Nuke mage

NNescio said:

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!

Kirisame_marisa -witch witch_hat alone is 28k posts, she would quadruple the tag's size and completely dominate it. If we also say her outfit is witchy enough as well, hat or no, then that's probably at least another 10-20k. Which isn't me saying she shouldn't be tagged witch, but she would skew the numbers heavily in one direction.

It doesn't surprise me that Marisa is never tagged witch, there's tons of unspoken "don't bother tagging this or that" with Touhou.

blindVigil said:

Kirisame_marisa -witch witch_hat alone is 28k posts, she would quadruple the tag's size and completely dominate it. If we also say her outfit is witchy enough as well, hat or no, then that's probably at least another 10-20k. Which isn't me saying she shouldn't be tagged witch, but she would skew the numbers heavily in one direction.

It doesn't surprise me that Marisa is never tagged witch, there's tons of unspoken "don't bother tagging this or that" with Touhou.

It's mostly because people don't want one character (or one copyright) dominating a tag. If most people just Touhou characters whenever they qualify, a lot of tags will be flooded with them, making it necessary to use additional tags to exclude -Touhou or -[specific char name]. There was not much of a need to tag an obvious tag. If someone wants to search for Marisa, they'll do an explicit search, making stuff easier for other people who don't want to do so.

For similar reasons, I don't tag, say, mechanical_arms (or most of the mechanical_* family of tags) for mecha or robot. They obviously have mechanical parts (barring I dunno weird exceptions like biomechas or something), there's no need to tag them because it's obvious and just wind up clogging up the search for people who are trying to look for mechanical parts on humans (or animals, or androids that are supposed to look like humans).

The system used to work well. Most things sort of intuitively know what to tag under those tags, even with unclear wikis. Mostly because there is some kind of implicit understanding what those tags mean. "Stereotypical design appearances", to quote NWF Renim.

The problem is that over the years we have a lot of new copyrights and new characters and new users coming in. So over time there is a 'tag drift'... especially since a lot of fans of newer copyrights seem to be overzealous with tagging everything that "might probably count". Which is part of the reason all these job tagging occurs, with people tagging a character trait (job title/race/class) included just because it's mentioned in canon lore, even though it's not readily apparent in the picture.

At this point, well... if one cares about certain tag distinctions, and if there's a convenient Touhou character that already more than qualifies for that tag but is undertagged for it (Reimu doesn't count for mikos because she wears a 'nontraditional' costume), it can be very tempting to just include multiple Touhou posts (that already more than qualify, but not included because of consideration for not clogging other people's searches) just to reassert the "old standards".

Oni also might have similar problem in the future. Nezuko comes in people started knee-jerk 'race'-tagging posts, resulting in... this: kimetsu_no_yaiba -horns oni. Even when all the characters have zero oni traits. It isn't a problem yet, but I dunno, if more series pop up with similar characters, and users continue to indiscriminately tag such characters with oni even if they have zero oni traits, then... well, we might have the same problem again, but with ibuki_suika -oni horns being 'added' instead to potentially fix this.

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Edit: Sleep-deprived ramblings removed until I can better edit those parts.

Edit2: Rephrased things to use more neutral language. I don't even know why I was ranting about those parts, and in a way contrary to my earlier position. Must be sleep deprivation kicking in. Anyway, sorry.

I do think we should avoid using witch as the term for any female spellcaster. The stereotypical witch is a caricature hundreds of years old, and while a lot of modern things called a "witch" may lack traits from that caricature, the core aspects of a witch goes back to the 16th and 17th century. Brooms, Cauldrons, Cats, odd ingredients, brewing, hexes, curses, and pointed hats (though pointed hats is a recurring theme and has additional origins elsewhere) are all derived from the caricature of alewives coming out of the 15th century.

