Resolving the existence of Grimm's Fairy Tales

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Damian0358

BUR #41269 has been approved by @nonamethanks.

deprecate grimm's_fairy_tales

This tag was created back in 2011, first mentioned in forum #61828, with the purpose of pairing together the fairy tales made popular by the Brothers Grimm and their efforts to collect them all together (which you can tell by the fact that the tag creator also supported a more general fairy tale tag to be made, a tag that'll never be given how we nuked mythology, folklore, etc. because those are way too broad).

However, despite existing for over a decade, this tag failed to gain traction, at least over the individual fairy tales associated with the Brothers Grimm. Now, it has to be pointed out that, in contrast to the recently-made Andersen's Fairy Tales, the Brothers Grimm wrote none of the stories. All of them predate them in some shape or form, and can often be referenced without any mention of Grimm whatsoever. While this tag hangs around the 600s, Little Red is in the 2k+ range... and once you remove Red from their tag, you end up in the sub-200s... and removing Snow White puts you in the sub-40s.

I doubt the tag has many folks searching for it at all, especially as it might confuse folks to use it instead of the given fairy tale's copytag. Of the tales listed, only two are chartag only, Golden Goose (Grimm) and Rumpelstiltskin, and you could probably easily give them both their own copytags no problem (and you also have the Frog Prince, a copy-chartag). So I propose deprecating the tag and piecemeal taking it apart, adding tags where necessary, specifically any missing copytags and chartags.

However, if this BUR fails, we need to have a discussion on what purpose this tag should have. Because otherwise it's just going to hang around with basically no purpose.

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AngryZapdos

We shouldn't be grouping together random fairy tales based on whether or not they were in some anthology book. As Damian mentions, almost nobody uses the tag outside of its two most popular tales, leading me to believe its count is only this high because of taggers' afterthoughs of "oh yeah, wasn't this one of those fairy tales?" I was surprised to learn Thumbalina wasn't in there, for instance, and Beauty and the Beast was removed from the collection after its first edition - where would that fit in?

At the end of the day, this is a padding tag used to string together various narratives that have no real connection other than genre. +1 to its removal.

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Damian0358

nonamethanks said:

There's a bunch of posts under grimm's_fairy_tales -little_red_riding_hood -snow_white_(fairy_tale) -frog_prince -snow-white_and_rose-red -allerleirauh that need the specific story tagged.

post #1891319 seems to only have it due to it being inspired by a fairy tale (its childposts have the Magic Mirror from Snow White, properly tagged, but nothing specific here that's taggable), post #1937473 is already tagged The Girl Without Hands, post #4214846 is already tagged Hansel and Gretel, post #6115229 is already tagged Rumpelstiltskin (Fairy Tale), post #4334489 is banned (it's the Golden Goose (Grimm) post - needs to be swapped out for Golden_Goose_(fairy_tale_character) and Golden_Goose_(fairy_tale)), and post #2278693 and post #4325587 have generic 'Grimm's Fairy Tales' books.

There's only three actual posts without a tagged story, post #5889730, post #5893865, and post #7903575. The first plainly says in the commentary it's Hansel and Gretel, the second that it's The Wolf and the Seven Young Kids, and the third seems to be purely because it's a post with Prinzessin (Yu-Gi-Oh!), who in the original Japanese is called 'Cinderella', so she was technically already tagged!

Updated by Damian0358

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Damian0358

BUR #41575 has been approved by @nonamethanks.

create alias gretel_(grimm) -> gretel_(hansel_and_gretel)
create alias hansel_(grimm) -> hansel_(hansel_and_gretel)
rename dwarf_(grimm) -> dwarf_(snow_white)
rename huntsman_(grimm) -> huntsman_(snow_white)

Simultaneously, between this thread and topic #31190, we've been steadily reducing the (grimm) qualifier. The qualifier contributed in part to the confusion of which copytag should apply, which is why it's been aliased into (fairy_tale_character) to better align it with their (fairy_tale) copytag. That leaves these four undiscussed and in a position where that strategy doesn't apply.

Hansel and Gretel have a unique story name which works perfectly for a qualifier, ala Witch (Hansel and Gretel). The Dwarf and Huntsman tags appear to be solely used for Snow White, so disambiguating them a bit more would probably be useful, even if that means for the Dwarf tag that we'll have to disambiguate it a bit further later ala Queen (Snow White).

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Damian0358

nonamethanks said:

Still 4 posts under grimm's_fairy_tales -little_red_riding_hood_(fairy_tale) -snow_white_(fairy_tale) -frog_prince -snow-white_and_rose-red -allerleirauh -the_girl_without_hands -rumpelstiltskin_(fairy_tale) -the_wolf_and_the_seven_young_kids -hansel_and_gretel -golden_goose_(fairy_tale).

Privately reminded those posts were addressed above, and after discussing it, the two books received fairy tale book to ensure they remain searchable. There's presumably more taggable instances of this among the various fairy tale copytags, pool #4296, children's book, and reading together. Speaking of, Hankpropaniac57 highlighted before how children's book is vague, as it is used both for literal children's books, objects that can be read, but also children's books in the sense of actual readable picture books ala pool #2103, so we should probably fracture the tag, tag the former as fairy tale book where applicable and the latter as something more specific so that that style can be searchable.

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