Donmai

Onimai and genderswap

Posted under Tags

As it stands, majority of oyama_mahiro posts are tagged with genderswap_(mtf). It seems superfluous considering their main appearance in the story is that of a girl.

Looking at other forum topics, I've found a very similar situation in topic #20695. It was resolved by creating separate tags for male and female versions of the character, and I propose to do the same here - either split it into _(male) and _(female), or keep the basic version and add oyama_mahiro_(male) to pre-transformation posts.

What do you think? And which of those alternatives do you prefer?

Since I was the one that started doing this (and expected this topic to happen sooner or later after the anime started) back when we only had the pool and nothing else I thought I'd explain why. I did it because the story is about this kind of content so I thought it would help people that are interested in it find it better, now with the big explosion in fanart and popularity it's probably not worth to keep doing it.

I don't think we need to rename the current tag though but creating a oyama_mahiro_(male) tag would be good since there are a few times we see him pre-transformation, both in the pool and show (so far), though they are all in flashbacks.

Updated

For Witch's_Weapon, which is likewise genderbender content, I remember that it was... decided? encouraged? something?, to include the genderswap tag for the main character, Ren, because even though ren's a girl from almost the get-go, it's a genderbend game/story, and people looking for that would want to know that Ren isn't -just- a girl, but a genderbent guy-to-girl.

Following this, I'm okay with keeping the genderswap tag, and creating a separate male tag for pre-transformation posts.

Veraducks said:

What is the use case for the tag when dealing with Ranma 1/2? Feels like that old series would be the precedence setter.

Ranma-chan is inconsistently tagged - 19 pages with genderswap_(mtf), 10 pages without.

But either way, as far as I know, Ranma is generally present in both identities in-story, while Mahiro is a girl all the time, outside of very rare flashbacks (5 posts out of almost 1000 pages). Those seem like pretty different cases to me.

I think the issue comes from "genderswap" ambiguously referring both to a genre of fiction (ranma and onimai) as well as an artwork tag for one-offs ("rule 63"). Right now people use the tag either to search for rule 63'd versions of characters or to identify if a work's copyright contains a "canon genderswap".

So even though male mahiro seldomly appears in the story, onimai itself is a genderswap story. To contrast mai_natsume's male form and backstory barely figures into blazblue, so I don't know if it's meaningful for her to appear in searches for for the tag.

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