this may be my most word salad forum post yet, but bare with me here.
was doing some casual browsing of the character doll tag and it reminded me of this topic again. i want to bring back up the subject of creating a "character and character item" tag for characters seen together with physical items depicting their own likeness, like what i mentioned in forum #347951.
there's two sane ways of going about this that come to mind:
- repurpose pool #20887 for this kind of post, nuking away all the juxtaposition, cellphone photo etc. posts. because these concepts are covered by their respective tags, there's no real reason for them to remain in the pool.
- create a new tag, character_and_character_item (name suggestions welcome) and, since it would no longer serve any purpose, fully nuke pool #20887.
now, there's the obvious question of what exactly would separate this from meta. i don't have a very watertight argument for this but here's the way i think of it. the wiki of meta paints a specific picture in my mind:
A character from a series, game, etc, interacting with their own series or game as if they were ordinary people in the real world.
a character with an item depicting themselves is only meta, then, in the sense that it's a self-referential work. any artist can paint a self-portrait and any writer can write an autobiography after all, whereas being meta implies some kind of fourth wall breaking self-awareness.
to piggyback off the examples that gzb and ylimegirl gave, meta is Tomoe Mami watching Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica (post #855484), while character and character item is Tomoe Mami next to a painting of herself, not necessarily making a meta-reference to the copyright she is present in.
to close off this post, i'm going to share favgroup #44931 which includes a list of candidate posts for this hypothetical tag to help imagine the kind of post i'm going after.