evazion said:
[...] (forum #333339)
Initially, I replied with forum #333341 as a quick response. I'm amending that slightly - even though I did not set up the initial tags, I do know why we split the outfits by the battlesuit tags and that's for searchability purposes. Honkai Impact 3rd does currently have a few pointless layered implications but a lot of the three-layered implications can be justified and it's better for them to be this way than to imply them directly to the base chartag for "convenience", admittedly.
Honkai Impact 3rd (and in turn Honkai (Series)) handles characters in a sort-of complex way. If we really wanted to be better with our tagging and make sure everyone can accurately find what they want, we would have to split up a lot of tags and break precedent a bit. That means characters that look-alike would be their own separate base chartag instead of an implication. Which, if you feel only two-layer implications are more convenient, this would be the best route there. It conflicts with having aliases/implications based on appearance/relation, and instead prioritises people being able to find characters independently.
We treat some alternate versions of characters as costumes, which in-game they are, but in reality they're not. So in a way I do follow your track that we don't have to reflect the exact circumstances in our tagging, but if I were to pitch what I wanted before, there would be some disagreement. Namely I hate how we currently handle Theresa Apocalypse (Lunar Vow: Crimson Love) which was one of the debated chartags early on. The current tagging reflects the game circumstances which results in a 4-level implication for her tags, when it should be 2-3 because she is a distinct character that people would definitely want to search for separately to pair with other Theresa Apocalypse variants, most especially Zhuge Kongming (Honkai Impact). I absolutely do. There are a lot of arts putting them together.
Normally we imply alternate forms of characters particularly if they look alike but Honkai Impact 3rd is a bit of a unique case where I think we can justify either splitting tags into more base chartags or keeping three-layered implications for some. The fanbase understands, even in the case of alternate forms, that some characters are entirely separate and I very much imagine if they're searching on Danbooru they would similarly treat the characters different if they want to find art of them. This is, for example, why I had Ai Hyperion Lambda and Ai-chan split; people would especially be looking for the former independently, but also for some fun arts where the both of them are together.
When I look at Elysia's costume tags, I see nothing that visually indicates that XMas Cottage is a Miss Pink Elf skin while Peachy Spring is a Herrscher of Human: Ego skin. They may be treated as belonging to different battlesuits in game, but that doesn't mean we need to reflect that in our tagging. It'd be simpler to me if all skins implied the base character tag and the battlesuit tags were only used for the default battlesuit appearance.
The face area. Artists are very deliberate when they choose to draw between Elysia's two primary "appearances". We currently double on some chartag usage to represent either an outfit or the major appearance associated with that outfit. It's generally understood that Elysia (Herrscher of Human: Ego) (Honkai Impact) refers to all posts where she has distinctly longer and spread out hair, purple eyes, diamond-shaped pupils, even if she isn't wearing her normal outfit for that tag - whereas all other posts, including her base chartag, are her lesser form with blue eyes.
XMas Cottage is implied to Elysia (Miss Pink Elf) (Honkai Impact) because it is a slightly adapted costume of that form, whereas Elysia (Herrscher of Human: Ego) (Peachy Spring) (Honkai Impact) specifically orients towards her second form. I don't think we should fragment the tagging - the costumes are better represented as three-layer implications. It can't be helped. It's not like what we did for Punishing: Gray Raven where they can just be implicated to the base tag with or without the battlesuit type name because they don't have aged up or alternate universe forms like Honkai Impact 3rd does. We did, however, separate two look-alikes into separate base chartags (see between Lucia (PGR) and Alpha (PGR)), so that might be an approach we can take with Honkai Impact 3rd. It just gets complicated like in the case of Griseo or Bronya Zaychik where it doesn't make much sense to separate their aged up forms into separate base chartags, but it equally makes no sense to put a base chartag for an older version, then the outfits, all on the same level. That's worse in my opinion than our current double-duty chartag use.
There are, however, some implications that do need to get broken up because it makes it harder to search for distinct characters that may simply share close appearances, and I plan to break those tags up in some time because the tagging indeed is a nightmare, a mess, missing and in some cases very wrong despite my protests (forum #334327).
It might be simplier to have everything implicated to the base chartag but it's not really practical. We serve the lesser of two evils so people can find what they want without breaking up the tag. Bronya Zaychik (Silverwing: N-EX) is understood to refer to all posts of older Bronya Zaychik and her outfits for example, which is why we tag older Bronya as that as long as it's an aged up version, plus it's a single tag search which is comfortable over bronya_zaychik+aged_up.
The absolute worst other plan is to split at least 1-2 of Honkai Impact 3rd's separate storylines/open worlds into a new copytag and shift the 3-layer implication to the copyright category but that doesn't sound intuitive either.