Topic: tamagotchi: characters or species?

i'd like to bring attention to and discuss the inconsistent categorization of individual tamagotchi characters. as an example of what i mean, mametchi is categorized as a character tag, but chamametchi, who is usually depicted as his younger sister in media, is categorized as a species tag. if you go through the tamagotchi tag as a whole (and ignore all the posts where it's just someone holding a tamagotchi device and there's no tamagotchi character present), you can find many examples of these inconsistencies.

now this is kind of a tricky situation, because they technically classify as both. in terms of the toys themselves, they are considered part of an evolution line, where the quality of treatment from the user determines what the tamagotchi evolves into. in this way, it would make sense to view them as species the same way you would view pokemon. however, in all the adaptations of the franchise (excluding some early japan-only playstation games and various mobile apps that mimic the toys themselves), they're treated as individual characters and, aside from character variations in very early adaptations (which have mostly been phased out of the franchise as a whole), there's never more than one of them. you never see fields of mametchis frolicking, you just have the one singular mametchi.

i'm personally leaning towards that they should be tagged as characters since most of the relevant art is very clearly based off the anime (there's only so much lewding potential from an egg thing that screams at you), but i'm interested to hear your thoughts.

Some Undertale/Deltarune monsters have a similar issue. I lean towards them being species for two reasons. First, in the mametchi tag there appears to be an oc based off the species as well as an image of them reproducing like surinam toads. Second, it would probably be helpful to imply them to an umbrella tamagotchi_(species) tag to separate out images of the critters from images of the toys.

The bulk update request #13479 is pending approval.

change category mametchi (50) -> species
change category ura_mametchi (3) -> species
change category devil_mametchi (7) -> species
change category bunbuntchi (1) -> species
change category bunkotchi (2) -> species
change category candy_pakupaku (9) -> species
change category charatchi (1) -> species
change category furifuritchi (2) -> species
change category gozarutchi (1) -> species
change category heroinetchi (1) -> species
change category herotchi (1) -> species
change category kiraritchi (10) -> species
change category sakuramotchi (1) -> species

Reason: I've recently ran into this problem as well, so I'm trying to do this BUR to at least clean up a few of these tags.
I know I could also manually change these, but these tags have been changed back and forth already.

Honestly, the more I try to look into this, the more unsure I get which one should be a character and which one species. The line gets verry blurry here.
For some, like Mametchi, I'm more certain they fit much better as a species tag.
Calling Mametchi a character tag would feel like calling Pikachu a character tag IMO.

Here's a list of all Tamagotchi related tags I found on here.
(Excluding Tamagotchi (Copyright) and Tamagotchi_(Species))

^{Most of these should probably also imply Tamagotchi_(Species)}

The bulk update request #13480 is pending approval.

create alias cafe_mama (2) -> mamapianitchi (2)
create alias furawatchi (4) -> flowertchi (0)
create alias meloditchi (20) -> melodytchi (6)

Reason: Also a few aliases I found while looking through the tags.

Cafe_mama is a nickname for Mamapianitchi
^{(See https://tamagotchi.fandom.com/wiki/Cafe_Mama )}
Furawatchi is an alias for the better known name Flowertchi
^{(See https://tamagotchi.fandom.com/wiki/Furawatchi )}
Meloditchi is an alternate spelling for Melodytchi
^{(See https://tamagotchi.fandom.com/wiki/Meloditchi )}