Danbooru

Removing tags that cause needless spoilers for Kumo Desu Ga (discusses Spoilers, obviously)

Posted under General

OK, so, Kumo Desu Ga Nani Ka?, if you haven't looked at it yet (I heavily recommend the light novels and manga and just as strongly recommend you avoid the trash anime...), involves a mystery as to the identity of its main character. The main character starts off as the nameless (fan-named) Kumoko, a cutesy white spider. Her true identity is hidden with several misdirections and red herrings (even her gender is originally not confirmed), and a significant amount of the story drops clues to her identity. (In fact, for the anime, it's only revealed at the end of the very last episode that has aired.)

Because of this, even if they have been tagged as spoilers in the past, putting the tag for Kumoko, the original spider character, on the character she eventually becomes, Shiraori is a massive spoiler in and of itself that is completely pointless and also winds up making about 80% of the posts from Kumo Desu Ga wind up with the Spoilers tag. The characters have different names, entirely different appearances, and even in the Kumo Desu Ga wiki have different wiki pages. The only reason I can see that both character tags are together when there is only one character in the image so far is that the spoiler-ific Pixiv tagging system was doing so.

Since it is such a needless risk of spoiling users, most of whom likely only know the series from the anime (which again, explicitly shows the two characters in different contexts and their being the same person is a spoiler only revealed in the last episode), I don't see a reason they should both be tagged on posts where there is not a spider in the image. I'm going ahead and separating out the tags and also added a note on the character tag wikis on this page, but wanted to put notice why this is being done.

Agreed. I feel like this more or less parallels the situations in Genshin Impact for which we use the tags barbatos_(genshin_impact) and rex_lapis_(genshin_impact). We do not blanket mark these tags as spoilers.

The only Genshin character we tag as a spoiler is makoto_(genshin_impact) and that's because, to my understanding, you literally do not know she exists until the reveal. People reading or watching Kumo Desu Ga know both these characters exist from fairly early on, and the only spoiler is that they are the same being.

I do wonder if there should be a third tag for the arachne form, something like shiro_(kumo_desu_ga), but I'm pretty sure Kumoko mentions that she wants to evolve into an arachne very early on so it's questionable how spoiler-y that really is. Only the fact that she combines elements of both other appearances makes it feel touchy.

The arachne form is unavoidably a spoiler. She clearly exibits traits of both characters, and I held back on removing all the Kumoko tags on those images so far, and just am leaving them all with the spoiler tag for now. If it's one or the other, it would make more sense to go with Shiraori as the name for that form, since she gains that name upon gaining that form, even if it isn't even her final form as it were. I'll try to go back through and see which images can have the spoiler tag removed now that Kumoko's tag is removed for now... (For example, post #5109181 is literally just a picture of White/Shiraori, so it's only a spoiler to have the spoiler tag or Kumoko's tag there.)

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