Arknights Endfield Endministrator, and other gendered protag umbrellas

Of all the characters listed in forum #415750, the only ones with specific costume tags are the Granblue Fantasy, Fate/Grand Order, Genshin Impact, Honkai: Star Rail, Wuthering Waves, Zenless Zone Zero, Stella Sora, and Miliastra Wonderland characters.

Gran and Djeeta, alongside having at least one costume tags for each, share a fuckton of chartags, listed under Class List and Costumes in each wiki respectively. This most resembles the current situation with Commander (Girls' Frontline) and Female Commander (Girls' Frontline), given they both share Journey in the Auspicious Snow, it just isn't obvious given the fact that Gran and Djeeta have names.

Fujimaru Ritsuka (Male) and Fujimaru Ritsuka (Female) used to do the same thing Gran and Djeeta did, what with the Craft Essences and all, until topic #20499 which saw those tags split between the two tags. Were we to turn Commander (Girls' Frontline) into Male Commander (Girls' Frontline), Journey in the Auspicious Snow and the GFL2 summer skin can similar be split betwen Male and Female.

Aether and Lumine follow the example of the Rituskas (or do the Ritsukas follow their example??), so what shared costume tags they might've had are split between the two evenly.

Caelus and Stelle are the first example like the above two that also feature a parent tag, just like in BUR #52010 for Commander (Girls' Frontline). Male Rover and Female Rover follow in their specific example.

Wise and Belle follow in the example of the Ritsukas and the Travelers, and so do the Manekin and Manekina, while Male Tyrant and Female Tyrant follow in the example of the Trailblazers and the Rovers.

All of this seems to suggest that BUR #52011 is out of the question once one of these sorts of characters has a costume tag attached to them, and it becomes a debate instead whether or not BUR #52010 gets approved as is, or if it gets a new version without the creation of a parent tag.

For me, part of the reason why I think a parent tag for GFL's Commander is still necessary is because, whether Male or Female, whether in the first or second game, or even as the Professor, the Commander is always depicted wearing the same clothes and almost always the same hair (Exilium complicates this with Fem!Commander having Gentiane-inspired pink hair now), because they are fundamentally the same character. As far as I understand, those who are lacking parent tags right now are each differentiated as different characters.

Generally speaking, I think a parent tag is only useful if there will be cases where you flatout can't tell apart the chosen gender in certain posts (like if the protag is out of frame as they tend to be in solo focus posts). For example, even if only by their hands, Caelus and Stelle share very notable differences that make them easy to tell apart (like Caelus having fingerless gloves and Stelle having regular old gloves). If that isn't possible for whatever reason (such as Umamusume's Trainer never actually being shown in any real capacity, which makes the gender completely ambiguous in, say, hand posts...Or it would if we had a damn Male Trainer (Umamusume) tag), then a parent tag should exist.

I am more biased in favor of separating by Protagonist (male) and Protagonist (female), mainly because the default assumption of the protagonist being depicted as male seems to just hurt in the long run, especially as these visibly male and female protagonists become more and more common, making separation necessary in their cases. I'm not into any gachas besides Umamusume that use the old-style set-up, but I feel like you are getting more and more Female Trainers and more male trainers with proper designs like post #10672630. Idk if it's like that in the boat and gun girl games, but this is what I've observed with the games that do interest me.

There's also the plethora of OC protagonists and even named characters of these roles in these old style tag systems I see, but every fandom is different. Still should be taken into account with this tho.

Knowledge_Seeker said in forum #415777:

Generally speaking, I think a parent tag is only useful if there will be cases where you flatout can't tell apart the chosen gender in certain posts (like if the protag is out of frame as they tend to be in solo focus posts).

I am more biased in favor of separating by Protagonist (male) and Protagonist (female), mainly because the default assumption of the protagonist being depicted as male seems to just hurt in the long run, especially as these visibly male and female protagonists become more and more common, making separation necessary in their cases. I'm not into any gachas besides Umamusume that use the old-style set-up, but I feel like you are getting more and more Female Trainers and more male trainers with proper designs like post #10672630. Idk if it's like that in the boat and gun girl games, but this is what I've observed with the games that do interest me.

I mean, in the older games where the player character is moreso a venue for self-inserting, you don't really see what the player character looks like, so that's where the assumption of the PC being male really originates from.

