How should fusions be tagged?

Maybe I’m only just starting to notice them, but it feels like pony fusions are increasing in amount of content recently.
 
Should pony fusions be tagged as ocs? Sometimes, they’re just “hey I mushed these two designs together, isn’t it neat”, sometimes they’re contextualized as a magical mishap, and sometimes they’re being treated a lot like original character designs and given special (unintuitive) names
 
Should pony fusions be tagged with the source characters’ tags? (When those characters aren’t depicted in original form in the image, because if they are then of course they should)
 
Is there a need to start a new set of namespaces in the vein of “parent(s):” and “offspring:”? I’m starting to think there is, because, for example, I’m not expecting to find >>2591891 in a search for “big macintosh”.

@Background Pony #0F22  
Whatever they’re considered, I’m not sure they need an OC tag and a separate fusion tag. Maybe if the fusion tag made clear the components of the fusion, but otherwise I’d say they’re unnecessary. I’d be fine with OC tags for specific fusions, though.  

I’ve typed several too long drafts in reply to this, shifting back and forth on my opinion and kinda settled on my feeling of probably not.  
I mean there are ways I can see “fusion:X” tags happening, but because of the wide variation of what counts as a “fusion”, it’d end up either with only some types of “fusion” getting them, or with removing a bunch of character tags from images that probably should have them. And if we’re adding these “fusion:X” tags without removing the character tags, it’d just end up bloating the tags without solving the problem. And then of course unlike parent tags, fusions do contain the actual character (sometimes recognizable aspects of them, depending on the fusion) and so people searching or filtering probably appreciate having the character tags there.
 
I’m not set in stone with that though, I’m sure there’s a simpler way to go about it I’m missing.  
_{This might sound rambling, I’m a little tired}

@Dragonpone  
Tricky, huh? Like, how do you subjectively declare whether a design is too unlike the origins to qualify? But, you also see how far the designs are pushing it and how it’d be inappropriate to have the plain character tags on those.

Any new thoughts about this? Have a look through a few recent fusion posts and let me know if you’d expect them to show up in a plain search for a source character.

@Background Pony #0F22
Time for opinions yay \o/

Most fan-created characters should be tagged oc:name. _{Exceptions: ponified versions of RL things, ascended ocs that have gained a canon status by apprearing in officially released media.}

There is no method of deriving fusions (apart from pokefusion-like automation) so each fusion design is, essentially, its own oc design. Offspring oc’s are already treated as a subtype of oc defined by their origin (having 1 or more canon character parents or ancestors) and often share similarities in design. Treating fusions like another such category would make sense. Their name tags should have the prefix oc:

Fusions should not be tagged with their source characters’ main tags, to mirror tagging of offspring. It’s safe to assume that the vast majority of searches made for canon characters want, in fact, results featuring those characters as themselves.

Source characters should be tagged as parent:character or with a new prefix such as fusion of:character.

Sharing “parent:” would be simpler for tagging, and excluding either “fusion” or “offspring” from a search would sort most cases out. Whether specific characters count as “fusion” or “offspring” would not matter. It may be confusing due to the strong association of “parent” with natural birth or adoption and a parental relationship.

Using a new prefix would be more precise and allow for a reliable sorting between offspring of X and fusions of X. Batch tagging would depend on “offspring” and “fusion” being reliably present in images featuring such characters, and be a mess for pictures with both types. Source/parent characters for obscure or poorly documented oc’s and those with fusion-like birth origins would be tricky to tag.

Above all, for me the important thing is to deal with issues like this where someone tags an image with characters who are not, in any way, in the image.

So - using that image as an example, it would be tagged oc, oc:dental authority, and also fusion of minuette and fusion of mayor mare?

How then does that work with the tag fusion:dental authority? To me, it seems like once the fusion of:* tags were in place, this fusion:* tag and all similar tags could be gotten rid of.

… commissioner:bigonionbean,fusion* is only 1,622 so that might be doable with bulk tagging and a few weeks of just slowly grinding through it …

@Ciaran
BOB is doable with bulk tagging, the real problem is that if the tags are not locked he’ll show up ban evading to change them back.

Oh, and in case of multi level fusions–should those be tagged as fusions of their immediate “parents”, the original non-fusion “parents”, every name in the “fusion family tree”?