Cattywampus said:
Now that all molcars have had their official names revealed (https://molcar-anime.com/stand/countdown/), we should probably change the current ones for easier searchability. There's just a few hangups:
- The police and ambulance molcar have inconsistent romanizations. Both are almost exclusively known as "patmolcar" and "kyukyumolcar", respectively (example), but the parco molcar town stickers have them as "police" and "ambulance". Kyukyu also isn't the most intuitive tag name.
This can often be the case for Japanese "products" that don't have an official English localization yet (like all the endless variants of Shirou and Siro back then for Fate/Stay Night). The "English" names are there just for marketing/data entry purposes, so they can be a little arbitrary and can be different when different teams are in charge of doing the romanization.
Anyway, going with the Molcar Anime page (which seems to be the most "official") so far... the police molcar is called 「パトモルカー」, "patomorukaa", from a portmanteau of "(police) patrol car" and "molcar". "Patmolcar" is a good way of rendering the name, and is how the "Pat(rol)" part of portmanteau names are handled anyway like for Patlabor.
The ambulance molcar is called 「救急モルカー」, "kyuukyuumorukaa", from a portmanteau of "ambulance" (kyuukyuusha, lit. "emergency (service) vehicle") and "molcar". Safest is to just transliterate the first part of the name as "kyuukyuumolcar", but if a more memorable tag is required we can instead translate the first part and go with "ambumolcar" or "emergency molcar" (or "ambulance_molcar", for maximum descriptiveness).
(It's the same consideration for other "descriptive-sounding" names without official English localizations too. Or without decent ones. There's some tradeoff between transliterating, resulting in a more consistent name, or translating, resulting in a more meaningful and memorable one.)
Cattywampus said:
- Different variants have their own listed names, like "Abbey" and "Magical Angel Abbey". Do we care about this? Having multiple chartags for variants almost always winds up being a PITA to manage.
I'm against "automatically" creating multiple "alternate variant" chartags unless there is some necessity for it. An actual alternate self of the character (timeclones, clones, dark personality, alter ego mantle that can be taken up by other people), trying to avoid spoilers, or... begrudgingly if the alternate variant gets enough art of its own that has it as the central focus.
I'm not familiar with those specific molcars though. Are they like the same molcar but with a different paintjob? Or actual different molcars, just the same "model"? Or is it like a mahou_shoujo and her civilian alter ego kind of deal?
Though, in either case, probably no harm giving magical molcar Abbey her own tag. Just one variant and the nomenclature (and low tag count) makes collision unlikely. Only annoyance is the requirement of a potential implication down the road.
Cattywampus said:
- How much do we care about the mob molcars? Do they deserve their own tags?
Well, probably like mob characters from other series then. if someone think they deserve it, then they deserve it. IMHO, usually all it needs is for one fanart depicting that specific background extra as the focal character of said art. Would be strange not to tag the mob kyara if the art depicts the mob kyara with a central focus and the title and commentary all mention that specific mob kyara.
Usually these kinds of background characters become popular because of some meme or something, like Poorfag.
If it's just the background character acting as a, well, background character, to pad out extras in a scene (like in the source material), then probably no.
