Fire Emblem Class Tags

I've recently noticed that there is an old swathe of tags relating to the classes from Fire Emblem, such as mercenary_(fire_emblem), archer_(fire_emblem), and bride_(fire_emblem). I've been mashing class names into the search bar to try and find them and a majority of them have a scant few images, with those that have more than two or three often being used incorrectly. In addition, the ones tagged on the sprite work of rw are character tags rather than costume tags, which seems odd for those images. For other images, such as the three for fighter_(fire_emblem), where it is actually the generic Fighter it makes sense for it to be a character tag.

So, I'm wondering if I should "nuke" (it'd be one tiny nuke...) some of them, such as the archer tag, if I should rename the fighter one to character:Generic_Fighter_(Fire_Emblem_Fates), and go on a bit of a project to find the rest of them.

Bride is a different case where it's being applied randomly to characters wearing their FEH bridal costumes, rather than the actual bride class from Awakening.

I feel that, in a lot of these cases, nuking the tag is more useful, at least until someone actually uploads the generic costume or generic character. As it is now, several of them are being applied to characters that just have the class. In cases like Bride, it needs gardening. I've brought up creating FGO-like tags for the character's alternate forms from FEH, which would clean up Bride really quickly, but it was shot down due to "not really needed as most FE characters rarely get artworks".

Veradux said:

I've brought up creating FGO-like tags for the character's alternate forms from FEH, which would clean up Bride really quickly, but it was shot down due to "not really needed as most FE characters rarely get artworks".

I think i was the one who said that in the past, and i must say, i have made a grave mistake. I said that in a general point of view, considering most characters have less than 200 artworks each. On the other hand, characters like camilla (fire emblem), lyn (fire emblem), corrin (fire emblem), etc. have a lot of outfits and a lot of artworks. I retract my previous statement.
If you want to go forward with it, i can lend a little bit of help if needed, although i'm currently busy with other things, as such i can't guarantee anything, sorry.

So, I'm wondering if I should "nuke" (it'd be one tiny nuke...) some of them, such as the archer tag, if I should rename the fighter one to character:Generic_Fighter_(Fire_Emblem_Fates), and go on a bit of a project to find the rest of them.

I think there's no harm in giving generic characters tags, as long as they're properly tagged with appropriate modifiers.
An argument could also be made for Three Houses class outfits, but i think those should be covered with generic tags rather than character tags.
It shouldn't be that different to list_of_pokemon_trainer_classes. (Although the latter could use some polish, since some NPCs have drastic changes between games...)

After some further conversation with @Veradux, and in line with Mr Username Hidden regarding how there's been an explosion of FE art, we'll be proceeding with the grand tagging update for the game, utilizing the game's official english titles for the alternative versions of different characters. We discussed using the banners instead, but it was decided titles were a better approach. We'll be following the formatting used for other games: name_(title)_(fire_emblem)

Here's a resource that conveniently shows all of them in chronological order for ease of looking up and tagging: https://feheroes.gamepedia.com/Summoning_event_archive

No guarantees of speed of finishing this, but it should be done eventually. At the time of writing there's around 550 pages of posts tagged Fire_emblem_heroes and the first alts begin 20 pages in, so there's -a lot- of ground to cover.

Before creating a large stream of new tags, I think it would be best to avoid creating new tags for characters where only official art exists of the new outfit and I seriously think we shouldn't be create new tags if there is only a handful of posts for the variant.

NWF_Renim said:

Before creating a large stream of new tags, I think it would be best to avoid creating new tags for characters where only official art exists of the new outfit and I seriously think we shouldn't be create new tags if there is only a handful of posts for the variant.

Username Hidden said the exact same thing to me when I first made the idea a year ago. It's what they're referencing when they say:

Username_Hidden said:
I think i was the one who said that in the past, and i must say, i have made a grave mistake.

I made a joke in that discussion with Toctoc about how it'd be a big undertaking for a character like Camilla but not for Joshua, but there's very likely a need for futureproofing and avoiding partial tagging like that. You never know when Admiral_JoshuaStan will pop in and start dumping every smooth-talking red head, ya know?

