I think ages ago there used to be such a tag, something like 'videogame_character', but I might be wrong.
Sometimes I want to search for a certain species, but only have characters from videogames come up, and not people's OCs, and sometimes vice versa.

Like I want to search for a gryphon, but I want it to only be gryphons from video games.
Or I want to search for dragons, but I don't want any dragons from videogames to be in the results.

This would make it much easier, so someone doesn't have to do a search like: dragon -bethesda_game_studios -spyro -warcraft -fromsoftware -capcom
and then any other game series that might pop up as you look through the results.
Or you want to find new dragons from videogames you don't know of yet and not just people's OCs, which is currently impossible.

We had a video games tag, but that was a terrible tag with so many millions of posts that it was practically useless, it was nuked a few years ago in topic #29801

media of origin as a tag is a mess in concept. both because they'd be entirely overpopulated and also because nearly every franchise is multi-media at this point.

And whether of not something "originated from a video game" isn't always clear. Pokemon, for example, started as a video game series, but expanded to television, movies, and comics. Some pokemon and pokemon characters were created for movies or tv and ended up in the games later because of popularity, while others debuted in movies or tv before appearing in video game, which creates unexpected results or making technically-incorrect special cases to align with user expectation irrespective of actually originating from a video game. Some characters may have first appeared in a game, but got a non-game incarnation which is technically different but hard to tell apart if not expressly named (e.g. gary_oak vs blue_(pokemon).

As well, "video game" is a rather broad concept. You can have a video game of a card game, or a video game that's less of a game and more an interactive tv show. The old video_games tag ended up being used for what people thought should be related to video games, resulting in it being so broad and arbitrary that it became pointless.

I see, I just thought it would be useful and make it easier to find certain things.
Maybe it could be done in a different way, with a tag for "original_character" applied to any post with an original character tagged in it? IIRC this also used to exist.
I get that millions of posts would have this applied to them, but I'm not sure I understand why that's inherently bad? It's not tag bloat if it's a tag that can actually be used. I know I wouldn't be the only one using it.

dogno said:
I see, I just thought it would be useful and make it easier to find certain things.
Maybe it could be done in a different way, with a tag for "original_character" applied to any post with an original character tagged in it? IIRC this also used to exist.
I get that millions of posts would have this applied to them, but I'm not sure I understand why that's inherently bad? It's not tag bloat if it's a tag that can actually be used. I know I wouldn't be the only one using it.

The original_character tag, which means something completely different BTW, got aliased to fan_character more than 10 years ago.

A tag like "original"_character would not be useful because essentially a vast majority of posts will already feature people's OCs or fursonas and tagging it consistently would be a constant uphill battle.
In addition, we don't tag a feature that is the "default majority" of posts anyway and would instead tag the lesser opposite that would be more manageable and could achieve the same thing search-wise (by searching -insert_tag_here).

While not the perfect solution, you can simply search copytags:>0 for ALL posts that feature a character from a copyright (such as video game and movie characters) while searching copytags:0 would give you all the "non-copyrighted" characters (such as people's OCs and such).

thegreatwolfgang said:
The original_character tag, which means something completely different BTW, got aliased to fan_character more than 10 years ago.

A tag like "original"_character would not be useful because essentially a vast majority of posts will already feature people's OCs or fursonas and tagging it consistently would be a constant uphill battle.
In addition, we don't tag a feature that is the "default majority" of posts anyway and would instead tag the lesser opposite that would be more manageable and could achieve the same thing search-wise (by searching -insert_tag_here).

While not the perfect solution, you can simply search copytags:>0 for ALL posts that feature a character from a copyright (such as video game and movie characters) while searching copytags:0 would give you all the "non-copyrighted" characters (such as people's OCs and such).

This is pretty much exactly what I wanted and works great, thank you!