Posted under Tags
BUR #3390 has been approved by @evazion.
rename blue_(pokemon) -> green_(pokemon)
create alias blue_(pokemon_special) -> green_(pokemon)
I have now created a leaf_(pokemon) tag and transferred almost all the applicable posts to it. The alias exists to help direct people to the new tag. Based on the discussion, posts should now be categorised according to copyright as follows:
Leaf
Green
EDIT: The bulk update request #3390 (forum #172276) has been approved by @evazion.
Updated by DanbooruBot
The bulk update request #3389 (forum #172263) has been approved by @evazion.
nonamethanks said:
It's not, it's one of the most important points to consider, because it directly affects how many people actually come here from Google and other search engines. A site like this stagnates if there's no constant influx of new people who contribute. If something is overwhelmingly known by its english name, there is no reason for us to stick to japanese other than for blindly following rules written 15 years ago, when the internet was very different.
This logic doesn't seem consistent with how the site itself sometimes tags and the decisions they have made in tagging in the past. You have japanese copyrights despite most users only knowing their official localization (and anime getting more popular then ever is getting more and more localizations, the excuse for many to just keep the japanese is slipping every day) alongside english tags, technical or rarely used terms in casual conversation like "fellatio" when everyone and their dog uses terms like blowjob, "paizuri" still being used among the english tagging when no westerner knows that, etc.
This logic even goes against the common consensus in a recent Nier Automata thread, where it would have been approved 100% had the same logic applied to it: https://danbooru.donmai.us/forum_topics/17094
As I said earlier in this thread, the entirety of how this site tags things even to general tags would get overhauled if we went by that logic to it's conclusion, and some decisions would even be reverted. Some NSFW examples include changing Mature back to Milf and bringing back the straight shota tag, terms that most people know compared to what the Danbooru consensus decided to change them to be more technical and accurate.
Wanting consistency is understandable, but "It's 'easier'/'more recognizable'" will always be a terrible reason because it is too subjective and in flux of other's whims as well as not easily verifiable or grounded, and I find it puzzling that many grasp to it. But regardless if people are serious about such an argument going forward then a lot more about the site needs to change. But how I see it in this case it's usage in this given argument is very cherry picked of those who somehow need to justify how they can't be bothered to find out the names of characters that are easily accessible to everyone with a click of a button.
And personally, there's very little excuse in the modern internet information age to not know or be able to find out how things are tagged, including the regional name differences. This excuse only worked back when this information was rarely accessible in the early Danbooru days. There's no excuse nowadays to not be familiar. Anecdotally, I have far more problems finding out how Danbooru tags a specific general tag to describe something utterly mundane then ever finding out what region calls a certain character or copyright/franchise, and I barely play or watch the stuff I tag.
pc88 said:
You have japanese copyrights despite most users only knowing their official localization (and anime getting more popular then ever is getting more and more localizations, the excuse for many to just keep the japanese is slipping every day) alongside english tags,
How often does anime even get localized to the point of having entirely different names these days, if it isn't one that's already been doing that for over a decade? Most of the anime and games that have been swapped to English names are old ones.
technical or rarely used terms in casual conversation like "fellatio" when everyone and their dog uses terms like blowjob, "paizuri" still being used among the english tagging when no westerner knows that, etc.
I have yet to see a single english speaking hentai site that doesn't use "paizuri", I don't think you're going to convince anyone that westerners interested in anime/hentai aren't going to be 100% familiar with the term.
This logic even goes against the common consensus in a recent Nier Automata thread, where it would have been approved 100% had the same logic applied to it: https://danbooru.donmai.us/forum_topics/17094
These are not comparable situations by any measure. One is JP names vs. EN names and the other is full names vs. shorthand names. There's no reason for the two to adhere to the same policy.
Some NSFW examples include changing Mature back to Milf
Why in the world would we do that? Milf is a specific type of character, Mature is a broader term that doesn't require the character to actually be a mother, and you are absolutely not going to convince anyone that Mature is somehow a rarely used term when literally every porn site uses it. Not all mature women are milfs, but mature women are a very easily recognizable type that includes milfs.
blindVigil said:
How often does anime even get localized to the point of having entirely different names these days, if it isn't one that's already been doing that for over a decade? Most of the anime and games that have been swapped to English names are old ones.
