Danbooru

Purpose of magical girl tag?

Posted under General

In the past, I've always thought of this tag the same way as unicogirl mentions, original characters and characters that aren't "normally" magical girls given that form (including some official cameo instances like fujibayashi_kyou magical_girl). Adding in character that are usually magical girls kind of overwhelms the other instances in the tag, particularly with a huge franchise like Madoka Magica, though I can see psich's point on the costumes.

I agree with your points psich and EB.
For example MSMM characters don't have 'magic girl names' as in a persona while they are dressed as Puella. When it comes to BSSM and PreCure they clearly do and simply clicking on the second persona makes it easy to find and separate magic uniform from civilian uniform. So I don't see the purpose of the tag with those series.

I usually search this tag in conjunction with a copyright that is not a magical girl series, for instance "magical_girl touhou", so my operative definition for it would be based around the "what-you-see" visual cues (costume, magic staff/item) regardless of copyright/series.

I can also see how it is useful for searching the negation in magical girl series as psich has described. Even if characters in some of these series do have alternate persona names reflected as chartags, having magical_girl is still a convenient way to do a wholesale inclusion/exclusion search. This can be further improved if we add implications from the magical girl persona names, e.g. cure_sunshine -> magical_girl

A very similar situation occurs with the idol tag which has series such as idolmaster as well as other non-idol copyrights; in both situations I find no issue with the usual guideline of tag-what-you-see. Perhaps the wiki can be further clarified to this effect.

unicogirl only suggests that magical_girl is redundant on series where transformed girls have a separate name, which is not always the case.

I don't think it should be treated differently than school_uniform, which always gets tagged regardless of being the character's regular outfit or not.

Like psich said the magical_girl tag is necessary for Madoka characters, especially if you're looking for images featuring several types of outfits at the same time (post #894720 and so on).

And like r0d3n7z says if you're looking for magical_girl outfits outisde of magical girl series, you probably already have some copyright in mind, or original (well probably not that easy for original, I reckon).

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