Nuke mage

BUR #5706 has been approved by @evazion.

nuke mage

As per forum #187451
The mage tag is polluted by canon tagging, mostly genshin impact. Searching for mage ass shows why the tag is useless at the moment. To me it makes no sense to keep mage anyway, if we have wizard and witch already. I don't think there is a needed distinction between mage and wizard on danbooru.

There's also sorcerer and sorceress which should almost definitely be aliased to witch/wizard.

In theory witch is for female ones while wizard is for male ones. In practice, wizard ends up being for female ones too depending on canon because some uploaders are blind.

Do we merge all these padding tags into a single one (probably mage), or do we enforce the gender distinction between witch and wizard, nuking or merging all the other tags where appropriate?

Also just a nuke is a bad idea because we lose information. We have to do it manually.

There's also the long standing issue of witch hat vs wizard hat but I doubt we'll be fixing that any time soon (and no, tagging gandalf's hat as witch hat is stupid and nobody can convince me otherwise).

Unless having mage 1girl or mage 1boy is fine, we can have a distinction between witch and wizard.

I think we should update all of mage posts manually, but it's obviously a lot of work.

BUR #5708 has been approved by @evazion.

create alias sorcerer -> wizard
create alias sorceress -> witch

As above.

I'll clean up mage manually in the coming days if there's no disagreement. I'll mass move the genshin ones first since that's easy.

nonamethanks said:

create alias sorceress -> witch

The majority of the posts under sorceress would be better suited as being tagged wizard, that would suggest that this alias would lead to mistagging of images that should be tagged wizard as opposed to witch.

NWF_Renim said:

The majority of the posts under sorceress would be better suited as being tagged wizard, that would suggest that this alias would lead to mistagging of images that should be tagged wizard as opposed to witch.

How can we tell that a character is a wizard or witch if we don't tag it based on gender? There's no distinguishable traits across all franchises dabbling in magic. A female wizard is a witch as far as fantasy goes. Even what we call witch hat is the quintessential wizard hat shown in early fantasy literature.

nonamethanks said:

How can we tell that a character is a wizard or witch if we don't tag it based on gender? There's no distinguishable traits across all franchises dabbling in magic. A female wizard is a witch as far as fantasy goes. Even what we call witch hat is the quintessential wizard hat popularized by early fantasy literature.

We have a base type witch design to go with which is what the tag was for. If we're literally just tagging any magic user as witch then you're just diluting the tag with an assortment of female characters and magic, which makes the tag imo fairly useless and removes the utility of having a tag for actual halloween-ish witches.

Edit: For example images like post #1637734 and post #2552278 should not be tagged witch.

NWF_Renim said:

We have a base type witch design to go with which is what the tag was for. If we're literally just tagging any magic user as witch then you're just diluting the tag with an assortment of female characters and magic, which makes the tag imo fairly useless and removes the utility of having a tag for actual halloween-ish witches.

By looking at sorceress I don't see a single post that I wouldn't just tag witch, or that I wouldn't tag at all with any of these tags because it's canon tagging (post #55015).

Even the wiki is contradictory, because it says:

Defined as a female witch who uses or practices magic that derives from supernatural or occult sources

which implies sorceress should at the very least be implied to witch.

Honestly you might as well just create a new catchall tags like male_magic_user or female_magic_user instead of trying to shoehorn your definition into terms that generally have stereotypical design appearances.

NWF_Renim said:

tags like male_magic_user or female_magic_user

This doesn't sound like a bad idea, but what definitions they'll have?

NWF_Renim said:

We have a base type witch design to go with which is what the tag was for. If we're literally just tagging any magic user as witch then you're just diluting the tag with an assortment of female characters and magic, which makes the tag imo fairly useless and removes the utility of having a tag for actual halloween-ish witches.

Edit: For example images like post #1637734 and post #2552278 should not be tagged witch.

I didn't think about those when I mentioned sorceress earlier in the other forum thread... but yeah, something just feels wrong about tagging those two posts as witch. Because, hmm, it doesn't fit with the usual design one would expect from a character described as a witch, even with the wide variety of designs in anime.

So, yes, if we must have a tag for male (non-religious/spiritual) magic user and female (non-religious/spiritual) magic user for consistency purposes... best to use separate tags for those. Though at that point we might as well just... stuff both into a single "magic user" tag (which oddly appropriately enough, can be called "mage") and just rely on the *boy(s) *girl(s) *other(s) tags for the 'gender' part. Because, well, by that point those tags are wholly detached from any kind of "design appearances". They just describe "male occult magic user" and "female occult magic user". Why not just use "occult magic user" then since we already have 'gender' encoded in the other tags? And by that point, why not call that "mage"?

And this is what the new proposed usage for witch and wizard are starting to resemble. If we completely divorce them from the usual "stereotypical design appearances" (as NWF Renim puts it), all we get is "female mage" and "male mage", at which point we might as well just drop the female/male distinction and use... "mage". Oddly enough. Which we already have, though admittedly it is flooded with Mona at the moment. But she is, technically speaking, an "occult magic user" after all.

