Danbooru

not all demon girls are succubi

Posted under Tags

jay19 put into words my exact thoughts.

You have a point, but every so often we change tag names because they're too broad, or not used like the wiki asks you to. In your case, succubus would just end up being a very broad tag with no clear definition - hell, just check the Succubus section of list of monster girl encyclopedia monster girls.
The common user won't go out of their way to check the wiki. At which point someone could add in what you would define as simply a demon girl, and a year down the line someone will go "hey what is the difference between demon girl and succubus?", everyone will have a heated discussion on what defines a succubus and what defines a demon girl, someone will propose to simply merge the tags, most people will agree to the merge and go on their merry way.

tl;dr broad definition, hard to implement.

Always remember that uploaders and taggers don't read wikis, if they have a common understanding of a very common concept. Basically everyone thinks he knows what a succubus is, which leads to the problem, that a hard definition is useless for danbooru. If we make a definition that is to specific, people won't read it, because, as I said, they have a common understanding of a succubus. If we create a definition that is open for different concepts it's going to be useless. Just google succubus and you will see, that we won't satisfy anyone with a open definition. Are they searching for a WoW succubus? Are they searching for the mythological one? Do they need to have wings or not? This leads to the problem, that succubus are very hard to tell apart from basic demon girls in sense of tagging. It would be more easy for everyone in such a case, to just search for exactly what they want, like "red skinned demon girls" etc.
Sometimes it seems favorable to have a basic tag for widely known concepts to please as much people as possible. I think that most people who come here to search for fetish art don't care if we had a wide definition of succubus, as long as they are able to search for succubus. Most will only care about the concept, not our hard definitions. But, like NNT explained, it will just lead to a lot of problems for tag gardening and searching, if people pollute such tags with garbage.

On another point: We don't keep tags because of tag limits. If we did that, we would have to implement even more combination tags, which will basically lead to more tag gardening problems etc. You can either support the site to be able to search for more tags or you have to use another booru, but then you're missing out on the active tag gardening user base and, once again, have to live with the trash tagging of other boorus.

I found a pair of images from the same artist that I feel illustrate the difficulties of tagging succubi visually. post #4546995 looks a lot like the stereotypical anime succubus, and I think fits most of the proposed criteria here. And indeed, the title of the image explicitly calls her a "succubus onee-san" so there's no doubt in my mind she's a succubus.

But what about post #3621050? She's got mostly the same visual motifs as the first pic. She's younger and has less emphasis on the sexy parts, but overall has the same color palette. Same bat-like patterns in the clothes. Same shaped wings, pointed ears, horns, fangs, and so on, but the artist describes her as a "akumakko", a demon kid. The artist's intentions here were not necessarily to make a "succubus," but they ended up using the same motifs as a character they did intend to be one.

One of the interesting things is that nearly all of your example images are of like... two characters. And one of the characters is canonically a Devil, not a Succubus.

So "succubus" as presented here wouldn't even be a canon tag. It's a headcanon tag. Hell, when I think Succubus I think of D&D 3.5e's Succubus, which wouldn't be tagged succubus by your guidelines.

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