Veraducks said:
100% disagree with this.
The main reason it wasn't done before has been because the main Pokémon uploaders say it shouldn't and I think that's silly. Doubly so when you consider the gender split NPC classes being kept under one tag.
Lass is a better example than Hex Maniac. Since she's been in every mainline game and several spinoffs, there're a dozen unique designs for the character from the games alone, then additional anime and manga versions. All in one tag that is only searchable via combining copytags with the chartag. pc88 says that the rule is that we do that, but that's never been a rule, but merely a tagging practice enforced by a handful of our most prolific 'mon uploaders/taggers. The soft guideline put forward by Evazion in forum #304070 is "If it's a unique design and it has more than one post, it should get a tag."
Copytags should not be the stand-in for character and costume tagging.
Did you consider that the reason the "Pokemon uploader cabal" enforced this "rule" is because it's been site wide standard policy for the entirety of the site's lifetime? Or that the evazion post you linked is being taken out of context?
Evazion is arguing against the absurd notion of asking users to find popular character designs, official or not, using General tags when the site does nothing to even indicate that as being an option. In that context, he's 110% correct. It's exactly the same as one of the arguments used to justify the gacha game outfit tags. It's also why tags like Yomako and Space Yoko are allowed to exist. A cobbled together General tag search should not be the primary way to find an entire outfit or character design that we know people are going to come here looking for.
We're not talking about General tags, though, we're talking about Copyright tags. "Character + copyright" has always been the accepted method of looking for designs that differ between copyrights. Unlike general tags, it's usually extremely reliable, rendering a character tag for every character/copyright search as a redundant combo tag. That's not something unique to Pokemon tagging, and I don't think having "dozens of unique designs" is a very compelling argument when every single one of them has an associated copyright tag.
If we actually look at these tags, lass (pokemon swsh), the largest Lass subtag and having more than double the second largest, has 109 posts. Lass_(pokemon) pokemon_swsh has 152, and Lass_(pokemon) pokemon_swsh -lass_(pokemon_swsh) has 44. Almost every post in that last search qualifies for lass (pokemon swsh), leaving at best 10 false positives for Lass_(pokemon) pokemon_swsh. That's a noise percentage of less than 10%. That's what all of them look like.
These tags are glorified combo tags. I don't believe there's any reason to expect that users can't figure out the copyright searching policy we've been using for over a decade. Copyright tags are not invisible in a sea of blue, and I expect anyone coming here looking for the newest fan favorite NPC everyone is drawing porn of is at least smart enough to figure out that they can easily find their goon material by using the correct copyright tag.
What you're arguing for is making character tags for every return character in every new entry to their series and their debut entry. Every single series with more than a single entry will have a bare minimum of two character tags, with half of those character tags being redundant with a very easy to parse two tag search. You're literally doubling the character count indiscriminately on all posts. As much as there's no good argument for Pokemon doing this, there's equally lacking reason for this to stop at Pokemon, either. If it's a good idea for Pokemon, then it's a good idea for everyone. Any arguments for why Pokemon should do this and no one else would be no different from the nonsense "minimum post count" evazion was arguing against in the thread you linked.
