The SNK/Fatal Fury/King of Fighters tagging quagmire

For nearly two decades, the SNK tag has been a mess, being generally applied to everything made by SNK which is not how the company tags are supposed to be used, but that's something that's generally easy to deal with. As proof of that, earlier this month, I gardened the tag of a lot of these instances and reduced it from 4611 to 2847 posts. But what stopped me from going further was the relationship between the SNK tag with the Fatal Fury and the King of Fighters tags.

The King of Fighters' relationship tagging-wise to SNK is, to draw a parallel, similar to that of Super Smash Bros.'s with Nintendo. While KoF has a prominent original cast, it also features tons of existing characters from SNK's other fighting games, in particular here Fatal Fury, so often you'll have Fatal Fury, King of Fighters and SNK tagged for one character, whether it be two of those tags or all three. And technically, alongside KoF you also have SNK Heroines: Tag Team Frenzy, Neo Geo Battle Coliseum, SvC Chaos, Days of Memories, as well as Capcom vs SNK and Capcom vs SNK 2, which also have SNK tagged, but most of SNK is just King of Fighters art (removing all of the tags mentioned here along with Enta Girl from an SNK search gives you 64 posts, while removing just King of Fighters gives you 179 posts).

So if we want to reduce the amount of posts needlessly tagged SNK, someone has to go through the King of Fighters and garden it, both in relation to itself and in relation to the crossover characters, especially Fatal Fury. If the Capcom tag can resolve this issue, so too could SNK. Shiranui Mai does not need three base copytags, or even two base copytags, when you know someone searching for art of her would just search her tag (so shiranui_mai the_king_of_fighters should just be art that references KoF, or at least art made with KoF in mind, and otherwise her copytag should be Fatal Fury).

Yup, the biggest issue with SNK is that most people only know these characters from the The King of Fighters series and that's how the overwhelming majority of SNK fans engage with it, so in a twisted way KOF basically became the main series for all of their characters outside of stuff like Metal Slug. To make matters more complicated, these characters will start to have certain character designs or references that's only in one of the other.

With Mai as an example post #8710141 (NSFW) is strictly a KOF reference. The design for Mai where her outfit has those cherry blossom patterns (post #7525769, post #8351647, post #8351646) also strictly KOF (well, until it made a cameo in Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves, but most images won't be a reference to that). There's a lot of nuance to keep in mind when gardening between Fatal Fury or KOF, so it needs someone being very familiar with both of them to understand these nuances.

Speaking of Mai, there's too many Mai Shiranui images under the Street Fighter 6 tag as well even when the images show no other SF6 characters, no references or not even the white tank top casual outfit. I assume Terry probably has some unnecessary SF6 tagging as well.

I really do think the biggest pain surrounding The King of Fighters as a tag is that it has an original cast while also featuring crossover elements. If its cast were from their own game, then you'd be able the chalk up the situation similarly to Nintendo, where you can easily just remove Smash from posts unless it's actually referencing Smash. That, combined with how long Fatal Fury as a franchise was gone, basically making KoF the core franchise for its cast, really complicates the situation.

Paired with this is how Fatal Fury itself provides some difficulties, sorta akin to Street Fighter, because they have their own sort of extended universe - while Street Fighter has Final Fight and Justice Gakuen, Fatal Fury has Ryuuko no Ken (and those two were the base KoF built on), games in the same shared universe that don't really have an umbrella tag, which leaves the base copytag of some characters uncertain. Poison is a great example, she's a Final Fight character and it is in her qualifier, yet she has a bunch of posts without it because she appeared in Street Fighter V as a playable character, making some folks treat "Street Fighter" as her base copytag.

BUR #61512 is pending approval.

create alias fatal_fury -> fatal_fury_(series)
create implication ryuuko_no_ken -> fatal_fury_(series)
create implication the_king_of_fighters -> fatal_fury_(series)

I don't expect this BUR to be approved, but I do genuinely think this is unfortunately our best option.

As mentioned above, Fatal Fury and Ryuuko no Ken are set in the same continuity. Meanwhile, for the King of Fighters, the titular King of Fighters through which our crossover happens, is actually taken from Fatal Fury. This has caused confusion in the past because Geese Howard is dead in the Fatal Fury continuity, but alive in the King of Fighters continuity, but they have separate parallel continuities. Ultimately, fans consider these games to be very closely associated, even if KoF-original content isn't canon to Fatal Fury, doubly-so induced by Fatal Fury not having a game in twenty years, making KoF basically the main franchise for its cast in that time period.

The only real way we can solve the issue of double or even triple base copytags for characters like Mai is to collapse everything in such a way that, per Danbooru protocol, there has to be one, in this case being fatal_fury_(series). The impact this has on the King of Fighters would be that all Fatal Fury and Ryuuko no Ken characters would no longer use the KoF tag unless relevant (and obviously by virtue of that, the SNK tag wouldn't apply, though that one's already quite wrong).

The reason why I don't think this would pass is because it would make it harder to find Fatal Fury-specific art, as you'd need to do fatal_fury -the_king_of_fighters to remove the crossover art and KoF-original characters, as KoF outnumbers FF by post count 2 to 1. If we wanted to maintain an umbrella tag for the Fatal Fury games specifically, we could follow the lead of the utility alias garou_(game_series), and have fatal_fury remain the parent copytag while the games go under fatal_fury_(game_series). Could do something similar for the King of Fighters too, but again, don't think this would pass.

BUR #61513 is pending approval.

create alias fatal_fury -> fatal_fury_(game_series)
remove alias fatal_fury -> fatal_fury_(game_series)
create implication fatal_fury_(game_series) -> fatal_fury
create implication ryuuko_no_ken -> fatal_fury
create implication the_king_of_fighters -> fatal_fury

Alternate option that keeps the Fatal Fury games separately searchable. As far as I know, the ultimate implication chains these would cause would be three copytags max, so that shouldn't be a problem.

Leaving off doing a create alias the_king_of_fighters -> the_king_of_fighters_(game_series); remove alias the_king_of_fighters -> the_king_of_fighters_(game_series); alias the_king_of_fighters -> fatal_fury just because we need more discussion.

If either of these pass though, it opens the door for doing the same with Street Fighter, Final Fight, and Justice Gakuen.