Discussion Characters / SentinelsOfTheMultiverseHeroes

I was planning of taking care of that after I finished the Daybreak character sheets but kind of got sidetracked.

I stand by alphabetical... but putting the RPG exclusive heroes in their own folder might be fine.

Should probably be consistent between Heroes and Villains. I do think maybe characters without decks in general could be on a separate page, or that Others could be expanded, possibly renamed.

I would include one section under Ra for the “legacy“ incarnation of the character, then a separate one for Muerto.

Second Daybreak related question: Should I put Muse as a separate character or just put her tropes under the same entry as the Dreamer.

I did ask about it in the clean-up thread and people favoured the clean-up. It violates the wiki rules (it reads like This Troper and first person writing, and it's self-demonstrating outside of the self-demonstrating namespace).

I'd be beyond happy if you active editors did the clean-up yourselves. :-)

My edit was hardly that huge. I fixed the description and re-wrote context of about 5 examples?

I also recommend you fix the page's other issues, like natter/example indentation or the occasional ZCE.

One person favored the cleanup on the basis of it being Character Shilling, not Self-Demonstrating, and Self-Demonstrating subsections being against the rules seem to be a grey area so far, a preference only you and Someoneman have stated so far. That rule would mean the rest of the article would have to change, too.

I'm not necessarily opposed to it, but I think it should be put to some kind of vote before it goes ahead.

I've been working on fixing ZC Es. I asked before, are there any specific trouble spots regarding Expy and Composite Character you had in mind?

^ Two people agreeing on something is generally okay for a consensus because the clean-up threads tend to be rather slow and few people usually chime in.

Yes. Several Expy examples list multiple sources or multiple inspirations. It is against the rules mentioned in the clean-up thread for this trope. You are welcome to join the expy clean-up thread, I posted a question about all the problematic examples there. (I won't link it here because the links don't work. It's in long-term projects.)

Thanks, I'll check out the Expy Cleanup Thread. And we can probably just continue this on the 'Cleanup help needed' thread.

I'm not really seeing how any of these expies / composite characters were questionable? With a few exceptions, they're all completely unambiguous to anyone familiar with both works, and the entries all seem to have listed the specific points that make them so unambiguous. Given the context of the game (it's intended to let people play popular hero-fights), the 'intentional' and 'copy' parts were obviously satisfied even before you get to the fact that several of these examples also cite Word of God on top of going into detail on the core resemblance.

(Also, some of these don't make sense as Composite Characters - "it's an unambiguous, intentional copy of character X, but there's also one card where they strike a pose resembling character Y" doesn't turn an expy into a composite character.)

Oh dear, not this again. Please read what an Expy really is. And ideally see the clean-up thread.

I would recommend PMing the person or taking it up on the forums, as I find such "drive by fixers" rarely pay any close attention at all to the pages they're serial editing (much to my annoyance, but it is what it is).

If they fit, the context was sorely lacking vital information.

An expy (short "exported character") is a character from one series who is unambiguously and deliberately based on a character in another, older series.

The examples were mostly Zero-context Examples.

I recommend taking the examples to the long-term project thread about this often misused trope.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=13983140170A37263400&page=21#506

Composite Character: A character in an adaptation of one work has traits from multiple characters from its source material.

Many of those listing this trope had so many sources, mixing films and comic books, table top games and franchises. Is this work really directly based on all of these? Or is it more a case of JustForFun.SurprisinglySimilarCharacters?

If I accidentally deleted valid examples, I apologise and they should obviously be restored, but please — with proper context.

They're actually deliberate references — right down to various poses and art compositions directly paying homage to those comics, quotes shouting out to specific scenes, not to mention the similar power sets and personalities. I mentioned this before, but I do think Expy and Composite Character are flexible enough to cover Homage and Pastiche as a form of adaptation.

Not trying to come off as snarky, but if you have the time to copy out all that, it might be more straightforward to drop a note on the Discussion page asking for more context before you delete it. Also my understanding is that ZCE policy is to comment examples out so they can be seen and repaired, rather than simply deleting them. If you had any specific trouble spots you could point out where you think context is most needed, that would also help.

Going to holler for a revert, then comment out the entries/remove Badass Longhair/etc.

Honestly I think it should be a required forum policy that if you're busy doing these sorts of projects to works you're not familiar with, you should take it to the discussion page first and tell the people who are familiar what the perceived problem is and get a consensus on how to fix it so you're not creating extra work for others.

Otherwise I find it ends up the person goes off merrily into the night and the regular editors of a page are stuck trying to figure out how to repair the mess left behind.

I mean, even if not as policy, at least as a courtesy on pages that show signs of recent activity.

Re-added them by hand, added some additional context where I could and zeroed out the rest for now.

Making a list at the top of who's in what expansion might be useful enough to add to provide some extra information, but if I'm looking for a character folder-wise I'm more likely to have an easier time looking alphabetically than remembering what group to look in.

(I have this frustration sometimes when looking at trope pages on here I'm not as familiar with; I want to look up a specific character I've heard of and am confronted with many confusing faction pages where I have no idea which one the character might be in.)

But if you already know the character's name, you can use Ctrl+F or the search function the site to find it, but if you don't, it seems like more context is only going to help you. I get what you're saying about large character pages being difficult to sift through, but that seems like it would be better solved by improving the labels and descriptions of the subsections. Like, the kinds of pages you're talking about don't seem like they'd be any less confusing if they were all in one page in alphabetical order if you didn't know anything about the setting.

Well, as I said, I personally have no problem providing more context by just adding a list to the top of the page. My suggestion is that I feel keeping the folders in the order requiring the least knowledge to skim and then adding a list for extra information access seems like the best of both worlds.