In Girls' Frontline's case, I'm having trouble remembering right now, but I think you didn't really have a consistent visual depiction of the Commander in-game until 2019, when Commander Customization was added to the game (which is why we have Journey in the Auspicious Snow). Prior to that, you just knew that you had the Griffin & Kryuger military uniform and that's that. This is your default-default, until you choose what gender you are and you unlock the clean default.

As you can see, in OG!GFL, the only difference is in like, the hair, eye size, whether you're wearing pants or skirt, and footwear... and this stuff wasn't gender-locked. So if you wanted to crossdress, or be tomboyish, or be gender-ambiguous, you were free to. In non-story contexts, the Commander is largely treated as gender-ambiguous, while in story he is eventually confirmed as explicitly male, though even then they avoid depicting his face. So unless the artist unambiguously depicts their out-of-frame Commander with masculine or feminine hands, you run the risk of ambiguity.

GFL2 makes the difference between Male and Female Commander more obvious, since they made Fem!Commander a reference to the manga commander Gentiane (Girls' Frontline) (which causes me a headache in gardening her tag). Clothes-wise, they're still identical by default, though the summer skin is way more differentiated. Proportions are different though.

If it were just GFL2, the above alone could inspire a tag seperation, but we're also dealing with GFL1, where the Commander between genders basically looked the same. Are post #2590953, post #3948379, and post #4722948 male or female? Hell, even with GFL2, are post #9228282 and post #8742562 male or female?

I actually did discuss retiring the umbrella for Honkai: Star Rail's Trailblazer in topic #32153 last June 2025, and it didn't push through. I necro'd the discussion there in forum #415803 because there's an update to how the Trailblazer is portrayed in the 3.7 story.

The tl;dr of it is that Caelus and Stelle seem to be treated the way Aether and Lumine are: choose one, and the other turns out dark, essentially hinting that the Trailblazer is actually two separate persons. And considering both Caelus and Stelle have separate costume tags now (and the fact that they're also getting costumes in the upcoming 4.0 in February), I was pushing for a full split sooner or later.

Damian0358 said in forum #415778:

I mean, in the older games where the player character is moreso a venue for self-inserting, you don't really see what the player character looks like, so that's where the assumption of the PC being male really originates from.

Yeah, I completely understand the reasoning why at the time. I'm just taking a "looking back this probably did more harm than good, huh?" angle to it. But then again, no one can truly predict the future. I just like to use the booru to observe trends in my spheres of interest lol.

In Girls' Frontline's case, I'm having trouble remembering right now, but I think you didn't really have a consistent visual depiction of the Commander in-game until 2019, when Commander Customization was added to the game (which is why we have Journey in the Auspicious Snow). Prior to that, you just knew that you had the Griffin & Kryuger military uniform and that's that. This is your default-default, until you choose what gender you are and you unlock the clean default.

As you can see, in OG!GFL, the only difference is in like, the hair, eye size, whether you're wearing pants or skirt, and footwear... and this stuff wasn't gender-locked. So if you wanted to crossdress, or be tomboyish, or be gender-ambiguous, you were free to. In non-story contexts, the Commander is largely treated as gender-ambiguous, while in story he is eventually confirmed as explicitly male, though even then they avoid depicting his face. So unless the artist unambiguously depicts their out-of-frame Commander with masculine or feminine hands, you run the risk of ambiguity.

GFL2 makes the difference between Male and Female Commander more obvious, since they made Fem!Commander a reference to the manga commander Gentiane (Girls' Frontline) (which causes me a headache in gardening her tag). Clothes-wise, they're still identical by default, though the summer skin is way more differentiated. Proportions are different though.

If it were just GFL2, the above alone could inspire a tag seperation, but we're also dealing with GFL1, where the Commander between genders basically looked the same. Are post #2590953, post #3948379, and post #4722948 male or female? Hell, even with GFL2, are post #9228282 and post #8742562 male or female?

Yeah, in the case of Commander (Girls' Frontline), I definitely agree that the umbrella should stay no matter what happens, for the very reasons you pointed out. If you can only tell it's that specific character and the character's appearance is at the whims of the creator half the time anyway, then not having the umbrella just creates way more strife than it solves.