Elf-san wa Yaserarenai/Plus-Sized Elf is the first example that popped into my head (VERY loose translation of the copyright).
According to the arguments in this thread and others prior regarding consistency and "what people know", there's no reason to have japanese copyrights when many have perfectly good English localization for our primarily English website of English users. These threads have made it clear: It's becoming harder to justify their existence and many think it's more of a hassle for the masses, as per many arguments in this thread.
I have yet to see a single english speaking hentai site that doesn't use "paizuri",
Sites that don't strictly follow after Danbooru tagging absolutely use other equivalents. For example Rule 34 xxx "titfuck" and "titjob" have either almost as much or more images under their tagging paizuri.
I don't think you're going to convince anyone that westerners interested in anime/hentai aren't going to be 100% familiar with the term.
The crux of the argument is consistency and what people know. Why, among the majority english general tagging, is there a random japanese term? Most English speakers are going to know the English equivalent. Even Google trend analytics shows this clearly, and the post I responded to brought up google searches.
Also what you just said can easily be applied to people defending japanese names/copyrights. Any westerner interested in anime/hentai are going to be familiar with japanese naming.
These are not comparable situations by any measure. One is JP names vs. EN names and the other is full names vs. shorthand names. There's no reason for the two to adhere to the same policy.
I don't see how it's not comparable. Most people know the main Nier Automata protagonist as just "2B". The driving argument of these topics is what people know and are more familiar with. People are more familiar with the shorthand terms, so why wouldn't it be the default by the same measure?
Why in the world would we do that? Milf is a specific type of character, Mature is a broader term that doesn't require the character to actually be a mother, and you are absolutely not going to convince anyone that Mature is somehow a rarely used term when literally every porn site uses it. Not all mature women are milfs, but mature women are a very easily recognizable type that includes milfs.
To most people, milfs and mature mean the same thing and both are used on porn sites, and Milf is rarely used for actual mothers (you can thank porn for that). Milf is very clearly way more commonly used abroad in English speaking art or porn circles then "mature", and major porn distributors tag Milf as well as the major porn sites (Brazzers, for example, uses Milf). The common usage of "Milf" and it's dilution in meaning actually bothers me a lot, but that doesn't mean I will deny that it's what most people use and it's what most people know.
Accuracy is clearly not relevant, as in regards to this thread you can't get more accurate then the original japanese.
Using Japanese names has never been an ironclad rule. There have always been cases where we used English names over Japanese, even for very famous shows. See:
For videogames it's even more common to use English names, especially for Nintendo games:
Or look at mobile games, where we originally used Chinese until we finally came to our senses and switched to English:
Frankly, we've been having this same argument over Japanese versus English names for over ten years now. Look at these highlights from past threads:
The argument always boils down to the same thing: absolutists wanting to use Japanese names for everything, no exceptions, versus other people pushing back and going "Hey, this is stupid, nobody actually calls it that." I'm not an absolutist, I've always been an advocate for using English names where reasonable, especially for things like Nintendo games. You're never going to convince me that we should have things like Zelda no Densetsu or Dai-Rantou Smash Brothers. You're never going to convince me that forcing users to learn the Japanese names of every Pokemon character makes Danbooru a better site. Even Pixiv uses English names for Pokemon characters nowadays. It's kind of crazy for us to insist on Japanese names when the Japanese themselves don't use them when catering to an English audience.
BUR #3394 has been approved by @evazion.