(Especially since as a digital-only player, we're much more likely to just buy the Season 1/2 passes and otherwise not pay a whole lot of attention to individual expansions.)

I don't know, I just think listing every character alphabetically is most helpful to people who are already familiar with the game, but part of the value of TV Tropes is its ability to serve as a gateway to different forms of media. If not by expansion, I feel like we could at least sort them by teams.

Well, first, sorting them by *teams* is very different from sorting them by *expansion*, and second, both team and expansion are listed under the character pages, and can easily be located with CTRL+F.

I know they're different, but it seems worthwhile to try and break them up to some degree, to make them less of a wall of text/info dump. There's 27 folders on the page and more inbound once Oblivaeon lands. I can live with either sorting method I mentioned, and there could certainly be another, better option I haven't considered, but I think we're going to need to pick one sooner or later.

OblivAeon doesn't add any new characters, it's just variations on existing ones that are pretty much already mentioned in the characters' folders already. (The RPG and Tactics add more characters, but so far it's more like a handful more than a ton of them. And it's entirely possible the RPG might get big enough to give it its own separate Tropes page entirely anyway.)

The fact that there's so many characters feels like an even better reason to me to leave everything alphabetized.

A potential problem I see with teams is that in the card game about half the heroes aren't in a team, and after that things get a bit confusing/contradictory depending on what you're looking at. (Tactics Prime Wardens vs. RPG Prime Wardens, Unity as F5-adjacent or in the Paradigms, Tactics Beacon as F5-adjacent vs RPG Beacon as the leader of Daybreak...)

It's already added one new character in the form of Benchmark, and I would argue that the Void Guard alone offer a pretty good reason to sort characters by team. I think you could make a case for listing the villains-turned-heroes separately as well, and if nothing else, team villains should probably be listed separately from solo villains.

The Void Guard are already covered in the "Sentinels" folder, and the Villains-turned-hero aspects are already covered in their respective villain folders. The VotM Villains are also already covered separately (the Vengeful Five are grouped together, though).

I know they are, but there's no particular reason they should remain that way once they have their own decks and can be played separately. The Vengeful Five are grouped together but the other team villains get their own folders. It was good enough at the time, but this is a wiki— articles should change and grow, and as they grow it's worth looking at whether they could be better organized. Again, 27 folders.

If the new Void Guard decks generate enough tropes for everyone we can separate them, but currently all four of the Sentinels together pretty much have only the same amount of tropes as other individual heroes.

Which in turn is why the Vengeful Five don't have separate folders; they just don't have enough tropes. Even the Letters Page gives the four non-Baron Blade folks a single episode while the VotM people mostly get separate episodes (I think Bugbear was the only exception), as the canon itself views the Vengeful Five as relatively minor characters as well.

And right now it's already easy to find and read all the heroes, so I admit this feels to me like trying to fix something that isn't yet broken. Grouping by expansion may be more confusing since not everyone necessarily knows who is in what expansion to know where to find a character's writeup, and grouping by team may be more confusing because a large number of characters aren't on any team, some characters are on more than one team depending on continuity (Tempest, Beacon, Unity come to mind), and in turn some teams have very different lineups depending on the continuity (Prime Wardens comes to mind).

I can certainly see putting in a list of expansions and/or teams at the bottom of the page for informational purposes, but I admit I don't right now see a reason to actually rearrange anything, especially since both obvious options seem more confusing to me, not less.

I really don't see what's so confusing about either of them, and I do think alphabetical order is only mildly useful if you already know all the characters and their names anyway, but if you're so determined not to do it, then we won't.

> but if you're so determined not to do it

I'm personally not that keen on putting in effort that doesn't seem to give a clear benefit, no.

Your arguments so far seem to consist of "it would provide more context" and "27 folders means we have to do something". So my own reaction so far is "I feel a simple extra added text list or two would provide the needed context with far less work and potential extra confusion" and "I feel alphabetical order is already a fine method for sorting 27 items".

In fact I think I might go ahead and try to find a way to add those two lists since it's not a major change.

Honestly, I'm surprised that "more context" and "27 folders" aren't reason enough to start including subcategories, going by the other Characters pages on the site. Alphabetization is great if you already know the characters' names, but if you don't, it's just a big block of folders with nothing to set them apart unless you go through them one by one. So I do think breaking up the list somehow provides a clear enough benefit to people who aren't intimately familiar with every character or expansion. I'm not sure what we'd really lose by not sorting everything completely alphabetically.

But the lists are appreciated, either way.

Honestly I actively dislike the way other pages organize their characters at times. I've had plenty of occasions where there's a certain character I want to know more about and I'm confronted with an array of factions/teams/other groupings I've never heard of with multiple unclear guesses about where the character might be.

It doesn't really provide context for me either as those groupings are frequently a blur for me, and any detailed explanations of why a given group might matter is usually in the character's trope list somewhere anyway.

And if I happen to be just reading the entire page, I'd rather keep track of it alphabetically still anyway as that's the most common and intuitive way for me to sort basically anything at all. And if anything alphabetical just gets *more* convenient for me the more entries there are since it's so quick to skim through.

Also adding to the confusion is that I've actually seen on the Marvel Cinematic Universe character lists people constantly getting shuffled from one page to another as characters switch teams over time or people disagree which is a "main" team for a character or how to arrange everything in general.

> I'm not sure what we'd really lose by not sorting everything completely alphabetically.

For me it's actually the other way around: What do we gain by putting in the work to rearrange everything?

Especially when have content still to work on adding. The main page and Villains page are still a bit outdated when it comes to new Letters Page info. We could write up some of the new RPG characters like Arataki or Anubis. It might be fun to finally add subpages for stuff that's Funny or Nightmare Fuel or so on. Etc.