Danbooru

Yōkai implications

Posted under Tags

The issue comes up when trying to decide what is and isn't a species that people will look for. Those mythical creatures are youkai, but that would mean chucking many non-monstrous (read: cute anime girls) into the youkai tag because the author insists they are youkai. For an example, Kaenbyou Rin is a nekomata, but she's pretty much indistinguishable from any other two-tailed catgirl.

I know e621 does this, but it leads to really strange trees of implications that I don't think anyone really finds useful. The current youkai tag is very polluted with touhou characters that look nothing like the youkai they are supposed to be. A nuke would be an extreme option, but what is really needed is to remove the youkai link from the touhou girls' wikis and then clean the tag so it is actual youkai.

So, first of all - the current usage of youkai tag is a mess either way and it will require work to fix it either way. So the question is which way to fix it, or whether to care at all, right?

thelieutenant said:

The issue comes up when trying to decide what is and isn't a species that people will look for. Those mythical creatures are youkai, but that would mean chucking many non-monstrous (read: cute anime girls) into the youkai tag because the author insists they are youkai. For an example, Kaenbyou Rin is a nekomata, but she's pretty much indistinguishable from any other two-tailed catgirl.

I know e621 does this, but it leads to really strange trees of implications that I don't think anyone really finds useful. The current youkai tag is very polluted with touhou characters that look nothing like the youkai they are supposed to be. A nuke would be an extreme option, but what is really needed is to remove the youkai link from the touhou girls' wikis and then clean the tag so it is actual youkai.

The problem is - any magical non-human or were-human being originating in Japanese folklore is a youkai. That's the definition of a youkai.

There is plenty of cute youkai girls in traditional Japanese tales. Yuki-onna, Hannya demons, the crane-shapeshifted-into-woman from "Tsuru no ongaeshi", etc. Any two-tailed catgirl, no matter how cute would in fact qualify as youkai, as long as she possesses traits originating from Japanese folklore. This did not originate with anime, youkai just have been progressively anthropomorphised more and more since their origin. Stating that youkai are magical beasts is over-narrowing the meaning of the term.

On the contrary - why not accept the broad meaning of youkai and dual-tag beast-type youkai as, well, youkai beast or youkai monster?
No one does youkai beast. but there is some of youkai monster and they seem to point to what you're after.

Talulah said:

Tagging fox girls, bird girls, cat girls as youkai is questionable. post #5380005 and post #1529151 have little in common. Lumping them together under the same umbrella doesn't seem particularly useful.

Well, currently there are more posts with cute girls tagged as youkai than with beasts tagged as youkai, so even if it's "questionable" to tag them as such, everyone does it anyway.
post #1529151 is a perfect example of what I would double tag as youkai beast or youkai monster.

What would that then be is canon tagging, something we are trying to avoid. Meiling and Yuuka are both youkai of some unknown species. They are completely indistinguishable from humans. Should they be tagged youkai? Should any non-human-but-basically-a-human-as-long-as-they-arent-something-else be tagged youkai?

I want to emphasize that the youkai tag currently has 2992 posts. Including these characters would push it into the hundreds of thousands, as every picture of any non-human touhou character would be to be retagged. And that's just touhou, never mind all of fate, azur, original characters, and all of the other copyrights that feature youkai.

Youkai either becomes a massive tag which means: non-human character based in japanese folklore in the loosest of sense OR monsters originating in japanese folklore. Option 1 makes it meaningless as a tag. Option 2 makes it bearable, but not great.

Well, currently there are more posts with cute girls tagged as youkai than with beasts tagged as youkai, so even if it's "questionable" to tag them as such, everyone does it anyway.
post #1529151 is a perfect example of what I would double tag as youkai beast or youkai monster.

This is because taggers are retarded. When they upload a picture and hit the Related Tags button on a character, the wiki of that character pops up. Usually one of the first tags in the wiki is the species of whatever fat tit bitch they're uploading. And so the tagger, blinded by her massive bazonkers, clicks all of the tags they can see. This issue arises because the Wiki and the Related Tags have different goals. The Wiki is designed to give a curious person more info on the character, such as species and personality. The Related Tags are designed to help taggers quickly and efficiently tag the appearance of the character. But since both are combined into the same section, people treat them the same.

