The tag alias #70152 eastern_dragon -> loong has been rejected.

Reason: The tag Specieshttps://e621.net/wiki_pages/8233 bichosan -> loong

Reason: These two concepts are independent and cannot be confused. I have checked with several Chinese friends and they said that the translation "loong" is more appropriate
It may be a bit out of format

EDIT: The tag alias eastern_dragon -> loong (forum #403759) has been rejected by @Rainbow_Dash.

this was also brought up a couple months ago in forum topic #42696. there's not much need to make separate forums to make these requests...

siral_exan said:
this was brought up a couple months ago in forum topic #42696.

You could even say it was a loong awaited alias

siral_exan said:
this was also brought up a couple months ago in forum topic #42696. there's not much need to make separate forums to make these requests...

They tried to request it on topic #44141, but it was done improperly.

weibilin said:
The tag alias #70152 eastern_dragon -> loong has been rejected.
Reason: These two concepts are independent and cannot be confused. I have checked with several Chinese friends and they said that the translation "loong" is more appropriate
It may be a bit out of format

Alright, based on the reasons given on topic #42696 & topic #44141, it could be basically summarised as (i) this is an English-centric website so we follow what most English speakers would call them and (ii) not all eastern dragons are Chinese dragons so it would be inappropriate to call them all "Loong".

Now since this was brought up again, I'm going to go into the rabbit hole part I mentioned on the first thread so everybody can have an idea where this distinction stems from.

thegreatwolfgang said:
What I am interested in hearing is whether other cultures (like the Japanese) share this same sentiment about the English term "dragon" being used to describe dragons in their respective cultures.

I can't exactly speak to Japanese culture, but at least in the last two Zelda games, Dinraal, Naydra, and Farosh are all eastern_dragons whose original Japanese names are portmanteaus with the word "dragon" (Dinraal being オルドラ, Orudora, a portmanteau of Orudin + Doragon, which in English is Eldin + Dragon, for example). There are the kanji 竜 and 龍, pronounced "ryuu", referring primarily to eastern/Chinese style dragons, while ドラゴン (doragon/dragon) is used more for western/European style dragons, but they do get used interchangeably at times (for instance, the light dragon is 白龍, hakuryuu, using 龍/ryuu as opposed to the others' use of ドラ/dra(gon), despite all four being eastern style dragons).

thegreatwolfgang said:
They tried to request it on topic #44141, but it was
I am under the belief that this stems from nationalistic propaganda that is very prevalent among Chinese state media and social media.
A simple Google search for "dragon vs loong" will turn up dozens of news articles talking about this supposed conflict in distinction between "dragon" and "loong".

I'm reading through these articles and I'm just confused on what they're trying to push here. I've never heard of this discourse until WeiBeilin brought it up, and it seems like a good majority of these "dragon vs loong" articles are extremely recent, within the past year or two. With the rise in botted articles and machine generation, I'm of the belief a lot of these articles might be botted and the loong debate is likely not as big as they're pushing it to be. I'll have to track down where this started in my own time.

That, plus the reason being "dragons are often seen as evil in the west" which is true, but recently and historically dragons have been associated with both good and evil across the world. It's an irrelevant argument. A big scaly creature is just something natural for humans to come up with, and the idea of a "dragon" has existed in cultures for upwards of 4,000 years.

That being said, forcing a Chinese transliteration for something that is international at this point and has been for centuries still feels inappropriate and chinese-centric. We still have the rest of asia and their dragons [like naga basuki from indonesia] which, again, "loong" is not an appropriate translation for. One country can't lay claim to an entire language's word- let alone everyone else's- for something.

If they want us to specifically refer to Chinese dragons as loong, that's less egregious, but eastern dragon definitely encompasses far far more than just Chinese dragons and- as several people have said at this point- not all eastern dragons are Chinese dragons.

moonlit-comet said:
I'm reading through these articles and I'm just confused on what they're trying to push here. I've never heard of this discourse until WeiBeilin brought it up, and it seems like a good majority of these "dragon vs loong" articles are extremely recent, within the past year or two. With the rise in botted articles and machine generation, I'm of the belief a lot of these articles might be botted and the loong debate is likely not as big as they're pushing it to be. I'll have to track down where this started in my own time.

