Danbooru

Someone keeps setting Myon as a character tag

Posted under General

I don't think it was so much agreed on as there wasn't a good answer to begin with. Myon as a character tag messed with the questionably useful chartags metatag. I believe it was reluctantly let pass because a slightly less broken mostly useless metatag was deemed more valuable than more intuitive tagging.

Actually, looking back on forum #54143 it really just seems like everyone gave up and let the vocal minority have its way.

More a character than an object, since Myon is a unique entity, but I don't feel strongly about it either. I wasn't aware that Myon was supposed to be general type and don't see that much of a consensus for it in the other thread, but I went ahead and modified the myon page accordingly.

Hrm. The problem is that:

First, there's absolutely no way to enforce the decision right now (whichever way it was decided), and second, more importantly, while yeah, there are some valid arguments for having it not tagged as a character, most of them are going to be unintuitive to random, non-forum-going regular users... which means that people are going to keep seeing it, thinking that the fact that it isn't a character tag is a mistake, and switching it back... and currently, if I understand right, we don't even have any way to know who's doing it so we can tell them why they should stop (assuming we even agree they should stop.)

Not sure what to do about it, or if there's even anything that can be done in an easy fashion.

Why is danbooru making up its own names for things now, anyway? "Myon" is Youmu. Not her spectral half, just her. It's a nickname.

I thought danbooru was supposed to be strict about these things, so why use an incorrect tag name here?

The only explanation I saw was "youmu_konpaku_(ghost_half) is too long to type", or something along those lines. That doesn't seem like much of a reason to start making up names.

Again, why are we going against the accepted usage of the name here?

WAHa_06x36 said:
Why is danbooru making up its own names for things now, anyway? "Myon" is Youmu. Not her spectral half, just her. It's a nickname.

I thought danbooru was supposed to be strict about these things, so why use an incorrect tag name here?

Myon is the fan nickname among Western fans for her ghost half. In Japan, its the nickname for her but that is not widely used.

The wiki goes over this distinction at Myon I believe.

Anelaid said:
In Japan, its the nickname for her but that is not widely used.

That is entirely incorrect. "Myon" is nearly as common as "Youmu" for referring to her. It is very widely used. It is probably the most-used nickname for any Touhou character.

There are 1.27 million hits on "Myon" on Google:

There are at the time of writing 10,450 pictures on pixiv tagged "Myon", versus 14,960 for "Konpaku Youmu" and 25,095 for just "Youmu":

All the relevant dictionaries have entries explaining that it is a nickname for her:

If anybody in the west ever contributed anything to the fandom, maybe I would care a little bit about how they use or misuse names, but that isn't really the case.

For now, I think the people who actually make the art being posted here get to decide what names to use for the characters.

WAHa_06x36 said:
If anybody in the west ever contributed anything to the fandom, maybe I would care a little bit about how they use or misuse names, but that isn't really the case.

For now, I think the people who actually make the art being posted here get to decide what names to use for the characters.

I'm not sure what you are trying to gain out of this, but the point being that Danbooru uses the Western nickname in this case and its something that can be tagged. At this point, as we are a western site, so using the western usage only makes sense to me.

As for your point, this isn't about the contributions to the fandom, but what the fandom uses. If the fandom in Japan uses Myon for the character, that's fine and your links prove that, but we aren't Pixiv.

Other than that, you're ignoring the point entirely.

That and I still feel Myon should be a character tag.

NWF_Renim said:
Care to bring up material for western usage? Or are you just going to glaze over that to give an unbalanced view to justify your position?

I'm not sure if that was directed at me, but I'm not trying to be unbalanced.

Anelaid said:
I'm not sure what you are trying to gain out of this, but the point being that Danbooru uses the Western nickname in this case and its something that can be tagged.

Again, though: Why are we just ignoring how the majority of fans use the names, and sticking to some alternate usage that makes little to no sense? Because the Japanese are the "others" who have nothing to do with "us"?

Why are we making a difference between "western" use and "japanese" use here?

WAHa_06x36 said:
Again, though: Why are we just ignoring how the majority of fans use the names, and sticking to some alternate usage that makes little to no sense? Because the Japanese are the "others" who have nothing to do with "us"?

Why are we making a difference between "western" use and "japanese" use here?

Because we are a western site and the majority of the users would use the western usage even if they make up a minority of the total number of fans? And how does it not make sense, its pretty clear what it refers to.

First and foremost, its something that can be tagged and I see no reason to destroy a useful tag because the Japanese use a term differently.

Anelaid said:
I'm not sure if that was directed at me, but I'm not trying to be unbalanced.

It was targeted at WAHa, since all the sources he linked were Japanese, including the google search. I thought he could be more persuasive if he could cite some western sources.

WAHa_06x36 said:
Why are we making a difference between "western" use and "japanese" use here?

Because this is a site run predominately by western fans and used predominately by western fans. The terms that are used are those that should be understandable by "us." There can be differences in definitions from how they use a term and how we use a term. We can't ignore such differences.

Anelaid said:
Because we are a western site and the majority of the users would use the western usage even if they make up a minority of the total number of fans? And how does it not make sense, its pretty clear what it refers to.

That's just isolationism. Why would you actively try to make yourself different from the rest of the fandom? And why would you want to continue to promote a misunderstanding of the name even after learning it is a mistake? Why not try to correct the mistake?

First and foremost, its something that can be tagged and I see no reason to destroy a useful tag because the Japanese use a term differently.

Nobody said to destroy it. Just rename it to something that does not conflict wildly with the accepted meaning of the name! Change it to "konpaku_youmu_(ghost_half)" or whatever. This is both correct, useful and doesn't confuse people on both sides of the sea.

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