Firefly and SAM (Honkai: Star Rail spoilers)

I personally know essentially nothing about HSR lore. However, based on my limited knowledge, it seems to me that Sam (honkai:_star_rail) is a mech suit worn by Firefly (honkai:_star_rail).

However, the tagging has been inconsistent. It seems that taggers have predominantly been treating Sam as a separate entity, tagging it as 1other, and not implying Firefly. But there are examples of just the mech alone being tagged as Firefly (post #7727302) or tagged as 2girls/yuri on the assumption that there's a girl in the suit (post #7894437).

It would be nice to establish a consistent rule.

It seems to me, as someone with no lore knowledge, that if a mech suit is worn exclusively by one character, then it should probably imply that character and receive get that character's gender tags. My understanding is that Sam is not an autonomous entity, it's just a mech suit. I have been told it might be possible that Sam has been worn by other characters in the past? If it's possible someone else is in the suit, it might be best to consistently tag the suit just as 1other. But I'd like some input from people who actually play the game.

Sam should imply Firefly. Tagging Sam as 1other is a hold-over from before this reveal was made in the main story and I suppose no one got around to creating a BUR for that later on; another issue here is that such posts were inconsistently tagged spoilers (or even not at all).

It's been a considerable amount of time since the reveal's been made and since the Penacony story ended so it'd be good to get this tag sorted out and to properly apply the gender tags. You are otherwise correct though and hit the nail on the head even without context: "SAM" is the name of the mechsuit piloted by Firefly (and people from her homeworld), it isn't an autonomous entity.

Regarding the "homeworld" comment: there are others like her who pilot similar such mechsuits (they're all "SAMs") but the specific tag we have refers to Firefly's mechsuit, not the others - they have separate tags applied to both their human and mech forms (e.g. AR-214).

BUR #29273 has been rejected.

create implication sam_(honkai:_star_rail) -> firefly_(honkai:_star_rail)

Proposal BUR as above to further invite discussion.

This needs cleaning, as does this.

Counterargument: if this BUR is approved, searching for Sam would also show Firefly posts, which would require another tag to filter them out, so users just trying to find Sam and not Firefly and vice versa would require an extra tag input to filter out posts accordingly. While this BUR is proper (and hence my upvote), searchability might be considerably ruined. Another counterargument: Sam -Firefly only has 118 posts versus Firefly's 5.6K+ posts, so the current tag dichotomy makes those few posts easier to find. I'm caught between correctness and searchability.

Unapproved_in_Three_Days said:

Counterargument: if this BUR is approved, searching for Sam would also show Firefly posts, which would require another tag to filter them out, so users just trying to find Sam and not Firefly and vice versa would require an extra tag input to filter out posts accordingly.

Is this really true? I think it's the other way around. Searching for Firefly would also show Sam's posts, which shouldn't be a problem at all. This is identical to how Danbooru handles VTuber and other character costumes. Searching for the costume doesn't bring up posts of the character without the costume. You're essentially just proposing to treat Sam as a costume for Firefly, akin to the existing tag for AR-26710. I think this should work just fine, unless I'm missing something?

yuudo said:

Is this really true? I think it's the other way around. Searching for Firefly would also show Sam's posts, which shouldn't be a problem at all. This is identical to how Danbooru handles VTuber and other character costumes. Searching for the costume doesn't bring up posts of the character without the costume. You're essentially just proposing to treat Sam as a costume for Firefly, akin to the existing tag for AR-26710. I think this should work just fine, unless I'm missing something?

Whoops, actually you're right about that, my brain fried and forgot how implications work. That is correct, yeah.

Unapproved_in_Three_Days said:

Whoops, actually you're right about that, my brain fried and forgot how implications work. That is correct, yeah.

Sure, no worries. Yeah in that case I have no issues with it personally. The only edge case I can think of is wanting to search for when Firefly and Sam are presented together in the same image, but dual persona exists for that, as long as people are good about tagging it.

yuudo said:

This is identical to how Danbooru handles VTuber and other character costumes. Searching for the costume doesn't bring up posts of the character without the costume. You're essentially just proposing to treat Sam as a costume for Firefly, akin to the existing tag for AR-26710. I think this should work just fine, unless I'm missing something?