A while ago, people were tagging dozens of pictures of Fischl as chuunibyou because it was the first tag in her wiki. After removing the pollution, I moved it to the very last tag in her wiki. Lo and behold, there has been only 10 pictures tagged since then, and none of them are her taking it up the ass like there were before.

As an example, yuki_onna. This tag is literally just "girl in white kimono". There is snowflakes or pale skin if you are lucky. In fact, fuck it, the kimono is optional. But we can't get rid of this, because there are some characters explicity named yuki onna or some pun of it. So we are stuck with this nearly useless tag. If I tagged post #3960358 a yuki onna, I doubt that anyone would notice, despite post #3132371 being tagged it and looking identical.

If the youkai tag is this bad, then we can just nuke it, and tell users to search the specific youkai they want.

thelieutenant said:

As an example, yuki_onna. This tag is literally just "girl in white kimono". There is snowflakes or pale skin if you are lucky. In fact, fuck it, the kimono is optional. But we can't get rid of this, because there are some characters explicity named yuki onna or some pun of it. So we are stuck with this nearly useless tag. If I tagged post #3960358 a yuki onna, I doubt that anyone would notice, despite post #3132371 being tagged it and looking identical.

That's a mistag by a random user, both of those posts are the same character. Which really just proves your point because no one noticed it, despite someone manually changing it from yuki-onna to yuki_onna.

Ixendr said:

There is plenty of cute youkai girls in traditional Japanese tales.

If you want to assert that the scope of the youkai tag should be broadened to include mostly human-looking girls with one or two hardly-noticeable visual "youkai" characteristics, then the tag will be nuked to Hell and back by new Touhou fanatics with gold+ accounts tag scripting youkai on every character that Touhou canon defines as some type of youkai. Like 99% of Touhou characters are youkai and almost all of them look like humans or animal girls. Apply this to every other copyright which has characters that look human but are actually "youkai" because they can shoot lasers or eat babies, and people searching this now useless tag will practically only see images like post #5136716 when they expected to see things like post #4985983 or post #3304794.

And then your solution is to create a new tag to fulfill the purpose youkai should already have if we updated the wiki with clear guidelines (like we have for vampire) and gardened it a bit. People would ignore that wiki too and start tagging regular animals or something lol

thelieutenant said:

Youkai either becomes a massive tag which means: non-human character based in japanese folklore in the loosest of sense OR monsters originating in japanese folklore. Option 1 makes it meaningless as a tag. Option 2 makes it bearable, but not great.

Well, there's always option 0. which is to do nothing, but currently the tag is a mess anyway...
Why not though replace youkai with with something actually descriptive like magical_beast and then clean it up from "Touhou girls" tagged?

Also, why have misleading wiki pages that never mention proper tag usage?
Is the purpose of wiki pages to provide description on how to use tags, or is it just some kind of Weebipedia detached from the rest of Danbooru?

This is because taggers are retarded.

No, it's retarded to have some "tribal knowledge" or otherwise unwritten rules regarding the "proper" use of the tag that is not described in the tag's wiki page.

The Wiki is designed to give a curious person more info on the character, such as species and personality. The Related Tags are designed to help taggers quickly and efficiently tag the appearance of the character. But since both are combined into the same section, people treat them the same.

Well, it's nice to have a short synopsis of the character on the character tag's wiki page, but it's really optional thing and many characters don't have one anyway.
For general tags, having a page that does not describe the tag usage is useless. Having some "real-world" description unrelated to actual tag usage is worse than that, as it's actively harmful.

A while ago, people were tagging dozens of pictures of Fischl as chuunibyou because it was the first tag in her wiki. After removing the pollution, I moved it to the very last tag in her wiki. Lo and behold, there has been only 10 pictures tagged since then, and none of them are her taking it up the ass like there were before.

