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Sandbox / SomeoneElse17

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This is my sandbox for deities to potentially either ascend or rework, along with other Trope Pantheon-related ideas.
Feel free to make suggestions and edits. Enjoy.

Ascended:

Successfully reworked:

Concepts introduced:

  • Organizations: Intermediate alliances whose numbers and influence would account for multiple Groups, but are still less pronounced than Associations and well below the Grand United Alliances. This has since been converted by Necromancer10 into Pantheonic Coalitions.

Profiles extended in free-action

More examples coming, but for now these are the ones I most recall:

    open/close all folders 

New bios:

WIP:

Reworks:

    Guile 
Major William Guile, God of Charge-Input Special Moves (William F. Guile, Soldier of Justice, Military Man, Air Slasher, Circletop Soldier [by Edward Elric], Colonel Guile, Air Force Pilot, Sonic Striker, The Professional)
https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/guile.png
Guile's classic design
Street Fighter V
Street Fighter 6
  • House: Gaming (Movesets)
  • Lesser God
  • Symbol: The Sonic Boom.
  • That song that goes with everything: Guile Stage (CPS1 base)
  • Portfolio: Charge Back, Forward; Charge Down, Up Attacks, Simple but Practical Combat via Two Moves of Doom, Improbable Broom Hair, American Hero, Difficult, but Awesome, Revenge, Family Man, Fountain of Memes
  • Domains: War, Heroism, Family
  • Heralds: Julia/Jane and Chris/Amy Guile (his wfie and daughter), Abel, Luke Sullivan
  • Allies:
  • Enemies: Bisssssoooooooon!!!!, Balrog and Vega, Kolin, Rugal Bernstein, Relius Clover, Kano, Albert Wesker, Father and the Homunculi (minus Greed), Esdeath
  • Rival: Crimson Viper
  • “Go home and be a family man.” A certain soldier who wears the American flag as a tattoo on both of his shoulders would often state this line to defeated opponents. But was he trying to speak sense into his opponents, or to himself? The subject of this certain mystery is a United States Air Force soldier by the name of Guile, who competed in the second World Warrior tournament to avenge the death of his best friend Charlie at the hands of the tournament’s host, Master Bison. He almost succeeded, having actually cornered Bison after the tournament, but was convinced by his wife and daughter to instead come back home and allow justice to deal with Bison.
    • Guile ventured back out onto the battlefield due to two revelations. One, that S.I.N., a weapons company whose name stood for Shadaloo Intimidation Network, was starting a brand new tournament. Two, that Charlie Nash’s body had never been found the entire time. Thus, he somehow became hopeful that Nash might still be alive, on top of returning to his mission to stop what was assumed to be the remains of Shadaloo. It was during this campaign that he met Abel, the French mixed-martial-artist seeking out his own past, who became an ally during later travels on numerous occasions.
  • Ascended in the early days of the Pantheon as the God of both Simple, Practical Combat and Charged Attacks, Guile is well-known for his ridiculous and obviously maintained standing disc-shaped broom hairstyle, his American flag shoulder tattoos, and his iconic attacks, the Sonic Boom and the Flash Kick. The bulk of his battle strategy is a defensive counter-style, aimed to find openings to hit those two moves or variations thereof in order to incapacitate enemies. Both in terms of gameplay input and in actuality, he would virtually always launch his trademark moves and their powered-up variations after concentrated moments in a defensive position, charging and building to use the attacks at the perfect time. Not only does nobody taunt him for having only two special moves, because that's all he needed, but this actually became a popular trend, with most fighting tournament events having at least one contestant turtling and charging his or her way to victory. Mitsuru Kirijo, with her calm demeanor and efficient approach remindimg him of Nash, was one who Guile trained personally for the P-1 Grand Prix tournament.
