Should there be tags for gacha characters' original costumes/skins?

Example: tashkent_(azur_lane) -tashkent_(the_sprite's_snapshot)_(azur_lane) -tashkent_(the_bound_cruiser)_(azur_lane) -tashkent_(muse)_(azur_lane) -tashkent_(the_blue_snoozer)_(azur_lane)

This kind of search is onerous to input and literally can't be done by most users due to search tag limits (and potentially also search timeouts from the number of exclusions). In theory, I guess excluding official alternate costume after a character's "base" tag should cover this use-case and come within the 2 tag search limit for regular members, but my experiences of attempting this have always met a large number of untagged official alternate costume posts, cosplay posts, and unofficial alternate costume posts that don't allow this kind of search to be very practical for normal users, especially when it comes to characters whose alternate costume(s) are vastly more popular than their original one (example: Le Malin), so I wonder if something better could be done. Is there a better way to doing this I'm not aware of, or is the thread title pertinent?

Umamusume and Honkai: Star Rail, among other copyrights, have already started creating tags like Special Week (Racing) (Umamusume) and March 7th (Preservation) (Honkai: Star Rail) for the "base costume." You could try setting up a favgroup BUR like in forum #375449 to get the ball rolling.

Tashkent_(azur_lane) -official_alternate_costume works as a replacement for that search.

I don't really know enough about the Uma or HSR situations to tell if they can be considered actual precedents for spreading their policies around to other copyrights. At least at a glance, it seems like Umas have mutliple outfits that could be considered "defaults" that wouldn't be applicable for official alternate costume, but that's not generally the case for games like AL.

My general rule of thumb for creating tags for defaults in Fate/Grand Hell is if the results are less than 50% of the total tag size, which is why I'm gunning for Johanna (Third Ascension) to be nuked and why I haven't created a tag for Kurohime's second ascension.

hasu_no_tokimeki said:

[..] March 7th (Preservation) (Honkai: Star Rail) for the "base costume."

For Honkai: Star Rail specifically, I should mention that March 7th (Preservation) (Honkai: Star Rail) only happened for two reasons: that character now has multiple variations where their original form would otherwise be unsearchable/take too many negations to find their "base" appearance and this was started by a single user who has/had an obsession with the character. Eventually that practice started to propagate to a limited selection of other characters in the game, otherwise base appearances do not get tags. See forum #339990 for a reply about tagging base appearances when this was done for the second time with Tingyun (Honkai: Star Rail).

I'm not a fan of tagging base character appearances unless it seriously can't be helped because searchability is otherwise difficult and it's not a precedent I'm thrilled to enable because then some builders are going to take it to the extreme for small copyrights. Open flood gates with caution.

If the default form is hard to search, especially for member users, then it's fine to make a tag for it. Half the tag being filled with other forms than the base is a good metric.

WRS said:

For Honkai: Star Rail specifically, I should mention that March 7th (Preservation) (Honkai: Star Rail) only happened for two reasons: that character now has multiple variations where their original form would otherwise be unsearchable/take too many negations to find their "base" appearance and this was started by a single user who has/had an obsession with the character.

Well, of course I know him. He's me.

To be specific, back when March 7th (Hunt) (Honkai: Star Rail) was first revealed I was initally going for (xianzhou) as the costume is obviously Chinese themed and is also what Pixiv had done there but then I went for (hunt) since I could also conveniently have (preservation) for the original one to follow the pattern of Trailblazer having new Path in every major versions.

In retrospective, (the_hunt) would be actually consistent to what is in the game but I was following the practice of shortening qualifiers like (feast) from Time to Feast! so whatever I guess.

nonamethanks said:

If the default form is hard to search, especially for member users, then it's fine to make a tag for it. Half the tag being filled with other forms than the base is a good metric.

For anyone needing an example, this was the same reasoning used to justify the creation of the VTuber (1st_costume)/et al default costume tags, as per the conversation starting at forum #240663, building off of the decision to tag Fate's first ascensions back in topic #17300.

I can quote forum #315192 from that costume thread that gave rise to the March example, when I suggested the same for Dan Heng:

While March's default outfit was handled without issue when her Hunt/Xianzhou outfit came up, no one ever considered applying the same treatment for Dan Heng's default outfit vis-a-vis Imbibitor Lunae. I decided to do this now since IL accounts for 42% of the total number of DH posts and this had to be done sooner or later.

I've always been of the stance that if an alternate costume/form doesn't take up a significant chunk of the chartag when searching, then a default costume chartag isn't needed. That was why I held back on further efforts after Fugue/Tingyun's example. Of course, that didn't stop others from applying it to others (e.g. Herta and Hoolay), so I (sorta) agree with what WRS said, that this is pretty much a slippery slope act.

