Donmai

Regarding the enmaided tag/Turning maid into an umbrella tag

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Damian0358

Username_Hidden said:

I was planning to make another topic for the western maid discussion, but at this point i'll just change the topic name.
Also changing BUR, french_maid -> western_maid

We can always alias french_maid and english_maid to western_maid.

EB said:

Going by Google searches, "Qi Lolita" is a term that has been used, but haven't found any evidence of the same for "Qi maid".

Didn't find anything using 華メイド, but 中華メイド seemed to produce results (both based on what Qi Lolita has in its Other Names).

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Damian0358

EB said:

There's also チャイナメイド, (china maid, similarly to "china dress") which produces a few more results on Pixiv, though they're both pretty sparse in results there. チャイナメイド is apparently the Japanese term used in this Love Live costume: chinese-styled maid's passionate welcome (love live!).

Well, that's another contender to be added under the theoretical qi_maid tag, but this makes me wonder whether or not there are traditional "native maid" tags for either the Japanese or the Chinese, as for the former, a good chunk of wa maid seems derivative of Western maids (with both wa maid and qi maid being found in post #2720825).

女中 appears to be the closest equivalent to a native Japanese maid (and mentioning these, 侍女, 家政婦, 召使 and じいや all appear to not be represented in any form in Danbooru's Other Names system, so that should be rectified), but tag-wise it appears to be used like another maid tag on Pixiv, while the main Chinese word for maid, 女僕/女仆, is aliased to メイド in-article, while others like 女佣, and 下女 (also used in Japanese) share the same trend (though if I've missed a word, let me know).

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NNescio

Damian0358 said:

Well, that's another contender to be added under the theoretical qi_maid tag, but this makes me wonder whether or not there are traditional "native maid" tags for either the Japanese or the Chinese, as for the former, a good chunk of wa maid seems derivative of Western maids (with both wa maid and qi maid being found in post #2720825).

女中 appears to be the closest equivalent to a native Japanese maid (and mentioning these, 侍女, 家政婦, 召使 and じいや all appear to not be represented in any form in Danbooru's Other Names system, so that should be rectified), but tag-wise it appears to be used like another maid tag on Pixiv, while the main Chinese word for maid, 女僕/女仆, is aliased to メイド in-article, while others like 女佣, and 下女 (also used in Japanese) share the same trend (though if I've missed a word, let me know).

The issue is that the various words for "female domestic servant" in both Chinese and Japanese can also be used to describe a Western-style maid (or a hybrid maid with both Western style and traditional clothes worn together), because they are also, well, "female domestic servants".

As for 召使, it can refer to a domestic servant (of either gender), a low-ranking retainer, or even a low-ranking civil servant or court official. じいや meanwhile is a affectionate nickname for an elderly male servant or retainer (being commonly used by rich people in fiction to address old family butlers).

I don't really think we should put them under "other names".

--

As for the Chinese equivalent of the Wa Maid trope, these are generally described using terms like 旗袍女仆 (Qipao maid) or 中式女仆 (Chinese-style maid), though some examples are just people dressed in qipao (or some variety of "China dress") without any overt maid features. Overall it seems like an imported Japanese trope though, because most results are either of anime-style art or cosplay.

Edit: Am fine with Chinese_maid, qipao_maid or even qi_maid. Just wanted to chime in that we should be careful with "other names" because some of them are used as catch-all umbrella tags (for servants in general) in their respective source languages.

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Nell

Bear in mind, whatever happens to enmaided should generally also happen to bespectacled and kemonomimi_mode to be consistent. The main problem I have with removing 'composite tags' like this is that guests and basic accounts are still limited to a meagre 2 tags. What makes the site neat for 'us' starts making it quite difficult for 'them' to navigate efficiently within the given limitations, as one can end up needing to minus at least 2 separate tags in a search instead of adding 1.

Another (possibly very minor) concern is historical. Enmaiding was a bigger trope in the 2000s, with things like official magazine art pieces having an lineup of maid versions of the characters, and meddling with old tags may damage the record, as it were, especially as old posts may not have been given other tags like alternate_costume and still rely on enmaided to be appropriately searchable. But to be fair this kind of thing was also done with swimsuits and bunnysuits, and no one thought to call characters 'swimsuited' or 'enbunnied'.

Mexiguy said:
enmaided is quite a dumb tag to begin with, I think 99% of the users don't care about "true" maids.

That's something that can be said about 99% of tags. But 99% of people don't overlap neatly. I'm not sure how to explain it but essentially 'everyone' has a few 1% tags they like or use often. As more and more posts are added to Danbooru, the need for highly weird and specific tags rises under the restriction of the capacity of a human user to navigate search results in a reasonable timeframe, such that these specific 'sub-ideas' remain reasonably findable.

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Damian0358

So, it seems for the time being, we're leaving enmaided as it, but we do still need to reach a solution for the other part of this thread, on maid. I still think moving the maid tag as is to western maid, turning maid into a catch-all, aliasing french_maid and english_maid to western maid, and then implying all current maid tags to the new catch-all (sans victorian maid, implying western maid instead) would be the best option here.

In the meantime, I've gone ahead and started up qi maid for those who want to tag garden Chinese-themed, non-Western maids. A utility alias for it, where chinese_maid is aliased to it, would probably be good to have too (and perhaps having a similar japanese_maid -> wa_maid alias could be good too).

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