Treat Evernight as a separate character?

BUR #48947 has been rejected.

remove implication evernight_(honkai:_star_rail) -> march_7th_(honkai:_star_rail)
create implication evernight_(lurking)_(honkai:_star_rail) -> evernight_(honkai:_star_rail)

Long read. I suck at being concise. It's a character with several thousands of posts and potentially creating new precedent for taggers of this copyright though (and maybe even others) so I felt I should be extensive enough to foster discussion.

Hear me out: forum #344441, forum #376668, user #1413361 (and all his other dead accounts, they're a user on Danbooru with several deleted accounts that only uploads March 7th due to a rabid obsession) and evernight_(honkai:_star_rail) (dual_persona and (2girls march_*)). Culminating off of some discussions on Discord, implication/wiki frustration, different insights and, after playing the story, this just makes sense.

Usually implications for a gacha game are at least somewhat obvious (see the reason and voting record of forum #375266). I play the game and know the story. They look the same but they're completely different. The posts treat them completely differently in tone and appeal too, except for cases like post #10061231 (don't know if we have a tag for this and I'm not so sure how fitting out of character or personality switch are).

This also takes care of a BUR that is currently stuck in non-approval, the first line of forum #388675. I'll go over that later.

My go-to argument for implication chains and umbrella tags (sometimes I contradict myself here though and it turns out I agree with the arguments against them) is being able to find common posts without trouble. What this implication chain instead causes is March 7th's tag to become diluted. People who want to find March 7th only (cute, ditzy, all smiles) are also getting posts of Evernight (evil, yandere, badass).

My question with this BUR and show of voting then is if this is something we want to keep or not. Do most people searching for March 7th also want to be seeing Evernight or would they prefer separate tags so they can search for either one or both together (i.e. dual persona, dark persona)? Does the current implication chain help or no, and can someone who has no idea who any of these characters are be able to tell there's an obvious difference?

This may also end up creating an invokable precedent. Someone suggested Herta (Puppet) be split from The Herta (i.e. destroy the overarching umbrella tag) (I updated the wiki of Herta for discussion purposes because it was horribly out of date since it appears absolutely no one gives enough of a shit to maintain the Honkai: Star Rail wikis, nice reminder that if you want things done you have to throw your own hands in the mud). Then there's curious cases like Tingyun and Fugue and their tags that simultaneously don't make sense to split.

Most of this comes after expressing frustrations again about BUR approvals for implications and trying to prod evazion about his recent stances with character tags, then working it out to understand part of his problem is because the wikis don't tell him anything as someone who basically knows next to nothing on most of these copyrights, namely the ones where the automatic costume implications bot are set up which so happen to be mostly gacha games. This is a heavy paraphrasing of the exchange we had. See forum #391817, forum #389086 (this is where Evernight (Lurking) is stuck) and topic #33053.

With a more level head and revisiting the costumes part of this topic, March 7th (Nascent Spring) doesn't imply March 7th (Preservation). So I at least see that in some capacity - with how BURs are getting stuck due to their implication levels or wikis not doing a good enough job to encourage a BUR approval - we can separate the costume from a playable variant of a character. To this extent, I don't have a problem, and haven't had one for a long time after being the sole maintainer of 3 other copyrights' tags and wikis (all of which have over 10-40K+ posts uploaded by various people) and being in thick of costume/variant/etc implications and discussions with admins here.

What I'm getting at is that an Evernight costume (forum #389086) is stuck in non-approval because of the Dan Heng (Lurking) current implication proposal, and while not explicitly stated that can be taken as an extended rejection of Evernight's because that line wasn't isolated and approved. So now it comes to my mind if doing this not just solves getting the costume implicated but also on a broader scale improves searchability for these characters.

Drawbacks: one, if this is approved, people who want everything need to use a two-tag search. However maybe this is not as egregious of a problem as it would be to fragment the tagging of another character with multiple forms but still remaining the same all throughout, not as some alternate persona or whatever but as the exact same person with just multiple unique visual differences. Two, it requires gardening. As it's removing an upstream tag, approximately 1000 posts (the count of Evernight's posts) need to be checked carefully (cases of objectification, split theme, different reflection and other scenario tags where it may be solo but March 7th is still in those posts or not).

I was a little dubious about the original implication in the first place, so I'm not inherently opposed.

Except, without getting too deep in the vaguely spoilery story weeds, for the final scenes and it looks like going forward into the next patch, the story also has March 7th's personality using Evernight's appearance - which is what post #10061231, post #10037452, and a few others are referencing. There's also just kind of generically art that has the trio of Trailblazer, Dan Heng and then Evernight "representing" March regardless of whether she's clearly drawn with one personality or the other (post #9817030), and other art where Evernight is drawn acting more like March (post #9875985).

