[Fate] "Variant of variant" implications

BUR #7021 has been rejected.

Oh boy, here we go.

Per what I said in forum #195711, I think it makes no sense to keep "variants of variants" (swimsuit alters, for example) detached from the variant/alter they're derived from. This is a prevalent problem for the extremely popular/rehashed characters like Jeanne d'Arc or Artoria but not exclusively, and the existence of their catch-all tags does not solve this issue.

As an example, Jeanne d'Arc (Alter Swimsuit Berserker) (Fate) isn't just a variant of Jeanne, she's specifically a variant of Jeanne d'Arc (Alter) (Fate). Following the same logic as other characters, the swimsuit form should imply the base Alter form, and I think it makes no sense to keep them completely separate. It would mean that you need a two tags search, just to see all the art of explicitly the same character in different clothes. The catch-all tag does not solve this, as it would also show all the dozens other irrelevant forms of Jeanne as well.
In the case of Saber Alter, the query to see all her forms becomes a three tags search, which is flat out impossible for standard users.

The fact of the matter is that some of these tags do routinely get used together, only to be gardened away by some other users and leaving only the swimsuit tag - which means that various users do assume this is the way it works.

It's possible that I missed some variants here and there that should fall under this, but thankfully there aren't that many overkill characters (yet) so there shouldn't be too many.

If you disagree with such implications then please do explain your reasoning.

As I mentioned in the linked topic, it's a pain in the ass to have to do multi-OR searches just to find all versions of a visually identical character. If Jeanne Alter makes me horny I shouldn't have to do a three-OR character search just to find all pics of her. Without these implications, to find Jeanne Alter one would have to do ~jeanne_d'arc_(alter_swimsuit_berserker)_(fate) ~jeanne_d'arc_(alter)_(fate) ~wicked_dragon_witch_ver._shinjuku_1999, already going past a member account's ability to search.

Totally agree with this

I agree with evazion in forum #195765, I'd rather not have cosplay posts with 1 character but 6 character tags, it's ridiculous.

Unbreakable said:

I agree with evazion in forum #195765, I'd rather not have cosplay posts with 1 character but 6 character tags, it's ridiculous.

The two most populated of cosplay tags for these characters have 91 posts each. The second most has less than 30 posts. In total this would affect less than 300 cosplay posts.
It feels like a minimal issue that shouldn't hinder actually properly tagging shit. It'd add one more character tag to the handful of cosplay posts that even exist, sure, but it would do so to the benefit of actually properly tagging and implicating the thousands of posts of the actual characters.

Astolfo said:

The two most populated of cosplay tags for these characters have 91 posts each. The second most has less than 30 posts. In total this would affect less than 300 cosplay posts.
It feels like a minimal issue that shouldn't hinder actually properly tagging shit. It'd add one more character tag to the handful of cosplay posts that even exist, sure, but it would do so to the benefit of actually properly tagging and implicating the thousands of posts of the actual characters.

I see nothing wrong with how it's done right now so I disagree.

Unbreakable said:

I see nothing wrong with how it's done right now so I disagree.

Well, the way it currently is, it's very counter-intuitive and inconsistent - within Fate itself, and within the rest of gacha games. Most gachas out there, including Fate, tag the skins and alters alongside their base forms. Fate already has a ton of implications to that effect in place as well and, in the most egregious of cases, overarching catch-all tags for the dozens of versions of one vanilla base.

The problem here is that Fate has taken it upon itself to release double variants, and the way it's done currently means that these versions, and these alone, aren't tagged alongside their base form but only the very general overarching catch-all tag - and that means we have a handful of tags that behave and are used completely differently from the rest.