Brewing in the past was originally a part of what would be considered "domestic work" and was therefore work commonly done by women. In the 15h century brewing as a business caught on and the ones commonly doing it were women. The cauldrons, odd ingredients, and cats were an associations stemming from brewing alcohol, as the cauldrons were for brewing the alcoholic concoction, the "odd ingredients" were the various herbs and spices for flavoring, and cats were very common because as a business dependent on grains that meant having to deal with mice and rats. Brooms and pointed hats were apparently associated as means of standing out from the crowd and identifying oneself or hut as the home to a brewer so people would know what was being sold. The broom for example being hung over the doorway as a means of indicating what you could find inside.

With the reformation in the 16th and 17th centaury also came hand-in-hand with the timing of men pushing to take over the practice of brewing for profit. As a means of destroying the competition by women brewers the accusation of witchcraft was labelled against them. Curses and hexes being also a means of laying blame for the actions carried out by drunk men onto the brewers who produced the alcohol. The stories and press then became tying things commonly associated with alewives with what was defined as a witch, which then became the stereotypical "witch" thought of today.

As for sorceress, there is a type of depiction that I think could be separated out from other conventional female spellcasters that may be worth using the label "sorceress" for. While I think witches and wizards are generally associated with more conservative clothing that covers the body, there was also that common depiction for of female spellcasters in fantasy as wearing very revealing clothing that tended to stand in contrast to the stereotypical wizard, mage, or witch. Examples: post #4451201, post #3023912, post #2681722, post #4065113, post #594918. The style probably originates from fantasy stories designed to appeal to young men as the female spellcaster wears very revealing and form fitting clothing.

I gave some thought and I think I sort of have an idea of how the various "occult magic user" tags/jobs are conceptualized, though I have difficulty... phrasing those in a coherent manner. Still working on those. Though basically the TL;DR version is:

1. Witch: Macbeth-esque “Double, double toil and trouble” female occult magic user. Usually wears a distinctive wide-brimmed 'traffic-cone hat' in combination with dark-colored traveling clothes (e.g. robes, cloaks, billowing capes, 'practical' dresses).
Archetypal examples: Weird Sisters (Macbeth), Granny Weatherwax (Discworld)

2. Wizard: 'Wise' and 'experienced'-looking occult magic user. Often old and has a long-flowing beard. Actual appearance/clothes vary, but the following examples provide two general archetypes.
Archetypal examples: Gandalf, Merlin (not the dickwizard version!)

3. Sorcerer: Powerful, 'confident-looking', 'virile' occult magic user. Often has propped-up high collars (Warning: TV Tropes link). As a further contrast to the wizard, generally has neatly trimmed facial hair (often sporting a goatee). Often has an 'exotic' appearance.
Archetypal examples: Doctor Strange (Marvel)

4. Sorceress: Powerful, 'confident-looking' (read: sexy) female occult magic user. Usually has some sort of exotic headgear instead of a hat, to further contrast with the witch archetype. Often has an 'exotic' appearance.
Archetypal examples: Maleficent (Disney)

5. Mage: Generic occult magic user. if you have an occult magic user that can't fit them into any of the above... mage is the usual fallback. Because of this, there are no archetypcal examples.
Examples: Black Mage (Final Fantasy I), White Mage (Final Fantasy I), Ricken (Fire Emblem: Awakening)

Currently trying to type a... better-explained version of the above, though it's still WIP.

Anyway, not sure if we need all the above tags, but in hindsight it'll be a good idea to at least keep Witch and Wizard. I suppose we can populate Witch with enough Marisa examples if we must.

Mage is also nice to have, but it does (and will) get 'polluted' very often with all the characters with "mage" as part of their job names. Still... if we want to, mage (as a discrete fallback generic occult magic user tag and not a catchall tag that the others imply to) is salvageable. So...

