About a month ago, I created the sada-chan (tawawa) tag to denote a particular character in the Getsuyoubi no Tawawa weekly series that as of about a month ago has become a recurring member of the cast. She's a parody of Sadako from The Ring whose physical design is basically "moe Sadako with large breasts"; her name "Sada-chan", incidentally, comes from the artist's own commentary on her second appearance, is an obvious abbreviation of "Sadako", and has been used consistently in subsequent appearances. However, practically from her debut she exhibited such significant divergences from Sadako that she seems to be her own character. To be more specific...
- In her debut, finding that the screen is too small for her large bust to pass through immediately stops her in her tracks and leaves her crying and pitifully demanding from the guy she's trying to haunt to buy a bigger screen. Now, I never watched The Ring, but from what I do know of the movie, the real Sadako is nowhere near this fragile and wouldn't be remotely so easily deterred by her intended screen-portal being "too undersized".
- From her second appearance onwards, she appears to have lost the core character trait of Sadako (namely, the murderous obsession with the target of her haunting) and essentially mellowed out into the common "clingy tsundere (not-)girlfriend" archetype.
- Her two most recent appearances (post #3573990 and post #3580705) have her unambiguously outraged by how the guy she's haunting is ogling a gravure idol, to the point of immediately making a very obvious seduction attempt to convince him to buy a sufficiently sized screen so that she may cross over to the real world. That is not the behavior of a creepy ghost that is hell-bent on terrorizing her target, even if we try to give the benefit of the doubt and assume she's a light-hearted version of the character she's supposed to represent; she's acting far more like a tsundere love interest who is implied to be aware of the nature of her feelings, if her "Even though you have me!" line is any indication.
In effect, while Sada-chan appears is based on Sadako from The Ring, it doesn't seem that she's intended to literally be the Sadako of the Getsuyoubi no Tawawa setting. Therefore, I believe that she deserves a character tag of her own, and that the yamamura sadako and the ring tags should only be applied to posts that clearly reference the original character's depiction in said movie (which is so far only applicable to her debut post, where she reenacts the well-known scene of Sadako approaching the TV screen). There's an actual precedent for the latter part in this pool, BTW.
... However, about a week later, Hillside Moose took issue with this, insisting that the two tags must be applied to all of the posts featuring Sada-chan. I wasn't convinced by their argument, and ultimately they suggested to bring it up on the forum.
Thus, here I am, asking this question: When does a parody version of an existing character become a distinct character of their own that deserves their own tag in place of their inspiration's own (barring instances where they're clearly referencing iconic scenes involving said inspiration)?
Some of the relevant arguments from post #3573990:
For:
MarqFJA87 said:
Garrus said:
I doubt it. Her first appearance makes it abundantly clear who she is, and it's a preexisting character (Sadako) with an alternate bust size.
She doesn't simply have an alternate bust size, her personality is drastically different. From little I know, the real Sadako Yamamura would have neither been deterred by a screen's size nor would she have mellowed out into a clingy tsundere who obviously no longer has any desire to do harm (let alone kill) the guy she's now "haunting". This Sada-chan is based on Sadako, but doesn't seem to be intended to literally be her.
Besides, even if we go by the "same person/character" approach you're advocating, it's not like Danbooru is a stranger to having separate tags for distinct alternate versions of a particular character/person (e.g. Merlin, who has been featured in Fate fan art long before the Fate/Protoype version and mainline Fateverse version were introduced).
MarqFJA87 said:
1. I never said Himura invented Moe Sadako.
2. Sada-chan isn't merely "Moe Sadako". She's "Moe Sadako with Tawawa-class Big Tiddies and romantically entangled with a faceless male character in a comic where all the females' appearances focus on their boobs in some way or the other", plus anything else that I'm forgetting; or to put another way, she's a clearly distinct character of her own.
3. The only time Sada-chan actually behaves like the character she's parodying is in her first appearance, which is why I left the yamamura sadako and the ring tags there. We even have precedent for this approach in this pool, where those two tags are only applied to the first two pages/posts.
4. Note how you're only one of two people who ever took issue with my creation and implementation of the tag; a lot of people commented on the most recent Sada-chan post, and yet none of them even batted an eye. I even asked a "senior" poster to give me their feedback regarding the newly created tag (among polishing up other Tawawa tags), and they told me there's no problem.
5. By your logic, we should be tagging king arthur whenever we tag artoria pendragon and herakles with berserker, among many other such tags. Come back to me when that gets implemented before trying to convince me that I'm doing something wrong.
Against:
Hillside_Moose said:
Moe Sadako is not a new concept and Himura did not create Sada-chan in a vacuum; her debut piece (post #3198589) is even an explicit reference to the movie. Giving Sada-chan her own independent tag is not helpful for people searching.
In between:
Garrus said:
At risk of poking a hornets nest, I do take issue with points 2, 3 and 5.
On point 2, she has precious little characterization since she has four posts total. First post is her intro, second is her being trolled while initially playing up the "Ring" angle, and the third and fourth are the ones which have started to distinguish her as "Sada-chan" while still keeping her as "Sadako". You could call her Sada-chan, yes, but she's not really been fully separated from "Yamamamura Sadako" quite yet. Hell, she's still living inside the screen, in the well from the movie! She's cute, yes. She has big boobs, yes. She's jealous, yes. But she's not quite a fully separate character yet. She's close, but not quite.
On point 3, I would say all of her posts should at minimum have "the ring" as a tag because, well, she's a parody of it and is wedded to the concept behind it of a ghost that haunts (and can cross) through the TV. Same reason that if Erma were posted on here (webcomic which could well be something like the "afterstory" of this particular story), her mother would probably need the tag on at least some of her posts where she's using the TV in that manner.
On point 5, Fate characters pretty much are fantasy characters inspired by their historical, mythological, or folkloric antecedents. If you are searching for them, you are not searching for the historical character, and vice versa. "Sada-chan" here runs into the issue, however, of not really being all that distinct from her source yet. Emphasis on the "yet". With how this story seems to be progressing, I have little doubt she will either do exactly that within about two more featured strips, or swing back to being a Ring parody.
Tangentially, the dispute got ugly rather fast because I thought I was arguing with a regular poster that is acting with a strange attitude of self-importance and not an actual moderator (check the last dozen or so comments on post #3573990 for a detailed explanation).
PS: My apologies if I did something wrong in the process of making this topic.
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