[HSR] Trailblazer umbrella tag discussion

(Crossposting from the HSR costumes thread because of fears the discussion would "contaminate" the thread)

While we don't have the Traveler and Proxy umbrella tags for the two other miHoYo games that do have selectable player charas (and recently, dealt with the Byleth umbrella tag for FE), I noticed that no one had thought of applying the same for the Trailblazer without a valid argument.

Evaz's justification for removing the umbrella Byleth tag in forum #337873 applies to the Trailblazer for the most part.

The only reason to have these umbrella tags is so that people can search for both versions at the same time, and because sometimes in rare cases you can't tell if it's the male or female version of the character. But in reality most of the time people are just looking for the female version even when they're searching for the umbrella tag. Cases where the gender is ambiguous can be handled the same way we handle Male/Female Ritsuka from Fate: by taking your best guess based on context, or by tagging both if you truly can't tell.

In the context of HSR:

• "Original purpose was so people can search for both at the same time": miHoYo treats both male and female selectables equally in promotional art, whether it be Genshin, HSR, or Zenless. Having both in the same pic for special occasions (e.g. post #5297060) wouldn't be any different from something like post #9210299, and it reflects in fanart if artists want to. Also, we have a rule that any art portraying Caelus and Stelle together warrants the dual persona tag.
• The case of "rare instances where you can't tell if it's Caelus or Stelle" does have some precedent: the wanted poster in the Belobog arc (post #6269369) was deliberately made ambiguous to allow player-side interpretation as well as removing the need for miHoYo to make separate gender-specific wanted posters. And most arts of that wanted poster are paired with either Caelus or Stelle, easy identification.
• "Most of the time, people just look for Stelle": 8413 > 4674, with Stelle leading in post count. Caelus normally only gets attention if it's a Firefly hetero pair art (or recently, Castorice), as noted by someone on the Discord.
• A unique issue is the Trash Cake cat form, which implies the Trailblazer directly. The easiest way would be to alias it to just "Trash Cake" and deimply it from the Trailblazer umbrella tag.
• Just like Byleth, Caelus and Stelle have their own costume tags already implicated to themselves and not to the umbrella tag, making it easier for us since we wouldn't need to touch those unlike in FE.

Long story short, the Trailblazer umbrella tag can be taken care of since there's enough arguments and prior precedent to do so. Not to mention we wouldn't have issues for such a move (barring the Trash Cake bit). I'm leaving this to others to cast opinions, although it seems there are some against because the Trailblazer has an identical costume set across both forms (with the difference being the skirt/pants and whether or not the gloves are fingerless or not.

BUR #42200 has been rejected.

Ergo.

Crossposting my own counterargument-

The arguments here aren't very good, IMO, and there are differences from Byleth that you aren't taking into account. For one- "people just look for Stelle"- so what? "Hoyo uses the two equally in promotional art"- so what? An umbrella tag like this costs basically nothing, and it serves an actual purpose and saves a tag, so if you want to argue for removing it, I think you need to put forth a reason why the implications are actively bad, or incoherent, or somehow serve to harm navigation rather than help it. A good example of this is with the Jeanne/Jalter situation, with the implications randomly being made between different versions of the character with no real rhyme or reason. With Byleth, there's the argument that Male and Female Byleth have different costumes; and while I don't think that's a very great argument, it is AN argument, at least. With Caelus and Stelle, however, their costumes are substantially similar, to the point where it would take less words on a wiki page to describe the differences than to describe them separately. And you're just taking these precedents as justification without actually critically examining them I feel- like, it's LITERALLY the same character, and we're unironically saying "well Danbooru users are heavily biased towards female focus" as if that isn't a problem with us, and that we don't need more people posting male focus just generally (and I'm guilty of this too, honestly)- forcing people who are interested in the character, not the booba or lack thereof, to use two tags rather than one is just dumb and pointless, I feel.

tl;dr No opinion, voting meh. Either option works frankly.

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Something important to remember is that you're allowed to say no to evazion if you can prop up a better alternative or counter reasoning, in case you felt compelled to make this BUR solely because he's posted about separating umbrella protagonist character tags before. Admins defer to people who know the copyright thoroughly except when it's so unclear that they have to do their own research or if they're making an authoritative decision. The admins may say no but until they force the decision, it's still up to the users. You can also just choose not to invoke precedent.

