keonas said:
Guessing we didn't use it for Komori Met too because she already had so many outfits under 774?
It's a mix of a few things:
- Her having so many costumes under 774 is one reason (and is a common reason some Nijisanji VTubers similarly don't have Old Design tags for their original debut costumes).
- Another is also scope of representation. For the Hololive girls, generally their old designs get swept under the rug, and in turn, end up getting little representation in fanart over time, especially if the redesign took place ages ago (so what people consider their "1st" ends up shifting instead to their current default costume, being the best known and most unambiguous, and that's what you see on some fan wikis too). So now consider this for much smaller (read: less represented in art and boorus) VTubers. The furthest example of how far you can stretch this though is Flare, since her redesign came two and a half years after her debut, said redesign is her fourth costume chronologically (so tagged 4th costume is her fifth chronologically), and there's still a lot of fondness for the old design.
- And lastly, it is reasonability in numbering and tagging. Using Tokino Sora as an example, what most folks consider her 2nd costume (including here) would be, like, her 12th or something, if we counted every costume she had prior to June 2019 accurately, most of which likely has no representation in fanart and are only mentioned as footnotes on fan wikis, so you'd arbitrarily have, like, 1st, 6th, 12th as Sora's first three costume tags (and that's not considering what we'd have to name these). So it makes sense to collapse all that under one Old Design tag, because it'd realistically only be filled with her old default design and none of the other 10 or so costumes time and fan artists have forgotten, and have everything be reasonably tagged and numbered. In contrast, Komori Met was part of 774 for three years, and received enough attention that both her old default and her 3 additional costumes from that era got represented substantially in fanart, at least relatively, so it doesn't make sense to collapse all that into an Old Design tag because you'd have four completely different designs that do appear in art and are remembered by fans well that'd be better served with individual tags.
And I didn't know about the 3D outfits being mainline numbered. Seems like most of them were renamed, so that hid the numbering.
Yeah, most of the 3D costumes come from sources that easily lend themselves to names (in contrast to the Live2D costumes), so they got renamed fairly swiftly.
Fair, (old_design) works well here. Might end up using that for Kaga Sumire too, since she had at least 1 old costume which was re-worked and re-debut. I need to read up on that more first.
Looking at it, based on the VSPO fan wiki, Sumire's current default is her fourth costume chronologically (she has seven in total), and while all her second, third, and fourth costumes have all received updates, her original first costume hasn't. Unless I miscounted, I could only find said costume in two posts, and she herself doesn't seem to list it in a late 2022 costume summary thread on Twitter. So the Old Design qualifier could work, especially since it seems to be utterly swept under the rug and forgotten in art since it got replaced.
