There are artists who go by one main username for publishing general/SFW artwork, but then have other dedicated usernames for other purposes: their NSFW art, their NSFW art focused on specific fetishes (e.g. vore), their art for specific fandoms (e.g. MLP or Sonic), or the art they present in-character as their OC.
My question is: does e621 have any guidelines about when all of an artist's images should be consolidated under one main artist tag, versus when we should use multiple artist tags to reflect the artist's use of multiple usernames for different purposes?
In such situations, does e621's artist tagging policy depend on how public the artist is about their use of aliases? Some artists are quite open about the fact that all these separate accounts are them, whereas others are more secretive about it. Sometimes the alt usernames are just the main username with something like "(NSFW alt)" or "After Dark" appended to the end, whereas other times the pseudonyms are unrecognisably different.
Here are examples of the two approaches:
- Glopossum is an artist who publishes most art under that username, but also has a separate scataraxia username for scat fetish stuff. On e621, these are kept as two separate active artist tags, with two separate wiki pages.
- Jonas is an artist who keeps separate SFW and NSFW accounts on gallery sites and social media (Jonas/ArtOfJonas/JonasDrawsStuff for SFW; JonasAfterDark for NSFW), but on e621, everything gets lumped together under just one e621 artist tag. SerarelDeer and hibbary are other artists who use the "After Dark" format for their NSFW alts; but again, e621's artist tags ignore this.
The main reason I'm asking about this is because I have in mind a certain artist who uses unrecognisably different usernames for their SFW and NSFW accounts. I don't really want to say who, because even though it's not really a secret on e621 (since their e621 artist/wiki page lists all thir names alongside each other), on their own galleries/social media they don't advertise the connection by linking between their SFW and NSFW accounts. Currently, on e621, their uploaded posts are a bit of a mess: they've changed usernames quite a lot, so their images are tagged with combinations of their current main username, their old NSFW username, and their current NSFW username. Some of their posts are tagged with both their SFW and NSFW usernames together. (Also, two of their old SFW usernames are aliased to their old NSFW username!) I'd like to try and sort out the artist tags on their posts, but in order to do that I need to know if their SFW and NSFW art should still be tagged with different usernames.
I also know of another artist who maintains a separate gallery site account for their OC, with descriptions written in an "in-character" voice. Again, they've never advertised the fact that they're the same person, but they have a distinctive art style so it's not that hard to figure out. (Especially since they've recently also used their main social media account to upload art of that OC, just without the in-character voice.) Currently, e621 doesn't have many images taken from that in-character account; if I add more, should I tag them with the artist's main name, or the alt name from the in-character account?