I'm going to be expanding the database today to handle "other characters".

I'm wondering, what sorts of other characters are there? The point of this expansion is to allow us to add every character in a series.

ie) all the yokai in Nurarihyon no Mago
ie) all the pokemon in Pokemon
ie) all the characters in manga that are Black and White

The way this will be implemented is, they will be added normally as characters and then marked as a type of other character.

So far I have

0. normal
1. animal
2. non-human
9. manga

as options. Are there any more that we'll need?


Another aspect of other characters is limited indexing. I suppose all of the standard traits will be optional for them.

私は日本語を少し読むと書くをできます。あなたも？

Dose "non-human" include only biological beings who are "non-human" or dose it cover sentient machines as well?

Non-Human will be the catch-all for all other characters. Unless of course, there are enough to warrant a category.

Sentient machines does warrant a discussion.


Let's take Android #18 as an example.




She has all the visible traits of a human character. Yet she is non-human - a sentient machine.


With the old system, I wanted this only to accommodate characters that were not human. So mostly animals were added.




So if we did have machines as an option, I suppose there's no getting around it helping with the accuracy of human looking machines, as well non-huamn ones. Hmm...



Then would we add

Ghosts / Spirits
Vampires
Monsters

as well?



Either direction is fine by me.

A) restrict this only to characters that do not look human
B) use this to accommodate non-huamn characters and sort human looking characters that are non-human


Although ... thinking this through ....

Accuracy of information is the job of the profile. Either tags or written description.

Accuracy of the search is based on LIMITED INFORMATION, so someone unfamiliar with DBZ would not know just by looking at #18 that she is a machine. If they could filter out non-human characters from a search, they'd never find her.

[ Edited Aug 6, 2011 ]

私は日本語を少し読むと書くをできます。あなたも？

The inherent problem with vampires, Ghosts and Monsters is the hybrids (Blade from Trinity or Danny Phantom come to mind). As well as people who are "human" but all (if not most) of their interactions with other characters is in the form of an "astro-projection" such as Fuko Ibuki from Clannad.

True, true. We'll continue to handles those using tags.

After going through a search for characters with no hair, I was able to remove all the garbage other characters using the following:

- Animal
- Non-Human
- In Armor


Filtered vs unfiltered


Haven't seen a mech yet. There were a lot of characters in armor, and a few skeletons.

As more characters are added, we'll have to revisit "non-human" to see if a new category is warranted.


The cheap guideline for using this: Note: Please only set the type IF this character would appear very out of place in a High School Classroom. or if it's a Black and White image ( manga )

^_^

[ Edited Aug 7, 2011 ]

私は日本語を少し読むと書くをできます。あなたも？

Because the option of animals and non-human is being added I have a question. What would you do about the gender of animals. Sometimes it can be difficult to determine their gender. For example what is the real gender of Pikachu? Would that index be left out?

Yes. When uploading and indexing animals and non-human characters - all traits are optional.

Basically only a name and image are required.

[ Edited Aug 8, 2011 ]

私は日本語を少し読むと書くをできます。あなたも？

Ignoring for now the fact that "animal" characters could also easily be classified as "non-human" characters as well, "manga" should definitely, absolutely, positively NOT be among these categories.

The simple reason being that any conceivable type of character, be it "human", "non-human", "animal", "ghost", "pokemon" or what have you, can feasibly appear in both manga and non-manga media.