@blindVigil: I'm not sure this discussion will have much...

blindVigil
2023-01-11T22:10:42-05:00

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.