you like should be tagged as gen_6 for the original and gen_7 for the new ones. But since they're not a permanent version like Alolan mons I'd say there's room for debate on that one.

AngryZapdos said:

(I don't know how big a deal they made of Shiny Pokémon though, I wasn't even old enough to attend school when they added them.)

FWIW, Shiny Pokémon really were a big deal at the time, though it seems they are not really that much of a big deal nowadays anymore. Red/Green/Blue/Yellow were for the original (monochrome) Game Boy, and later Gold/Silver were released for the Game Boy Color. So the Gen2 introduced the concept of playing with actual (non-monochrome) color palettes, as well as the Shiny Pokémon as alternative color palettes. The Shiny (Red) Gyarados was also part of the main plot, involving the Team Rocket.

But of course, all main games have Shiny Pokémon since that time, so it ceased to be the Gold/Silver exclusive novelty thing it was back then. (If Danbooru existed when Gold/Silver were released in 1999, I bet we would feel inclined to use the tag pokemon_gs for all Shiny Pokémon, much like currently some Alolan Pokémon have pokemon_sm -- a tag that, as we know, should be removed as per this discussion.)

I'm 28 years old. I think I started playing RGBY and GSC around 2000-2002 when I was 10-12 years old.

AngryZapdos said:

I think more than anything it's the fact that the Pokémon franchise itself has made such a big deal about Alolan Pokémon being different to their regular counterparts. With Mega Pokémon, the focus was about how it was an exciting new form change for existing Pokémon.

Here's an alternate idea that was not mentioned yet, please tell me what you think. What if we decided that Mega Pokémon and Alolan Pokémon should NOT have any generation tags? They already have inclusive group tags: mega_pokemon and alola_form. Still, both seem a bit underpopulated. (post #1820994 is a mega_gallade NOT tagged mega_pokemon; post #2912432 is an alolan_vulpix NOT tagged alola_form)

Reason: Mega/Alolan are odd things. I can't speak for others, but maybe it would not be clear to everyone whether a Mega Gardevoir is to be considered strictly a Gen3 or Gen6 Pokémon. A possible bad outcome from this is that a Mega Gardevoir post might be randomly tagged Gen3, or Gen6, or both tags, depending on who is doing the tagging work. If we explictly forbid any Gen tags for Mega/Alolan Pokémon, we could avert this.

This way, this would be the complete result, listed below.

Normal or Shiny Pokémon:

Alternate forms:

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AngryZapdos said:

If regular Pokémon reverted to their Alolan counterparts when you transferred them into SM/USUM and changed back when you pulled them out again, then I'd probably agree with tagging then as gen 1. But they don't; it's a permanent aspect of each creature.

I see, but I'd like to point out that being Shiny is a permanent aspect too. So the same argument could be made that a Shiny Caterpie needs to be tagged Gen2, because it's permanently Shiny.

Although I'm fine with using Gen1 for the Shiny Caterpie.

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AngryZapdos said:

[...] something like the new Zygardes that you can keep as the new forms for as long as you like should be tagged as gen_6 for the original and gen_7 for the new ones. But since they're not a permanent version like Alolan mons I'd say there's room for debate on that one.

Just my two cents:

To repeat one point I said previously in this discussion, if we used different generation tags for each variation of the same Pokémon, then we would have these special cases to deal with:

  • Arceus = Gen4; Fairy Arceus = Gen6
  • Unown A-Z = Gen2; Unown !-? = Gen3
  • Zygarde 10% and Complete = Gen6; Zygarde 50% = Gen7
  • Lugia = Gen2; Shadow Lugia = Gen3
  • Pichu = Gen2; Spiky-eared Pichu = Gen4
  • Normal Pikachu = Gen1; Female Pikachu with heart tail = Gen4; Cosplay Pikachu = Gen6; Pikachu with Satoshi's cap = Gen7
  • The same with dozens of Pokémon from Gens1-3 who got gender differences in the Gen4 (Wooper, Scyther, Dodrio, etc.)

