Tagging Virtual Youtubers

I noticed someone started a virtual youtuber tag, which for the moment seems to be a catch-all tag for unknown virtual Youtubers similar to how the niconico and [youtube copyright tags are also used for their personalities. With all the virtual Youtubers showing up, I was wondering if tagging the characters under their channel names would prove more difficult in the long run, especially in mass crossover images. Would it be more efficient to tag them under the virtual youtuber copyright, or should we leave the tagging as is?

For now it seems youtube channels and their respective virtual youtuber idols are 1:1

A previous discussion had some thoughts about this as well topic #14877

But I anticipate that some channels in the future may have more than one character, or that existing channels may start expanding their roster...

- It'd probably be simpler to make an alias for all the channels in a format like kizuna ai's channel -> a.i. channel ?

- If a catchall tag is preferable, then it should probably be named virtual streamer instead for streamer that may not stream on youtube.

- For unknown characters, I think the original/borrowed_character + character request tag should be enough, as if you don't know who the character is, then how would you be able to tell the character is a virtual youtuber?

The virtual youtuber tag seems to have been around for a while, i just added the pixiv tag to it since it's so popular nowadays.

I wanted to turn it into a general tag to be honest, because it's more a designation than a copyright... like how we tag pokemon_(creature).

It would be best to keep both the character and copyright ratio as it is. Something tells me, in a few months/a couple of years, a lot of these channels will start to introduce more virtual characters to franchise out.

Squishy said:

But I anticipate that some channels in the future may have more than one character, or that existing channels may start expanding their roster...

keonas said:

It would be best to keep both the character and copyright ratio as it is. Something tells me, in a few months/a couple of years, a lot of these channels will start to introduce more virtual characters to franchise out.

This has already happened, months ago. When Mirai Akari debuted, she replaced another virtual character, Eilene (her video explaining this). Afterwards, Eilene was moved to a second channel (link here) that she appears to share with two more characters, but she still appears in Akari's videos.

However, they aren't all part of Mirai Akari Project, even if they're connected this way. Eilene's character runs a twitter called Bit Youtube that tweets out information for both channels, but they're also (as far as I can tell) separate channels. I don't think the current copyright tag needs to change, but technically, two characters could appear under Mirai Akari Project if anyone ever uploaded relevant Eilene art here.

Over the last month there has been a very significant boom in the number of virtual youtuber channels, there are well over a hundred of them now. Kizuna Ai is at the top, while the so called "four heavenly kings" behind her are Kaguya Luna, Digital Girl Shiro, Mirai Akari, and Virtual Nojaloli Fox-eared Youtuber Ojisan (aka Nekomasu). Beyond that you've got YUA, Tokino Sora, Nora cat, Moemi & Yomemi & Eilene, Fuji Aoi, Gengen, Kurumi, and Baacharu (horse head guy). And beyond that you have loads and loads of lesser ones, which are catalogued by subscriber count here: http://virtual-youtuber.userlocal.jp/

So that said, I think this tag should probably be expanded, and implicated with the associated characters for ease of tagging. I also don't think there's much point in having separate character and property tags for all of them, since most of them aren't going to have anything else to go under that tag, and for the ones that do it's a bit unorthodox, since Eilene, the creator of Mirai Akari, has I believe 7 characters split between three projects (Mirai Akari under her channel, Eilene, Beilene, Beno, and MoE under OtakuMoE, and Moemi & Yomemi under their channel). And I think the tag should have links to the characters we have art for here on the wiki page of it, along with an explanation of it, since there's only going to be more art as time goes by.

c933103 said:
- If a catchall tag is preferable, then it should probably be named virtual streamer instead for streamer that may not stream on youtube.

I wholeheartedly disagree. Firstly, because the name "Virtual Youtuber" has been completely adopted by Japan and these characters, secondly, because many of them don't stream, they only upload videos, and thirdly, because I haven't heard of any of these characters not using Youtube.

keonas said:

I wanted to turn it into a general tag to be honest, because it's more a designation than a copyright... like how we tag pokemon_(creature).