1. Toss in the Vivi Ornitier posts that qualify (hat seem a bit undertagged for Vivi) and we prolly get two hundred posts. Black Mage has more but this requires careful sifting because any black mage that appears overly female is a witch instead. And Final Fantasy XIV ones (different outfit) being sorceresses.
2. Toss in ricken_(fire_emblem) hat, another thirty.
3. Toss in white_mage robe... 374. And white_mage has more that qualify because their robes are kinda undertagged. Might probably be too much though.
4. Red Mage is a big toss-up. Some count as witch, some count as mage, some count as sorcerer... kinda a headache. Good way to find examples to feed to other tags though.
5. The Touhou witches (the race/youkai) also count, at least when they're overtly using magic. Ironically enough despite their 'race'. So, ~alice_margatroid ~hijiri_byakuren ~patchouli_knowledge magic -witch_hat has nearly 400 examples (probably ~300 that qualify, and maybe around 150-200 'decent' ones). Fortunately enough, this doesn't flood the tags with Touhou examples.

And I suppose 'Eastern' occult magic users that don't quite fall under onmyouji or miko (nontraditional ones too) miiight also fit under mage, but this is probably not a good idea. Yukari overtly using magic doesn't really fit, and neither do, say, Taoist practitioners.

(The Yukari/Eirin/Okina-style occult magic user seems to be some sort of syncretic mix between both Onmyouji and Taoist practices. Not overtly any of them though, but there are some elements of both. Clothes-wise they tend to wear, well, almost everything, but they usually also wear some kind of Chinese-style tabard on top, often with trigram markings and/or Eastern-style constellation print)

NWF_Renim said:

As for sorceress, there is a type of depiction that I think could be separated out from other conventional female spellcasters that may be worth using the label "sorceress" for. While I think witches and wizards are generally associated with more conservative clothing that covers the body, there was also that common depiction for of female spellcasters in fantasy as wearing very revealing clothing that tended to stand in contrast to the stereotypical wizard, mage, or witch. Examples: post #4451201, post #3023912, post #2681722, post #4065113, post #594918. The style probably originates from fantasy stories designed to appeal to young men as the female spellcaster wears very revealing and form fitting clothing.

It's mostly because the sorcerer/sorceress archetypes project "power". And "confidence". Both tend to use bolder colors than their witch/wizard counterparts. The male version also generally cares more about his appearance (compared to the sagey-philosophy "I don't give a damn" Wizards) and tends to wear 'tailored' clothes (though still occult/robe-like) and have well-trimmed hair and facial hair.

The female version also projects a similar air of "power" and "confidence", but because of well... 'gender conventions', this tends to manifest as "dresses provocatively".

Though... speaking about those two... most Fire Emblem characters with the "sorcerer" class (or an advanced version) will probably count as as either one of the two, depending on gender. tharja_(fire_emblem) tiara -alternate_costume -fake_animal_ears -nude -rating:e alone has 318 examples that mostly count for sorceress.

(Funnily enough... for Tharja I needed that many excluded tags to exclude the posts that depict her in various states of undress, or stick animal ears on top, to the point where she longer resembles a "sorceress".)

Though, speaking about Tharja, it's interesting to note that her clothes share many similar traits with Mona's. The main difference is their headgears. Just swap their headgears, and now Tharja looks like a witch while Mona looks like a sorceress.

Edit: Continuing:

Did we agree that mage should be manually purged? Or do we want to keep it for posts with mage like accessories like post #2978950 and post #2361404?

So, on the subject of "magic users"...

For some weird reason druid (AKA Nature-themed magic user. AKA "hobo mage".) is a chartag. Well, was. Shoved all the appropriate examples into druid_(warcraft) (which already exists as a separate MMO-style job-chartag) and changed druid into a gentag.

Not exactly sure whether we need a separate druid tag (especially since it might overlap with shaman), but, well, no harm done for now. And there were two tagged examples (mixed in with all the WoW ones) that already fit pretty well. Think those are DnD OCs. The third (post #2963387) is... kinda borderline, but since there's a bit of a plants and animals theme going on, and the artist commentary makes it clear(ish), think it can stand on its own for now.