As this is a pretty important debate overall, I'm mostly aiming to stick to the games I'm most familiar with for this one, as every fandom is different. But right now, I am generally more in favor of splitting by gender and keeping an umbrella for ambiguous cases (at least for the ones with no set appearance or are impossible to tell apart in a solo focus image). It seems to have better results overall, especially since the old-style system immediately becomes a nightmare if a male and female protagonist version are paired together (like this easy example from Girls' Frontline on the topic, post #10418776).

If we have to set a uniform approach, this is the one I'd personally prefer at least.

We've got another GFL2 Commander skin being added, one where appearance-wise they're once again basically identical, further adding need for there to be a GFL Commander parent tag.

Some things before I forget since I've been holding onto them without any movement for a while now so they're candidates for eviction from my memory:

Ananta is going to have dual protagonist a gender-selectable protagonist, but looks like the costumes are completely customisable (not fixed) so no need for costume character tags. I imagine this will also get the umbrella protagonist tag treatment.

Duet Night Abyss had a good thing pointed out to me. In its dual protagonist narrative, there is actually male and female versions of both protagonists. So the current tagging is actually rather off. I've identified them in favgroups but haven't made updates yet. The umbrella tag is also currently the generic character address of "Phoxhunter" (all playable characters are this).

Neverness to Everness main character is called "Zero", so "Esper" needs to be dropped from their tag. Esper is a way of addressing characters, like how Wuthering Waves characters are called "Resonators". The main character also has the title of "Appraiser" but that's less relevant. What's more relevant is that the protagonist is probably getting outfits, so three implication chain if their tags are fixed and they get an umbrella tag.

As of the recent Silver Palace beta, Male Detective (Silver Palace) and Female Detective (Silver Palace) are actually twin siblings, not different genders of the same character. They currently have an umbrella tag but it has no implications. The Male Detective cannot be picked right now and all marketing materials have been using the Female Detective, and it's very reasonable to assume that most fan art will be featuring the Female Detective first and foremost. If an umbrella tag exists, it will be a deeply uneven post split where the umbrella predominantly already refers to the female version.

Some fun trivia: one of the arguments against umbrella protagonist tags is that most people are searching for the female version so they expect that when they click the tag. While it's not search statistics, an interesting thing to see is that both Rover (Wuthering Waves) genders are always close in post count, with only a gap of 100-200 posts at any given time. This is one of the few rare times where both are equally represented in fan art, whereas in most other big series, there is a disproportionate number of posts of the female protagonist. Caelus (Honkai: Star Rail) and Stelle (Honkai: Star Rail) come to mind with a ~4K post count difference. The former got a boost with Firefly (Honkai: Star Rail) and any other strong-relationship-oriented characters mostly.

ETA: Changed reference for Ananta protagonist so as not to confuse it with how I described Duet Night Abyss.

WRS said in forum #421920:

Some fun trivia: one of the arguments against umbrella protagonist tags is that most people are searching for the female version so they expect that when they click the tag. While it's not search statistics, an interesting thing to see is that both Rover (Wuthering Waves) genders are always close in post count, with only a gap of 100-200 posts at any given time. This is one of the few rare times where both are equally represented in fan art, whereas in most other big series, there is a disproportionate number of posts of the female protagonist. Caelus (Honkai: Star Rail) and Stelle (Honkai: Star Rail) come to mind with a ~4K post count difference. The former got a boost with Firefly (Honkai: Star Rail) and any other strong-relationship-oriented characters mostly.

Crossposting from the Trailblazer thread and courtesy of Evazion:

evazion said in forum #360332:

Tag	Weekly Searches	Manual Searches	Post Views	Views per search
Stelle	10.94k	5.31k	37.9k	3.46
Caelus	7.42k	3.8k	21.8k	2.93
Trailblazer	3.11k	575	4.51k	1.45
Trailblazer (Trash Cake)	58	17	155	2.67

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.

Maybe one of the criteria on whether or not to discard the umbrella tag is if there's a significant enough gap between male and female player chara post counts, regardless of costume similarities. I'm amenable to either keeping Trailblazer as a repurposed umbrella for truly ambiguous cases or repurposing Galactic Baseballer for the same reason, in line with what Knowledge Seeker said, especially since there's around 5 pages or so of truly ambiguous cases like post #10314831.