The bulk update request #869 is active.

Reason: Characters shouldn't implicate fan_character since they can be depicted in a way that has no ties to the setting they're a fan character for. Also, some fan characters that have the _(mpl) or _(fallout_equestria) marker likely shouldn't, as they're not official MLP or Fallout Equestria characters by definition, and should instead have the character owner in its place (if anything). Also somehow some species got implicated to fan_character, despite not being characters.

EDIT: The bulk update request #869 (forum #309323) has been approved by @Millcore.

fully agreed and you a fan of FoE?

watsit said:
_(mpl)

my pittle lony

strikerman said:
my pittle lony

Monster Person Lore

Cool BUR. I think you missed a line though:

wat8548 said:
Cool BUR. I think you missed a line though:

category fan_character -> invalid

One step at a time.

wat8548 said:
Cool BUR. I think you missed a line though:

category fan_character -> invalid

And what's your reason for suggesting moving fan_character to the invalid category...?

wat8548 said:
Cool BUR. I think you missed a line though:

category fan_character -> invalid

Fan character seems valid to me, but with this proposed change it would need to be tagged manually. Sometimes, it might need bulk tagging, but at least it would mean avoiding false positives if they ever get drawn in another way.

...This is quite the change from the trend that I personally started six years ago. It might be good to go through that thread and see what reasoning we're arguing with now. I was going to support this change, but not I'm actually kind of torn. The reason I suggested the implication before is that the characters were made to be fan characters. If they're suddenly drawn in another style, they're still a "fan character to <series>", just not necessarily in <series> context anymore. It's like how Spike_(mlp) will imply my_little_pony even if he's drawn like godzilla, such as in post #648297.

furrin_gok said:
...This is quite the change from the trend that I personally started six years ago. It might be good to go through that thread and see what reasoning we're arguing with now. I was going to support this change, but not I'm actually kind of torn. The reason I suggested the implication before is that the characters were made to be fan characters. If they're suddenly drawn in another style, they're still a "fan character to <series>", just not necessarily in <series> context anymore. It's like how Spike_(mlp) will imply my_little_pony even if he's drawn like godzilla, such as in post #648297.

As an example, take pklucario's Ethan:
post #2444782 post #2403902 post #2252230

Someone's lucario character, who is a fan_character due to being "based off of a franchise, series, or other copyright but is not a canon character," and thus would logically imply fan_character if that's all that's to be considered. However, sometime after his initial creation, an alternate form was created:
post #2287199 post #2403910 post #2716031

It's still the same character, same owner, but this time it takes the appearance of a fox with no ties to the pokemon franchise, so isn't a fan character. Both forms are "Ethan", both are used, and they can even appear together in a square_crossover. Any character can undergo a similar change.

That said, I do think the fan_character tag needs a serious overhaul, because it's too broad as it is. For instance, any pokemon or digimon art where the depicted 'mon is not one that has appeared somewhere in the series, is a fan character under the current definition, even if unnamed. Any non-official sergal falls under the definition too, since Sergals are from "the Vilous universe created by japanese artists Mick Ono and Kiki-Uma", even when they don't appear in the Vilous universe. I think the tag should only apply for non-canon characters unofficially appearing in someone else's established setting. Breezer Marais wouldn't be a fan character in the Wanderlust comics because he was created for the Wanderlust setting that he appears in, even if the Wanderlust setting itself is derived from the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon setting and Breezer himself is a Charmeleon. In contrast, someone's ad-hoc human character appearing in or around Viridian City would be a fan character, as Viridian is a location in a pre-established setting that a non-canon character is acting within.

Whether or not that could effect how implications could work, I don't know. But as it is, I don't think a character simply being of someone else's fictional species should automatically make it a fan character, if it's not otherwise tied to a specific setting someone else made.

watsit said:
-snip-
That said, I do think the fan_character tag needs a serious overhaul, because it's too broad as it is. For instance, any pokemon or digimon art where the depicted 'mon is not one that has appeared somewhere in the series, is a fan character under the current definition, even if unnamed. Any non-official sergal falls under the definition too, since Sergals are from "the Vilous universe created by japanese artists Mick Ono and Kiki-Uma", even when they don't appear in the Vilous universe. I think the tag should only apply for non-canon characters unofficially appearing in someone else's established setting. Breezer Marais wouldn't be a fan character in the Wanderlust comics because he was created for the Wanderlust setting that he appears in, even if the Wanderlust setting itself is derived from the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon setting and Breezer himself is a Charmeleon. In contrast, someone's ad-hoc human character appearing in or around Viridian City would be a fan character, as Viridian is a location in a pre-established setting that a non-canon character is acting within.