My suggestion would be consistently using just the generation tag where the Pokémon was introduced, no matter if the alternative form was introduced later. That is, we would do this:

  • Arceus = Gen4 (no matter the type)
  • Unown = Gen2 (no matter the letter/punctuation)
  • Zygarde = Gen6 (no matter the percentage)
  • Lugia = Gen2 (no matter if normal/Shadow)
  • Pichu = Gen2 (no matter if spiky-eared)
  • Pikachu = Gen1 (no matter the gender, no matter the clothes)
  • Gen1-3 Pokémon with gender differences = Gen1-3 (the generation when the Pokémon itself was introduced, not the gender differences)

Updated

Create a wiki page for those tags (meaning gen 1 to 7).
I hope that someone can still review the contents of the wiki pages and adds something that I may have forgotten:

Gen 1 Pokemon as a template. The only difference in the wikis is the number describing the gen (first, second, third etc.)

Provence said:

And finished the 3rd gen.
Left out Primal Groudon/Kyougre and Mega Rayquaza since they have its own character tags.

I hope I can go through Gen 4 to 7 soon, but there's other stuff to do as well :/.

Provence said:

Create a wiki page for those tags (meaning gen 1 to 7).
I hope that someone can still review the contents of the wiki pages and adds something that I may have forgotten:

Gen 1 Pokemon as a template. The only difference in the wikis is the number describing the gen (first, second, third etc.)

Nice. Thanks for the tagging work and the wikis.

Should the wikis also include scenarios featuring objects either modelled after Pokémon or that have a Pokémon's image on them? For example, stuff like Pokémon-shaped cupcakes or keychains, or a shirt with a Pokémon on it.

AngryZapdos said:

Should the wikis also include scenarios featuring objects either modelled after Pokémon or that have a Pokémon's image on them? For example, stuff like Pokémon-shaped cupcakes or keychains, or a shirt with a Pokémon on it.

Sure.
Every instance of a Pokemon should count.

And I've pulled sme time together and will do the Gen 5 Pokemon later. This will also be the last pool since Gen 5 has the highest amount of Pokémon while Gen 6 and 7 have been rather low, so I've worked on the seemingly smaller stuff a bit earlier.
Will now start with Victini.

Ok, done now.
There are some images that were completely uneditable, though. They exceeded the height limit, like post #1282126.

Now to see how well populated each generation is regarding its Pokemon:

Gen 1 Pokemon : 11458
Gen 2 Pokemon : 4992
Gen 3 Pokemon : 5537
Gen 4 Pokemon : 5116
Gen 5 Pokemon : 5174
Gen 6 Pokemon : 2230
Gen 7 Pokemon : 3848

Looks like the generation are all pretty equal.
Gen 1 highly profits from the existence of Pikachu. If you make the search without tht little dude the count goes below 8000. But Gen 1 also has the advantage of Charizard, Mewtwo and Eevee + its eeveelutions.
Gen 2 does also mostly profit from Espeon and Umbreon which are also tied together with Eevee.
Gen 3 has the oversexualized Gardevoir which takes a large part in it.
The other generations don't really have THAT outstanding Pokémon, though. Especially good visible at Gen 5 which has around 30 more Pokemon than Gen 2, 3 and 4.
Generation 7 does at least have the hype surrounding Rowlet and Cosmog, but other Pokemon are rather left in the dark, though.

I'm removing a few tags like pokemon_sm and pokemon_(game) manually. Is there any easy way to remove them automatically by userscript?

As we know, these game tags are already way underpopulated in the first place.

post #2638693 got a gen 5 and a gen 7 Pokémon together, so under the old system it should've been tagged pokemon_bw and pokemon_sm. But, strangely, it got only the latter, which I already removed.

post #2590185 is basically the same -- it got a gen 2 and a gen 7 Pokémon together, but only the pokemon_sm tag, which I removed too.

post #2358838 was (correctly by old standards) tagged both pokemon_gsc and pokemon_sm.

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ion288 said:

No, Missingno has different appearances in different games and more importantly doesnt appear in all following games like normal Pokemon. Better to let it stay tagged with pokemon_rgby or what ever game its form is from.

Should something like post #906693 have the rgby tag since the trio is rather iconic from that game?

It's also iconic in the first or second Pokemon movie..

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