From the four witch is the only concrete one with a pervasive appearance in pop culture and is also an inherently gendered term see post #3046054 that's why I don't support aliasing it to sorceress, since the latter is more open to interpretation.

On the other hand how would you distinguish between sorcerer/sorceress, mage and wizard? For those cases we have the plethora of attire and equipment tags and I don't know if those subjective tags hold their purpose.

witch is already being used for all manner of female magic casters. Unless someone is willing to go through the 9.4k posts in the tag and sort it out, and then garden the tag until the end of time, then I don't see the point in keeping all of these different denominations separate when users are just going to go with canon tagging.

There's more results under witch -hat -broom -cat -robe than sorceress, even counting mistags, so good luck enforcing any semblance of order.

The search results did look fairly 'witchey' to me at first but I guess then the tag is not really necessary considering the attire tags and labor needed otherwise.

There is 120 or so women in wizard that I suppose will need moving.

nonamethanks said:

There's more results under witch -hat -broom -cat -robe than sorceress, even counting mistags, so good luck enforcing any semblance of order.

I mean the same could be said with cleaning up any tags, and there are plenty of examples in your results that wouldn't really qualify for any magic user tag to begin with, let alone the witch tag. Examples: post #124529, post #2259447, post #473775, post #1839409.

The fact still stands that with 9k+ post the vast majority actually resemble the stereotypical witch is much more telling imho than the fact that a small minority don't.

NWF_Renim said:

Examples: post #124529, post #2259447, post #473775, post #1839409.

I guess these are just tagged cannonically.

Let's just use mage as the generic "occult magic user' tag. This is what a lot of English-speaking people would do in the context of fantasy media anyway. That's how DnD uses it. And a lot of games. [Don't want to (or can't) exactly describe someone as a "wizard", "wizard", "warlock", "sorcerer" "sorceress", etc. etc., just use mage. I suppose "magic user" would also be okay, but that's more syllables (and letters), and spellcaster might cause some issues because some people only consider "spells" to be a specific 'kind' of magic, i.e. something that is formulaic and/or systematic.

So if one wants to find a specific gendered "magic user", then mage + the usual 'gender' tags will work somewhat adequately.

Then let all the various different "occult magic user" tags (Wizard, Witch, etc. Not Priest and the like though, or "divine magic user" in DnD terms) imply mage. Doesn't matter if it's a generic cosplay, if it looks like a "magic user garb", then it gets implicated to mage, easy as that (Yes, not like how I suggested earlier, but that distinction was kinda silly and makes things harder to judge). Now all the mage tags on Mona posts fit.

Leave most of 'mess' with Witch and Wizard and Sorceress alone. If one finds anything that is 'mistagged', that is, fits better with one tag than the other (e.g. Witch instead of Sorceress), then change the tags accordingly.

(And maybe also [re]write some wikis to help clarify the usual "stereotypical design appearances", especially for ESL users who are not familiar with how those words usually mean for English-speaking fans of fantasy-setting media.)

This keeps the status quo, which seem to be working fine for people looking for Witch and Wizard posts, make all the "job tagging" of Mona fit within this "general definition" of mage (though all her posts should also probably be tagged Witch on top. And all her images in civvies or alternate costumes should have both removed). It also lets us use mage as a generic tag for "occult magic user", which seems to be how people was using it before Mona. So, overall, I'd say win-win for everybody.

NWF_Renim said:

The fact still stands that with 9k+ post the vast majority actually resemble the stereotypical witch is much more telling imho than the fact that a small minority don't.

If the description the wiki provides is what you mean by stereotypical witch, then not really. 7.7k of witches are tagged witch hat; 2.6k are tagged broom; 876 are tagged black dress, even fewer long dress and fewer still both; 355 are tagged magic; and 261 are tagged black cat. Combining any of these, only witch broom witch_hat returns a significant amount, at 2.1k.

So this means the only actual recurring themes of being a witch are wearing a wide brimmed pointy hat and carrying a broom. Which apparently the majority of witch doesn't actually fulfill.

blindVigil said:

If the description the wiki provides is what you mean by stereotypical witch, then not really. 7.7k of witches are tagged witch hat; 2.6k are tagged broom; 876 are tagged black dress, even fewer long dress and fewer still both; 355 are tagged magic; and 261 are tagged black cat. Combining any of these, only witch broom witch_hat returns a significant amount, at 2.1k.

So this means the only actual recurring themes of being a witch are wearing a wide brimmed pointy hat and carrying a broom. Which apparently the majority of witch doesn't actually fulfill.

For some reason there are like around 20k+ Marisa posts under -witch kirisame_marisa witch_hat -alternate_costume that haven't been tagged with witch yet. And a quick look of the first few pages seem to show that most of them qualify. Witch hat + black_dress (or purple robe) for most of them, which generally would count as Witch by themselves. Never mind that Marisa's default costume just screams "witch" even if you take her hat off and deprive her of her broom. Her overall character design is meant to be, well, witch anyway, so she still looks witchy even if you individually take away bits and parts of her costume that normally define a generic, stereotypical “Double, double toil and trouble" witch.

So, just include, I dunno, 10k of those into Witch. and presto! Majority of witch posts now look like witches!