Aliasing and Implications: shikinami_asuka_langley and souryuu_asuka_langley

Apparently in the Rebuild of Evangelion Asuka's last name has been changed from souryuu to shikinami, and there's already a small pool of posts with the new last name (although I believe they have both names at current).

Since this might become an issue at some point down the road it might be better handled now. I would suggest at the very least that shikinami_asuka_langley be given an implication to souryuu_asuka_langley and perhaps the other way around as well.

I'm not sure about any sort of mass edit, because there seems to be argument over which of her names will be the more widely recognized one. At this point it almost seems like tagging with both might be the most productive thing to do, oddly.

Any opinions on this whole mess? Should there be any change? Should it be retroactively applied? Or should things just be left as is?

See forum #17785. shikinami asuka langley is already implicated to souryuu asuka langley.

Shouldn't shikinami_asuka_langley be aliased to souryuu_asuka_langley rather than implicated? I don't know the series very well, but there doesn't seem to be any physical difference between the two.

(And even if that's wrong, shikinami_asuka_langley needs to be a general tag, since it's messing up chartags: searches, which is how the issue came to my attention.)

We can't make a character a general tag just because it messes up tag counts, unfortunately. There are lots and lots of situations that legitimately break tag counts, dual persona situations being one.

As for whether Rebuild Asuka specifically needs a separate tag, well, it's never really been questioned before, thus never brought up, and I haven't thought about it. I imagine there would be quit a lot of opposition to removing it though.

There's a visible difference in her uniform, but otherwise they are the same.

I don't know how best to proceed since the new Evangelion is basically a reboot and Shikinami is likely going to be her name from this point forward. It feels odd to retroactively rename her on all the old posts though.

The way I've been working is whenever I see her in the distinctive test plugsuit of the new series, I tag her Shikinami, otherwise only Souryuu.

Oh it's probably irrelevant to the thread, but just for informations' sake, the likely justification for the name change was to put Asuka on level footing with Rei and the new Mari character.

Most Eva main characters' surnames are named after WWII naval vessels. Asuka used to be named after an aircraft carrier "Souryuu" but was "demoted" by renaming her after a destroyer "Shikinami". That put her in line with Rei and Mari who are both also named after destroyers "Ayanami" and "Makinami".

Asuka's middle name is still named for an American aircraft carrier "Langley".

jxh2154 said:
We can't make a character a general tag just because it messes up tag counts, unfortunately.

Given that "shikinami" is implicated to "souryuu", making it a general tag doesn't seem to be any different than making ex-keine a general tag (as we decided to do in forum #35572), which seems to be working out pretty well.

glasnost said:
Given that "shikinami" is implicated to "souryuu", making it a general tag doesn't seem to be any different than making ex-keine a general tag (as we decided to do in forum #35572), which seems to be working out pretty well.

I second that. It seems worth doing on more characters (got 3 others to suggest so far).

glasnost said: Given that "shikinami" is implicated to "souryuu", making it a general tag doesn't seem to be any different than making ex-keine a general tag (as we decided to do in forum #35572), which seems to be working out pretty well.

That's a bit of an unusual situation, though. And I don't quite think it's ideal either - why shouldn't ex-keine show up when clicking "Related Characters", for example?

I don't think people would argue for making saber_lily or any of the many many other alternate persona tags we have into general tags, right? Plenty of them double up for a single character already. It's just an inherent flaw in the [x]tags: system.