Ok so this is my first forum post, please let me know if i have done anything wrong. I've got at artist tag (https://e621.net/posts?tags=mx99926) with a Waaifu_(arknights) looking character tagged as such. problem is from observing multiple pictures and looking at the artist twitter it seems that the characters name is actually Mei Xiang. I went about trying to investigate to make sure it isn't a case of someone claiming the character as their own and just posting it on the internet, but found another twitter handle and e621 artist (https://e621.net/posts?tags=aspirindabaitu) after a SauceNAO search that has the exact same character and similar twitter feed to the first I found. So now I'm looking at a potential character theft scenario but I recognize that it may just be the same person on two different twitter handles. The only thing I cant figure out is why the accounts both have the same pictures associated with them. Can someone with more knowledge please help with figuring this out as I would prefer to avoid screwing up multiple posts due to a misunderstanding on my part.

They're likely the same person. Here's a bunch of tweets where Aspirin Dabai Tu responds to replies that Mei Xiang Xiaojie receives.
https://en.whotwi.com/aspirindabaitu/tweets/user/MX99926

lafcadio said:
They're likely the same person. Here's a bunch of tweets where Aspirin Dabai Tu responds to replies that Mei Xiang Xiaojie receives.
https://en.whotwi.com/aspirindabaitu/tweets/user/MX99926

Oh thanks for helping out with that part your help has kept me from making a large mistake. Now I just need to do remove the arknight and waaifu tags to slip in the Mei Xiang tag.

Looking through mx99926's Twitter, it looks like mei xiang is an original character hir made, just looks very similar to Waaifu_(arknights), basically, all those posts are tagged wrong...

Ill get to it over the weekend and fix most if not all of the errors. I'm pretty sure some other waaifu tags are wrong as well sense I see a similar mom-bod tiger gal that are also tagged, though those will need a better eye on them.

Rolling to a stop on my efforts here. kept checking back and forth through the artists gallery and his/her waaifu art, and after a certain point Mei Xiang(no orange sunglasses) becomes indistinguishable from his/her art of Waaifu(wearing orange sunglasses). The original tags had the right of it simply because it would be impossible to enforce, this is going have to be tagged on bases of TWYS.

datsun said:
Rolling to a stop on my efforts here. kept checking back and forth through the artists gallery and his/her waaifu art, and after a certain point Mei Xiang(no orange sunglasses) becomes indistinguishable from his/her art of Waaifu(wearing orange sunglasses). The original tags had the right of it simply because it would be impossible to enforce, this is going have to be tagged on bases of TWYS.

generally, waaifu has a pointy hair branch on the top of her head(mei xiang doesn't have it) and no hair branch both sides behind neck (most of mei xiang's art has), see waaifu's character design

and the strip pattern on hair is differenet

watchdog22 said:
see waaifu's character design

Link broken, needs /revision/latest?cb=20200201060352 trimmed off it
(fixed link)

watchdog22 said:
generally, waaifu has a pointy hair branch on the top of her head(mei xiang doesn't have it) and no hair branch both sides behind neck (most of mei xiang's art has), see waaifu's character design

and the strip pattern on hair is differenet

Ok i see the differences your talking about. I actually went back and checked and noticed that some of the art is Kinda extra iffy to my eyes on who is who. I'll take a breather and get back to it once i'm not dead on my feet. I've got my Hydrus client setup to pull from both twitter accounts so i'll be able to check in the morning with better side by side comparisons.

My first question is who is this character, relative to Arknights?
She's got the copyright tags, but does she have any actual relevance there?

datsun said:
Kept checking back and forth through the artists gallery and his/her waaifu art, and after a certain point Mei Xiang(no orange sunglasses) becomes indistinguishable from his/her art of Waaifu(wearing orange sunglasses).

I think I agree with this, personally. The recent posts are a lot more clear-cut, but getting back to page 2 I think her original design was a lot closer to Waai Fu's, and moved further apart later. To make things worse the sources are mostly Twitter without even much in the way of artist statements attached. That and I don't have enough of Arknights or this artist's lore to unravel posts such as this

magnuseffect said:
My first question is who is this character, relative to Arknights?
She's got the copyright tags, but does she have any actual relevance there?

it's an OC and not relative to Arknights, wrong tagged, I'm a player of Arknights and can't recognize her, beside, by the description under the original tweet, she might be mei xiang's daughter. (in Arkngihts, waaifu is single, never married, and does not have a daughter)

The artist himself(?) was famous for waaiu's fanart on weibo before his account was suspended. My guess is he made an OC after then.

Find his new weibo account
https://m.weibo.cn/7604133511/4695426849310610

In this post he claims that it’s a different character and “wants to get rid of impressions of artknights”.

update:

I investigated a bit more and find what happened.

The artist drew a lot waaifu fan art with eye-grabbing big breasts, and fans of waaifu complained that big breasts are out of character.

On 2021-10-22, the artist claims the character is his own OC "mei xiang" and deletes all waaifu-related posts.

And by the artist's comments on e-hentai

I am the author of these pictures. I hope the uploader can delete all the contents and labels about "arkniths" and "Waifu". The new pictures I draw after October 2021 are my OC, which has nothing to do with all the above contents. Thank you very much for your cooperation

Hello again Watchdog22. It seems that your own OCD is worse than mine, and thank you for the amount of legwork you have done for this colossal brain fart I've managed to bring into the forums. Is there a way to add information to the Mei_Xiang tag in order to let people know this is an OC while I go about messing with the tags? Mainly because I do worry about the TWYS rule in regards to other users, not everyone is going to be able to recognize one from the other. Does E6 have any other rules regarding this? At this point i'm just going to change the ones that are more obvious and leave the rest alone.