rename sakura_(pokemon_johto) -> sakura_(pokemon)
rename masa_(pokemon_colosseum) -> cail_(pokemon)
rename giovanni_(pokemon_school) -> earl_dervish
rename mirei_(pokemon_special) -> mirei_(pokemon)
rename james_(pokemon_sm) -> hobbes_(pokemon)
rename yuuki_(pokemon_ranger) -> garret_(pokemon)
rename minami_(pokemon_(anime)) -> kathi_lee
rename male_protagonist_(pokemon_+_nobunaga_no_yabou) -> hero_(pokemon_conquest)
rename kojirou's_mother_(pokemon) -> james'_mother_(pokemon)
rename kojirou's_father_(pokemon) -> james'_father_(pokemon)
rename rumika_(pokemon) -> jessebelle_(pokemon)
rename kiyo_(pokemon) -> nicholai_(pokemon)
rename sayaka_francois_joy -> marnie_frances_lynnette_joy
rename mai_francois_joy -> paige_frances_lynnelle_joy
rename tetsuya's_meowth -> tyson's_meowth
rename curti_(pokemon) -> trista_(pokemon)
rename sakusa_(pokemon) -> trinnia_(pokemon)
rename torika_(pokemon) -> tricia_(pokemon)
rename chetta_(pokemon) -> rachel_(pokemon)
rename sakuragi_yoshino -> talia_(pokemon)
rename nariya_ookido -> samson_oak
rename kazura_(pokemon) -> chaz_(pokemon)
rename natsume's_mother_(pokemon) -> sabrina's_mother_(pokemon)
create alias maamane_(pokemon) -> sophocles_(pokemon)
rename pokemon:_the_origin -> pokemon_origins
remove alias sapphire_birch -> odamaki_sapphire
remove alias yvonne_gabena -> y_na_gaabena
remove alias pokemon_mystery_dungeon -> pokemon_fushigi_no_dungeon
Some minor characters that I either missed, or which previously had a conflict.
EDIT: The bulk update request #3394 (forum #172312) has been approved by @evazion.
Updated by DanbooruBot
I think I'm not a big fan of this change:
create alias pokemon_ranger_1 -> pokemon_ranger_(game)
create alias pokemon_ranger_2 -> pokemon_ranger:_shadows_of_almia
create alias pokemon_ranger_3 -> pokemon_ranger:_guardian_signs
I would rather keep pokemon_ranger_1, pokemon_ranger_2, and pokemon_ranger_3.
It's kind of how we have tags pokemon_m01, pokemon_m02, pokemon_m03, etc. instead of spelling the full movie names.
The full movie names would be (if we wanted them, which I think is not the case):
We also used to have full long tags for the core series games... Now we have pokemon_frlg, but we used to have pokemon_firered_and_leafgreen.
evazion said:
Even Pixiv uses English names for Pokemon characters nowadays. It's kind of crazy for us to insist on Japanese names when the Japanese themselves don't use them when catering to an English audience.
I feel most of this post is not really relevant to both pro- and anti- arguments that were levied in this thread since most are already well aware and it's difficult to read any reason given in this thread for either as "absolutist" without taking heavy liberties in interpretation, but I just want to point out this is only true if you use EN Pixiv. If you stick to default Pixiv the tags are the same as always and the localized names are noted in the wikis as they always have. And even in EN Pixiv using the english names in the search bar sometimes still nets lacking results for some characters in comparison to the japanese originals (Natsume/Sabrina is a good example) so it's not diligently kept up at all like it should. I don't really get this point or see how it's noteworthy since this is no different then what the previous aliases did.
Updated
The arguments in this thread are the same arguments we have every time this topic comes up, which has happened many times in the past. I'm not going to rehash this issue every time, it's been argued to death. It's already been established that we don't always use Japanese names for everything, even as far back as a decade ago.
To address some of the common arguments here:
Treating this as an ironclad rule leads to ridiculous things, like people seriously arguing we should call it Zelda no Densetsu instead of The Legend of Zelda, or having tags like Dai-Rantou Smash Brothers instead of Super Smash Bros., or aliasing things like Fullmetal Alchemist to Hagane no Renkinjutsushi and Neon Genesis Evangelion to Shin Seiki Evangelion, because those are the original Japanese titles. If we follow this logic all the way through, we end up with many things no one really wants.
This is how we end up with things like Bilan Hangxian instead of Azur Lane, or Zhan Jian Shao Nyu instead of Warship Girls R, which we actually had originally. Of course, when it comes to Chinese games, people don't care nearly as much about the original names as they do for Japanese games. Which tells me that this is less about correctness and more about a weeb affinity for anything Japanese.
And I don't consider the English Pokemon releases to be less official or less authoritative than the Japanese releases. Pokemon is a global franchise, like Mario and Zelda. New games are released simultaneously worldwide. The English releases are just as official as the Japanese ones.
This cuts both ways. You can just as easily search Musashi to find Jessie or Takeshi to find Brock as you can the other way around. The question is which name you should see in tag lists.