Whether or not that could effect how implications could work, I don't know. But as it is, I don't think a character simply being of someone else's fictional species should automatically make it a fan character, if it's not otherwise tied to a specific setting someone else made.

I don't think there's a need to be so broad with the term, no; Pokemon is such a vast universe now that just having a pokemon shouldn't be enough to add the term, but if it's a pokemon character who was made to interact with a core entity (Ash, his Pikachu, etc) and not just some generic Joy or pokemon, then it would. A typically disconnected character would qualify when they're interacting, but a character who was primarily made for such interactions would get an implication even when they aren't.

Ovni is a fan character to a much more narrow universe, the world of Lilo & Stitch. There aren't really any extentions off of that, so a character made to be an Experiment is more immediately a fan character. Perhaps some discussion could come into play on when exactly a copyright is considered large enough to no longer warrent an immediate implication.

Ethan_(pklucario) is more of a personal_character or persona, not a fan_character. Characters made to represent the artist should have a unique tag (I definitely see value in being able to search for that), and could perhaps have fan_character added manually, but I certainly agree that these ones should not imply fan character.

Okay, but what would be the tag to filter out the red and black zebra bat-winged alicorn MLP characters? That's all that matters at the end of the day.

furrin_gok said:
I don't think there's a need to be so broad with the term, no; Pokemon is such a vast universe now that just having a pokemon shouldn't be enough to add the term, but if it's a pokemon character who was made to interact with a core entity (Ash, his Pikachu, etc) and not just some generic Joy or pokemon, then it would. A typically disconnected character would qualify when they're interacting, but a character who was primarily made for such interactions would get an implication even when they aren't.

I think that too might still be a bit too broad or vague. Take the Silver Soul comics, which has a unique cast of characters (some of whom are owned by other people and used prior to the comic, but included in it with permission) in the writer's own story, which ostensibly takes place in a Pokemon world similar but definitely not identical to the games or anime (it's much more sexualized, with new characters, places, companies, and events). But there are some cameos of canon characters, and a very non-canon portayal of some others, although the number and length of such cameos is quite small compared to the series as a whole. Where's the line with fan character here?

furrin_gok said:
Ovni is a fan character to a much more narrow universe, the world of Lilo & Stitch. There aren't really any extentions off of that, so a character made to be an Experiment is more immediately a fan character. Perhaps some discussion could come into play on when exactly a copyright is considered large enough to no longer warrent an immediate implication.

Could probably say the same thing about the Vilous universe. If a character can more immediately be a fan character for being an Experiment, wouldn't the same hold for a Sergal character too?

furrin_gok said:
Ethan_(pklucario) is more of a personal_character or persona, not a fan_character. Characters made to represent the artist should have a unique tag (I definitely see value in being able to search for that), and could perhaps have fan_character added manually, but I certainly agree that these ones should not imply fan character.

Maybe, but I think that would be too hard to pin down. We won't often know whether a character is a persona of the creator, vs a character they just like to use. This can even be dependent on the form (e.g. maybe fox Ethan is the creator's persona, while lucario Ethan is less so; or maybe vice versa, or neither), and it can change overtime (a creator can lose touch with what tied them to their old persona, and take on a new one or not, but still get art of their old character even though it doesn't represent them personally anymore). Managing that sounds like it'd be a pain.

votp said:
Okay, but what would be the tag to filter out the red and black zebra bat-winged alicorn MLP characters? That's all that matters at the end of the day.

Find their name, and blacklist it. Or otherwise find the set of tags that most identify the character to the exclusion of others, and blacklist them. If there isn't any such thing, you might not be able to (a red and black zebra bat-winged alicorn that happens to be drawn in an MLP-like style is just a red and black zebra bat-winged alicorn... art style doesn't get tagged).

watsit said:
I think that too might still be a bit too broad or vague. Take the Silver Soul comics, which has a unique cast of characters (some of whom are owned by other people and used prior to the comic, but included in it with permission) in the writer's own story, which ostensibly takes place in a Pokemon world similar but definitely not identical to the games or anime (it's much more sexualized, with new characters, places, companies, and events). But there are some cameos of canon characters, and a very non-canon portayal of some others, although the number and length of such cameos is quite small compared to the series as a whole. Where's the line with fan character here?

