Sword Art Online different character appearances and naming issues [warning: many spoilers]

Which tag will identify which Asuna design? Will we go by order of appearance in the anime?

Hillside_Moose said:
Which tag will identify which Asuna design? Will we go by order of appearance in the anime?

Yeah, order of appearance: "1" for the navel-baring outfit, and "2" for the blue/aqua-haired form.

Not sure if I'm adding any value, but for what it's worth, the name of her first ALO avatar is "Titania," the Fairy Queen. Although I'm sure that would probably just cause confusion if used.

Could use asuna_(titania), and then asuna_(sao-alo) would be reserved for the aqua-haired avatar.

What about calling her "Titania_Asuna," would that be a bad idea? Just tossing out that possibility.

I would prefer that than excessive qualifiers.

Hmm... every image still gets tagged asuna_(sao), so maybe it wouldn't be so confusing just to tag her titania_(sao). That would avoid mixing different monikers in the same tag and keep the tag short and consistent with the others.

If she isn't referred to as Titania in the anime, then all titania_(sao) creates is confusion. It would have to be something that even a casual viewer can pick up on, not just the superfans.

Hillside_Moose said:
If she isn't referred to as Titania in the anime

She is, though I think only by Oberon. Still the name is definitely said in-series, so it isn't something casual viewers wouldn't know.

Ehh, I still think we're better off going with titania_asuna. People will think of her as Asuna first before they think of her as Titania.

I really don't like titania_asuna because that combines two different first names for her and makes it look like "Titania" is actually her last name or something.

If we want both names in one tag I'd strongly prefer asuna_(titania), despite complaints about excessive qualifiers this tag conveys the information most appropriately: her actual name is Asuna, and her persona/appearance as shown in the pic is Titania. The only alternative I can think of which also conveys that would be something like asuna_as_titania, but that's basically inventing a new syntax for qualifiers for no good reason.

Otherwise, I like using two tags as suggested earlier, asuna_(sao) for the person and e.g. titania_(sao) or even titania_(cosplay) for her (seemingly involuntary) "cosplay" of Titania. As far as the game logic seems concerned, nothing requires linking the "queen of fairies" to Asuna's character other than that she was chosen to be the first one to represent her. This also opens the possibility of using that tag for other characters cosplaying Titania.

piespy said:
I really don't like titania_asuna because that combines two different first names for her and makes it look like "Titania" is actually her last name or something.

That was pretty much my feeling on it, which is why I was inclined to go with something else. Any more opinions? I want to start tagging (some other SAO-related stuff I might be looking for, after starting the hardware tags, and I can get this at the same time) but doesn't seem we've had an agreement yet.

The titania (sao) solution sounds ideal to me for the reasons other people already covered.

Titania_(SAO) is fine with me. The only proposed name I'd be against was the Asuna_(Titania) one, as it makes it seem like a character from another series.

How about differentiating Silica and Silica_(sao-alo) vs Ayano_Keiko?

That's been covered in the first page of this thread. Since SAO avatars look like their real-life player, there's no great need for separate tags.

I don't think a large amount of real-life art is going to appear anyway, the main interest is still their online presence.

Yeah, there is inconsistency with the characters original to ALO, but it makes more sense with them as they have a distinctly different appearance from real life. There should be a way to isolate the "real-life art", though (not having a large amount of it just makes it more difficult to find). Proper use of clothing tags (particularly casual and school_uniform) will work for the most part but there is no catch-all solution. Perhaps it should be OK to tag both their SAO handles and real-life names in those instances.

I've gone ahead and started titania_(sao) and removed asuna_(sao-alo) from images with that form (except post #1322569 which has them both). post #1326658 is the only one that presents some confusion (doesn't have the ear covering or hair style of Titania, or the hair and eye color of ALO Asuna, but she does have pointy ears...)

asuna_(sao) and titania_(sao) (which I imagine would usually be tagged along with asuna_(sao)) sounds like the best course of action to me.

Edit: Oh there was a whole other page.

Update:

With the just released SAO:Infinity Moment game on the PSP, I will proceed to do the following:

add the tag sword_art_online:_infinity_moment
add certain styles of costumes that canonical (pure) ALO and GGO characters- particularly leafa and shinon_(sao) into the new tag+alternate_costume tags, as well as adding leafa_(sao:im) and shinon_(sao:im) respectively.

will followup soon with the status of this job.