Posted under General
A lot of these tags will have some sort of issues, especially when popular media may use terms for one thing and use them for another which changes their meaning.
Glaive is one of those examples, where it's not uncommon in western games for the term to be used for throwing star-type weapons for example. Thankfully the tag seems to be pretty clean, but the fact that popular games use the term for a different kind of weapon will always means that it'll be prone to mistagging.
NWF_Renim said:
A lot of these tags will have some sort of issues, especially when popular media may use terms for one thing and use them for another which changes their meaning.
Glaive is one of those examples, where it's not uncommon in western games for the term to be used for throwing star-type weapons for example. Thankfully the tag seems to be pretty clean, but the fact that popular games use the term for a different kind of weapon will always means that it'll be prone to mistagging.
I think that one was from Krull. The eighties movie. Basically a named artifact ("The Glaive") which was, uh, I think, an oversized five-pointed throwing star? Then Warcraft took a hold of it and popularized it for games. Though I think the movie version of Blade also had mini chakram boomerangs or something called glaives... which probably is a reference to Krull. Don't think it was the case for the comicbook version of Blade though.
Anyhow, the glaive wiki probably needs a slight rewrite, IMHO. It does acknowledge the ambiguity but doesn't mention it shouldn't be used. Mind if I do the rewrite?
NWF_Renim said:
In terms of distinctions, a flail weapon should be a melee weapon. It's usage is one that would be one used at melee range, like a sword and club. A ball and chain weapon is a ranged weapon in the same sense as a whip is commonly used in fiction. If the chain is long enough that it'd be used as a ranged weapon, then it's a ball and chain.
ideal flail depictions: post #660676, post #212735, post #1868720
In general, if you could think of the weapon as a whip using a chain, then it's a ball and chain and not a flail.
That is a quite sensible definition and makes sense in "elucidating " why some over-long examples (Rem's in particular) feel wrong as a "flail" (when held slack) even when there is a visible handle (because that weapon no longer 'feel' like it could be swung flail-style), but trying to enforce that as a tag seems to be... hard. In particular some examples might change from 'flail' to not-flail depending on artist (or even from frame to frame within the same comic, due to how the angle of the strikes are depicted).
(Also, personally, when a 'flail' is actively being swung, well, 'flail'-style (nevermind the physics impossibility/leverage issues) it seems no longer accurate to call that a ball-and-chain or 'whip'... I think? No matter how long it is.)
Medieval weapon tags are pretty messy in general and full of both canon tagging and what I call "vocabulary test tagging", ie people tagging based on their knowledge of obscure weapons terminology and using the next best thing if they don't. I welcome any adjustments to clear up OldBooru wikis and ambiguity caused by weird fantasy stuff.
Updated by Veraducks
NWF_Renim said:
Feel free to make any necessary adjustments to make it clearer.
Updated.
Then went through our posts looking for good examples to use (other than Tatsuta's), at which point I realized we might have another potential ambiguity issue. Namely, well, all the other "blade on a stick" weapons.
So, currently, I think... we have glaive, nagimaki, naginata and guan_dao? And prolly a few others I missed. No problems with nagimaki and naginata for now, there's nearly no tag overlap with glaive or with each other, despite their similar appearances (or in other words, most users know how to tell the difference when tagging). Guan_dao, meanwhile... well, it's not really populated, and those that are have like around one fourth double-tagged with glaive. So no I'm not entirely sure about the glaive article whether to exclude guan daos from tagging.
Veradux said:
Medieval weapon tags are pretty messy in general and full of both canon tagging and what I call "vocabulary test tagging", ie people tagging based on their knowledge of obscure weapons terminology and using the next best thing if they don't. I welcome any adjustments to clear up OldBooru wikis and ambiguity caused by weird fantasy stuff.
*Looks over at AD&D's weapons table*
Hey, at least nobody is crazy enough to create guirsarme, faulchard, voulge, bec-de-corbin, bohemian earspoon, ranseur etc tags yet! Or all those weird compound polearms named by combining multiple single polearm names into one.
Wait a minute... on the subject of compound polearms... think Sailor Saturn's Silence Glaive is technically... sigh... a glaive-guirsarme. Or more accurately a faulchard-fork. Welp, gonna count it as a glaive anyway. It's how it has been tagged.
This might open up a whole new can of worms, but... I don't think most users care about this distinction anyway (unlike for naginata and nagimaki). And fortunately Tatsuta provides many examples of the classic glaive. Now the problem is how I'm going to mention this in the glaive wiki (i.e. "group all those other similar European blade-on-a-stick-weapons-that-isn't-a-scythe under glaive, Danbooru currently doesn't care about the distinction") without confusing people. Maybe best not to mention it at all?
Anyhow, probably will open a new thread to discuss this, I think. For polearms. This is starting to turn into a rabbit hole.
Edit: Oh wait, we have a poleaxe tag! I didn't realize it when I retagged post #3581855 from glaive to halberd, because I didn't know we have a separate tag for "choppy European 'axe' on a stick". And apparently most people don't either, because halberd is filled with poleaxes.
Updated by NNescio
Halberd is filled with polaxes, poleaxe is filled with greataxes, claymore and zweihander used to be triple-digit tags filled with every possible bladed weapon (including knives), and so, so much more.
It's currently very difficult for me to tag and whatnot due to being mostly on mobile as I am not home, but when I get back in a week I'm probably going to make a dedicated thread for this stuff and making alias similar to my previous spaulder/pauldron one. Make it into a pet project between harpy posts.
Updated by Veraducks
The bulk update request #5755 (forum #187814) has been approved by @evazion.
I don't really follow all of this, but from what I understand:
The difficulty arises with fantasy weapons like Rem's, where it has a handle like a flail but an extremely long chain like a ball and chain. I don't know if there's a simple solution here, this is a case of fantasy not corresponding with reality.
evazion said:
I don't really follow all of this, but from what I understand:
- A spiked mace is, well, a mace with a spiked head. Self-explanatory.
- A flail is a short ball-and-chain with a handle.
- A ball and chain (weapon) is a long chain without a handle (example: Yuubari Gogo).
The difficulty arises with fantasy weapons like Rem's, where it has a handle like a flail but an extremely long chain like a ball and chain. I don't know if there's a simple solution here, this is a case of fantasy not corresponding with reality.
I think trying associate whether it has or hasn't a handle is an unnecessary element on determining what it is, because it's the length of the chain that determines how the weapon functions when used. All flails should have handles, but I don't think that should mean that ball and chain weapons can't have handles.
A flail weapon comes in two forms the short ball-and-chain weapon (aka military flail) or it could be a weapon sort of like a nunchaku (post #212735, aka a peasant flail, were either modified or designed after the agricultural tool used by peasants). The point of it is to be able to go around a defender's parry or shield when swung, so having the chain overly long changes the nature of how the weapon operates altogether which is why it would cease being a flail.
NWF_Renim said:
I think trying associate whether it has or hasn't a handle is an unnecessary element on determining what it is, because it's the length of the chain that determines how the weapon functions when used. All flails should have handles, but I don't think that should mean that ball and chain weapons can't have handles.
I agree. Stop worry about the handle and instead base it on the chain itself.
No chain? Mace.
Some chain? Flail.
Lotta chain? Ball n chain.
The bulk update request #5758 (forum #187841) has been approved by @evazion.
BUR #60008 has been approved by @evazion.
create implication flanged_mace -> mace
Just noticed that spiked mace implied mace but flanged mace didn't.
The bulk update request #60008 (forum #441443) has been approved by @evazion.