Gonna tag Radagast (movie ver.) with druid too to further populate this tag. Should we deem this unnecessary, we can move this the druid posts into wizard and shaman, then retire the tag.

Edit: Alright, so... currently gardening a bit to toss in more examples into Sorcerer and Sorceress. Doctor Strange and Henry into Sorcerer, Maleficient and Tharja_(Fire Emblem) into Sorceress, when they're wearing their default costumes. Just some of them though (not all) because often times the entire outfit isn't visible, or there's something else added like bunny ears that ruin that effect. Oh and also created mystical_high_collar because that seems to be a very common design element for both archetypes (less so for sorceress).

And while doing so I ran into post #3688965. Seriously, wizard, sorcerer, sorceress, mage and witch, all at once!? It's like the uploader is deliberating tag bloating with every single "magic user" sounding tag.

Oh and post #3613004 too. Same user. Actually, quite a lot of other posts too (those two are just the worst ones), even magical girl thrown in, though fortunately that... particular user's tagging practices is no longer a problem.

Edit2: Wrote wiki for sorcerer. Rewrote wiki for sorceress. In particular, removed the "defined as a female witch" because that part just confuses people and leads to 'mistags' (and is just begging for an implication/alias, making it sound like sorceress is a specific subtype of witch).

In general, I think we should try to avoid "hard-gendering" the archetypes. Most of these 'occult magic user' archetypes carries a hefty amount of implicit gender roles and appearances. One generally needs to be female to 'sell' the witch and sorceress look, and male for wizard and sorcerer), but those are not absolute rule of thumbs, and many exceptions do exist (e.g. stick a girl into an unmodified Doctor Strange outfit). This will help greatly in avoiding the confusion caused by our current "male magic user"/"female magic user" definitions.

Do we have something like tag group:magic? It would be useful to gather all these magic therms, not only classes of magical users, but also objects and other therms related to magic. It could even work as a simple guide to differentiate all those magic users.

mongirlfan said:

Do we have something like tag group:magic? It would be useful to gather all these magic therms, not only classes of magical users, but also objects and other therms related to magic. It could even work as a simple guide to differentiate all those magic users.

Don't think so. And yes, probably be a good idea too.

Or maybe we could group it all under the magic wiki to make it more overt (letting people see other options when they check magic on how it should be used), similar to how cleaning does it. Though, magic stuffy probably deserves a tag group on its own, along with a more detailed wiki. Maybe fit a summarized version under magic with a link to the tag group wiki?

Anyhow, also ran into another "magic user" tag. This time it's necromancer. Which is kinda getting flooded with Uruha Rushia right now. Sigh, disambiguating all of these is going to take some time.

Edit: On the subject of Wizard, found it harder to populate than I had initially thought. The Wizard look is iconic, but unfortunately beards seem to be in short supply. There are many characters that qualify (Fire Emblem has loads), but so far the overt ones I thought up of are... well, rather unpopular for fanart. Guess not many artists want to draw old guys with beards.

I suppose any 'magic user' that looks sagey/philosophical/old/wise enough can also count as wizard, but that part is harder to define and can lead to a lot of wizard and mage overlap if we decide to keep the tags separate.

ion288 said:

Did we agree that mage should be manually purged? Or do we want to keep it for posts with mage like accessories like post #2978950 and post #2361404?

Doesn't look like it will go through looking at the current votes and how the thread seems to be going. On that subject (with one of the posts bringing up Megumin), would you (and the rest of the community who are watching this thread) prefer allowing double tags if a character looks like they fit both 'magic user' archetypes? Especially for mage? Might be somewhat tricky to write the wiki and tag 'instructions' without confusing people if that's the case, but I do agree that Megumin kinda qualifies for both mage and witch, with both her hat and staff on (and is facing towards the viewer), even when not visibly casting magic. And that specific example has both tagged.

(Or maybe we should just go mage and forgo witch entirely for her.)

