Tag... mayhem: .hack//

Well, that's the best way I have to describe it.

Currently, there's 7 copyright tags for .hack// stuff:

.hack// (the generic franchise)
.hack//dusk (the manga/second anime)
.hack//g.u. (the second set of games)
.hack//liminality (OVA series, unimportant to this, has only one post)
.hack//games (only games, as opposed to the whole franchise)
.hack//roots (third anime)
.hack//sign (first anime)

There’s a couple problems with several tags

.hack//dusk: There is no such copyright. Dusk is a popular mistranslation of “tasogare”, from the original “.hack//Tasogare no Udewa Densetsu”. The actual name in English is .hack//Legend of the Twilight Bracelet. I think I already rambled enough about why I’d prefer the English title (seriously, it even says the exact same thing, only more people can understand it) but do whatever you see fit. In addition, it is sometimes colloquially called “.hack//UdeDen” in Japan, an abbreviation of Udewa Densetsu.

.hack//roots: The tag is painfully misused. I think I’ve seen a grand total of one image of a character that appears only in the anime, the rest are just Tabby or Haseo, and not even Haseo in his beginner model he used in the anime. Since Roots is part of the whole G.U. segment of the franchise and there are virtually no images of anyone that doesn’t appear in the game, I really see very little purpose for this one, it’d be like tagging the individual G.U. games. Mass edition possible?

.hack//games: This one just seems redundant. It’s somewhat of an arbitrary separation for game-only images that just excludes SIGN and what little there is of UdeDen. UNLESS the tag was originally meant for what I’m about to say and got confused along the way:

Whatever you’d call the original four games: Infection, Mutation, Outbreak and Quarantine. I think I’ve seen “.hack//IMOQ” used as a nickname, though this section of the franchise doesn’t have a proper name like G.U. does. However, there ARE a couple of these game-only images around and unlike Roots and G.U., the cast of the games is for the most part unique to them and doesn’t mix (too much) with SIGN or the rest. I’m willing to go and tag those images myself, but I thought I’d ask since it’s basically a tag I’m somewhat making up myself.

Ephyon said: Dusk is a popular mistranslation of “tasogare”, from the original “.hack//Tasogare no Udewa Densetsu”. The actual name in English is .hack//Legend of the Twilight Bracelet.

Well, not really a mistranslation. Just a shortening, after a fashion.
"黄昏 [たそがれ, こうこん] - (n) dusk, twilight"

As for the rest, I know nothing about Hack so I'm going to let people discuss this for awhile first before deciding anything. These multi-installment series tagging reevaluation threads are always a headache.

Ah, it's understandable if you don't have the context since it's mostly made up: The importance of the word is a somewhat complicated word-play that actually starts in English. In-universe, the root of all this was western, so the word was originally "Twilight", translated to Japanese as Tasogare. There's a symbolic detail regarding the bracelet in question: Whether the Twilight represents the dawn or dusk. The duality is lost if you translate it exclusively as one or the other, especially since the answer is the other way around.

Anyhow, I'm rambling.

My thoughts on the tags, seeing as how I uploaded many and gave them .hack tags where I saw them.

.hack//roots: In your message, you're saying that uploaded images shouldn't be tagged with roots unless the character only exists in roots. I think this would be a mistake. These characters appear prominently (for Tabby, mainly) in the anime. There ARE people out there who might search just the anime name and not think "well maybe they decided to leave characters from the anime out of this listing if they were in the games too." The later forms of Haseo might be something to remove that tag from, that one I'm not going to argue on, but when describing something, I tend to try and cover across installments when they're fairly concurrent.

.hack//games: I didn't know what to do when I found this tag in the beginning. Now that I'm a month or so later, I THINK this tag was meant to cover the first series of .hack games, not ALL of the games. It would be too redundant to use the tags .hack//infection, .hack//mutation, .hack//outbreak and .hack//quarantine to say what the characters are from, and too broad to leave it at .hack// .

I'm not saying the tag is useless in theory, it's just a retarded mess right now. It gives results for Haseo in the Xth form, Atoli and Azure Balmung for whatever reason and right now all it really does is serve as a joined search for Shino and Tabby images since none of the other anime-centric characters have any, [sarcasm]which makes sense given its popularity and outstanding production values.[/sarcasm] To boot, some of the Roots posts aren't even tagged as G.U.

Ephyon said:
I'm not saying the tag is useless in theory, it's just a retarded mess right now. It gives results for Haseo in the Xth form, Atoli and Azure Balmung for whatever reason and right now all it really does is serve as a joined search for Shino and Tabby images since none of the other anime-centric characters have any, [sarcasm]which makes sense given its popularity and outstanding production values.[/sarcasm] To boot, some of the Roots posts aren't even tagged as G.U.

I can't say anything for ones tagged Roots but not G.U., all the ones I remember tagging as roots also tagged G.U. because they were Tabby or Haseo and I counted Tabby's cameo and joining at the end of the last installment as worth putting her on as part of the games.

I never saw the anime outside the episodes that were on the game discs, so I don't know who else might be in them (such as maybe Atoli or Pi made an appearance or something).

.hack//games is the label typically used for the first four games: Kite, Blackrose, etc. See the hack wiki entry: http://dothack.wikia.com/wiki/Games

Shinjidude said:
.hack//games is the label typically used for the first four games: Kite, Blackrose, etc. See the hack wiki entry: http://dothack.wikia.com/wiki/Games

And as you can clearly see from what the tag actually lists here, nobody posting had any goddamn idea about that. It's really very understandable, just saying "games" is equivalent to only the first four is extremely arbitrary and unintuitive. If the tag is going to be made up, at least let's make up one that sorta seems logical.

I never said it was intuitive, only that it wasn't arbitrary or "made up". Among hack references "./hack//games" is what the first four are called. It's like using TOS for the first Star Trek; it's what everyone uses, but if you are unfamiliar with it, you might be confused.

Last I looked at the tag, .hack//games didn't have all the GU stuff in it, I'm not sure when that happened.

Edit: I've cleaned it up and added a wiki entry. Interestingly it seems most of the GU stuff was already properly tagged. I wonder if someone didn't just go ahead and decide to add .hack//games to them as well after the fact.

Shinjidude said:
it's what everyone uses

Who would "everyone" be, exactly? Whoever made that article? "Everyone" clearly had no idea when they used the tag for whatever had a game character in it. I've never seen it consistently called like that anywhere, it's either IMOQ, or "the first games" or "the original games" or "the first four games" or whatever. The tag is confusing not only for anyone not familiar with the franchise, but for anyone who is, but doesn't happen to know that THAT one particular arbitrary label is supposed to refer to only the first four. In practice, most people check the Wiki when they don't understand the meaning of a tag, not when the tag could easily mean something else and there's little reason to suspect ambiguity.

Besides, "TOS" is actually used in official or pseudo official media, by the copyright holders themselves and is tremendously widespread. This... isn't.

So change it, I'm not really attached to it. Like you said though, there isn't a canonical name for those games, so anything we do would be made up. A number of sources used .hack//games (which was probably coined prior to GU coming out making it unambiguous then), which is why it's used here. In any case it's clean now, as for its intended purpose, which will make moving it easier.

I have NEVER heard of them called IMOQ. Ever.

Earliest postings for the .hack//games tag go back to over 2 years ago. There's no way of telling what year the TAG was introduced, but it's a safe bet that it came in as soon as it could, which would mean about when those got posted.