I don't think that's the same thing at all. Vtuber costumes are (almost, if not always) just the character wearing other clothes. There's never any doubt about who the person is. Their face and other identifying features are the same regardless of what they're wearing. Sam is entirely unrecognizable as Firefly if you don't already know they're the same person. That's what made it a reveal. If it was obviously Firefly from the get go we wouldn't even be having this discussion.

blindVigil said:

I don't think that's the same thing at all. Vtuber costumes are (almost, if not always) just the character wearing other clothes. There's never any doubt about who the person is. Their face and other identifying features are the same regardless of what they're wearing. Sam is entirely unrecognizable as Firefly if you don't already know they're the same person. That's what made it a reveal. If it was obviously Firefly from the get go we wouldn't even be having this discussion.

I was referring specifically to the point about searchability when I said "should work just fine", certainly open to other opinions about whether Sam counts as a proper "costume" or not. I agree that is pretty much the point of this discussion, along with whether tagging this way is still considered a spoiler. Your take is perfectly valid.

yuudo said:

I was referring specifically to the point about searchability when I said "should work just fine", certainly open to other opinions about whether Sam counts as a proper "costume" or not. I agree that is pretty much the point of this discussion, along with whether tagging this way is still considered a spoiler. Your take is perfectly valid.

The thing with searching is that usually the first and biggest thing to consider is what's being "seen". Gawr Gura (casual) is obviously still Gawr Gura no matter how you look at it. A search for gawr_gura should obviously include gawr_gura_(casual), they're the exact same person in appearance and there's no good argument for the former not including the latter because it all looks the same.

Sam and Firefly don't fit the criteria of "looks the same". Is someone that searches firefly_(honkai:_star_rail) wanting to see a mech suit in their search and should they be forced to use firefly_(honkai:_star_rail) -sam_(honkai:_star_rail) to not have to? This is the same issue we run into with super hero personas, magical girl transformations that completely change their appearance, Sentai/Kamen Rider, and any other alias that gets its own tag and doesn't look like the original character. We've never come up with a consistent way to address these. Everytime it comes up we end up doing something different.

My personal opinion is that Sam shouldn't imply Firefly. Sam only accounts for a 10th of Firefly posts, though, so it's more a preference and not a strong opinion. I'm not sure how we would reconcile the gender tagging, though.

blindVigil said:

Is someone that searches firefly_(honkai:_star_rail) wanting to see a mech suit in their search and should they be forced to use firefly_(honkai:_star_rail) -sam_(honkai:_star_rail) to not have to?

I am assuming you meant to say "doesn't want to see a mech suit in their search", and my response to that would be that they already have to do this because a lot of Firefly art also includes Sam, but it is true that if you are only interested in posts that include Firefly outside of her suit specifically (regardless of whether Sam is there or not) that this technically wouldn't be covered by her tag anymore, and that is worth considering even if the effect will be pretty small (~120/5.7k posts).

And granted Danbooru usually doesn't create implications for the animal form of a particular VTuber to their original persona (such as Subaru Duck -> Oozora Subaru), and I imagine it's for similar reasons as you mentioned.

blindVigil said:

My personal opinion is that Sam shouldn't imply Firefly. Sam only accounts for a 10th of Firefly posts, though, so it's more a preference and not a strong opinion. I'm not sure how we would reconcile the gender tagging, though.

Yeah, I also don't feel strongly about it. I just think that creating the implication would be the simplest solution for consistency and resolving the gender tagging problem.

yuudo said:

And granted Danbooru usually doesn't create implications for the animal form of a particular VTuber to their original persona (such as Subaru Duck -> Oozora Subaru), and I imagine it's for similar reasons as you mentioned.

We actually do, it was decided a while ago that tags like mococo abyssgard (dog) should implicate mococo abyssgard, we just didn't do it for the rest. We do it for most Touhou characters, too, as another example. It varies by depiction somewhat, but I think generally you can tell at a glance that something like https://danbooru.donmai.us/posts/7604295?q=inugami_korone_%28dog%29 is Inugami Korone, so it still fits the "looks like the original character" idea. Using Kamen Rider as an example, you'd have to be told that https://danbooru.donmai.us/posts/433819?q=kamen_rider_kuuga is godai yuusuke, and the Kamen Rider costumes don't implicate the people wearing them.

blindVigil said:

We actually do, it was decided a while ago that tags like mococo abyssgard (dog) should implicate mococo abyssgard, we just didn't do it for the rest. We do it for most Touhou characters, too, as another example. It varies by depiction somewhat, but I think generally you can tell at a glance that something like https://danbooru.donmai.us/posts/7604295?q=inugami_korone_%28dog%29 is Inugami Korone, so it still fits the "looks like the original character" idea. Using Kamen Rider as an example, you'd have to be told that https://danbooru.donmai.us/posts/433819?q=kamen_rider_kuuga is godai yuusuke, and the Kamen Rider costumes don't implicate the people wearing them.

