This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Gus: This entry and Human Popsicle need to merge. I like Suspended Animation for the winner for the simple-and-directness, but Human Popsicle brings the funny for the title. I am thereby torn.
Looney Toons: I always vote for the funny, but that's just me.
Gus: I can go with the funny. Any defenders for Suspended Animation? If not, this puppy is going down.
Robert: Six months with no objections - I think it'll be safe to merge them.
Robert, a few weeks later: Merging and redirecting.
Fast Eddie: OK, I undid a thing that Gus/Robert did. Over in Human Popsicle Discussion, Lale raised a good point, though. That entry — mainly by examples — is all about the SF. For a lumper like me, it is all the same thing. Juliet, Rip Van Winkle and the crew of the Nostromo all sleep for a while, for the purposes of the plot. To a splitter, it all seems different.
Robert: I would split, but by narrative function, not genre. That, after all, is what this site is about.
Suspended animation can be a way of getting into the future. It doesn't matter much whether it's King Arthur in a magical sleep or astronauts sleeping the years away until they reach their destination - the narrative function is essentially the same.
Suspended animation can be a way of being Not Quite Dead, as in Romeo and Juliet or Snow White. The mechanism can be fantasy or SF, but the narrative function is essentially the same: they seem dead but it's reversible.
These functions could be split further, but for now I think a split along these lines would be sufficient.
Fast Eddie: Good enough. Hypothetically, then, Suspended Animation has no real content of its own. It just points the ways to (something like) Faux Death and Human Popsicle. Most of the examples in Human Popsicle are of the time-travel-by-sleep variety. Moving the examples in the present entry to Faux Death and leaving some text that remarks on the story function of suspended animation should do the deed. //later: I'll take a stab at it.
AKK: Actually, rather than characters appearing to be inanimate, I was thinking more along of the lines of actual suspended animation along the lines of an animation show being stuck in executive hell, as they decide whether to renew it for another season.
