Frankenstein's costume

Posted under Tags

BUR #54112 has been rejected.

create alias frankenstein's_monster_(cosplay) -> frankenstein's_costume
remove alias frankenstein's_monster_(cosplay) -> frankenstein's_costume
create alias frankenstein_monster_costume -> frankenstein's_costume
mass update frankenstein's_costume -> -cosplay -frankenstein

This is probably going to be a hot take, but I think it's worth bringing up.

Right now, we're using Frankenstein's Monster in two ways: the character from Frankenstein and media adapted from it (if they don't have their own tag for the monster), and the folkloric monster inspired by the literary monster, represented in the same ways vampires and witches are. The latter usage is what most cosplay of the monster is, a calcified pop culture representation of the monster that can be found as far as Castlevania and Spirit Halloween.

Most of the monster's tag is just cosplay. I imagine some of that cosplay actually referenced the book or adaptations of it, but I imagine most are basically just equivalent to vampire costume and werewolf costume/wolf costume. So, I'm proposing we seperate out the entire cosplay tag into its own costume tag, and manually move whatever is actually valid back to the monster's cosplay tag, gardening it ala Dracula (Cosplay) (though that one does need another look again).

Given how many people call the monster just Frankenstein, calling it "Frankenstein's costume" feels appropriate and also allows for some name parallelism with Frankenstein's monster. While I doubt people would tag Victor Frankenstein cosplay under this tag, I will include a utility alias just in case.

BUR #54133 has been approved by @evazion.

create alias dracula_costume -> vampire_costume
create alias wolf_man_costume -> werewolf_costume

This is less necessary, but may as well do this. The pairing of "Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Wolf Man" (and the Mummy too) was popularized thanks to the Universal Classic Monster movies from the 1930s and 40s, and as a result you'll often find posts pairing together werewolves, vampires, and frankensteins (and mummies), but as they became pop culture icons, they just became generic combinations as opposed to specifically referencing those classic movies.

Something like post #9064990 feels like it's leaning into that connection more, while something like post #8370141 feels like a generic combination. So, to give Dracula and the Wolfman some grace, having utility aliases like these would probably remove some pressure on their cosplay tags.

With that settled, I'm reminded of something regarding werewolf costume. Currently, the werewolf costume wiki states that "The most famous example is Mash Kyrielight's Dangerous Beast outfit," but if you actually check the search, you'd find that that outfit is currently not tagged with werewolf costume, but with wolf costume instead.

Bringing this up in the Discord, and stating that we should probably do something to distinguish werewolf and wolf costume more, @zetsubousensei said this: "I think if I wanted to distinguish them I'd tag all of them 'wolf' and leave 'werewolf' for ones that are more wolfman/public domain monster style."

We may as well discuss this here since we've got a bit of halloween costume energy here, since it's gotta get done eventually.

I didn't ultimately make a forum post on it since I think any effort to distinguish them is going to get polluted since a lot of revealing "werewolf" costumes and gacha skins are destined to fall into it. Specifically I gave up after looking at kazusa_(halloween)_(blue_archive), nothing about this screams "werewolf" but because it is a Halloween skin it's going to be tagged as one regardless.

1