Ah okay, thanks for the information! Well, Sam is certainly closer to Kamen Rider than Inugami Korone's dog form, so it makes sense to me to treat them similarly and keep them separate in this case if no one else has any objections. Casually browsing the Kamen Rider tag it looks like the suits are tagged in a gendered way even if the person wearing it isn't tagged (but I don't know how consistent that pattern is), so in that case perhaps an alternative proposal would be to consider Sam as 1girl instead of 1other and tag posts with both of them as 2girls dual persona? I suppose an argument against that would be that Sam doesn't immediately read as female (and of course spoilers, but that isn't consistently tagged here either and is a whole other can of worms).

yuudo said:

Ah okay, thanks for the information! Well, Sam is certainly closer to Kamen Rider than Inugami Korone's dog form, so it makes sense to me to treat them similarly and keep them separate in this case if no one else has any objections. Casually browsing the Kamen Rider tag it looks like the suits are tagged in a gendered way even if the person wearing it isn't tagged (but I don't know how consistent that pattern is), so in that case perhaps an alternative proposal would be to consider Sam as 1girl instead of 1other and tag posts with both of them as 2girls dual persona? I suppose an argument against that would be that Sam doesn't immediately read as female (and of course spoilers, but that isn't consistently tagged here either and is a whole other can of worms).

Just wanted to note that Samus is tagged with 1girl and not 1other regardless of whether she is recognizable in her suit or not. In fact, the tags for Samus' suits aren't even considered character tags. I'm in favor of seeing all Sam posts when searching for Firefly, but that's just personal preference.

Just wanted to chime in to say that at the moment you can search for sam_(honkai:_star_rail) -firefly_(honkai:_star_rail) in order to filter out posts where Firefly herself appears (and usually the armour doesn't take the spotlight in that case), like post #7766850, post #7761098, post #7750367 and so on.
If this BUR passes, it won't be possible to filter artworks of Firefly and SAM appearing together anymore. (And no, filtering out 1girl would remove artworks with other characters such as post #6585449).

TurtlyP said:

Just wanted to note that Samus is tagged with 1girl and not 1other regardless of whether she is recognizable in her suit or not.

My exposure to HSR is secondary at best, however I just want to say that, as far as I know, Samus has never been referred to as a guy, her identity has always been pretty straightforward, and she never spoke with a male voice. SAM is much more akin to an alternate identity.

WeakestResUser said:

BUR #29273 has been rejected.

create implication sam_(honkai:_star_rail) -> firefly_(honkai:_star_rail)

Proposal BUR as above to further invite discussion.

If we follow HSR lore, I would prefer to keep separate as there is many type of SAM (example: post #7708774) with different people and gender, and I don't know if we going to get another SAM in the game, so yeah my opinion is we keep it seperate.

Login_to_view said:

Just wanted to chime in to say that at the moment you can search for in order to filter out posts where Firefly herself appears (and usually the armour doesn't take the spotlight in that case)

...

My exposure to HSR is secondary at best, however I just want to say that, as far as I know, Samus has never been referred to as a guy, her identity has always been pretty straightforward, and she never spoke with a male voice. SAM is much more akin to an alternate identity.

This is a fair point. However, I would argue that SAM is not akin to an alternate identity; a major part of Firefly as a character is that SAM is part of who she is. Aside from when the translation team made mistakes (which were later corrected), in-game text about SAM has always referred to them with gender neutral or female pronouns (with the German and French translations for "Stellaron Hunter Sam" even being "Stellaron Huntress Sam"). Furthermore, after Firefly's reveal in the Penacony story, HSR has been very open about SAM's true identity in promotional material and social media.

Might repeat myself a bit, sorry in advance for the scroll.

There are a few options we have on the table I feel, personally.

• Gardening SAM to use 1girl and keep them separate. This leaves the chartag still heavily prone to mistags as 1other.
• Recategorising SAM to general. This would be more accurate however there aren't enough non-Firefly powersuit posts to justify this major change in thought and I think it would cause more of a headache for our users and admins to go this route.
• Leave the tags separate and continue to use 1other. Although it is inaccurate, the current dichotomy is more searchable to the average user.
• Furthermore, any posts like the example (SAM and Robin) should not be tagged as yuri, even if that is correct.