Speaking of, Megumin also has that mystical high collar thingy. Huh, never really noticed that before.

All this granularity is ultimately a pointless vocabulary quiz. I can understand shaman instead of wizard, but super granular and ultimately subjective synonym tags are useless. I'm certain someone can pull up search numbers on whether or not these tags are actually used.

Right now, most of them are either padding or canon. Alias most of them, reserve necromancy for the actual act of raising undead, garden out the "patchouli is a magician!" canon tagging and be done with it.

Before the creation of this thread these are the stats (mostly anonymous, and excluding automated crawlers like Googlebot or Yandex): in four days a total of 5 IPs searched for sorcerer, 14 for druid, 30 for sorceress.

This might sound like a relevant amount, but by comparison, more people searched for "black wristband" (6) than for sorcerer. More people searched for "blue scrunchie" (32) than sorceress.

By comparison "witch" had 425 different IPs searching for it in the same timeframe.

If you create this kind of fragmentation, the only thing that'll happen is that in two years from now these tags will have the exact same posts as you left them with, plus another couple hundred posts from a random canon-tagged character from whichever gacha will be popular at that point, and then this BUR will be submitted again, and it'll be accepted without discussion because this thread will be used as proof that nobody cares about any of these tags.

Don't get me wrong, I don't mind having tags for specific archetypes, like druid or shaman, given how hard it can be to search for them (and it's debatable whether they'd end up being proper tags, I'm personally sure they'll just be ignored by pretty much everyone as people just naturally end up gravitating towards wizard tree or similar, which has more relevant results than druid btw), but when you take extremely generic names like "sorcerer" and "sorceress" that the only people who'll ever search for it are people trying to get to sorceress_(dragon's_crown) but don't know how to autocomplete, that just makes me laugh. Might as well make thaumaturge or archmage while we're at it.

I was mulling over the same thoughts as nonamethanks myself, but having the actual numbers at hand is educational.

I personally suggest that we:

• Leave witch as is, strictly applicable to the wiki for it describes as "A stereotypical witch." (Marisa probably should be mass added to the tag, but no other Touhou characters should, even if they're referred to as 'witches' in Touhou canon. Other fairly emblematic characters are kiki, elaina (majo no tabitabi), and most everyone from Little Witch Academia.)

• Alias every other gentag that's been brought up to something completely neutral in gender and other implications, like magic_user (...or mage.) This tag might become a subjective mess with no unifying aspects, but would at least let us avoid having multiple subjective messes with no unifying aspects.

I wouldn't object strongly to nuking all the tags instead of aliasing them all to a unified tag, but if that's what we go with, I think it might be time to revisit making it possible to prohibit mod or admin-specified tags from being used on the software level, lest these tags just be recreated as soon as some popular new copyright calls a character a 'sorceress' or some new user comes along who's passionate about Dragon's Crown and ignorant of tagging etiquette.

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 actually think there's a lot of mistagging in there already; just at a glance at the thumbnails I saw a bunch that obviously have hats or robes that weren't tagged.

7HS said:

I was mulling over the same thoughts as nonamethanks myself, but having the actual numbers at hand is educational.

I personally suggest that we:

• Leave witch as is, strictly applicable to the wiki for it describes as "A stereotypical witch." (Marisa probably should be mass added to the tag, but no other Touhou characters should, even if they're referred to as 'witches' in Touhou canon. Other fairly emblematic characters are kiki, elaina (majo no tabitabi), and most everyone from Little Witch Academia.)

• Alias every other gentag that's been brought up to something completely neutral in gender and other implications, like magic_user (...or mage.) This tag might become a subjective mess with no unifying aspects, but would at least let us avoid having multiple subjective messes with no unifying aspects.

I wouldn't object strongly to nuking all the tags instead of aliasing them all to a unified tag, but if that's what we go with, I think it might be time to revisit making it possible to prohibit mod or admin-specified tags from being used on the software level, lest these tags just be recreated as soon as some popular new copyright calls a character a 'sorceress' or some new user comes along who's passionate about Dragon's Crown and ignorant of tagging etiquette.