Do we care about this? I don't know. Without a crystal ball to guess what artists are going to draw in the next few months, I worry we're setting ourselves up for some ambiguous line drawing about when an Evernight post should be tagged with March 7th and when it shouldn't. (I don't even want to think about trying to do some kind of split between Evernight (Honkai: Star Rail) and a hypothetical March 7th (Evernight) (Honkai: Star Rail) to try to distinguish "actual Evernight" from "March looking like Evernight".)

(And for whatever it's worth I'm about 90% sure that at some point years down the line the story will fully confirm that they are "really" the same person in some way or another and maybe merge the personalities.)

So at this point I just kind of throw up my hands and meh-face.

I believe Fire Emblem keeps the implications with this sort of character.

I think the answer to the story questions will probably become more clear in the near future.

I haven't gotten to the part of Honkai: Star Rail with Evernight (Honkai: Star Rail) yet, so please stop me if I'm saying something completely off-base, but we have the various personalities of Kuzu Suzumi implying the base tag, so it's not unprecedented to have implications like this.

The issue is twofold here, however:

A. Size. March 7th (Honkai: Star Rail) alone is 7.1k posts big, while Kuzu Suzumi is under 400 posts. This is not great for filtering in the former case.

B. Besides above, the base March 7th has been around for longer than Evernight, whereas the personalities of Suzumi have always been firmly established. And since Evernight is explicitly an alternate personality of March's and the outfit is also used as an official alternate costume for base March, this runs into the issue of trying to find art of the personality and only getting base March in the outfit which is...Well, not great.

The solutions here are to either use a tag like dark persona to indicate the difference, or to, well, deimplicate it as this thread is suggesting we do. And I'm not really sure how good either solution is, with all this in mind. As it stands right now, I think it'd be safer to just use dark persona/dual persona for art of the personality (so that the costume remains safely implied for base March, but I'm not against a deimplication.

Maybe any art of base March in this outfit could be tagged as Evernight (Honkai: Star Rail) (cosplay)? I don't think that's quite how the cosplay tags works though...Otherwise, we might just end up with March 7th (Evernight) (Honkai: Star Rail) as feared.

tamuraakemi said:

I believe Fire Emblem keeps the implications with this sort of character.

I think the answer to the story questions will probably become more clear in the near future.

A simple example of this would be the Female Robin (Grima) (Fell Tactician) (Fire Emblem) -> Female Robin (Grima) (Fire Emblem) -> Female Robin (Fire Emblem) chain. Of course, Grima!Robin's outfit is much closer to normal Robin, but it's a distinct character that gets implied to the main character due to appearance and story circumstances anyway.

Honestly, I didn't know we opened up a discussion thread regarding Evernight.

Unlike the one getting an "honorable mention" for their "dedication" to March, I was the one who made the Evernight chartag when her drip was released. Beyond that, I left it to others to decide on whether it would be separate or implicated to March herself (with the latter happening in the end). I'm really not in favor of splitting her off March implication-wise since story-wise, Evernight's going to stay in March's consciousness as March's anti-Garden defense mechanism. Basically, we're currently on a Seele Vollerei-to-Veliona situation and it works just as fine.

Although at some point, we may end up with a Herrscher Of Sentience scenario and just split Evey's implication off March, depending on the story years down the line. But I'd rather adopt a wait-and-see by monitoring the story as it happens.

While I am not too adapt in HSR lore, I am pretty certain that, like ArcieA above me already mentioned that we are dealing with an Seele-Seele (Alter Ego) type of situation. With both Night and March occupying the same body. Plus in this cutscene March turns into Evernight. Which just further reinforces the case of keeping M7 as an implication for Evernight.

While March can exist without Evernight, Evernight cannot exist without March, thus fulfilling what is needed for a implication. Herrscher of the Void cannot exist without Kiana Kaslsna either for example. Despite them being pretty much different characters in terms of personality.

So no, Evernight shouldn't be a independent tag and the implication is reasonable and justified.

Sorry for late contributions to this topic - I've been waiting a bit for some more responses and I've also forgotten to reply each time I see a new reply to offer an alternative perspective. Now that I actually remember, before I forget again, I'll send one through.

First, I don't like that Honkai Impact 3rd precedent keeps being mentioned in these similar types of topics. Even to the maintainers (me) of that topic, things can get very easily confusing, and the implications are sorely outdated. You need to explain these things in terms of people who don't know a single thing about the characters and the world. I've already been working on fixing their implications. So I just want to get that out of the way - don't bring it up if you can't explain it to a non-player.

nonemouse said:

the story also has March 7th's personality using Evernight's appearance

This was my chief concern. Currently, most art of Evernight clearly depicts the dark persona. That could change at any time. If you show anyone these two characters without context, they would likely assume official alternate costume + dark persona. To this extent, in lieu of my arguments and invocaiton of precedent for separating them, I wonder how much sense that would make to someone who doesn't know anything here to have them separate.