Since swimsuit X is implicated to normal X, and always tagged alongside normal X, then people naturally would expect it to work the same way for character Y, and Z, and the rest. And since this is the case for the vast majority of the roster, it would also be expected that swimsuit Jalter implies normal Jalter, or swimsuit Okita Alter implies normal Okita Alter... but for some reason it's not the case.
We have posts of swimsuit Jalter getting tagged normal Jalter, only to be manually gardened to remove normal Jalter because these, and these alone, work on a completely different standard "just because" their basest of base character has a trillion variants thanks to FGO being FGO - and it doesn't make sense.

This bulk update request is pending automatic rejection in 5 days.

I prefer every single variant implying to the main tag only.

Absolutely agree.

That doesn't make sense. If nero_claudius_(fate) was called "Artoria", she would be implied to the main artoria tag.
She got more similarities appearance-wise to saber than artoria_pendragon_(lancer).
I don't think tags should be implied just because a character has the same name of another. If the appearance is different, then the character is different. If the appearance and name are the same, then the character is the same.
artoria_pendragon_(swimsuit_ruler) should be implied to artoria_pendragon_(lancer).
If we want we could also go the Gorgon way, unimplying her from the base tag due to how different her appearance is from standard Medusa.

The game treats it like a separate character, so as far as I'm concerned, I see no reason to change things. If anything, we are taking one unique scenario and just exchanging it with another. We always default to whatever logic the game itself uses when establishing tag rules, thus a separate tag.

RingyThingy said:

The game treats it like a separate character, so as far as I'm concerned, I see no reason to change things. If anything, we are taking one unique scenario and just exchanging it with another. We always default to whatever logic the game itself uses when establishing tag rules, thus a separate tag.

Going by that logic we shouldn't even have implications or catch-alls at all because the game says they're different characters. But that's not the case, and for good reason; all the swimsuits are implicated to their base, all the alternate classes are implicated to their base, so on so forth, because it would make no sense to fully separate them. A separate tag, yes, but a tag completely standalone from the base, no: swimsuit Scathach is still Scathach, Saber Astolfo is still Astolfo, etc.

All this really does is actually align the "double variants" with the rest of the cast, because as it stands they are in this weird state of exception where a swimsuit or costume doesn't imply the actual servant that wears it, despite it being the case for the rest of the cast. Just like swimsuit Caenis is Caenis, or swimsuit Kama is Kama, or Saber Astolfo is Astolfo, or swimsuit Scathach is Scathach (all implications that already exist, and tagged together), swimsuit Jalter is Jalter, swimsuit Okita Alter is Okita Alter, idol MHXA is MHXA... implications that should exist but don't, and are manually gardened to not be tagged together - directly going against how things are for the rest of the cast.
The fact that they quite often DO get tagged together and have to actually be gardened at all is telling as to how people intuitively expect it to work: why should swimsuit Jalter NOT be tagged alongside regular Jalter? After all, that's how it is for pretty much every character in Fate and also other gachas.

RingyThingy said:

The game treats it like a separate character, so as far as I'm concerned, I see no reason to change things. If anything, we are taking one unique scenario and just exchanging it with another. We always default to whatever logic the game itself uses when establishing tag rules, thus a separate tag.

Other than what Astolfo just said, i want to add that, while the in-game story usually treats alternate forms differently from the main character (see: Scathach/Skadi, Saber/Alter/Lancer/Mysterious Heroine...), it does not treat alternate forms of alternate forms differently.
As far as i know swimsuit servants are always "X wearing a swimsuit" (+ some other stuff).
It makes no sense to not imply them.

Username_Hidden said:

Other than what Astolfo just said, i want to add that, while the in-game story usually treats alternate forms differently from the main character (see: Scathach/Skadi, Saber/Alter/Lancer/Mysterious Heroine...), it does not treat alternate forms of alternate forms differently.
As far as i know swimsuit servants are always "X wearing a swimsuit" (+ some other stuff).
It makes no sense to not imply them.

The answer, like everything related to the fate universe and its constant back tracking into nonsense ville, is purely at the discretion of whoever is writing at the time.