  • A strong figure among the good soldiers of the Pantheon, Guile is a stoic and respectable God for the most part. His one tragic flaw is that he is sometimes too hotheaded about the events around Charlie’s death, whether that be taking revenge for his apparent demise or finding out if Nash could still be alive. On the matter of revenge, he’s been tempted to take his next best shot since he heard Bison ascended to the Pantheon, but has been able to keep an even keel since getting along with the God of Vengeance. In Guile’s early days here said God was Teru Mikagami, but he since left the place and had his temple taken over by Edmond Dantes. While not one bit reluctant to encourage Guile’s revenge against the Shadaloo Dictator, the Count of Monte Cristo had learned from experience and would often advise Guile to temper himself lest he go too far like Edmond himself once did.
  • Was rather annoyed at the fact that Rugal Bernstein had a prized statue of Guile in the Blacknoah. Upon one meeting, Guile destroyed it. It's been said that Rugal has been wanting to replace it ever since…
  • Once heard someone with a very similar voice to his in English saying that they could’ve worn they heard an echo speaking the words of a fool. Taking umbrage to this, the Air Force soldier found himself face to face with the Mad Puppeteer, Relius Clover. Rather than take Guile’s apprehension seriously, Relius turned the conversation into an experiment with Guile as the test subject, courtesy of a sudden attack from Relius’ iron puppet Ignis. After fending off this attack and failing to capture Relius, Guile did some research on this man. To his horror, he discovered that Relius is one of the worst kinds of "family men" imaginable, running expriments on his own wife (the soul within said iron puppet) and even his daughter. It didn’t take much persuading for Valkenhayn to get him to join forces in the interest of putting Relius down. He hopes to give him the second mightiest Flash Kick he could ever muster, or at least something that’s hard enough on the jaws that the next Relius-wannabe is gonna. feel. it.
    • This, however, will be met with utter pride and joy when referred to Asura (at least Japanese-wise). Guile considers him one of the greatest family men to exist.
  • Still believing that somewhere, in the Pantheon or in the world he calls home, his old friend Charlie Nash may still be alive, Guile never wavered in his search. Looking around the site of Charlie’s fatal battle with Bison, he was confronted by a hostile woman named Helen who defeated him and turned him back with ice powers. However, following a losing battle with Shadaloo’s Four Kings in New York City, he got the answer he was looking for...and almost wished he didn’t. Nash appeared before him, Chun-Li, and Cammy, but in a horrifically stitched-up state. What’s more, Charlie fought Guile in cold silence to take a chess piece which had been delivered to him. Said chess piece turned out to be a key to one of Bison's seven Black Moons in the Dictator's latest and greatest scheme to achieve Nigh-Invulnerability.
    • Fortunately, Nash wasn’t truly quite the one-track Revenant Zombie he appeared to be in that moment; just a man who was pissed, paranoid, and impatient in his desire to kill Bison for several good reasons. While the two operated as part of separate factions, they ultimately found themselves reunited on an escaping helicopter from the first salvo at Shadaloo’s base. Fortunately, things got better and the brothers-in-arms were able to somewhat reconcile. Unfortunately, Charlie sacrificed himself absorbing as much of Bison’s Psycho Power as his body could take before imploding, weakening the Dictator enough for Ryu to put him down. Thanks to the Pantheon, though, things wouldn’t end there just yet.
