To start off with the current
site rules on the subject:
“When a character has a ‘canon’ (official, merchandise/show-given) name that differs from the ‘fanon’ (fan-given) name, the fanon name is typically preferred, but tagging both names is encouraged to allow people to find images relating to a character no matter which name they use.”
This isn’t, of course, how it plays out in reality. “Merry May” exists but not “Flora” (except as an OC), “Sea Swirl” but not “Seafoam”, “Twinkleshine” but not “Twinkle”, and so on and on. Fanon tags
regularly get removed when they
are added to images. Meanwhile “Minuette” and “Colgate” compete for attention, as do (unevenly) “Golden Harvest” and “Carrot Top”. The opposite extreme is reached by “Lily”, the fanon name: “Lily Valley” gets absolutely no results at all, even photos of the toy where the text “Lily Valley” is visible in the photo. A slightly different paradigm exists for “Daisy”, which is used for nearly all screencaps and original art, and “Flower Wishes”, which is used almost exclusively for the toyline… that kinda feels like a good way to go, although “Daisy” is actually a canon name within the show, which is probably why it’s gotten this special treatment. (“Bon Bon” and “Sweetie Drops” are similar.) Arguably the best example of the site’s rules working is “Doctor Whooves” (fanon), having significantly more results than either “Doctor Hooves” or “Time Turner” (merchandise).
This is silly. It makes it harder to find the images you’re looking for if you know only one of the two names, and also promotes tagging wars between people who favor one name vs. people who favor another.
One character shouldn’t need two distinct tags. “Carrot Top” and “Golden Harvest”, just to pick a common example, should be one tag with two expressions, and tagging an image with one name should mean tagging it with both. How should this be displayed? It could show up in a tag list as “Carrot Top/Golden Harvest”, or “Carrot Top (Golden Harvest)”, or just “Carrot Top” but with “Golden Harvest” as the mouseover title text, or whatever. Or put toyline names first and fanon second, or let users choose in their settings which set they want to give priority to, or have the site pick one option at random every time a new session begins. Any of those options would be a
policy, and what we have now is only unhelpful chaos.