In the case of Firefly and SAM, our SAM chartag refers to Firefly's powersuit. Any further changes to this chartag for correctness at this point becomes a mess when it further expects understanding of the game material, which we should not expect from Danbooru users. That's why I'm a little torn between whether to consider the correctness or the searchability.

Enough time has passed with the completion of the story, release of the character and leaks that it is no longer an obscure secret that SAM is Firefly even to those who don't know a lick of the game's lore, so I personally do not feel the ambiguity of the two's identities is a relevant talking point. The only confusion it could bring to Danbooru is the continued inconsistent tagging that we should still strive to sort out at some point. If these were tagged correctly and fixed ASAP, there would be no confusion even to our userbase here on Danbooru.

Part of the confusion here is existing precedent (a la Samus and Sentai characters brought up earlier) and the continued inconsistent tagging. I noticed that there was the point of "looking the same". This would be a deviation from precedent if the implication were to be accepted since Firefly is not visible once SAM is active, however the other angle to consider is searchability and it is generally widely known right now that the two are the same for anyone who is clearly looking for Honkai: Star Rail posts. I think searchability and widespread knowledge has more weight and validity in getting this implication done than the current precedent of costume chartags where a cursory glance shows yes they are still very much the same person with just different hair colours/outfit.

For precedent's sake as well: we have Kakavasha and Yingxing chartags for Aventurine and Blade respectively as earlier points in their lives. These are more obvious than SAM with a simple glance but we still did not imply them until enough posts and time had passed. The scenario is very similar, and the current post makeup should also further allude to there being some similarity (particularly, whenever Firefly is transforming but is not tagged as SAM.

Circular devil's advocate: as much as I keep talking about searchability, blue users are still beholden to two tags like res users are to the modqueue. This implication may potentially force them to use up a tag search to filter out the powersuit. That being said, there isn't enough SAM that gets posted in comparison to Firefly. I feel that users can just ignore those posts during their search, or may not even come across them frequently enough to justify their separation. Now that I also corrected my knowledge of the implication, it would also still allow users solely looking for the powersuit to be able to find it sort of without Firefly. Hell, we never even tag any of her henshins with SAM (or maybe we have in some off-hand circumstances, I haven't checked the query).

I agree with @WeakestResUser that there should be no ambiguity that Firefly is SAM. That would mean that even if we don't accept the implication for searchability, sam_(honkai:_star_rail) should still be gardened to 1girl, and posts like post #7894437 should be tagged with yuri. After all, every artist drawing Robin x SAM does so with the intention of it being a yuri ship between Robin x Firefly in the suit.

With regards to the other suggestions, I definitely don't think we should recategorize sam_(honkai:_star_rail) to general, and I don't think tagging sam_(honkai:_star_rail) with 1other instead of 1girl makes it more searchable for the average user. If anything, it just makes it more confusing for users who don't have much knowledge about the game.

Thanks for the additional information about Samus! I just wanted to respond to a few points people made:

Login_to_view said:

If this BUR passes, it won't be possible to filter artworks of Firefly and SAM appearing together anymore. (And no, filtering out 1girl would remove artworks with other characters such as post #6585449).

Yeah, that's why I was saying that you'd have to establish a different tag like dual persona to make that work, but of course there's the issue of tagging consistently as there is with anything like that.

Login_to_view said:

My exposure to HSR is secondary at best, however I just want to say that, as far as I know, Samus has never been referred to as a guy, her identity has always been pretty straightforward, and she never spoke with a male voice. SAM is much more akin to an alternate identity.

Small bit of trivia, don't think this should majorly influence the decision or anything, but Samus was actually referred to as a guy in the English NES manual for Metroid 1, making her gender reveal at the end of the game a reward for players who completed it quickly. Ever since then, yes, she has always been referred to as a woman and basically anyone who knows anything substantial about the character is aware of that.

Ashaci said:

If we follow HSR lore, I would prefer to keep separate as there is many type of SAM (example: post #7708774) with different people and gender, and I don't know if we going to get another SAM in the game, so yeah my opinion is we keep it seperate.

I believe that the character tag for Sam is meant to refer specifically to "Stellaron Hunter Sam", the established in-universe character associated with the Stellaron Hunter faction, which exclusively refers to Firefly. How we choose to reconcile this is up for debate of course, but in my opinion it makes more sense to either make a general tag or new character tags in the event of a hypothetical future introduction of additional SAM suits.

This bulk update request is pending automatic rejection in 5 days.