+1. I'll try to lend a hand if possible.
I think we should tackle one character a time. So for example, go through all Marth posts, then all Caeda posts, ...
This way it's fairly ordered and there aren't many chances of missing some alt.

After *even further* discussion with Zap, Vera and Unknown, it's been decided to swap the title usage for simple thematic grouping, which has far more google hits, is more practical to use/write, and is closer in line both to community usage and fate's current nomenclature system. There are some cases/banners where atm it's not clear what we'll do but we'll burn that bridge when we get it

In the meantime, given how we're bringing this in line with Fate and their stuff, but we originally started out imitating AL, it should be considered (for another time plz for the love of god @_@) trying to see whether it's possible to do something similar for AL, for the sake of consistency or something (although I guess it's fine if AL and arknights are consistent between themselves... maybe)

Toctoc said:

After *even further* discussion with Zap, Vera and Unknown, it's been decided to swap the title usage for simple thematic grouping, which has far more google hits, is more practical to use/write, and is closer in line both to community usage and fate's current nomenclature system. There are some cases/banners where atm it's not clear what we'll do but we'll burn that bridge when we get it

In the meantime, given how we're bringing this in line with Fate and their stuff, but we originally started out imitating AL, it should be considered (for another time plz for the love of god @_@) trying to see whether it's possible to do something similar for AL, for the sake of consistency or something (although I guess it's fine if AL and arknights are consistent between themselves... maybe)

Since you guys keep bringing up discussions no one else is privy to, I'm not really sure what you're suggesting to be done. What is it you think needs to be changed about AL's tags?

I'm not sure what "thematic grouping" is, but by the name I'm relatively certain it wouldn't work for AL or AK, those two games aren't compatible with Fate's insane mess of a tagging system.

Veradux said:

I made a joke in that discussion with Toctoc about how it'd be a big undertaking for a character like Camilla but not for Joshua, but there's very likely a need for futureproofing and avoiding partial tagging like that. You never know when Admiral_JoshuaStan will pop in and start dumping every smooth-talking red head, ya know?

I think it would be a reasonable requirement that the character needs at least over 40 fanart posts that are not deleted to warrant tagging clothing variants for the character. There needs to be a show of interest in the character by fan artists, because if there isn't then there isn't going to be new images unless you come across the rare artist like say Haruhisky who keeps churning out a single character long after the series has come and gone. Such artists though are rarities, which is why they're always considered notable and we shouldn't be assuming every character will have an artist like that supporting them. Interest in characters typically wane with time after their main work has come and gone, and when we "future-proof" something it should be on the foreseeable future not a hypothetical long into the future where even the site itself might be long gone.

You reference Admiral_Pectoral's efforts with bara images, but that's an apples to oranges comparison because bara is a genre of work and not a character. As a genre there was always plenty of untapped images that hadn't made their way to this site, you can check any of the pixiv names we have linked in the bara wiki and find well over a hundred new posts (over 400 for two of the three) for this year alone. Unfortunately this same thing is very clearly not the case with characters, in comparison a character like Olwen for example has gained essentially 1 post on pixiv since the start of the year (it's 4 posts, but all advertising using the same image) and gained only 11 new images for all of last year.

A requirement of 40 non-deleted fanarts posts (ie 2 default pages worth of content) should frankly be an easy task unless there really is a dearth of fanart for the character (and honestly I think it's such a low bar having it higher would be better). As for why fanart posts, it's because a game like Fire Emblem Heroes easily results in several images of variation for the same character with each version of a character creating at least 4 images (normal, attacking, special attack, and damaged art) and if there is another version of the character that means an additional 4 images and it isn't uncommon for us to have people reposting better quality versions of these same images thus resulting easily in some 12-16 images of the same official art. This can easily pad a character's image count despite the fact that said character may lack appeal to fan artists and thus not receive additional art down the road. Taking Olwen again as example, she has 49 posts on the site but almost half of them are official art (24 of the 49) and of that FEH variation art accounts for 17 (35%) of the total posts.