  • During a confrontation with Balrog on an airstrip in the Pantheon, Guile soon found himself double-teamed and momentarily overwhelmed by Balrog and Kano. Before the two criminals could finish him off, however, Kano was suddenly clobbered from behind by a vertical Sonic Hurricane, then collapsed to the floor and revealed Charlie Nash, in his stitch-revived state, standing behind him. Not wanting to deal with anymore, Balrog ran off. Charlie had this to say.
    Charlie: We never did get to finish that conversation at Miss Kanzuki's, did we, Guile?
    • Said conversation involved revealing information about the circumstances of Nash's revival as well as the things he saw that made him so uncontrollably angry in his downfall to begin with. Charlie also informed Guile that President Bartlet, whose mutual admiration with both men is well known, wanted another word with him. This led to the beginning of seeds that would form a larger command unit with Bartlet, the World Warrior officers, and various smaller factions they were either already in on or in the process of forming.
    • Guile’s faction would be the Mighty Majors, led by the Chief Major Motoko Kusanagi. Chun-Li being their mutual friend, she’d recommended Guile to Major Kusanagi to join the team shortly after Kusanagi assumed its leadership. When Motoko and Edward Elric presented the offer to him, he accepted posthaste. Among the Majors, he can often be seen training with Alex Louis Armstrong, and Edward calls him the "circletop soldier" relating to his disc-shaped hair.
  • Is well known for the meme that his theme song goes with everything, capable of taking place making his theme even when he's not present. This has earned him comparisons to another famous soldier, Elzam von Branstein, but the two have yet to meet and no one currently knows whether Branstein is still a deity at this point. One parody of lyrics to his theme talks about how he always shaves off his eyebrows before fighting, but it’s unknown whether this is the case, or if said eyebrows were shaved earlier in life and never grew back.
  • On the subject of his hair, his hairstyle and classic attire have two inspirations, both from the world of the Bizarre Adventure: Jean-Pierre Polnareff for the general idea of standing hair and a sleeveless top shirt with pants, and Rudol von Stroheim for the extending disctop and clothing color green. He also shares two commonalities with both men as well: a revenge quest with Polnareff, and strong patriotism with Stroheim. Polnareff was at first peeved to hear the man introduce himself as Guile sounded too much like Geil as in J. Geil, but after clearing up the misunderstanding the two came away with respect for one another. Guile promised that anytime he saw J. Geil he would clean his clock for Polnareff’s sake, while Polnareff gave his word that the Joestar group would be on the scene if Shadaloo attacked the Pantheon. As for Stroheim, Nash has told Guile how he once teamed with a World War II Nazi eccentric who kind of looked like him in order to help repel a wide-scale incursion of XANA’s monsters. While Rudol was able to recognize that supernatural threats to humanity are also threats to the esteem of German science, Charlie was never at ease with his presence. Both Americans agree that it’s probably for the best Guile never met the man before he left the Pantheon.
  • During one mission, Guile called for Captain America for assistance on combating Shadaloo, but wanted a friendly spar first to see if he was up for it. Steve Rogers didn't disappoint and thoroughly beat Guile in just one minute. He's also heard that some believe John Cena's constant displays of respect for soldiers and sick children is moreso PR-motivated than it is genuine, a possibility only not ruled out because of Vince McMahon, but overall got along decently with Cena whenever they met in person.