The characters weren't made with the intention of being a part of the (semi)canon lore, just to be in the pokemon world. An official character showing up doesn't make the others suddenly fan characters, but characters made to show up in those pages would be.

Could probably say the same thing about the Vilous universe. If a character can more immediately be a fan character for being an Experiment, wouldn't the same hold for a Sergal character too?

I'd say yes, but there's more leeway on "Just a sergal" versus "Literally a numbered experiment created by Jumba".

Maybe, but I think that would be too hard to pin down. We won't often know whether a character is a persona of the creator, vs a character they just like to use. This can even be dependent on the form (e.g. maybe fox Ethan is the creator's persona, while lucario Ethan is less so; or maybe vice versa, or neither), and it can change overtime (a creator can lose touch with what tied them to their old persona, and take on a new one or not, but still get art of their old character even though it doesn't represent them personally anymore). Managing that sounds like it'd be a pain.

It'd be a pain to manually add fan character to a lot of content, too.

• Kept implications:
• Users will need to find new common characters that would need the implication
• Users will have to keep track of characters to know if they're hitting a point where the implication is no longer relevant
• Removed implications:
• Users will have to keep an eye on the character tag to manually add it
• Tag wars will occur where some users feel it's necessary and others think it's not

furrin_gok said:
It'd be a pain to manually add fan character to a lot of content, too.

• Kept implications:
• Users will need to find new common characters that would need the implication
• Users will have to keep track of characters to know if they're hitting a point where the implication is no longer relevant

Which I don't think can be really quantified. When is a character common enough? When is it no longer relevant? There's no way to measure that, so it could only be based on a person's feeling or intuition, which will be different for different people. And do changes need to be retroactive when they're no longer considered "always a fan character", particularly for images that didn't directly reference the canon?

furrin_gok said:

• Removed implications:
• Users will have to keep an eye on the character tag to manually add it
• Tag wars will occur where some users feel it's necessary and others think it's not

The point is that it's not based on character tags. It's based on the setting non-canon characters are in, and whether said setting is close enough to official or different or vague enough to be considered its own. Just like you don't have to keep an eye on the character tag to manually add their species or gender, you simply tag the species or gender you see regardless of who it is, similarly you would simply tag non-canon characters you see being in an official setting regardless of who it is.

Granted it can get tricky as to what counts as an "official setting" vs a derivative or generic one, which is why part of me thinks fan_character should just go away. But I can see why people would want it, so I'm trying to find reasonable ways it can remain useful.

watsit said:
Granted it can get tricky as to what counts as an "official setting" vs a derivative or generic one, which is why part of me thinks fan_character should just go away. But I can see why people would want it, so I'm trying to find reasonable ways it can remain useful.

The more I read of this argument, the more I find myself wondering whether an official_setting lore tag might more reasonably address the problem fan_character was intended to solve.

wat8548 said:
The more I read of this argument, the more I find myself wondering whether an official_setting lore tag might more reasonably address the problem fan_character was intended to solve.

I think the issue is more that some people don't care to see others' super-special OC that's totally original and has more edge than a ginsu knife but is for serious Sonic's best friend or secret crush. The official setting itself isn't really the problem, I think it's more about people impressing their personal fan desires into someone else's setting or its characters. Problem is, we can't really tag that; simply being drawn in the style of Sonic or MLP or whatever can't really be tagged, because art style is too vague and subjective to define (anime was recently invalidated on these grounds, when it was for art in a japanese anime style). You can maybe tag a character's canonicity(?) to the portrayed setting, though there's the question of whether the setting being portrayed is similar enough or different enough (if there's even a portrayed setting at all).

watsit said:
As an example, take pklucario's Ethan:
[thumbs snipped]

Someone's lucario character, who is a fan_character due to being "based off of a franchise, series, or other copyright but is not a canon character," and thus would logically imply fan_character if that's all that's to be considered. However, sometime after his initial creation, an alternate form was created:
[thumbs snipped]

It's still the same character, same owner, but this time it takes the appearance of a fox with no ties to the pokemon franchise, so isn't a fan character. Both forms are "Ethan", both are used, and they can even appear together in a square_crossover. Any character can undergo a similar change.

