Sorry for the awkward thread title, I was trying to think of a quick way to explain this problem.

Some shows have characters that have 2 (or more) very different appearances. This is particularly noticeable in animes that involve magical transformations. Someone looking for this lady is going to have a hard time figuring out that this is the character they are looking for. I was wondering what folks thought might be the best way to add these characters. I am inclined to add the alternate version as a separate character, but indicate in the name and description that they are the same character as the main version.This is basically what I did for Howl's Moving Castle although it's made a bit easier in that film as the main character creates another identity for her cursed self, with another name. However, after having done so it occurred to me that there might be a different method that other people used, and for the sake of consistency I should find out.

The same problem crops up for characters from a franchise that have had their appearance altered among media. It's not a huge deal if the manga has a character with brown eyes and the anime makes them green, it might deserve a note in the character description. On the other hand sometimes there are far bigger changes, and it might make sense to list the character twice, once under each look.

Good summary Emmejo. We're moving closer to resolving this problem.

Been thinking adding TWO additional options to characters might do the trick.

The alternative versions of characters and series can be added is the normal way. But afterwords, they can be indexed as:

Redirect Type : a range... from different appearance ( soft redirect, we make note there are other versions of this character in the profile ) to complete duplicate ( hard redirect. it's as if this was never uploaded, we take people right to the original ) .
Redirect To : original character ID / parent ID

Then a 3rd aspect, not quite as easy... filtering where appropriate.
Do we show the character in Name Search results?
Do we show the character in Visual Search results?
Do we show the character in the Anime/Game's character section?


I also want different versions of characters to fit in somewhere... Anime, manga, game, PS2, DS, PS3, XBox, etc etc if the art style is different enough and another artist is due credit.


- UPDATE -

I'm ready to dive into this. First scenario:
http://www.animecharactersdatabase.com/source.php?id=100214

http://www.animecharactersdatabase.com/find.php?search=Ruri+Hoshino&c=Characters

Will it be OK having alternate versions of Ruri appear on the same page, and in the same search results?



[ Edited Mar 29, 2011 ]

私は日本語を少し読むと書くをできます。あなたも？