As for the idea of "future-proofing", I would like to avoid having this as a blanket policy on low count character tags to prevent the possibility of say a person uploading an image of a relatively obscure/unpopular series that contains several versions of the same character and that ends up the first (and for the sake of argument) and last post from this series. If we go with the argument of always future-proofing, then we'd end up creating multiple character tags for this 1 character of which only 1 single post exists when in the end only a single character tag was needed. There is no real value in subdividing a character on their outfits if they can't even fill two measly pages, at that point you're not improving searches you're just making it easier for a user to pad their tag counts.

blindVigil said:

Since you guys keep bringing up discussions no one else is privy to, I'm not really sure what you're suggesting to be done.

If a formal change is going to be made we should have to post that information here instead of expecting everyone to be on the discord server, especially for something as big as this. I frankly don't think discord discussions should be considered formal on major changes until some notice that includes the details is posted on the forum about it. If we don't, then we're simply denying the input of users who only use the forum. We'd then run the risk of creating an echo chamber where only a few likeminded voices have the ability to input on changes.

I agree with everything Renim said, we shouldn't jump the gun and create alternative character tags unless there's several pages worth of fanart.

Also nothing is "decided" until it's brought up in the forums first.

After checking various things and gleaning what I could from this thread, I think I can definitively say that it's not feasible for Azur Lane and Arknights to be made to conform with how Fate, and now I guess FE, handles its variant tags. Those games do not have "classes" like FGO that the same character can be rereleased in a dozen times, nor do they release their skins/alts in themed sets the way I'm led to believe FEH does.

It's also probably no surprise that I'm as usual against forced consistency for the sake of consistency. Fate is a special kind of crazy where tagging is concerned, other games don't need to be twisted around to match it just because one or two other franchises happened to mesh well with how Fate does things around here.

As far as FEH tagging is concerned, after checking the tagging history of the participants of this thread to try and figure out what it is that's being suggested, I'm not totally sure what was settled on is really a great option. Using wedding variants as the baseline, instead of naming the tags with the official name of the specific alt the way we do for AL and AK, it was decided to just use (bridal). My understanding is that this is how the FE community collectively refers to these variants.

That seems unwise to me for the same reason I wouldn't want to rename all AL wedding skins to (oath), it's too ambiguous. It might make sense to someone who plays FEH, but for everyone else I don't think "bridal" really conveys that the tag is for a specific official design, and not just any depiction of said character in wedding attire. Even if one might be able to say that FE doesn't generally get enough fanart for this kind of problem to come up, I don't think it's a good idea to use potentially ambiguous terms because there "probably won't be any problem" only to find ourselves fixing it down the line.

Alright so, here's a semi-recap on the points that were raised yesterday.
From here on "title tags" will refer to the small titles all heroes have over their name in the in-game detail menu.
"Community names" will refer to titles given by the community to a group of characters released in the same banner or series of banners - for example, the Legendary series, Brave series, Fallen series (...). This is also what TocToc meant by "thematic groupings".

Regarding the way AL and AK tag their skins: as far as i know, those are the official names, which are also used on the game's wikis. They don't have alternate names like FEH alts do. I'm not sure how much it matters, but all units are alts and not skins, somewhat similar to F/GO.
Skins exist under the moniker of "Resplendent Heroes", which would also fuck up the title tag standard, because they don't have a title and need to be typed as "resplendent" anyways.
My personal suggestion would be to group AK skins by in-game maker rather than by the single name, so for example, astesia_(starseeker)_(arknights) would become astesia_(epoque)_(arknights). But they usually aren't very long, so i wouldn't be against keeping them as they are right now. (Also i'd rather not start a discussion like this in this thread, it's big enough to deserve a thread of it's own.)

EDIT:
To answer @NWF_Renim 's suggestion of 40 minimum posts: i'm against it.
First of all, i'm pretty sure there are many skins from both Arknights and Azur Lane that don't break the threshold.
I completely understand the reasoning behind it, especially with the Olwen example, but then someone would have to keep track of which alts don't have a tag, and then monitor the chartags until there are enough posts to reach the threshold to make the tag.
Needless to say, since there are hundreds of alts, it would make the situation pretty messy, especially if, for example, only half the characters from a certain set have the requirements for a chartag.