Another thing is that every series, including ones created by the same company, have different circumstances. Traveler (Genshin Impact) was attempted in forum #247329. That being said, we don't have umbrella tags for those games simply because it never made sense to have them; regardless of your choice as the player; Aether (Genshin Impact), Lumine (Genshin Impact), Wise (Zenless Zone Zero) and Belle (Zenless Zone Zero) have always been depicted as independent characters both by artists and official media.

"Traveler" is only used by other characters to refer to the player character because you obviously can't create voice lines for every single person's username and have them read out so it's a way to just record voice lines normally. It's also HoYoverse's first big step in self-insert main characters (Adam (Honkai Impact) does not count as he is not the focus of Honkai Impact 3rd's Part 1 main story). An umbrella tag would be inherently wrong because they've never been the same character; the character you do not pick plays a different role rather than being cut out from the story entirely.

Same with not having a "Phaethon" tag. It doesn't make sense to have an umbrella tag because even the game itself repeats that this name is for two people, not one. When a pair or group of people share an identity, we don't umbrella tag them on Danbooru, it's just trivia for a wiki at best. If you want to get really technical, then "Phaethon" is only an online account. Wise and Belle are explicitly distinct non-self insert characters and have never been depicted otherwise in any circumstances.

On the other hand: Caelus (Honkai: Star Rail) and Stelle (Honkai: Star Rail) are not distinct characters and the game makes no effort to distinguish them either; when you pick one, the other one does not exist. In some cases, the Trailblazer is intentionally shown ambiguously (such as on Sampo's wanted posters or the critter pick of them). This, bundled with precedent from other copyrights having umbrellas for their main characters, is why it made more sense for this to happen than it did for the other two games with pickable main characters.

Ultimately, however, it is true (at least personally speaking) that in most cases when I'm looking for either trailblazer with a character I'm going to be searching their specific tag over the umbrella tag. The umbrella tag only provides some utility when you want to find art of either character with a specific one without using more than a few tags, and their distinct names prevent the ability to use a wildcard search. It is also true, compared to other copyrights, that more people are likely looking for the female playable character more than the male playable character. As I said on Discord; basically the only time Caelus gets any boost is if artists don't want a faceless male or other character for romantic/sexual purposes, otherwise Stelle is really the only character that exists to the fandom.

Wyrmmidon said:

For one- "people just look for Stelle"- so what?

The point is that if people are searching Trailblazer (Honkai: Star Rail) they expect to get results of Stelle (Honkai: Star Rail). This is a situation we've dealt with beyond just character tags and have adjusted tags for accordingly; to recent memory, it's what caused topless to be aliased to topless female. There are situations where we favour the majority of searchers, and others where we favour the lesser denomination (e.g. blacklisting purposes). Not everything can be handwaved away with "think of the others".

I'll basically second everything WRS said.

I'm very loosely slightly more in favor of keeping the parent tag as it does have some minor utility and more or less accurately reflects that they are notionally two versions of the same character, but not enough to downvote.

The point is that if people are searching Trailblazer (Honkai: Star Rail) they expect to get results of Stelle (Honkai: Star Rail).

I don't really have any sympathy for people who should know better, given that these are official names and the characters are tagged with their respective language-dependent official distinction names basically everywhere (while "Trailblazer" and such are used for both appearances basically everywhere)

I think there are enough cases where there is true ambiguity to warrant an umbrella tag, especially considering the higher overlap in outfit between Trailblazers compared to Byleth or the Genshin/ZZZ protagonists.

How would you propose we tag:
post #7683810 (ambiguous objectification, G)
post #8468238 (ambiguous character doll, S)
post #6676970 and post #8216505 (wearing Trailblazer's jacket, G and S)

Ambiguous depiction was one of the concerns I had for removing the umbrella tag and I think that tagging both characters if you truly can't tell is a particularly crude option even if it's what another copyright has chosen to do. Tagging both characters achieves the same result that the umbrella tag currently does in exchange for bloating the character list one line though I imagine most taggers are just going to default to tagging Stelle (Honkai: Star Rail) when they can't tell, similarly to how most people searching for a trailblazer expect her unless explicitly otherwise added to the query.

One thing I like about the umbrella tag is that it forces taggers to make a fair decision based on what they have and umbrella tags for gendered, non-distinct characters is already prevalent across most copyrights. It has set up a certain expectation for tagging and unimplying them may be a difficult cultural shift in how we tag protagonists. The big unknown is for searchers/people looking them up particularly. Also it just looks cleaner in the sidebar for dual persona purposes.