Oh, isn't chuunibyou one fat useless tag anyway? "An equivalent insult in English is calling someone "edgy". Only use for images explicitly showing chuunibyou personality traits and clothes, such as dramatic hand gestures, eyepatches, and scarves" - this is so arbitrary that it begs for mistagging and canon tagging.
Also, if you look at most depictions of fischl_(genshin_impact) -chuunibyou, she does indeed wear an eyepatch, perform some weird gesture and/or look "edgy" on those posts, so according to the tagging guidelines of chuunibyou tag they should be re-tagged XD.

If the youkai tag is this bad, then we can just nuke it, and tell users to search the specific youkai they want.

That's one solution, or maybe change it to some more descriptive tag or tag combination (magical_beast, dual tagging as monster japanese_folklore, idk?), provide tagging guidelines in that wiki page, and phase out youkai as a tag?

BUR #10603 has been rejected.

deprecate youkai

Well, there's always option 0. which is to do nothing, but currently the tag is a mess anyway...
Why not though replace youkai with with something actually descriptive like magical_beast and then clean it up from "Touhou girls" tagged?

This is the option I would be most in favor of, but then you run into the issue of what is and isn't magical. I can foresee pokemon being an issue for this. I'm not good at coming up with new tag names.

Also, why have misleading wiki pages that never mention proper tag usage?
Is the purpose of wiki pages to provide description on how to use tags, or is it just some kind of Weebipedia detached from the rest of Danbooru?

Proper tag usage is the main goal of the wiki, but additional non-taggable knowledge can be given for context. For fan-comics especially, personality traits tend to be constants, and having a note of those in character wikis is useful.

No, it's retarded to have some "tribal knowledge" or otherwise unwritten rules regarding the "proper" use of the tag that is not described in the tag's wiki page.

The "tribal knowledge" is the hope that taggers could use their fucking head and realize "hey maybe Aya really has nothing in common with mythical tengu appearance". The other head evidently took precedent.

Well, it's nice to have a short synopsis of the character on the character tag's wiki page, but it's really optional thing and many characters don't have one anyway.
For general tags, having a page that does not describe the tag usage is useless. Having some "real-world" description unrelated to actual tag usage is worse than that, as it's actively harmful.

Yes, tags should have wikis that are useful. Removing useless information from wikis is encouraged. There are a lot of tag wikis that need to be fixed because some random user wrote it years ago and no one noticed, and anyone can fix them any time. Some wikis haven't been touched since Bush was president.

Oh, isn't chuunibyou one fat useless tag anyway? "An equivalent insult in English is calling someone "edgy". Only use for images explicitly showing chuunibyou personality traits and clothes, such as dramatic hand gestures, eyepatches, and scarves" - this is so arbitrary that it begs for mistagging and canon tagging.
Also, if you look at most depictions of fischl_(genshin_impact) -chuunibyou, she does indeed wear an eyepatch, perform some weird gesture and/or look "edgy" on those posts, so according to the tagging guidelines of chuunibyou tag they should be re-tagged XD.

You can go ahead and tag the appropriate pictures. I really don't care about genshin, and it's popularity will probably lead to fischl being majority of the tag until genshin dies. Some tags are just like that. I wrote that wiki because the previous one was truly fucking terrible, but if you can figure out a better way of describing it, go for it.

That's one solution, or maybe change it to some more descriptive tag or tag combination (magical_beast, dual tagging as monster japanese_folklore, idk?), provide tagging guidelines in that wiki page, and phase out youkai as a tag?

I'll set up the BUR for this. I think youkai is still useful as a tag, it just needs correction. The japanese mythology tag is a bit nebulous and we never found a use for it since again, so many copyrights on this site use some japanese mythology as a base. I have no idea what to do with it, as long as it is not the e621 route of tagging every picture of all those copyrights as it.

This will be the first step, to stop people from adding to it.

Step 2: moving all of the beast youkai to traditional_youkai
Step 3: nuking youkai into a disambiguation page so they can find the youkai they want

I would rather alias it after the nuke, since most of the tag is "youkai" girls. Deprecating just allows us scan the tag for the beastly youkai first and save those ones from the nuke, then afterwards youkai can be aliased to traditional_youkai.

That being said, I'm not entirely sure an alias would be better than having a disambiguation wiki of:

Ambiguous tag, do not use. Try traditional_youkai for more historical depictions or search a specific youkai species below:

etc

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