Username_Hidden said:

EDIT:
To answer @NWF_Renim 's suggestion of 40 minimum posts: i'm against it.
First of all, i'm pretty sure there are many skins from both Arknights and Azur Lane that don't break the threshold.
I completely understand the reasoning behind it, especially with the Olwen example, but then someone would have to keep track of which alts don't have a tag, and then monitor the chartags until there are enough posts to reach the threshold to make the tag.
Needless to say, since there are hundreds of alts, it would make the situation pretty messy, especially if, for example, only half the characters from a certain set have the requirements for a chartag.

@Username_Hidden I think you've misunderstood me. I'm saying the character as a whole requires having over 40 fanart posts, I'm laying out a horribly low bar on this in my suggestion. For example I'm saying a character like Henriette should not be given subdivisions with like a Henriette_(Overflowing_Love)_(Fire_Emblem) tag for her recent valentine's variant because as a whole Henriette only has 23 posts of which only 9 posts are undeleted fanart. At such a low number creating tags for her variants doesn't actually improve search ability and only serves as tag padding.

Ah sorry, i think i understand now.
I agree then, but it still leaves the problem that there will be untagged alts that someone has to keep track of.

Username_Hidden said:

Ah sorry, i think i understand now.
I agree then, but it still leaves the problem that there will be untagged alts that someone has to keep track of.

There will always be untagged alts as they keep adding more in the future anyway. I don't see what is so pressing that we have to make these alts until they're actually vaguely necessary.

blindVigil said:

That seems unwise to me for the same reason I wouldn't want to rename all AL wedding skins to (oath), it's too ambiguous. It might make sense to someone who plays FEH, but for everyone else I don't think "bridal" really conveys that the tag is for a specific official design, and not just any depiction of said character in wedding attire. Even if one might be able to say that FE doesn't generally get enough fanart for this kind of problem to come up, I don't think it's a good idea to use potentially ambiguous terms because there "probably won't be any problem" only to find ourselves fixing it down the line.

Unlike games like AL, in FEH the Bridal sets (2017's Bridal Blessings, 2018's Bridal Bloom, 2019's Bridal Belonging, and 2020's Bridal Beloveds) releases are tied to a season (late May to June, really it's a tie in with the idea of "June Bride") and the common name tying the sets is Bridal.

NWF_Renim said:

Unlike games like AL, in FEH the Bridal sets (2017's Bridal Blessings, 2018's Bridal Bloom, 2019's Bridal Belonging, and 2020's Bridal Beloveds) releases are tied to a season (late May to June, really it's a tie in with the idea of "June Bride") and the common name tying the sets is Bridal.

No, I understood that. My point was that Bridal is not an FEH specific term, and doesn't necessarily convey to people who don't play FEH that it's for a specific official design. AL wedding skins are typically called "Oath skins", but naming all of them (Oath), while in line with what most in the community would call them, is ambiguous to others. Bridal is certainly clearer in intent than Oath, but it's still somewhat ambiguous. If it works, then it's fine, though.

Username Hidden said:

- Precedent set by how Fate handles tagging of alts

This is the part that keeps confusing me. I assume you mean like Artoria Pendragon (Lancer) (Fate)? Isn't that naming scheme by necessity? How else would we distinguish the 8 million variants of Artoria except by Class? To my knowledge, that's just what they're called in game. I'm not sure you can really call it a precedent when it was the only reasonable option, they don't have any other names to use.

Regarding the way AL and AK tag their skins: as far as i know, those are the official names, which are also used on the game's wikis.

They are, yes.

My personal suggestion would be to group AK skins by in-game maker rather than by the single name, so for example, astesia_(starseeker)_(arknights) would become astesia_(epoque)_(arknights). But they usually aren't very long, so i wouldn't be against keeping them as they are right now. (Also i'd rather not start a discussion like this in this thread, it's big enough to deserve a thread of it's own.)

That only works for as long as no character has more than one skin from the same "brand". Amiya currently has two skins belonging to the Test Collection brand. There's also these brands. Some of the brand names are pretty long, too. Nobody calls them by brand name, either.