It's a bit of a tangent but since it's being used for the argument here, should such visually-distinct characters even be contained within the one character tag?
I get it when distinct elements of the character are transferred over (and acknowledge that this is the mechanism allowing cosplays to be character-tagged,) or when there's not enough of the character shown to distinguish them without resorting to artist statement, but is there practical utility in holding depictions which are intentionally visually distinct to be the same character for the purposes of tagging? (Beyond the obvious suffix-bloat when someone goes through four different distinct 'sonas under the same name.)
If so, fan_character should ^{as with the application of species tags to individual depictions of a character} be a case-by-case tag as there's nothing to concretely assure that nobody will ever take a given "fan character", rework them to the point of unrecognisability, then heavily use them outside any context in which they can reasonably be considered a fan character.

Little late to this game but I have a wired alternative proposal. I've probably not thought this completely through but anyway....

What's the purpose of the fan_character tag?
According to the wiki it's to distinguish fanon characters from canon ones and Most traditional furry characters ... because they aren't created and based off of an existing franchise, movie, game, comic, etc.

So if we want to be able to separate the three sets a single tag won't do. We need at least two.

Instead of OC, Fan_Char, Official_char and what not I'm thinking about tags like character_canon and character_fanon.
Every official/corporate/etc character would get .._canon, every private fan character .._fanon and Most traditional furry characters as well as normal private characters/fursonas/etc neither.

The first two sets have their own tag and the third would fall under -character_canon -character_fanon.

But as my main objective is being able to search for eg. Zootopia with only canon characters we'd need a third tag for the latter group.
Then this search would be possible: zootopia -character_fanon -character_private.

This would lead to a new implication to one of the three types for every single character tag :-/
That's why I'd actually prefer a beefed up metatag search system like this zootopia:chars which would deliver all posts containing any mix of character tags which directly implicate the zootopia tag (but no other character).

kalider said:
What's the purpose of the fan_character tag?
According to the wiki it's to distinguish fanon characters from canon ones and Most traditional furry characters ... because they aren't created and based off of an existing franchise, movie, game, comic, etc.

As far as this BUR goes, the problem is character depiction. A character can be depicted in a way that's not related to the series their "normal form" is connected to, and thus depicted in a way that's not a fan character. It can only be applied manually rather than implicated by character tags.

There's also issues with the ocs, original_character, oc_only, originalcharacter, and oc tags being aliased to fan_character, since some people use OC/Original Character to mean a not-wholly-original fan character while other people use the tern to mean actual original characters not tied in any way to a preexisting setting or franchise (which is causing distinctly non-fan characters to be tagged as fan_character fairly often). But that would need to go through a whole disambiguation pass, because truly original characters don't need to be tagged anything other than their name if they have one, while there's still a debate on what would be necessary for a character to be tagged fan_character.

kalider said:
So if we want to be able to separate the three sets a single tag won't do. We need at least two.

More generally, the problem isn't separating types of characters, but the breadth of them. Ranging from this, a whole cast of unique characters in their own story with no direct relation to official canon characters and story, drawn in the creator's own style, except they're of certain species from a particular franchise, to this, a person's fan character interacting with canon characters in an art style reminiscent of canon artwork. IMO, it doesn't make much sense to label a character a "fan character" in the creator's own story just because it happens to be a vulpix, for instance, let alone be under the same tag as someone's fan character in a wholly different franchise that's best buds with the canon heroes fighting against the canon villains.

But that's a separate debate about the validity of the fan_character tag itself and what it should cover, rather than the issue of characters implicating the tag that this BUR is focused on.

To determine how fan_character should be tagged, I think it’d help to determine the purpose of the tag. The only serious purpose I can think of would be to allow people to search for a franchise and filter out art of non-canon characters. To that end, I think it should be tagged as follows:

- Never tag fan_character unless there is also a franchise tag present. This also helps to keep largely unrelated posts from cluttering the franchise tags with fan characters that may not even seem relevant to the franchise.
- Don’t tag the franchise unless it’s apparent from the image what franchise the character is supposed to belong to. So if someone has a pony character drawn in the MLP style, it is obviously related to MLP and qualifies for both tags. But if the same character is drawn in a very different style such that it could just be a horse, and there aren’t any canon characters in the picture or anything else to imply some apparent relation to the series, neither tag should be applied.
- Don’t apply the tag in the case of fan species (like Fakémon - unless it’s also obviously related to the series by the presence of other actual Pokémon or is a slightly modified real Pokémon - see the Fakémon wiki page) or non-distinct characters (like someone’s Pokémon character that looks identical to any other Pokémon of the same species), so that a Pikachu character, for example, has to be visually distinct from all other Pikachus to get a fan_character tag.

As such, there can be no implications for this tag, and it could only be applied on a case-by-case basis.