Posted under General
It seems to be the case that not all original art work contains characters with names. It might be helpful when searching for OCs to tag "original_character" if one is ever searching for characters with names or at least aliases. For example: "dark-skinned_girl_(23)" would warrant the "original_character" tag in addition to the "original" tag.
If it would help you could rename the "original_character" tag to the "recurring_oc" tag.
Aside from when gardening tags like casual which should never be used on one-off original characters, is anyone actually going to make use of a tag to cover all repeat original characters?
Because you can already make tags for unnamed original characters. But it can be very difficult, unless the artist confirms it, to tell whether a character is a repeat character or someone completely different drawn in a way that they look basically indistinguishable. Take an artist like matsunaga kouyou for instance. Back when he had only produced a couple of hundred images I tried to sort them out into distinct characters - there were definitely groups of images that seem to be the same character. But I found one character rapidly blended into the next and then into the next. Now he has over a thousand images, and the more obvious variations have actually reduced over time, making it even harder to distinguish - yet he still produces groups of images that very much look like the same character/s.
Creating an overarching tag for this type of character does not resolve this sort of problem - if anything it accentuates it as it creates more pressure to determine whether a given image contains a repeat character or not, whereas at the moment it can just be left alone without causing any problems.
If literally all you want is a list of original characters then the existing wiki (wiki #23837) works far better than creating a tag like this would.
You can filter your search results for named OCs by adding original chartags:>0 to your search. You'll get a few false positives here and there, mostly from unnamed OCs appearing alongside non-original characters, but in general I think this search is reliable enough that it obviates the need for any new tags.
Implementing a tag like the one you've suggested also strikes me as wildly impractical as there are hundreds of named OCs to keep track of. Good luck getting all this site's uploaders to tag them all on a regular basis. Tag implications aren't a solution; making character tags implicate other tag types is something we simply do not do, for well-founded reasons. Then there's also the problem of tags needing to be changed every time an original character becomes part of a named copyright, as happened with nekopara and getsuyoubi_no_tawawa. It's lot of headaches for very little gain.
I was trying to organize the IP Lavender Quartz by LM7 and I ran into this issue. The characters are all named, but the IP is in development and evolving. GoodSmile has figures of each character with names, so you can assume that is virtually a final design of the character, but older art looks like it's one character, but they have different colored eyes or hair ornaments aren't present that are always present now. It's a mess to get into, and probably better left off until the IP is better established and there's more confirmation for context/identities.
But like said above, it's really your own prerogative if you want to do the grunt work and make dictations, as probably no one would be against it if it's for a tiny original character not apart of a recognizable series or whatever. There's no real harm/risk in mistagging a virtually identical character that would be otherwise unnamed, drawn by the same artist or derivative parody/inspiration.
