Been considering this one for ages and got a blessing from a mod and a few others at least saying that it was fine.
I've made the favgroup to be basically every image under harpy that lacks significant bird features beyond wings and/or winged arms. This is primarily for characters such as Meidri or Crow-chan_(karasu_raven). The former is important as her canon race is listed as birdmaid, hence the name here. Mimilo of the same series is listed as a harpy while Meidri and Eldri are listed as a separate race.
This tag would thus give additional granularity and the ability to search for bird girls that are notably more bird than secondary features, but also not enough bird to qualify for harpy.
Thus: Bird Girl = Kemono Friends characters such as Shoebill, Arknights Liberi characters such as Fiammetta; they have bird tails, feather-like designs and, at worst, head wings.
Birdmaid = Noticeable feathered wings as part of the core design as well as additional bird features, but lacks winged arms and may often be unable to be tagged harpy due to this. Meidri is often not tagged harpy entirely because her legs are out of frame.
One alternative would be to simply move the favgroup to bird girl, but I feel that would make characters like Ziz needlessly difficult to search for from beneath the deluge of good 'ol Arknights birbs.
I've never heard of the term birdmaid before. Googling it, it seems it's specific to Ishuzoku Reviewers, so naming it after a (fairly recent) copyright might not be a great idea.
What gives me more pause though is that even something like the D&D definition of harpies, as widespread as it is, would not qualify for our Harpy tag under this proposal.
I've never heard of the term birdmaid before. Googling it, it seems it's specific to Ishuzoku Reviewers, so naming it after a (fairly recent) copyright might not be a great idea.
What gives me more pause though is that even something like the D&D definition of harpies, as widespread as it is, would not qualify for our Harpy tag under this proposal.
Birdmaid is very much a "best possible option" scenario. I asked around for weeks for a better name and nobody could come up with one. In fact, you were part of one of those discussions.
The classical greek harpies have a fully bird body and a human face only. Harpies throughout 90s anime are rife with characters that have back wings and nothing else, see harpy_(puyopuyo).
Most of our mythological creature tags do not follow any one pop culture or even mythological root. Lamia in Faerun (DnD, as you linked), Golarion (Pathfinder), and many mythologies are lion-based taur that eat fetuses (such a depiction is first on a fresh google search and second behind FGO on my horrible search metrics) and many mermaid depictions make them more fish than human and vice versa. And don't even get me started on kobold.
With Monster Musume and similar monster girl-fetish focused media specifically depicting harpies as we know them through Papi and a hardcore fetish show based on it specifically marking such a character as not a harpy, I don't think it's too harsh to ignore Dungeons and Dragons' never-made-playable depiction of them. Harpies in D&D are not particularly widespread. It's probably better for us - the anime focused site - to fall back on the anime-centric monster girl fetish definitions.
I can't recall these discussions, but I likely just missed them all. In any case, the one thing I can speak to is that birdmaid is a terrible name for it. I hear "birdmaid" and I think "bird maid", or "new Yu-Gi-Oh archetype".
If we can't think of a better name, would attaching a qualifier like (creature) or (monster) work to disambiguate birdmaid? That'd at the very least help with the birdmaid/bird maid issue that's been raised.
If we can't think of a better name, would attaching a qualifier like (creature) or (monster) work to disambiguate birdmaid? That'd at the very least help with the birdmaid/bird maid issue that's been raised.
I don't think it would help since the core issue is that it's a copyright specific name.
Birdmaid is a terrible name for this concept, literally everyone who sees that tag will think its a birdgirl in a maid uniform.
Moreover, do we really need this level of granularity in these tags? Does anyone other than Vera actually care about this distinction? No one is going to remember these definitions.
I don't think it would help since the core issue is that it's a copyright specific name.
Well, I have a counter-question in that case - is it? Like, I just looked up these Ishuzoku Reviewers' 'birdmaids', and found that the original Japanese is just 有翼人 - winged people. This then lines up with the official manga translation referring to them as such, and fan translations calling them avians. Searching バードメード only gives me ARCHITECTMADE's wooden Bird figures, as designed by Kristian Vedel - attempting to narrow the search down by including the copyright name gives me nothing.
And that's when I ran into this blog, where someone tries to learn English by looking at overseas reactions to Japanese stuff, and they seemed just as confused in the main post covering reactions to Ishuzoku Reviewers Episode 12, thinking the term was used for Meidri until realizing that this wasn't the case and noticing the same thing I just pointed out. Scrolling down to the comments you had people continuing the discussion and realizing that 'birdmaid' is essentially just another way of saying bird girl (with 'maid' being used in the sense of 'maiden', ala mermaid), localizing what was originally just "winged women" in the manga to something that'd fit more in a casual fantasy setting.
That is to say then, the term is not copyright-specific, akin to hobbit or saiyan. It's a translation flourish. There's nothing that makes that term exclusive to Ishuzoku Reviewers, aside from the impression of such due to it being the first to do so. Someone could translate "winged women" in another fantasy anime as "birdmaids" tomorrow and make that argument completely invalid. Shameimaru Aya is tagged with the term on Pixiv.
So the actual core issue is not whether we should use a copyright-specific name, but rather if we should use such an ambiguously-coined term to refer to a specific range of bird girl, because us doing so might accidentally establish birdmaids as an actual bird girl type.
About a week has passed since my big post, but lingering in the back of my mind was still the question of "was there a better name for these". And then, as if something clicked, my eyes widened.
Half-harpy.
That's the only reasonable name that I can come up with. Unlike the usual problem with half-races on Danbooru, where they'll often be indistinguishable from their non-half counterparts (half-elf and half-orc, hence why they don't have tags), using the proposed criteria for 'birdmaid' would actually provide an actual distinguishable (and therefore taggable) difference for a theoretical half-harpy tag. And in contrast to 'birdmaid', searching online, half-harpies actually exist, albeit in homebrewcircles (so you won't find shit searching ハーフハーピー), but the few examples I can find here at least seem to share the notion of half-harpies having hands and not winged arms ala Ver's proposal, so at least we wouldn't be making something up here.
Based on feedback from others both here and elsewhere, I've made a separate favgroup that is a bit less hardline (harpies with back wings but also heavily feathered arms are no longer in this favgroup). This is still predicated on my previous statements, though has dialed it back. There would still be some western-style characters sometimes labeled as harpy not tagged harpy, but this is mostly characters like Xayah, who are already not tagged harpy.
If this one fails, I'm probably going to go through and take the mildest approach and move a few characters over to bird girl manually. I just cannot see characters like Meidri or post #6781095 as a harpy.
I'm still not exactly certain on what a half-harpy is. I gather it's a harpy without winged arms - that is, they have feathered wings and either bird legs or hand talons, but definitely no wings on their arms.