Imagine if we followed this logic for Pokemon creatures. Imagine if we had Sirnight instead of Gardevoir or Purin instead of Jigglypuff. Well, you don't have to imagine, because we did exactly this at one point, based on the same logic of "the Japanese Pokemon names are the original names and you can just use aliases if you don't know them". Aliases don't help when you're reading a tag list and you're trying to figure out who the characters are.
Imagine if we had stuck with Japanese names for Pokemon creatures. If we had done that, I guarantee you that we would be here today, arguing about how using Japanese names for Pokemon creatures is the only logical choice, and English names are wrong and unnecessary.
Imagine if we took this logic to the extreme and used actual Japanese in tags. Imagine if we had tags like ムサシ and タケシ and told people to just search for Musashi or Takeshi instead. This would be even more accurate than romanized names, and you could still use aliases to find the right tags. It's obvious why we don't do this. Being able to recognize tag names is important. As much as we say we like Japanese names, we don't want to deal with actual Japanese.
We're in the same situation now with human Pokemon characters that we were with Pokemon creatures a decade ago. There are dozens of major Pokemon characters and hundreds of minor characters by now. It's become too difficult to learn both the Japanese and English names of every major character, just as it's too difficult to memorize the Japanese names of every Pokemon creature.
Danbooru is a Western site. Of course we use English here. This shouldn't be surprising or unexpected to anyone. And I've seen multiple non-native English speakers (some of which are in this thread) say that English names are easiest for them, because English names are used globally, even by non-native speakers.
We don't have this problem for the mainline Pokemon games. We don't have it for most global franchises these days. In fact, when Pokemon Sword and Shield was first revealed at E3 last year, we had the opposite problem, where we knew Nessa's English name before her Japanese name and even Japanese artists were using it, because the Japanese names weren't widely known yet (topic #16157).
These points you listed are more reasoned to me then just the "what people know", "too difficult" or "google search results" I was reading earlier in this thread. The change itself is whatever but the reasoning used to approach it by many was weird and seemingly self-contradictory to me.
evazion said:
The standard is to use Japanese names. We should be consistent and use Japanese names everywhere.
Treating this as an ironclad rule leads to ridiculous things, like people seriously arguing we should call it Zelda no Densetsu instead of The Legend of Zelda, or having tags like Dai-Rantou Smash Brothers instead of Super Smash Bros., or aliasing things like Fullmetal Alchemist to Hagane no Renkinjutsushi and Neon Genesis Evangelion to Shin Seiki Evangelion, because those are the original Japanese titles. If we follow this logic all the way through, we end up with many things no one really wants.
Frankly I don't believe it should be standard, and most here I would think know it's not. My issue is that Danbooru should have had a more standardized practice of how to deal with alternate languages, localizations, and non-English tags/slang a long time ago instead of what it seems to me a selective game of whack-a-mole "case by case basis". It makes a lot of these decisions years upon years after the fact look flimsily justified due to another's preference then anything objective or proven whether it is actually a great benefit or not.
Regardless, mostly agreed here with the rest of this segment.
The original names should be used because they're the most official, or most correct.
This is how we end up with things like Bilan Hangxian instead of Azur Lane, or Zhan Jian Shao Nyu instead of Warship Girls R, which we actually had originally. Of course, when it comes to Chinese games, people don't care nearly as much about the original names as they do for Japanese games. Which tells me that this is less about correctness and more about a weeb affinity for anything Japanese.
It should be noted that Pokemon, especially in the early years, had objectively poor localization and sometimes inaccuracy. I don't find this point alone to be insignificant. Not saying it should be enough to swing any decision one way or another, but I also don't think anyone who brings this up should be brushed off and is a point in favor to their reasoning. And I don't find this a point of just being "weeb".
(And for the record, I would be fine with non-english/non-japanese tags if the original game was not set in either of those regions and Danbooru didn't care much about consistency, I do remember those tags and didn't have a problem with them for the short time we had them)
And I don't consider the English Pokemon releases to be less official or less authoritative than the Japanese releases. Pokemon is a global franchise, like Mario and Zelda. New games are released simultaneously worldwide. The English releases are just as official as the Japanese ones.
