That problem being - a lot of the game's character designs that the canon calls Magical Girls are not anywhere near close to a "stereotypical" appearance of a Magical Girl, but may otherwise be unsearchable without the tag - you *can* try subtracting their school uniforms, costumes with their own chartags and similar, but you are not guaranteed that 100% of the search will be those designs, given the multitude of either fanmade costumes or one-off official ones without a name, along with instances of dual persona and multi-character pics where one person is transformed and one isn't.
But I do feel bad polluting the Magical Girl tag like this, even if I know how vague the concept of a Magical Girl can be (compare Sailor Moon to Winx Club S1 to OG Madoka to Precure). But there's a problem - unlike series like Sailor Moon, MGs in Madoka Magica as a whole do not have separate names for civilian and MG persona. The only work-around for creating chartags under the current "costume must be named for a separate chartag to be created" is that these costumes very technically have their own names - here are in-game screenshots of twocharacters' - you can see that they, like pretty much all characters, have MG forms listed under "魔法少女" (Mahou Shoujo, Magical Girl).
For some stats - this search: tamaki_iroha solo has 54% of posts also tagged as Magical Girl. And I keep that tag in good shape for Magia Record (if you can excuse canon-tagging for characters like Izumi Kanagi or Kureha Yuna).
Basically what I'm asking is - should I go ahead and create character tags like tamaki iroha (magical girl)? And if yes - Magia Record-only or all of Madoka? And on that note - since chartag pairs like Sailor Moon and Tsukino Usagi, or Cure Black and Misumi Nagisa do not imply each other, should those?
(Though this still does not solve the problem of "I want to see characters from the series, transformed, though I don't care exactly which ones", unless we decide to create a non-traditional Magical Girl or something. And then decide which characters fall under that.)
I started creating favgroups for those potential MG chartags. Though, since I'm unsure - posts that belong to favgroup #20050 and similar should also get the tag, if it's created, right? They still use some elements of Magical Girl Iroha's design (usually cloak), after all, even if they are combined with other costumes.
Of course, these will need to have their category changed to character and most likely be implied to the main chartags, and I still have around a hundred characters more to sort through.
(Though this still does not solve the problem of "I want to see characters from the series, transformed, though I don't care exactly which ones", unless we decide to create a non-traditional Magical Girl or something. And then decide which characters fall under that.)
Though, since I'm unsure - posts that belong to favgroup #20050 and similar should also get the tag, if it's created, right? They still use some elements of Magical Girl Iroha's design (usually cloak), after all, even if they are combined with other costumes.
I don’t think we have a definitive rule for that yet. Currently I tag the costume tag whenever there’s even the smallest reference to it cuz or else they’ll be missed in searches, and sometimes alongside fusion or self cosplay, or alternate costume if paired with fanmade clothes but this might need further discussion.
KagayakuShiningGate said:
Of course, these will need to have their category changed to character and most likely be implied to the main chartags, and I still have around a hundred characters more to sort through.
Just add "char:" in front of the tag and the they’ll automatically be character tags when the BUR went through.
Not sure about the implications, as you mentioned other MG copyrights don’t do it. One reason I can think of is that the civilian tag wouldn’t end up on posts cosplaying the magical girl persona and pollute tag search.
Madoka Magica has over a hundred MG characters, and is still growing. Wildcard searches only show the top 100 tags. Not to mention characters with a copyright qualifier, like Kuroe or Shinobu Akira.
I don’t think we have a definitive rule for that yet. Currently I tag the costume tag whenever there’s even the smallest reference to it cuz or else they’ll be missed in searches, and sometimes alongside fusion or self cosplay, or alternate costume if paired with fanmade clothes but this might need further discussion.
(no further opinions on this segment)
Just add "char:" in front of the tag and the they’ll automatically be character tags when the BUR went through.
Oh, okay, thanks! Added now.
Not sure about the implications, as you mentioned other MG copyrights don’t do it. One reason I can think of is that the civilian tag wouldn’t end up on posts cosplaying the magical girl persona and pollute tag search.
It's hard to tell, really. Ultimate Madoka didn't imply Kaname Madoka until June 2022 (topic #21544). Though it seems like the lack of Sailor Moon/Usagi Tsukino implications lead to kind of a mess in general:
Post count for ~sailor_moon ~tsukino_usagi : 5072
Post count for sailor_moon tsukino_usagi: 2925
Post count for sailor_moon -tsukino_usagi: 448
Post count for -sailor_moon tsukino_usagi: 1699
Post count for tsukino_usagi: 4624
Post count for sailor_moon: 3373
Post count for sailor_moon tsukino_usagi solo -dual_persona -multiple_persona : 1855
That was for a different reason, Ultimate Madoka was considered a spoiler back then thus the implication was avoid, but over the time it became a common knowledge and someone went to request a BUR. Not exactly a fitting example for this topic.
KagayakuShiningGate said: Though it seems like the lack of Sailor Moon/Usagi Tsukino implications lead to kind of a mess in general:
Post count for ~sailor_moon ~tsukino_usagi : 5072
Post count for sailor_moon tsukino_usagi: 2925
Post count for sailor_moon -tsukino_usagi: 448
Post count for -sailor_moon tsukino_usagi: 1699
Post count for tsukino_usagi: 4624
Post count for sailor_moon: 3373
Post count for sailor_moon tsukino_usagi solo -dual_persona -multiple_persona : 1855
I'm not familiar with Sailor Moon, but currently Precure works like this:
MG transformed from its canon civilian: civilian tag + MG tag
MG transformed from someone else: Mg tag + that random character tag + cosplay
Civilian A and civilian B exchanged MG identities: civilian A + MG B, civilian B + MG A (post #5086810 and children)
Civilian A in her MG form wearing MG B's clothes: Civilian A + MG A + MG B + cosplay (post #5090043)
Civilian in Civilian identity: civilian tag only (post #6003718)
Another option I've been thinking about is to give Madoka Magica its own, separate Magical Girl tag that'd serve as a catch-all for all characters. It wouldn't imply the regular Magical Girl tag, but specific characters "deemed worthy" would still be tagged. This still has the problem of 1) being kinda weird (like saying, not all magical girls are Magical Girls) 2) needing to determine which Magical Girls are Magical Girly-enough.
There seems to be no simple and sensible solution.