How about this:
1. Keep witch separate. This is the most important tag to keep. And as you say, mass add all the emblematic characters inside. Though I'm not sure about Marisa (despite her more than already qualifying) since 10-20k of her posts will flood this tag.
2. Keep wizard separate and use it only for the Gandalf and Merlin (not the Dickwizard!) kinds.
3. Alias every other 'occult' magic user to mage. Excluding things like priests/shamans/druids (basically anything overtly religious or 'naturely' or 'Eastern'). Also exclude necromancer because that seems thematically different. This prevents people from recreating those tags without resorting to banning specific tag name.
4. Write a tag group:magic wiki to help people tag magic and casting spell and similar things, as well as to clarify the various 'magic user' archetypes. Mention why most of them are thrown under mage (instead of separate tags), and then provide search tips on how to find those specific archetypes. e.g., "mage -old_man ~mystical_high_collar ~goatee" for "sorcerer", "mage ~feather_trim ~tiara ~diadem ~horned_headwear" for "sorceress", "mage robe staff -witch" for "mage".
5. If someone wants to add mage on top of witch and wizard, let them. Sometimes a character might fit multiple archetypes, and even if 'mistags' happen, those can be excluded with further negated tags.
6. Consider introducing a long_beard tag to tag, well, long beards (at least chest length?). This will help in separating the wizard and sorcerer archetypes when searching, as well as being generally useful for tagging long beards for other purposes.
7. Consider aliasing further 'occult magic user' tags to mage. If they are distinguishable archetypes, include them in the tag group:magic wiki along with search and tagging tips.

Edit: Further clarification:

7HS said:

Alias every other gentag that's been brought up to something completely neutral in gender and other implications, like magic_user (...or mage.) This tag might become a subjective mess with no unifying aspects, but would at least let us avoid having multiple subjective messes with no unifying aspects.

Magic user might be problematic as it might get tagged whenever a character is using magic, even if they don't have the 'occult' mage look. The more magical kinds of priest/priestess/miko/nontraditional_miko/onmyouji might also get chucked in. Granted, magic user is less susceptible to getting 'canon job/title polluted' than mage is, but that probably wouldn't matter if we're going to make mage the generic catch-all 'occult' magic user tag. Most characters described as a "mage" in canon title/job/class are probably going to have enough of the usual 'magey' accoutrements anyway.

I suppose... Mona ass shots (where one can't even see enough of her outfit to qualify as 'magey' or 'witchy' or anything) are still going to be a problem, but chucking every other 'occult' mage look (that has enough parts of their outfit visible to 'qualify') under the sun into this will help counteract this tag flooding if the issue resurfaces in the future.

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Edit2:

Veradux said:

Right now, most of them are either padding or canon. Alias most of them, reserve necromancy for the actual act of raising undead, garden out the "patchouli is a magician!" canon tagging and be done with it.

Alias necromancer to necromancy, perhaps? And use necromancy only for the actual act of raising undead and other 'necromancy'-ish stuff?

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I did spend some time tagging mage based on dress and accessories. I know I didnt finish, I started cleaning baton and tagging feathered wings instead, but now the posts I moved from witch to mage cant be found anymore.

I'm not sure whether nuking mage was a good idea at all. I think it should have been converted to an umbrella tag for magic users.

Right, and then we would end up with one more padding tag in every single post of some random anime girl with a pointy hat.

nonamethanks said:

Right, and then we would end up with one more padding tag in every single post of some random anime girl with a pointy hat.

I get what you mean and i don't disagree, but at the same time there currently are many tags for magic users, that are too restricted to cover all cases.
If i want to search for a generic magic user of any kind, what search should i do?
There currently is wizard and witch, but the second one already gravitates towards "witch costume".
Is there any magic_user tag of some kind?