Both agree and disagree. English/West is by far one of if not the biggest consumer bases for most of these franchises nowadays so it pulls the most weight. But there are also errors made that unfortunately keep perpetuating themselves that sometimes do not exist in other or the home region that some could question it's validity. Again I don't think it's wrong to consider this for those who may not agree with the swap to a certain localization due to this point.
We don't need to use English character names as the primary tag names. You can just use English aliases to find the Japanese tags.
It does indeed go both ways, but the existence of aliases makes any change of this nature far less paramount then some have made it seem when arguing for it to take place. Especially with people arguing how despite in the internet age of information, increasing mingling and globalization of communities, familiarity with variant language differences and years of rigorous astute tagging accuracy, after over a decade somehow still don't know the names of certain characters in another region, even when the website itself tells you for the overwhelming majority of the characters. Becomes far less likely to me that those asking for change in the defaults are genuinely doing so for that specific reason. Which why I accuse it as more of an excuse to justify other reasons (which to me would just be preference, which is fine, but don't feel it's entirely honest as is)
Imagine if we followed this logic for Pokemon creatures. Imagine if we had Sirnight instead of Gardevoir or Purin instead of Jigglypuff. Well, you don't have to imagine, because we did exactly this at one point, based on the same logic of "the Japanese Pokemon names are the original names and you can just use aliases if you don't know them". Aliases don't help when you're reading a tag list and you're trying to figure out who the characters are.
Imagine if we had stuck with Japanese names for Pokemon creatures. If we had done that, I guarantee you that we would be here today, arguing about how using Japanese names for Pokemon creatures is the only logical choice, and English names are wrong and unnecessary.
For the record, I actually do recognize a decent amount of the Japanese Pokemon names so this point isn't as applicable to me, but I do acknowledge it would be difficult for others to deal with them now if today we all of a sudden decided to switch them back, which is completely understandable, as now Pokemon have almost a thousand in it's ranks. However had we kept using the japanese names for pokemon as well, for well over a decade, I don't feel it would be nearly as problematic for taggers in the modern era as some expect such a thing would be (though definitely more cumbersome in early Danbooru days). I'm not learned in japanese but I can get familiar with names fairly well. But that's just a personal thing. The point is that I think you are underestimating how long being exposed to certain terms, vigorous tagging culture and the information age of those that browse Danbooru would be far more equipped. People of the wider internet have gotten more exposed to japanese names more then ever (in Pokemon's specific case a large part of that is probably due to Danbooru's popularity frankly), so I think that alternate timeline is more plausible then you think.
Imagine if we took this logic to the extreme and used actual Japanese in tags. Imagine if we had tags like ムサシ and タケシ and told people to just search for Musashi or Takeshi instead. This would be even more accurate than romanized names, and you could still use aliases to find the right tags. It's obvious why we don't do this. Being able to recognize tag names is important. As much as we say we like Japanese names, we don't want to deal with actual Japanese.
Isn't this what Sankakucomplex does to some extent (though they do have a English side as well)?
If Danbooru started off as having actual japanese tags such a thing would be easier to defend depending on the goal of the site at the time. But obviously the site started off as English and romanizations, so I wouldn't personally ever defend a change from that to full japanese. As you say, recognizing tags are important and it's also something for the pro-english side of the argument that shouldn't be brushed off (Though I think many in this thread didn't convey it properly)
We're in the same situation now with human Pokemon characters that we were with Pokemon creatures a decade ago. There are dozens of major Pokemon characters and hundreds of minor characters by now. It's become too difficult to learn both the Japanese and English names of every major character, just as it's too difficult to memorize the Japanese names of every Pokemon creature.
See, here I don't agree with this at all. Outside of maybe some minor Anime or manga characters, who I will fail to remember regardless of language, I just don't get the mindset that Pokemon human names are difficult at all, and am kind of confused at how others use this as the main argument, where I think there are far stronger arguments to use. Specifically, the protagonists/gym leaders/champion/villains. I don't find it completely equivalent. One of the reasons I'm able to remember them so well is because I find them very distinct and memorable compared to a lot of the English names which I find can be generic (at least to an English speaker, Gen 5 & Gen 7 protag names are a good example of this). I barely touch the games/anime, most of my pokemon folders are English themselves but I can't just buy this as a good reason to use to warrant anything. Not to mention it's a bit too subjective for my tastes on both sides.
