A lot of "Lamia" and "Naga" pics have both tags at once. But other times some pictures only have a "Naga" tag while others only have "Lamia" tag.


What's the difference? How can you tell whether something's a Naga, Lamia, or both?

Lamia: img4.gelbooru.com//images...5dac0e06d0e0ae.jpg?229665

Naga: img4.gelbooru.com//images...69e543a5e7114.jpg?1067005

Both: gelbooru.com/index.php?page=post&s=view&id=665223

They all seem the same to me. Is there any difference that I can't tell?

Only difference I know is that one is a Hindu/Buddhist deity (Naga), and one was a Greek Queen (Lamia).

In regards to here, Danbooru has the two tags aliased. That's all I know.

EDIT: The wikipedia has too many examples . . .

Visually there's no difference, except maybe their traditional dress, Naga being a Central/East Asian monster, and Lamia being a Greek monster that was folkloricly born in Libya.

Lamia shouldn't generally be used in my opinion for the same reason Medusa shouldn't, that being that those are specific figures, and have only been perverted into races. Also as a consequent that there's no such thing as male Lamia, but there are male Naga.

I didn't realize that Lamia was a specific name, but I have seen Medusa used incorrectly as the monster type; I've fixed those instances when I've seen them and gave them the gorgon tag.

Nagas don't have arms, Lamias do (at least, according to a monster wiki I read a while back).

So for the purpose of tagging in this site, is there a better way to tell the two apart asides from "Naga looks more indian" and "Lamia looks more greek"?


For example, look at the mother and daughter Lamia in the Lamia only example I posted....there's no way to tell whether they're Lamias or Nagas...


And how can something be both a Naga and a Lamia at the same time?

Technically, for the purposes of tagging on this site, it is preferred to use "lamia" rather than "naga" in all cases, as Danbooru has naga aliased to lamia.

Something can be a naga and a lamia at the same time in the same way that something could be a dragon and a 竜 (ryuu, Japanese for Dragon) at the same time: two different words in different languages for the same mythological creature. Amusingly, that same kanji read as ryuu can also be read naga. The same naga we're talking about.

I think the logic behind Danbooru's alias is the same logic behind using "panties" over "panchira" or "pantsu", and using for example "cat" over "neko". We're an English-speaking site, so when it comes down to tags that are not character, artist, or copyright tags, pure English is preferred. Since "lamia" is recognized in English, and "naga" is Japanese for the same concept, Danbooru chose to use "lamia" instead of "naga".

However, as SBE says, "lamia" is more properly the given name of a specific character than the name for a species of monster girl.

I'd be willing to perform the Gelbooru-tag alias either way. If Danbooru only uses one tag for it, then we only need one tag for it. I think the question here, therefore, is: do we break our usual policy of following Danbooru's tagging policy to make the tag definitions more accurate, or do we follow their tag policy and merge it all into lamia? Doesn't matter much to me which way it goes, but either way we have a redundant tag that should be merged.

danbooru.me/forum/show/3200

The danbooru thread that let to the decision to alias naga into lamia. Just to share what their thought process was.