A simple wiki article for Mei Xiang should probably do the job. Explain the relative differences between the two characters, maybe sneak in a link to this topic for people who're curious about the facts (topic #35808), then resolve individual posts.
Given what was discussed here, it's probably a safe bet that anything specifically sourced from the mx99926 Twitter is not Waaifu, as character names are generally not TWYS.

I think the issue is the character is actually waaifu but the artist claims she is not. I'm not sure if this is something e621 is forbidden.

watchdog22 said:
I think the issue is the character is actually waaifu but the artist claims she is not. I'm not sure if this is something e621 is forbidden.

post #2184174 post #3642343
These are not the same face or hair.

lafcadio said:
post #2184174 post #3642343
These are not the same face or hair.

looking at more recent ones post #2808319 post #2843837 before he claims waaifu as his OC, not much difference

watchdog22 said:
looking at more recent ones post #2808319 post #2843837 before he claims waaifu as his OC, not much difference

Not only do I disagree that there's "not much difference", I genuinely am not feeling this particular excuse. Just because the art predates the Weibo post does not mean these are supposed to be depictions of Waaifu.
This same line of logic, that Mei Xiang is completely equivalent to Waaifu because an original character of vaguely appearance is replacing a copyrighted character, is tantamount to suggesting that Kurodood's lawyer-friendly sex animals (pool #17759) should be tagged as pokemon, which is flatly not how things work here.

lafcadio said:
Not only do I disagree that there's "not much difference", I genuinely am not feeling this particular excuse. Just because the art predates the Weibo post does not mean these are supposed to be depictions of Waaifu.
This same line of logic, that Mei Xiang is completely equivalent to Waaifu because an original character of vaguely appearance is replacing a copyrighted character, is tantamount to suggesting that Kurodood's lawyer-friendly sex animals (pool #17759) should be tagged as pokemon, which is flatly not how things work here.

I didn't get the point, from my point of view those sex animals have nothing in common with pokemon and don't even make me think of pokemon(I played pokemon games). But in the case discussed here, the uploader can't even tell the difference between mei xiang and waaifu (hence he use wrong tags) as the above replies also mention they can't tell.

It's a shame to claim another one's character as self-owned.

watchdog22 said:
I didn't get the point, from my point of view those sex animals have nothing in common with pokemon and don't even make me think of pokemon(I played pokemon games).

They are now original versions of characters who were previously portrayed as Pokemon. To provide one example:
post #715913 post #1940117
These are the same character, but the latter isn't a Pokemon and gets a separate tag.

watchdog22 said:
But in the case discussed here, the uploader can't even tell the difference between mei xiang and waaifu (hence he use wrong tags) as the above replies also mention they can't tell.

It's a shame to claim another one's character as self-owned.

The solution to bad character tagging is to fix it, not to perpetuate it. Regardless of your own feelings as to how blatant a copy the character is, Mei Xiang is a different character and warrants a different tag.

lafcadio said:
They are now original versions of characters who were previously portrayed as Pokemon. To provide one example:
post #715913 post #1940117
These are the same character, but the latter isn't a Pokemon and gets a separate tag.

The solution to bad character tagging is to fix it, not to perpetuate it.

Looking at the latter one, I don't think people will recognize it as a glaceon, but here... the point is clear.

Searching in the forum and seems character stole can only be handled by the original author (or can't be handled at all? didn't find enough information, let me know if I'm wrong)

I think that, at least, post #2788522 (June 2021) is the point that the artist definitively^{OR I could just be wrong.} ceases to draw Waai Fu at all, though there are posts even before that where they'd already started to draw [maybe]Waai Fu with the more rounded hairstyle. I think the from October statement is mostly a matter of trying to cut their losses, as people were still actively identifying Mei Xiang as Waai Fu.

lafcadio said:
Not only do I disagree that there's "not much difference", I genuinely am not feeling this particular excuse. Just because the art predates the Weibo post does not mean these are supposed to be depictions of Waaifu.
This same line of logic, that Mei Xiang is completely equivalent to Waaifu because an original character of vaguely appearance is replacing a copyrighted character, is tantamount to suggesting that Kurodood's lawyer-friendly sex animals (pool #17759) should be tagged as pokemon, which is flatly not how things work here.

Personally I disagree with the Oversexed Eeveelutions comparison. There is a much greater difference in Kuroodod's redesigns than between Mei Xiang now and how this artist was drawing Waai Fu in early 2021
post #3123662 post #2606841
The more recent colour/pattern changes help a ton, but that was a gradual change, and it doesn't help that the artist was already starting to desaturate Waai Fu's fur colour as early as June 2020
To really make that Lust example equivalent, Kuroodod would have had to already been drawing her with the shortened ears, 2/3 of the way to the muted blue, and missing the Glaceon Forehead Thing before the swap.

This is also not the first time someone's essentially turned an established pop-IP character into their own pseudo-OC, and won't be the last.
teemo_the_yiffer has nearly as many posts as teemo_(lol) now, all the jet_the_hawk posts with the flame patterns, and I'm sure I'm brain-fumbling more examples. Honourable mention to kinners.

magnuseffect said:
all the jet_the_hawk posts with the flame patterns

wait that's not his canon pattern??

strikerman said:
wait that's not his canon pattern??

Apparently it is. Somewhere along the line I got muddled up by that one guy who goes around online as the character. @_@
Unless I'm getting confused about that, too.