It's biased to pick English over Japanese or over other languages. Localized names are different for every language.
Danbooru is a Western site. Of course we use English here. This shouldn't be surprising or unexpected to anyone. And I've seen multiple non-native English speakers (some of which are in this thread) say that English names are easiest for them, because English names are used globally, even by non-native speakers.
Naturally English will be prioritized whenever possible, makes sense. My angle on this is that the discrepancy becomes weird with how inconsistent this seems to be applied across the website when it comes to tagging inquiries, and my actual point I was trying to hammer home with the last few posts in this thread (though Mysterious Uploader is correct that this is more meta and off topic, and more of the core with my issue). Material lacking localization sticking to their original language is one thing, but we're an English site, with many material that has since been localized but despite that still stick with random japanese. We just had a thread where english translations for anime titles were aliased to their japanese counterparts, yet to see most common argument present in threads like these is that the site is English, being consistent and supposedly prioritizes on what is the most popular to the utmost importance and goes with the flow of popular consensus raises an eyebrow when the rest of the site doesn't seem this way at a glance, and if that were the case the japanese titles would have been aliased to the english localizations a long time ago if such a viewpoint was truly believed by many on this site. To me it just seems to pop up for convenient circumstances.
We may not know the English names if something is released in Japan first, or if it's never released outside Japan.
We don't have this problem for the mainline Pokemon games. We don't have it for most global franchises these days. In fact, when Pokemon Sword and Shield was first revealed at E3 last year, we had the opposite problem, where we knew Nessa's English name before her Japanese name and even Japanese artists were using it, because the Japanese names weren't widely known yet (topic #16157).
This is an argument I used in one of my earlier posts here to show that it's worldwide presence is just as much of a point to keeping the status quo as it could be used for any changes. Pokemon is a global franchise that extends far beyond the games and have for ages. It taps into many mediums, and most of these mediums are not always released globally worldwide and not all of them reach every region, which I feel is something to warrant being wary of when deciding to focus on one localization. Though obviously global releases for the games have diminished this issue somewhat for the core games, and we had the unique scenario with Nessa, the existence of the anime and mangas is one of the reasons why I still note this point, those have terminology known for months long before any official localization, they keep adding more original non-game material and anime characters getting tagged has gotten more popular over the years.
In your own words:
elci said:
You're making a mountain out of a molehill.
[This is] most certainly is a case of people wanting to change things into what they themselves like.
English is not my first language. I have to learn 3 names of each character:
-The one localized in my language, to play the game.
-The one localized in english, to speak with other english people about the game.
-The japanese one, to tag Danbooru artworks.
Many other people are in this same position. People don't come on Danbooru to learn new names. This only drives people away from danbooru. You may like japanese names over english for whatever reason, but let's be real, you're one of the minority, and Danbooru's fuction is to be an easy-to-use image gallery sorter, not a wiki. If people wanted to learn japanese names, they would've done so already.
And no, Danbooru shouldn't be harder to use for baka gajins that can't be arsed to learn japanese names for whatever reason.
Then again, all this discussion wouldn't have happened with an aesthetic JP/EN tag switch in the settings, and i hope in the future something like that can be added so both parties are pleased.
Mysterious_Uploader said:
Then again, all this discussion wouldn't have happened with an aesthetic JP/EN tag switch in the settings, and i hope in the future something like that can be added so both parties are pleased.
I agree, and this is exactly what I proposed in the Discord a while back. Once such a setting was in place, our already extensive aliases would make it easy for users to quickly select main EN names for copyrights and characters. We could finally stop having multi-page forum arguments about which names should be used, like we've been having for over a decade. And it wouldn't just be the "weebs" who would benefit. Since most copyrights and characters currently use their JP names, this would perhaps help those who prefer EN names even more than the reverse.
The bulk update request #3394 (forum #172312) has been approved by @evazion.
BUR #3419 has been approved by @evazion.
create alias pokemon_fushigi_no_dungeon -> pokemon_mystery_dungeon
create alias y_na_gaabena -> yvonne_gabena
create alias odamaki_sapphire -> sapphire_birch
Reversing the aliases that were removed in the last BUR.
EDIT: The bulk update request #3419 (forum #172484) has been approved by @evazion.
Updated by DanbooruBot