Waiting for the all-clear on:

None at the moment.

Free-action extension goals

    An issue I have seen with the direction of certain profile trends. 

Hear me out, this is worth explaining.

The Trope Pantheon used to be a fun project where people put forward characters for tropes, wrote bios with a healthy mix between fun and logical interactions with other existing deities, and, if the material was decently long enough, got approved for ascension. Then profiles started becoming more organized and detailed, both those coming in and those being reworked to stay/return. This was acceptable, in fact it was a good thing.

Then it got to the point where certain people started declaring themselves leaders, mascots, and gatekeepers over the Pantheon, dictating that profiles were only good if they were encyclopedically long and contained no note of alliances, and that everything they considered substandard, from less-than-uber-long profiles to any visible emphasis on alliances and story events to even the concept of alliances and stories themselves, must be deleted. Going forward on this address, these people will be referred to as the purging faction. No need to name names, if you're reading this, you know for yourself if you're one of them or not.

Now comes the problem.

The purging faction's declarations of headship were shot down at face value, but their scare language about the Pantheon being at a terrible crossroads toward an unsustainable path succeeded in convincing other contributors to give into what they want little by little because something had to be done. Thus their endeavors to "fix" the project according to their specifications seemed to go almost unopposed. Massive purges of profiles started happening to where houses and halls created to account for the expansion of the project began looking bare as fuck, and all secondary concepts, such as factions and story events, were proposed for the chopping block as well. Thankfully that plan was shot down in favor of recalibrating said concepts, but it felt like too little too late for a minute, as though it would only be a matter of time before these things were neutered to the point of uselessness.

In questioning the sheer volume of these purges in private, I was met with disingenuous justifications suggesting that what are listed as tips and guidelines in regards to profile length are being cited and applied as absolute rules. Yet even this is only being done selectively, because, while length of flavor texts is taken into high consideration with these new "standards" being imposed, and quantity is also considered somewhat important, something else has gone completely unnoticed that these same guidelines also encourage: agency.

There seems to be no attention to examining the flavor texts and whether a decent amount of them include active interactions showing what the character is doing in the Pantheon as opposed to everything being some overly detailed piece about what the character thinks of another or what someone else thinks of them. In fact, given the purging faction's notion that mentions of alliances are supposed to be forbidden, the only care they put into making sure your characters are even doing stuff in these big long profiles they want you to write is to limit what they even CAN do! See how well that tracks now?

1 2

This is coming from a dude who writes long anyway. Ask anybody who's seen my work on profiles. Hell, just read this right here. Even with that, why are profiles like Asdrubael Vect that are almost entirely character opinion being lauded as great or even timeless because their flavor texts are not so much "flavor texts" as they are "attempts to write a college-level essay," while others such as Travis Touchdown and Lina Inverse where the flavor texts do showcase a healthy attempt at activity but vary more between short, regular, and long are put on nitpick lists or marked for future deletion instead? Somewhere along the line, a mistake was made in qualifying what a great, high-effort profile is. That mistake needs to be corrected PRONTO.

Some changes were beneficial to keeping the project appealing and accessible. Going this far, though, was entirely arbitrary, serving the whims and distastes of the purging faction more than the actual well-being of the project. Increasing profile standards and avoiding scope creep are understandable goals, but the way this faction is trying to impose it is simply NOT IT. If having to figure out all the different people your character needs to be aligned with based on grand alliance factions and forever wars will make contributing profiles to the Pantheon unappealing, having to make sure everything you write is big enough for a term paper even if it means turning your character into a gossip columnist will only do the same thing. It'll also limit the amount of profiles that can fit on a page, forcing more expanded House/Hall divisions than even necessary. Which will then cause people to think the Pantheon is bigger than it is, resulting in many of the scope creep issues we supposedly want to eliminate slowly coming back over time anyway.

Here's how we fix this.

Before we get started, if this hasn't been done already, there needs to be an immediate hold put on any and all sweeping house purges until an agreement based on the following steps is reached.

After that, we establish an actual concrete fitting criteria for profile quality, that includes categorizing profile flavor texts according to both length and agency content. Within that criteria, the majority and average of flavor texts should fall within an acceptable median range, while allowing for a small quantity of short texts as well as heavier bullets, and there must be an accounting for activity and agency to make sure at least half of flavor texts involve the character(s) having interactions and doing and experiencing things. I came up with a system a while ago for how that would work, but I understand this is only my idea, and it could probably use a few tweaks, so I'm putting this forward as an example or a rough draft rather than a final answer.

