Turning "Official Artist Extras" into a tag

Applying the tag liberally like this would lead to precisely what NNT warned of in forum #226924, it'd be flooded by random copyrights that have almost no art not from the official artist. Just some random copyrights off the top of my head:

And that's not even mentioning reverse cases, where (nearly) all of an artist's posts would qualify (Kashiwagi Tsukiko would be 167 / 213 = 78% at least, for example). This would just be tag padding going two ways where both aren't useful.

Apologies for the delayed response.

This case revolves around 2 games in a franchise by a major game publisher. When a game is developed at the same scale of releases like Drag-on Dragoon 3 and NieR Re[in]carnation, design decisions often pass through some sort of approval process by the leads of the development team, not just the character designer's inclinations. Processes like that happen across other mediums, but with video games in particular, its rarer for the lead character designer to have final say.

I understand the unwillingness to make this tag's coverage too broad, but if a line in the sand is to be drawn, I think, at least when it comes to video games, it should include illustrations by other leads of the development team. They all had opportunities to help define the overall look of whichever project they helmed, and by definition make up a very small contingent to be taken in consideration. Producers, writers, engineers, managers etc. seldom illustrate; and not every creative lead, concept artist, 3D director is on social media.

For overall considerations, this tag can be incredibly useful, but the scale and medium differences at play mean that a one-size-fits-all definition is not possible. It needs guidelines to be hashed out beyond the simple definition on the wiki.

by-septic_pm said in forum #415730:

words

by this logic all the kiana x fu hua art meadow drew back in the day is canon cause she sometimes does art for honkai impact 3rd

When I see official artist extra, I am thinking much more about copyrights where an entire character's design is contracted out to a single artist who is responsible for creating their design and full assets, as is the case for Arknights, Azur Lane and Goddess of Victory: NIKKE. I think it's fun to see artists who love "their" characters so much that they even draw extra media of them, like mikan03_26 with Red Hood (NIKKE).

I am not thinking of it being applied to characters where someone is only tangentially related and does not handle the character alone in their sole capacity. Someone who is simply responsible for giving the okay in a design or someone who participates in a group of people responsible for a part of a character might not necessarily be an artist or have the art side in mind for their contribution, so it doesn't make sense to apply it there. At best, it can be a fun factoid in the comments.

If we only start considering tangential contributions or "anything from this artist at all that they made themselves that they're also making non-canon content of", it's a quick way to reduce the already-tight value of the tag into uselessness.

The wiki says it's for the official artist of a character. An art director is not the official artist of a character. Someone who contributed sketch A that never made it as the final draft is not the official artist of a character. Someone who researched culture X as the inspiration for the character's thematics is not the official artist of a character. By then we are far divorced from "fanart by a character's artist" and looking at "fanart by anyone remotely involved with the character". I don't think that's what anyone had in mind when it was the pool, so it shouldn't change now that it's become a tag.

For the above, official artist extra doesn't make a statement of canonicity, but in a similar vein, I would expect to see the tag applied for Benghuai Xueyuan characters (i.e. ask (askzy) drawing Raiden Mei) but meadow_(morphinecaca) being considered an official artist just because they were contracted to draw a CG set smells like dilution to me.

I'm confused on the scope of this tag now so I'd appreciate some clarification, does extra artwork from people who are involved with the series in official capacity like animators posting bonus art around anime episode release to announce that they worked on it such as post #10641643 not count as official artist extra, or artists responsible for manga adaptation of a series drawing unofficial alternate costumes like in post #10429483, since they're not the character designers? These are something that comes to mind for me when official artist extras are mentioned and something I'd want to find with this tag, but I guess I might have been fundamentally misunderstanding it...

To give an example of how the current definition is unsuitable to major publisher video games: Final Fantasy IX credits 12 different people for "character design"; some of their work is publicly known, some characters can be assumed to have been designed by specific artists via stylistic comparison of concept art, but for various characters, their "parent" is completely unknown.

Meanwhile, Hideo Minaba (who is solely credited as art director) is known to have designed Vivi and "primarily designed" the Tantalus troupe. Shuko Murase's final design of Freya was the result of his significant alterations of a pre-existing draft by 1 or more unknown artists, while his Quina design was merely adding clothes to work already done by 1 or more unknown artists. Toshiyuki Itahana worked on side characters, but also provided additional design work for some main characters (variant facial expressions for Zidane, Garnet's dress in the final cutscene). And that's on top of the base ideas, which came from the entire art team and producer Hironobu Sakaguchi. Of those 3, Itahana was the only one who stayed at Square Enix for more than a few years following the game's release, and he was the main artist who took on new illustrations over the decades and the approvals process for subsequent products based on the game.

And that's only known because of a 20th anniversary feature by Famitsu, which interviewed those 3 artists. There's myriads other games out there where exact division of labor and some attribution of authorship is either hard to find or downright impossible.

To reiterate, different mediums elicit different dynamics in this matter. The followups have concerned service games, where designers are credited individually and can have significant social media presence. This situation is also prevalent in the vtuber space, but its very different from how "package" games go about things.

ANON TOKYO objected to my application of the tag to art of a franchise with work by plenty of artists here due to concerns about copyrights mostly present here through drawings by their creators. They listed manga as examples, and pointed to an earlier post in this thread voicing concern over pixiv manga and webcomics with similar presence. Personally, I think a "ratio rule" in the wiki could be pointed to so as to not dillute the tag on this front. Plenty other pages have "do not" clauses already.

Someone else earlier in the thread pointed out some murkiness in what counts as official or extra art, in regards to indie music by producer/illustrator duos, but nobody else familiar with that field chimed in.