Perhaps the more accurate way to summarise that is to say "the ship has already sailed" in them being implicated instead of waiting a bit longer until we had more context on who the character actually was and what kind of art would be pumped out of them. It's not a massive dealbreaker when it comes to searching and only because March 7th (Preservation) exists. It's a bit of a trickier deal for untagged alternate costumes and nude where the two apply, though we might want to start thinking about the applicability of dual persona + dark persona to help with differentiating their searches.

Knowledge Seeker said:

[..] but we have the various personalities of Kuzu Suzumi implying the base tag, so it's not unprecedented to have implications like this.

Most of the time this makes sense. miHoYo is notoriously confusing even to the most well-informed on their copyrights. For their previous game, Honkai Impact 3rd - and this is where it makes sense to talk about a different copyright, where I will explain exactly what the circumstances are instead of just expecting people to assume - there was a slightly similar situation with the characters Fu Hua and Herrscher of Sentience where the latter was implicated to the former because they were introduced to us as a dark persona. Over time though it became abundantly clear - through the game, through media and otherwise - that they were treated as completely separate characters (look-alikes). That's why I was able to get them separated.

The main thing to make note of is if this would be confusing to the average user or if they could reasonably pick a sample size and find that there are different expectations on such posts when searching either tag, and if it's a pain in the ass to tag. A lot of taggers, familiar or not with the copyright, use implication hierarchies as a lazy excuse to avoid other tags that'd make finding or differentiating these posts better. Sometimes it can help to separate "alternate" "personas".

B as you bulleted is a definite issue though, I agree.

Azura DB said:

While March can exist without Evernight, Evernight cannot exist without March, thus fulfilling what is needed for a implication. Herrscher of the Void cannot exist without Kiana Kaslsna either for example. Despite them being pretty much different characters in terms of personality.

None of this matters to Danbooru which is part of the discussions I had on character tag implications with evazion being difficult to go through. He doesn't know anything about the game so he expects some information somewhere to help him out otherwise he won't reach the same conclusion that some of the implications are good like someone well-versed in the copyright does, which then forces him to do his own research/play the game and make a decision on his own.

The only reason I do not plan to separate Kiana Kaslana (Herrscher of the Void) isn't because of whatever you said here, it's because they're quite literally still the exact same character in every way. These aren't good discussion points for implications. Different characters beget separate tags unless there's a good reason for keeping them together that you can explain in terms of someone who doesn't play.

This discussion is also hopefully supposed to show, if that consensus is reached, if having a three-tier implication hierarchy to accommodate Evernight is really the only option as a current costume BUR is stuck. That is all in addition to if removing the implication would improve searchability or understanding of these characters.

It is also - rant time - a cry for help for someone who cares enough to update the fucking wikis already. Part of this whole trouble is because the wikis are shit. People write the absolute most random shit and lie on what the tags are really about by misusing the custom text formatter as well as not even making base character tag wikis extensive on the possible tags a character can have. Compare 735567 to 788756 for Herta. Hell, I didn't even realise until I needed to hyperlink those that for whatever reason someone decided it was smart enough to call them skins when they're actually alternate forms and that confused evazion when he realised there were implications to those tags!

It would be easier for us to get implications if admins could actually see, without having to dive into a rabbit hole themselves, what the differences between the characters are instead of assuming these are all costumes for the same character. Rant over. tl;dr Go update the wiki pages, especially the people who care enough to make implications but not to do any proper writing. Wiki pages are half the issue. The other half is the original post which is if it makes sense to do this from a general perspective both for people who know the copyright deeply and those who don't or at all.

WRS said:

It would be easier for us to get implications if admins could actually see, without having to dive into a rabbit hole themselves, what the differences between the characters are instead of assuming these are all costumes for the same character. Rant over. tl;dr Go update the wiki pages, especially the people who care enough to make implications but not to do any proper writing. Wiki pages are half the issue. The other half is the original post which is if it makes sense to do this from a general perspective both for people who know the copyright deeply and those who don't or at all.

Could you mention some of those faulty wiki entries? I could take a look and see what I can do.

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 #48947 (forum #391837) has been rejected by @DanbooruBot.

Azura_DB said:

Could you mention some of those faulty wiki entries? I could take a look and see what I can do.

There's honestly a pretty big list. If you want a gold standard to follow, Herta (Honkai: Star Rail) or just look at the ones evazion edits to see the kind of format he prefers for checking how a character looks and if their implications are worth the trouble. Generally all wikis should follow the same format and have every single implied tag visible in the base tag.