Criterium I: Length

This is how I would categorize each flavor text according to number of lines it takes up on an HD computer screen in 100% view:
  • 1-2 lines is a one-liner
  • 3-4 lines is short
  • 5-7 lines is regular
  • 8-9 lines is long
  • 10-12 lines is heavy
  • 13-20 lines is a wall of text
Going by this list, the average and majority length of flavor bullets in a profile should be in the regular or long categories. A few bullets that are short or heavy are still good to go, but the general rate should still be in that sweet middle of 5 to 9 lines. In particular, short texts should be mostly limited to sub-bullets, while heavy texts should generally only be on main bullets or standalone sub-bullets. And there should be an absolutely minimal amount of one-liners or walls of text. The only appropriate uses of one-liners are to reference a meme*, lead in to multiple sub-bullets, separate characters in group profiles*, and provide a closing quote*, whereas seeing multiple walls of text in a row should be treated as a sign to check for word cruft immediately. If a profile is averaging short, some texts need to be extended or combined. If a profile is averaging one-liners, you're not even trying. If a profile is averaging heavy or especially walls of text, the requirement for criterium II will become steeper as a result, because if the character ISN'T highly active in the Pantheon, having that much detail is gratuitously excessive.
A subscript quote makes for additional lines in its preceding bullet, btw, not a bullet by itself.
  • Also, any flavor text bullet that's 21 lines or more is a goddamn tower and therefore MUST be either condensed or broken up into sub-bullets in order to be cohesively legible.

Criterium II: Agency

Here is my proposed method of scoring each flavor text according to depiction of agency:
  • 0 points to bullets detailing how the character thinks of or is thought of by someone else.
  • 1 point to bullets describing any conversations the character has had with another character, OR bullets showing the character actively doing or experiencing things in official material.note 
  • 2 points to bullets showing the character as actively doing or experiencing things in the Pantheon.
Going by this standard, a good profile should have at least 80% as many agency points as it does total flavor texts. A great profile would have just as many or even more agency points than flavor texts, showing a concentrated effort to have the character be active within the crossroad of worlds. Going back to the first criterion, wall-of-text profiles are typically just assumed to be great and contain a lot of effort put into them simply due to how long and heavily detailed they are, yet even the purging faction themselves have proven that this is not always the case. Therefore, if a profile is going to consist of majority heavy bullets or walls of text, there should be a matching expectation of great to outstanding agency in the content of these bullets. Anything less than 125% agency-to-flavor output in a wall-of-text profile should be treated as gratuitously long and therefore unacceptable.

Still paying attention?

When I put up a profile for a character in the Pantheon, I'm looking to write out interactions, connections, and actions. I'm trying to imagine and piece together an idea of this person actually being in the world of the Pantheon. While character opinion will naturally be a part of that, it should not dominate 90% of flavor texts. At that point it's just glorified fictional gossip writing. With the creeping implementation of the purging faction's way of things, I can no longer be sure that every contribution to the project is done with the similar goal of maximizing the immersion of characters into this new world. Length of text demands need to be scaled back to a more moderate level as opposed to the extreme that it's currently trending towards, and character agency demands need to be introduced as an equally strong factor in how profiles get in.

Then there's the whole matter of the purges themselves.

First off, it has to be agreed that the new, more balanced quality standard, whether it looks like my sample proposal above or not, will be adopted as the standard for sweeping purges going forward. Secondly, it can't be a matter of the purge list just being posted once and then it's okay to delete everything that isn't salvaged three days later. We need a whole damn week, with the purge list being reposted once per page and/or once per day, just like profiles should be. Finally, in order to know that we can trust the conductor of these purges to operate by these new standards, there needs to be a vote among project contributors as to who will take up the responsibility of running the purges, with at least three volunteer candidates.

I'll tell you already right now, it won't be me. Not only am I just now deciding to come back, my approach to fixing the "profiles are too short" problem is to simply make them longer. Adding intro texts and further details, extending and combining interactions, finding interactions in newer profiles and adding them to the older profile, etc. I like to preserve and build rather than destroy, so I'm no good to run a purge list. In fact I'm not interested in running shit at all, I just want to bring the fun back.

Because sometimes, things have gotta change back in order to push forward right.

One last thing: seven hours fighting was the last call for Scott Hall. Salute to the Bad Guy. I think there might be a message from God in that somewhere, I dunno...

Anyway, boys and girls, stay tuned and stay gold.

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