Yeah, that makes sense.

As I said in topic #14877, I don't think this warrants an umbrella tag. We don't have a virtual singer tag for Vocaloids / Voiceroids / UTAUloids. We don't have a ship girl tag for Kantai Collection / Azur Lane / Zhan Jian Shao Nyu characters. We don't have umbrella tags for these things because they'd be too big and they'd group together too many characters who are otherwise unrelated to each other. I think the same is true for virtual youtubers.

Those examples you just gave are for products from specific companies with their own identifying property tags, though. Virtual Youtuber is a different concept; they're not all from some game or a few companies, they're only linked by their role as a virtual Youtuber, and it would be the only associated tag for most of them since most have no need for any sort of property tag. A better comparison would be for the overall Fate series tag, which by now is encompassing dozens of works from different companies and hundreds of characters only linked by the premise.

I agree with evazion, and for the following reason: I don't think an umbrella tag will ever be useful because it does not define any "quality" of the pictures. There's nothing that groups these different characters besides the very meta fact that they post their videos on youtube (and maybe that some of them use live2d, but that's absolutely not reflected in 99% of the fanart). I think a list of virtual youtubers wiki page that is also linked in each of these "franchises"' wiki will serve better anyone who seeks to search for this kind of character.

Anonymaster said:

I wholeheartedly disagree. Firstly, because the name "Virtual Youtuber" has been completely adopted by Japan and these characters, secondly, because many of them don't stream, they only upload videos, and thirdly, because I haven't heard of any of these characters not using Youtube.

- Engkishbtag might not necessarily natch Japanese, although it seems like people have been using it in English too.
- Maybe they don't livestream, but all video on youtube are streamed to users and that's how they distriivute their videos.

Anonymaster said:

Those examples you just gave are for products from specific companies with their own identifying property tags, though. Virtual Youtuber is a different concept; they're not all from some game or a few companies, they're only linked by their role as a virtual Youtuber, and it would be the only associated tag for most of them since most have no need for any sort of property tag. A better comparison would be for the overall Fate series tag, which by now is encompassing dozens of works from different companies and hundreds of characters only linked by the premise.

Examples listed above like ship girls or virtual signers aren't just created by specific companies with specifoc property tag only. Anyone can draw their ship girl and there are also magazines doing it in ad hoc way and such, and then virtual signers can also be made by anyone.
Fate series still refer to everything that come from in relation with the original Type moon creation, in the same way all Vocaloid released by different companies are characters associated with voicebanks for Vocaloid, which is not the case here.
Plus, how would you categorize what is a Virtual Youtuber for the purpose of danbooru? The most straightforward definition of Youtuber who use virtual characters in their stream could cover a lot wider aspect than what most people would perceive vortual youtuber is, characters like yukkuma would also fit into this definition but most probably won't consider tham as such, but then how do you narrow down the tag?

category virtual_youtuber -> general

Link to request

Similar to pokemon_(creature): Catchall term.
Next step would be to implicate the five(?) copyright to this tag...maybe.

Other option is to nuke the tag completely (Evazion stated good arguments) . I'm fine with either way, but all this discussing is pretty tiring if we don't have a solid request about what we're actually talking about.

EDIT: This bulk update request has been rejected because it was not approved within 60 days.

EDIT: The bulk update request #1475 (forum #142908) has been rejected by @DanbooruBot.

Provence said:

category virtual_youtuber -> general

Link to request

Similar to pokemon_(creature): Catchall term.
Next step would be to implicate the five(?) copyright to this tag...maybe.

Other option is to nuke the tag completely (Evazion stated good arguments) . I'm fine with either way, but all this discussing is pretty tiring if we don't have a solid request about what we're actually talking about.

I'm for nuking it.

I would nuke all the existing copyright tags and just use youtube. Virtual Youtubers are a subset of Youtubers, not a separate entity, and there's no real justification for keeping copyright tags that are functionally identical to their respective character tags.

feline_lump said:

I would nuke all the existing copyright tags and just use youtube. Virtual Youtubers are a subset of Youtubers, not a separate entity, and there's no real justification for keeping copyright tags that are functionally identical to their respective character tags.

