Characters Navbox review - Marvel Comics

Following on from this ATT discussion, it was suggested that there should be a short term project thread to look at some of the Marvel navboxes.

In particular, the X-Men one (as seen here) has a huge number of links and takes up an increasing amount of space at the top of the 50+ Characters pages using it. One mod suggestion on the ATT query was that we should go for something much smaller, possibly in a similar style to Star Trek's approach (as seen here).

That approach certainly works for me, but we probably need a consensus on this.

Thoughts?

Edited by Mrph1 on Oct 11th 2022 at 12:40:15 PM

I personally think leaving it is fine. If anything just fold the index box into a collapsable. The pages all cover specific things and I did do a lot of work on it. So making it collapsable will solve all those problems without making any big unnecessary changes that will ultimately just make a big mess of what we worked hard to make.

Edited by Furygildeman on Oct 11th 2022 at 5:45:39 AM

As someone who has had to manually update dozens of pages because something was cut or merged or split, count me in as an overly-detailed navbox hater, and I'd argued for their trimming on Series.Game Of Thrones and Characters.Pokemon prior.

I rather like the approach on Characters.Marvel Cinematic Universe, where each page just has any 'parent' and 'child' pages linked. That way you don't have to update 70 pages just to split something.

Edited by Synchronicity on Oct 11th 2022 at 10:03:18 AM

I like this idea since it’s another alternative to cutting pages.

Another alternative is this format which shrinks the box without really changing anything

Revisiting this - the navboxes and page names aren't matching on decades.

So we get "X-Men 90's Members" on the page, but "'90s Members" in navbox, with apostrophe at the front - which should it be? I think the navbox is probably right on this one.

Edited by Mrph1 on Oct 25th 2022 at 10:47:10 AM

That looks good to me.

This might just be me, but I feel that the changes in Beast’s section emphasize his current characterization more than the ones he has had throughout his many appearances. Considering how dramatic his character shifts have been in the last decade or so, what does everyone think about dividing Beast’s sections into different subsections? Like one for “General” character traits, one for “Pre M-Day” characterization, another for “Post M-Day” characterization, and (maybe) a fourth one for “Krakoa Era” characterization?

I don’t think that’s the right way to go . It applies to the character as a whole. Just because they are current changes doesn’t mean we split them up. In fact Beast has been edging towards this with hints his darker nature for a while before the Krakoan era. This is just the result. The earliest hints were when he gave Threnody to Sinister in the 90s. If it was a split personality maybe, but this is who Beast is and it’s not a different person. A lot of characters have dramatically changed. Doesn’t mean they aren’t the same.

Edited by Furygildeman on Nov 13th 2022 at 8:23:57 AM

Agreed. If it's later revealed he's got the Dark Beast's mind overwriting his, or something similar, we might justify a split. But if it's just Face–Heel Turn and Depending on the Writer, I think we need to tackle it all in one place.

More recent characterisation and stories do tend to get more tropes, which can unbalance it, but the best way to tackle that is to add more valid tropes for his earlier stories. The intro already talks about the shift in his portrayal.

Okay. Thanks. It was just a thought. I’ll add tropes and examples of his pre-Schism characterization for the days to come with the proper context. And I’ll definitely keep the ones for his current characterization. But I highly doubt that the current personality is the endpoint for the character.

I understand when it seems like Character Bashing, which I do my best to refrain from. Sometimes Tropers write tropes from an emotional stare after having read it watched a work writing it as if they have a bone to pick with a certain character and ignoring that there may be two sides to a story. But these tropes that have recently are very much picked straight from the Ben Percy’s writing without going all in like with long emotionally written one sided context.

Gotcha. I wasn’t accusing anyone of Character Bashing. I was just proposing a way to balance out the tropes of his current characterization with those of his previous characterizations.

Now that we have a wider Marvel Comics cleanup thread, can I suggest we try to get this one locked and move any future discussion there?

Locked as requested