Donmai

Merging the Big Bad Wolf

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AngryZapdos

Hillside_Moose said:

Does it necessarily need the (grimm) qualifier if the character's public domain?

Without the qualifier, it'd be ambiguous with any other Big Bad Wolf characters inspired by the original Grimm tale (which are commonplace for classic fairy tales).

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Damian0358

sabisabi said:

I don't know why we have two tags for the exact same character.

The funny thing is that, based on things on site, no one else seems to really know either. Big Bad Wolf is the older of the two, going back as far as 2007 but having existed consistently since 2008, while Big Bad Wolf (Grimm) was created in 2011. Someone around this time even asks why someone was removing the former tag, in forum #62166, only to be rebutted with the latter tag. 5 years later, no one answers forum #122546's question on what differentiates the two tags.

Based on the early tagging history, the one and only reason why the latter tag exists is purely to distinguish the Big Bad Wolf from Little Red Riding Hood from all other Big Bad Wolves (and following in Little Red Riding Hood's footsteps, adopted the Grimm qualifier), entirely contrary to what the wiki suggests, which was created a month ago (and checking the tag history, it only got tagged on the Three Little Pigs once... in 2019, with post #3710176, while the non-qualified tag had already been tagged on another Three Little Pigs post back in 2017, post #2805071). Hilariously, the wiki for Little Red Riding Hood still links to the older tag, since 2009, purely because the folks who made the new tag never cared to edit the wiki to link to it. This also reflects another truth - the only reason the unqualified version exists is because of Little Red as well. Hell, if we check the wikis one last time, the Little Red Riding Hood wiki is the only wiki which links to the unqualified tag, meanwhile for the qualified tag, if we check it, it's only linked in one wiki... big bad wolf (cosplay). It's in the wrong fucking wiki (also what a silly wiki history it has).

Now, if there were anything visually distinguishing the Big Bad Wolf from Little Red Riding Hood enough to distinguish him from other Big Bad Wolves, like the one in the Three Little Pigs (side-note, apparently that fable is not from the Grimm Brothers, it's English in origin, so that further makes the qualified tag's wiki wrong), then there might be a valid reason for it, but we're talking about a fairytale character that traditionally does not have a consistent visual appearance. As such, it feels entirely arbitrary to be distinguishing big bad wolves in the first place, especially since a lot of folks will lump together technically different big bad wolves together into one because there's no rules behind how you're supposed to handle public domain fairytale characters (post #3710176, for example, combines the wolf from Little Red and Little Pigs, and for a non-Danbooru example, Disney does the same for its Big Bad Wolf character in Silly Symphonies).

So yeah, +1 for the BUR, remove the qualifier because Big Bad Wolves aren't unique to Grimm stories.

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