Danbooru

Disambiuation on the Shikigami tag

Posted under General

So, this question came about from looking at some recent touhou images, and sort of developed into it's own question here.

The Shikigami tag is used in several ways, somewhat inconsistently.

- In most series "Shikigami" means the paper talismans/manikins used to represent them (e.g. Kancolle, post #6445121)
- In certain series, like Jujutsu Kaisen and onmyoji, however, it's instead used as a species tag to represent when a given monster is a shikigami (post #6554773)
- Then in third cases, like Touhou, there is Shikigami with real forms and paper talisman shikigami, and it's used as an object tag only, not a species tag. (like, if the second case applied, posts like post #6613563 should absolutely be tagged, but they're not.)
- Moreover, there's unique cases where certain shikigami papers have incredibly unique designs, and are at least part of the form of specific characters, but whether those images should be tagged with the character is another question entirely, as the talisman itself is inanimate (chen's talisman in post #6706255 is what started this whole line of questioning.)

So, my proposal is this:
- The existing shikigami tag applies both to shikigami with paper and non-paper forms, essentially being both a species and object tag.
- A new tag, shikigami_talisman, is created to indicate the paper forms specifically. Shikigami in other forms don't get that tag.
- In cases where there are animate talismans with known identities, like shiki_taishou, those keep their character tags.
- In cases where there are unique talismans with known identities, but the character has a different main canon form, those are tagged with a character tag x_(shikigami_talisman). So Chen's paper talisman form would be tagged Chen_(shikigami_talisman), and standard alt-form implication rules apply.

This butts up against the howto:tag Rule of Thumb:

Tag what you see, not what you know. In other words, only tag the visual and factual elements in the image. For example, images where the full moon is prominently depicted will have a full_moon tag. Ideally you should use an existing tag on Danbooru.
This means you should not tag what you know about a character. For example remilia_scarlet is supposed to be a vampire, but don't tag every picture depicting her with the vampire tag. Only use the vampire tag if the characteristics are clearly visible.

If not for this rule of thumb, every image of Patchouli Knowledge might well be tagged with witch because character profiles and wikis call her a witch, even though no one searching for witches on Danbooru is looking for a girl wearing pajamas.

Renaming shikigami to shikigami talisman might not be a bad idea to discourage any "canon tagging," and the tag could then be safely applied to post #6706255, but for other situations I think we should just create tags like shikigami_(jujutsu_kaisen) when they're necessary.

Another way to think of it is: is anyone, for any reason, going to want to pull up an arbitrary combination of Kancolle aircraft carriers flinging around pieces of paper, nameless creatures from Jujutsu Kaisen and other copyrights that are canonically referred to as "shikigami", and a couple of Touhou characters that are canonically referred to as "shikigami" at the same time? If not, a tag having a definition that includes all those things is not useful.

Species tags should, ideally, be used to tag something with consistent, visually identifiable physical traits. Remilia Scarlet and Flandre Scarlet are not tagged vampire unless vampiric traits are visual in the image (drinking blood, emphasis on their fangs, ect.). This is "Tag What You See" and how the majority of the site is meant to operate. Tagging someone like Chen with shikigami violates TWYS because she's basically just a cat girl.

That aside, I agree with renaming shikigami to strictly limit it to paper shikigami.

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