Sometimes costumes are treated as separate slots, sometimes they aren't. Generally its more joke events that do the 'Doubles of characters' logic, but most of the swimsuit examples are in themselves joke characters.

The question that ultimately needs to be solved for this is whether or not we are following it from a game mechanics standpoint(where the characters are standalone and have slightly different mentalities than normal.) or whether we are following this from a perspective of 'they count as a costume because the difference is negligible'. Both options are going to lead to future issues (arguements of how different a character has to be before they get their own slot come to mind.)

The last matter I'd like to confirm before I make any changes of my mind is whether this implication will bring up the catch all when it implicates the original. If it does, then I dislike the idea purely on the basis of not having three different names show up every time she is in a swimsuit.

RingyThingy said:

The answer, like everything related to the fate universe and its constant back tracking into nonsense ville, is purely at the discretion of whoever is writing at the time.

Sometimes costumes are treated as separate slots, sometimes they aren't. Generally its more joke events that do the 'Doubles of characters' logic, but most of the swimsuit examples are in themselves joke characters.

The question that ultimately needs to be solved for this is whether or not we are following it from a game mechanics standpoint(where the characters are standalone and have slightly different mentalities than normal.) or whether we are following this from a perspective of 'they count as a costume because the difference is negligible'. Both options are going to lead to future issues (arguements of how different a character has to be before they get their own slot come to mind.)

The thing is they always get their own slot - alt servants do, costumes do, and even craft essences do now (work in progress anyway). But they still get implied to the original form because they are the same character, either visually or lorewise. That's also generally how things are tagged in other gachas whether implications exist or not. Alter implies base, swimsuit implies base, different class implies base, costume implies base, special form implies base, composite servant nonsense implies base, yadda yadda.
Going from there, it only makes sense that a variant of Jalter implies regular Jalter instead of just the very general "this is all the Jeannes" tag, especially when said variant is so visually indistinct it might as well be a "Jeanne d'Arc (Alter) (Fate) bikini" search, and having the summer form only imply the catch-all really hurts searchability like nonamethanks said in forum #195779.

A catch-all is very useful to encompass all the forms of characters that have a wide variety of different forms like "Artoria normal, Artoria alter, Artoria but young, Artoria but older and with big tits, Artoria but older and with big tits and also Alter, Artoria from space, Artoria from space and also Alter, Artoria from space but different" and so on and so forth, but it doesn't solve everything either, and in cases like these the insistence on only implicating variants of variants to the catch-all only introduces more issues.

So to use another example than summer Jalter, "Artoria with big tits in a bunny outfit because of the summer event" isn't just a form of Artoria - visually she's pretty blatantly a form of "Artoria with big tits" specifically and a search for "Artoria with big tits" absolutely should return "Artoria with big tits in a bunny outfit because of the summer event". This not being the case makes as much sense as searching Nightingale and not getting coomer Nightingale from Halloween CE, or searching Mash Kyrielight and not getting Dangerous Beast.

The last matter I'd like to confirm before I make any changes of my mind is whether this implication will bring up the catch all when it implicates the original. If it does, then I dislike the idea purely on the basis of not having three different names show up every time she is in a swimsuit.

Well, the catch-all exists to encompass every single possible version of a character for the ones that have been rehashed to death, there's no way to have only the two appear without the catch-all. Since Jeanne Alter implies Jeanne catch-all, then a tag that implies Jeanne Alter will indirectly imply Jeanne catch-all, there's no way to do otherwise short of doing away with catch-alls.

Rather difficult to continue to say no in the face of that logic. I'm not happy with the idea that she's going to bring up four different tags every time she puts on a swimsuit, so I'll change to a neutral vote.

This bulk update request has been rejected because it was not approved within 45 days.

The bulk update request #7021 (forum #195777) has been rejected by @DanbooruBot.

So what about this, then? It had quite a number of votes so it's kind of weird to see it just fizzle out into 45 days rejection.