There was a rather high influx of news articles, both Western and Chinese, when the topic was brought up.
This coincided with the arrival of the Chinese New Year and (surprise, surprise) welcomed the Year of the Dragon.

While you may brush off Western news articles as being botted and blowing it out of proportion, I can tell you that it is very much prevalent in Chinese state media.

thegreatwolfgang said:
While you may brush off Western news articles as being botted and blowing it out of proportion, I can tell you that it is very much prevalent in Chinese state media.

Don't get me wrong, I'm sure there's a lot of news articles that are legitimate like the ones you linked, it's just that tons of the ones I saw [yes, western as you said] had telltale signs of being botted, which makes finding reliable information on this topic difficult. I wasn't brushing anything off, or at least not trying to. I appreciate the chinese sources, I'll be reading into them more so I'm not ending up misinformed on anything.

It still does line up with my last point in my previous post tho- referring to chinese dragons as loong is fine and seems to be preferred by chinese individuals, but it's not really all that appropriate to say all eastern dragons are loong.

The bulk update request #7956 is pending approval.

create alias loong (0) -> eastern_dragon (13488) # has blocking transitive relationships, cannot be applied through bur

Reason: alias the Chinese (PRC) name to the more general tag, similar to chinese_dragon

moonlit-comet said:
It still does line up with my last point in my previous post tho- referring to chinese dragons as loong is fine and seems to be preferred by chinese individuals, but it's not really all that appropriate to say all eastern dragons are loong.

Asking for Chinese dragons to be referred to as "loong" is one thing, what the thread OP is asking for (at least implicitly) is for the complete separation of Western dragons and Eastern dragons.
This means unimplying dragon from eastern_dragon, and having the latter be aliased to loong.

thegreatwolfgang said:
Asking for Chinese dragons to be referred to as "loong" is one thing, what the thread OP is asking for (at least implicitly) is for the complete separation of Western dragons and Eastern dragons.
This means unimplying dragon from eastern_dragon, and having the latter be aliased to loong.

Right. So, from the site and aliasing perspective:

If this site decided to accept the loong alias, we'd have to first do a ton of work disambiguating "eastern dragon" before aliasing it to loong. Because otherwise, you'll catch a lot of non-Chinese dragons [such as Sisu] in the alias, and you'd have to do cleanup work afterward. And then if we did alias eastern dragon to loong, we'd have to come up with a new name for the currently existing eastern dragon group, as it is still significant enough to warrant having its own tag.

Either that, or first scrape through the eastern dragon tag [all thirteen thousand posts], find anything resembling a chinese dragon, untag eastern dragon [and dragon] from the chinese dragon, and then re-tag it with loong.

And then, once that work is all done, spend the rest of time removing incorrect dragon and eastern_dragon tags from new loong posts- since to the general public, they are dragons, and you can't alias human thoughts. lol

That's really what I meant with the "it's not appropriate to say all eastern dragons are loong", but I couldn't word it properly the first time.
TLDR, for OP: Such an alias, if it were to be approved, would need far more preliminary and proactive work before it can be put into action. You can't just one-and-done an alias this significant and call it a day, because it would catch thousands of other posts that do not apply, and then everyone would have to go and fix that.

moonlit-comet said:
Right. So, from the site and aliasing perspective:

If this site decided to accept the loong alias, we'd have to first do a ton of work disambiguating "eastern dragon" before aliasing it to loong. Because otherwise, you'll catch a lot of non-Chinese dragons [such as Sisu] in the alias, and you'd have to do cleanup work afterward. And then if we did alias eastern dragon to loong, we'd have to come up with a new name for the currently existing eastern dragon group, as it is still significant enough to warrant having its own tag.

Either that, or first scrape through the eastern dragon tag [all thirteen thousand posts], find anything resembling a chinese dragon, untag eastern dragon [and dragon] from the chinese dragon, and then re-tag it with loong.

And then, once that work is all done, spend the rest of time removing incorrect dragon and eastern_dragon tags from new loong posts- since to the general public, they are dragons, and you can't alias human thoughts. lol

That's really what I meant with the "it's not appropriate to say all eastern dragons are loong", but I couldn't word it properly the first time.
TLDR, for OP: Such an alias, if it were to be approved, would need far more preliminary and proactive work before it can be put into action. You can't just one-and-done an alias this significant and call it a day, because it would catch thousands of other posts that do not apply, and then everyone would have to go and fix that.