Nell said:

Example: tashkent_(azur_lane) -tashkent_(the_sprite's_snapshot)_(azur_lane) -tashkent_(the_bound_cruiser)_(azur_lane) -tashkent_(muse)_(azur_lane) -tashkent_(the_blue_snoozer)_(azur_lane)

This search can be done with tashkent_(azur_lane) -tashkent_(*)_(azur_lane)

That will still include official alternate costumes without dedicated character tags (not that fanarts of official illustrations reliably have that tag), fan alternate costumes (also often not tagged), nudes, and won't include any post of the default costume alongside elements of other costumes (I don't think there are any in this case, but to know that you'd have to go through the lot).

I think it's better for the database to just tag default outfits for gachas, which is no more difficult than tagging any other outfit (you have to know it's the default to know not to add other tags), than to not do that just because subtractive searches can get roughly the same results.

BUR #47093 has been rejected.

mass update favgroup:46813 -> character:Bremerton_(Default)_(Azur_Lane)

Here's a Bremerton BUR to set precedent

>bremerton (azur lane): 5093 posts
>favgroup:46813: 1044 posts
Other searches
>bremerton_(azur_lane) -bremerton_(*)_(azur_lane): 2429 posts (40 false negatives)
>bremerton_(azur_lane) -*alternate_costume: 2006 posts (73 false negatives)

(edit: another important stat:
>bremerton (scorching-hot training) (azur lane): 1683 posts
)

Spatula22 said:

It seems Grimms Notes has tags for default skins. Those use (original). I don't know if that's terminology used in that game. I thought of suggesting that here, but everyone calls them default skins, and Original gets used to refer to what Danbooru calls old design.

Those aren't skins. The (original) qualifier is used to refer to the "無印" (don't know what the official English translation for this would've been) versions of characters. In Alice (Grimms Notes), outside of 'Original', from what I've been told the rest are all Alters. Or, to use a comparative example, Alice (Original) (Grimms Notes) to Alice (Grimms Notes) is Saber (Fate) to Artoria Pendragon (Fate).

Alice (Original) (Grimms Notes) was originally just Alice (Grimms Notes), and none of the alters were under the latter tag, until I spoke with the tagger behind Grimms Notes, Carmilla555, and explained how doing that was confusing compared to elsewhere on-site, leading to the (original) tags being made.

Damian0358 said:

Those aren't skins. The (original) qualifier is used to refer to the "無印" (don't know what the official English translation for this would've been) versions of characters. In Alice (Grimms Notes), outside of 'Original', from what I've been told the rest are all Alters. Or, to use a comparative example, Alice (Original) (Grimms Notes) to Alice (Grimms Notes) is Saber (Fate) to Artoria Pendragon (Fate).

Alice (Original) (Grimms Notes) was originally just Alice (Grimms Notes), and none of the alters were under the latter tag, until I spoke with the tagger behind Grimms Notes, Carmilla555, and explained how doing that was confusing compared to elsewhere on-site, leading to the (original) tags being made.

I've checked the usage of 無印 in Japanese internet discussions of Grimms Notes. I can't find it used to refer to characters. Instead, it seems to be consistently used in a sense of "first version" similar to how Pokemon Season 1 is called 無印.

The Grimms Notes game received a major update in Jan 2018, renaming the game to Grimms Notes Repage. The first version of Grimms Notes Repage was numbered 2.0.0, while previously the game's version numbers were 1.0.x. See: release notes. Japanese players called the 1.0.x versions "無印時代" (Mujirushi Era).

The character alters already existed in the 1.0.x era though. For example, Alice (Kagami No Kuni) was released in May 2016.

Therefore, I think it's inaccurate to use "無印" to describe the "original" characters, and we don't need to base the naming of their tags on this word.

I think it's a good idea, even if it's a Herculean task to go through every character. It's pretty annoying when it's harder to tag the base art of chars with popular skins then any skins that they have.

This bulk update request is pending automatic rejection in 5 days.

This bulk update request has been rejected because it was not approved within 45 days.

The bulk update request #47093 (forum #385535) has been rejected by @DanbooruBot.

I guess there wasn't enough support for such a departure from the norm, and the potential effort involved in applying it elsewhere. But I'm not done with this yet so I'll repropose this in a dedicated Azur Lane-specific thread at a later time.

Fun facts: Kashino has more depictions in cowprint costumes prior to her cowprint skin (102) than she has of her default from her inception until now (100). Three of her alts have more posts than her default, and maybe the other one will too one day because Robust Floral Strings makes up most of her recent posts.

And Zara has four times as many posts of her only alt skin (968) than her default (236).

The HMS Maids seem to have the most popular defaults. Most of the top-characters have <50% posts in their main, but Formidable's default has 2.6k posts to her overall 4.8k.