Donmai

Making robot an umbrella tag and figuring out android vs cyborg

Posted under Tags

nonamethanks said:

I mentioned it in forum #211603, both androids and the current definition of humanoid robots are technically humanoid robots. I don't have a solution on naming these two tags unambiguously. Note that also humanoid mechas like gundams risk being tagged with humanoid robot (and indeed mecha humanoid_robot has several posts).

While I think leveraging mechanical_* would be a good idea for these sorts of robots, I can't think of anything that could point to their bodies being akin to those of humans. Surely one of the tags on Danbooru uses a synonym for humanoid rather than just humanoid straight-up, because it feels like we've argued about its usage in the past. Otherwise though, something like automaton could work instead, since it feels like most people imagine automatons to be more mechanical and autonomous (which would fit with what we need), but that has its own vagueness issues surrounding it (plus, the more common version of the term in Japanese, automata, has been coopted by Nier).

At least when it comes to 'bioengineered' androids, I don't think anyone would see issue with us just repurposing replicant, given the context of that term's creation.

Would you possibly need something like a giant robot tag to differentiate human-size or appliance size machines from the massive ones if the tags end up bleeding into each other? Most popular mecha do use a humanoid form, but it would be somewhat possible to differentiate them by size (although that starts to rely heavily on canon tagging for default categorization).

If necessary could use something like a <size>_robot tags. Like a large robot = size of a car or bigger, medium robot = size of a person or suit of armor, small robot = size of a household pet or something.

Technically speaking, by definition an android is a mechanical being with a human appearance. In many Science Fiction uses, an android is visually indistinguishable from a human physically unless opened up (this type of robot being referred to as humaniform by Isaac Asimov), with the tell being mannerisms, or possibly small hints such as the skin being TOO perfect or the eyes being dull. A character like M1903 Springfield from GFL is, by definition, an android due to being mechanical in nature underneath the fleshy bits. A robot would just being any autonomous mechanical being, a humanoid robot would be just that. An obviously mechanical being the shape of a humanoid, such as an Assaultron from Fallout. Where things would get complicated would be a character like Alia from MegaMan X, who could technically fall under both, especially based on how they are portrayed by the artist.

nonamethanks said:

I don't know about keeping cyborg separate because looking at the tag I can't see anyone caring about it right now.

As the resident Girls' Frontline -poster, i do care.
Nytos are a good excample of cyborgs.

Yeah. There's a lot of redundancy here. Originally that tag was called parts_exposed.

That would be better imo. Whole tag is efficiently mechabare but it's not alias for it for some goddamn reason even though the pixiv tag for it is the only tag in the other names.

Note that also humanoid mechas like gundams risk being tagged with humanoid robot (and indeed mecha humanoid_robot has several posts).

How about humanoid mecha?

Tomzai said:

How about humanoid mecha?

Redundant since the vast majority of mecha are humanoid, and almost anything that's not would be classified as a walker.

The only place you get non-humanoid mecha that wouldn't get tagged as walkers is with giant robot animals like Zoids or spider-tank sort of stuff like the M1A4 Juggernaut and XM2 Reginleif from 86, though I guess those in particular may qualify for the walker tag by danbooru standards.

BUR #13163 has been approved by @nonamethanks.

create implication humanoid_robot -> robot
create implication clothed_robot -> robot

Finally finished cleaning out the mistagged androids and mecha from humanoid robot, so it's ready to be implicated to the main tag. Also implicating clothed robot for obvious reasons.

All that's left now is to clean up android, but before that can be done we have to figure out where to draw the line on android/humanoid robot. So far the android tag is largely comprised of 3 categories:

  • Human-passing androids (eg. 2B, Android 18, Atom), which are indistinguishable from a human and shouldn't be tagged as androids unless there's visible mechanical internals or attachments.
  • Clearly mechanical androids (eg. Mega Man, KOS-MOS, Aegis), who are obviously robotic at a glance but still have a largely human appearance.
  • Mostly mechanical androids (eg. Ash, Dia, Jenny Wakeman), which is where things start to get difficult. These kinds of androids have human-like faces (sometimes fleshy, but mostly metal), but from the neck down are completely robotic with no attempt to pass as a human. This brings us to things like post #5444836, post #5526458, and post #5267091 that would undeniably be humanoid robot if they had more robotic heads.

A line between humanoid robot and android for the third category needs to be set before any serious gardening of the android tag starts to avoid mass mistags while fixing it.

BUR #13164 has been approved by @nonamethanks.

create implication robot_dog -> robot_animal
create alias mechanical_dragon -> robot_dragon

Separate BUR for smaller robot tags. Implicating robo-dogs to the main robot animal tag and renaming mechanical_dragon for consistency. After the robot dragon rename goes through, I'll implicate it straight to non-humanoid robot instead of robot animal since dragons aren't animals.

1 2 3 4