Someone asked in Discord for the search stats, so here they are:

Weekly searches is the number of searches this week. These are not unique searches, this includes people searching for the same tag multiple times. Manual searches is the number of times the tag was manually typed into the search bar, as opposed to just clicking it in the tag list. Post views is the number of posts that were clicked on as a result of these searches. Views per post is the average number of posts clicked per search.

The low numbers for Trailblazer indicate a lower level of interest in the tag. The majority of people searching for it are just clicking on it in the tag list, not manually searching for the tag, and after that they only click on one or two posts on average before giving up. Probably because they either only clicked it out of curiosity, or the tag isn't giving them the results they wanted (i.e they wanted the female version but they're getting the male version instead).

A lot of the time the justification for umbrella tags is "what if someone wants to search for both versions at once?", when in reality if you look at the numbers most people just want one or the other. You could say people are stupid or wrong for searching for the umbrella tag when they really wanted the female character, but that's just how it goes. People don't really think about it until they search the tag and find out it's not what they wanted.

In this case I believe there is enough design overlap to create frequent enough situations where the character is depicted in an ambiguous manner.

evazion said:

The low numbers for Trailblazer indicate a lower level of interest in the tag. The majority of people searching for it are just clicking on it in the tag list, not manually searching for the tag, and after that they only click on one or two posts on average before giving up. Probably because they either only clicked it out of curiosity, or the tag isn't giving them the results they wanted (i.e they wanted the female version but they're getting the male version instead).

I still don't see the issue here...? Like, that's a very, VERY minor inconvenience resultant from an error that you're probably never gonna make ever again- meanwhile, someone who does want either version of the character, which is a real situation that you can't just discount (the vast majority of ALL tags on the site are very niche/specific, relatively speaking), will be forced to use two tags for it, which for any non-builder makes a huge amount of searches just straight-up impossible. You're comparing these numbers to each other and saying that the ones for the trailblazer tag are smaller, but the way I see it, that number is objectively massive by simple absolute metrics, and it's still massive even if you discount a large portion of those searches as being in error- the vast majority of chartags don't get nearly that many searches just in general. So if we make a cost-benefit analysis between the marginal inconvenience of being an idiot and searching the umbrella tag and magically expecting it to give them Stelle, versus someone who DOES want both versions of the character and now simply cannot make the search they wanted in only two tags, the more beneficial option seems pretty clear to me.

Update: we now have a related discussion regarding self-inserts: forum #362393.

Basically, there's a similar issue with Entropy from Honkai Impact 3rd where we're now proposing to nuke the umbrella Entropy tag altogether, but the case is more apparent there since due to HI3's continued adherence to the "women-only" rule, which makes the male Dreamseeker all but useless in favor of the "canon" female Dreamseeker.

And yes, this is HI3's attempt (albeit botched) to follow in Genshin and HSR's footsteps in having a self-insert player chara.

Oh, and the Dreamseekers have an outfit design (post #7083824) that is meant to complement each other like the Trailblazers and Travelers, with a greater degree of commonality akin to the Trailblazers. While they're also two versions of the same character, the Entropy umbrella tag is being thrown out the window due to the severe gender imbalance in their case, and would have been so in our case if HSR didn't take much influence from Genshin.

I'm not aware of any cases where John HonkaiEntropy is depicted in an ambiguous manner, while HSR art has quite a lot (including ambiguous partial cosplay). Such a thing would really have to just be glasses probably? Not a lot of full overlap in those designs, just similar theming.

tamuraakemi said:

I'm not aware of any cases where John HonkaiEntropy is depicted in an ambiguous manner

None. John Honkai II (not to be confused with John Honkai I) was only relevant for one single story arc before being completely canned and in that appearance there was no ambiguous depictions so they're fully and completely separate characters with only the female version being further built upon due to the need to establish her as a parallel to another character, Leylah. The gender choice is insignificant compared to other games where the main character is the bread and butter of character interactions and story focus for the game's full run. Only about 3 months of relevance compared to Kiana Kaslana's 7 year run as the game's main character prior.

I would say that the case of Entropy and Trailblazer are incomparable and can't be linked together as an example just because of the nature of how both games handle the main character, unless the takeaway is about which Trailblazer would get the "Trailblazer" tag as a utility alias which there's already Male Trailblazer (Honkai: Star Rail) and Female Trailblazer (Honkai: Star Rail) aliased. It's just shit to type but "Caelus" and "Stelle" are used more than "Trailblazer", the latter only being for formality's sake in story/gameplay discussions and such.

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