I disagree with this. If we went this route there'd be no way to differentiate between different characters belonging to the same series and completely unrelated others. And what if someone starts uploading their videos on niconico instead?

nonamethanks said:
And what if someone starts uploading their videos on niconico instead?

Than you'd be dealing with virtual presenters.
I would have suggested virtual vlogger, but that has limitations on content type.

nonamethanks said:

I disagree with this. If we went this route there'd be no way to differentiate between different characters belonging to the same series and completely unrelated others. And what if someone starts uploading their videos on niconico instead?

The problem is that we're not tagging "series", we're tagging the channels of characters who (whether they're owned by individuals or teams) effectively exist as independent vloggers. There are no "characters" in the PewDiePie "series". If, on the other hand, someone started a group Let's Play series, podcast, vlog, etc. with a recurring roster of characters, that would be worth tagging, but to the best of my knowledge that hasn't happened with Virtual Youtubers yet.

If a content creator uploads primarily on niconico, they get tagged niconico. This is already done, and I can't foresee this genre of creators changing that.

feline_lump said:

The problem is that we're not tagging "series", we're tagging the channels of characters who (whether they're owned by individuals or teams) effectively exist as independent vloggers. There are no "characters" in the PewDiePie "series". If, on the other hand, someone started a group Let's Play series, podcast, vlog, etc. with a recurring roster of characters, that would be worth tagging, but to the best of my knowledge that hasn't happened with Virtual Youtubers yet.

If a content creator uploads primarily on niconico, they get tagged niconico. This is already done, and I can't foresee this genre of creators changing that.

But there's no reason to have a "youtube" tag include virtual youtubers, because these characters have nothing to do with youtube besides posting their videos there. We don't tag anime characters with the japanese TV channel their series air in.

And as for your example, kemomimi_vr_channel has at least two different characters (though only one currently has pictures on danbooru), so it's definitely a distinct problem.

As it was said before, there's nothing that identifies these characters as youtubers in any of the pictures present on site, so why would we tag them as such? Like evazion said, we don't have virtual singers tags. If we did, they would be completely pointless and better replaced by wiki lists.
And if there's something that refers to the site youtube, the youtube tag exists. Adding all of these characters to it with no discrimination would simply make the tag useless.

Tags are meant to be an aid for searching, not a mean to compile every single info about something whether or not it's reflected in pictures.

nonamethanks said:

But there's no reason to have a "youtube" tag include virtual youtubers, because these characters have nothing to do with youtube besides posting their videos there. We don't tag anime characters with the japanese TV channel their series air in.

And as for your example, kemomimi_vr_channel has at least two different characters (though only one currently has pictures on danbooru), so it's definitely a distinct problem.

As it was said before, there's nothing that identifies these characters as youtubers in any of the pictures present on site, so why would we tag them as such? Like evazion said, we don't have virtual singers tags. If we did, they would be completely pointless and better replaced by wiki lists.
And if there's something that refers to the site youtube, the youtube tag exists. Adding all of these characters to it with no discrimination would simply make the tag useless.

Tags are meant to be an aid for searching, not a mean to compile every single info about something whether or not it's reflected in pictures.

But we do tag niconico personalities with niconico. People who stream or post videos on niconico are tied to the platform in the same way as Virtual Youtubers are tied to Youtube. Specific elements of niconico (e.g. terebi-kun, niconico comments) are tagged to aid in searching. Following that, we could create tags such as youtube play icon or youtube player to narrow down searches to specific elements.

Conversely, following your opinion, we would completely lack a general tag for a distinct group of people who frequently cross over in fanart (and occasionally on YouTube itself), and we would need to fundamentally alter the way we tag niconico personalities.

This bulk update request has been rejected because it was not approved within 60 days.

The bulk update request #1475 (forum #142908) has been rejected by @DanbooruBot.