I'm not going to advocate for a subcategory of Eastern dragons that is going to include every cultural variations of a largely similar looking wingless serpentine dragon.
We don't even do that for Western dragons, with the exception of Wyverns.

If you want to go into detail, Chinese dragons can have only 4-5 toes (with the latter exclusive to Imperial dragons) while Japanese dragons can only have 3 toes. Then, Korean dragons can have 4 toes but differ from Chinese dragons due to their larger beards.
To make matters even worse, Sisu is based on a mishmash of Southeast Asian dragons (some claim to be the Naga which are supposed to be half-human & half-serpent or a fully legless serpent, while others the Vietnamese dragon which look identical to the Chinese dragon), so she doesn't belong in any specific subcategory.

So yeah, no to subcategories of Eastern dragons because character designs often don't match their real lore-based counterparts

thegreatwolfgang said:
I'm not going to advocate for a subcategory of Eastern dragons that is going to include every cultural variations of a largely similar looking wingless serpentine dragon.
We don't even do that for Western dragons, with the exception of Wyverns.

If you want to go into detail, Chinese dragons can have only 4-5 toes (with the latter exclusive to Imperial dragons) while Japanese dragons can only have 3 toes. Then, Korean dragons can have 4 toes but differ from Chinese dragons due to their larger beards.
...
So yeah, no to subcategories of Eastern dragons because character designs often don't match their real lore-based counterparts

Yeah, long story short it'd be a lot of work for something that, as far as the site is concerned, is inconsequential. Dragons is dragons here, and it's really not needed to go into further detail on the variation of dragon you have in a post, unless it's a pre-established body type. Especially because most character designs don't follow the official real-world lore of the dragon they're based on. Mine certainly don't.

This is jumping the gun. loong hasn't exactly caught on yet.
Could possibly go with loong dragon for better clarify. Because let's face it, historically these are dragons. Eastern Europe has similar myths of dragons (serpent-like, shapeshifting), likely spread naturally via spice trade over centuries. It would be very odd to call every serpentine dragon 'loong'.

genjar said:
This is jumping the gun. loong hasn't exactly caught on yet.
Could possibly go with loong dragon for better clarify. Because let's face it, historically these are dragons. Eastern Europe has similar myths of dragons (serpent-like, shapeshifting), likely spread naturally via spice trade over centuries. It would be very odd to call every serpentine dragon 'loong'.

The problem is it could be mistaken as being a misspelling of long dragon

genjar said:
This is jumping the gun. loong hasn't exactly caught on yet.
Could possibly go with loong dragon for better clarify. Because let's face it, historically these are dragons...

Would be pretty counterintuitive to OP's argument here, which is with the word "dragon" and not "eastern". Their argument, according to wolfgang and the articles he[?] linked, is that "dragon" is an inappropriate transliteration to what China calls loong, due to its negative association with monsters that need to be slain. So agreeing with loong but still tacking "dragon" onto it kinda defeats the point, lol.

genjar said:
Could possibly go with loong dragon for better clarify.

Please no, loong already means dragon in Chinese. Calling it loong dragon literally means "dragon dragon".
We don't want another "Chai Tea" scenario.

moonlit-comet said:
Their argument, according to wolfgang and the articles he[?] linked, is that "dragon" is an inappropriate transliteration to what China calls loong, due to its negative association with monsters that need to be slain.

Which — as you pointed out — is false. Eastern Europe had dragons as household guardians, etc. And modern western fiction (except in games) overwhelmingly portrays dragons as good. Dragon xenofiction alone is so popular that one might consider it a genre of its own by now.

I'd prefer to just keep the status quo. But if there's renaming to be done, then the 'dragon' element needs to be kept. Because one can't just point and say that 'these aren't dragons, but those are', when it's all interconnected in the mythology.

thegreatwolfgang said:
Please no, loong already means dragon in Chinese. Calling it loong dragon literally means "dragon dragon".
We don't want another "Chai Tea" scenario.

That's true

The tag alias eastern_dragon -> loong (forum #403759) has been rejected by @Rainbow_Dash.