What goes to Character Sheets?

Yeah, biodata needs to be relevant to who the character is in the narrative and not overly technically detailed, IMO.

Like, listing on the Origins SMP character page that Sneegsnag is an inchling is pretty important because it's a major aspect of his character. Listing all the in-game powers and downsides to him being an inchling is much less relevant unless it contextualizes a specific trope, which should be in the example anyways and not the little biodata blurb.

I see no benefit to things like rarity being listed for Gacha Game characters, since it has no relevance to who the character actually is.

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More questions after I've looked at some more character pages:

On quotes

Quotes are optional, but is there any "hard limit" on how many quotes should be in one character's folder/page? Or can tropers add as many as they want provided the quotes can still give some kind of context?

For examples:

• Characters.Fate Grand Order Tam Lin Tristan has two quotes, but it's because the character has a "true identity".
• Characters.God Of War Series Kratos has three quotes, but that's because his character page has been "soft-split" into the Greek Era and the Norse Era... Or if "image captions" are also considered quotes, Kratos then has five in total because two of his portraits have captions.

Stats that are "needed to contextualize an example"?

Currently on the How to Create a Character Page, this text says:

If I'm reading this right, a character's stats, birthday, etc. are okay in the "description" if they are needed to contextualize an example? Or is it saying that these stats are better off mentioned in the trope example instead of the description? I admit this should've been one of my earliest questions when I joined this Wiki Talk, as those statements on the Administrivia page can be misinterpreted, misunderstood, or worse, the page may be contradicting itself.

For example, look at Atsushi Murasakibara's folder in Characters.Kurokos Basketball Generation Of Miracles:

• His image caption contains some basic data such as his Position, Height, and Weight. (As a side note, this proves my point earlier that "biodata" stuff is written/formatted inconsistently on this wiki, why are these in his caption?) It may make sense to include them because this work focuses on basketball, and most of the cast are basketball players, and there are several trope examples overall that talk about the characters' height. Specifically for the character I mentioned, Murasakibara is 208 cm tall.
• If you look at his trope list, at least two tropes lean on the fact that he's very tall:
  • Gentle Giant: He's noticeably taller than anyone else, and when not playing basketball, is actually rather lazy and easygoing despite what his intimidating appearance suggests. In fact, his lazy demeanor is at least partially to avoid injuring his opponents and teammates. That being said, however, he isn’t without his own moments of cruelty: if he thinks an opponent is being too passionate about basketball, he will try to crush their spirit.
  • Vocal Dissonance: Despite being extremely tall and huge, his voice is rather high-pitched and lazy-sounding, especially with the way he often drawls out his words.

With how that Administrivia page is currently written, it begs these questions:

• Are the basketball players' Position/Height/Weight stats from the descriptions/captions cases of those "needed to contextualize trope examples"? For instance, the Gentle Giant trope example says Murasakibara is "taller than anyone else", and it's true; look at that character page alone and no other basketball player has a height taller than 208 cm. You could even look at the rest of the cast listed on Characters.Kurokos Basketball and prove it, as there's still no one else taller than 208 cm. Should the current guidelines allow these stats to stay in the descriptions/captions?
• Or is the current Administrivia page saying the basketball players' Position/Height/Weight be completely scrapped from the descriptions/captions? Does this mean Murasakibara's specific height of 208 cm would be mentioned twice in the trope list?

I've also seen few other anime Sports Stories that also list Height, Weight, or Position stats in their character pages, such as Slam Dunk, Eyeshield 21, Princess Nine, Haikyuu!!, etc.

Edited by DanteVin on Nov 10th 2023 at 1:42:35 AM

With Great Power, Comes Great Motivation

Information used to contextualize examples needs to be in the examples and not just the character description... And at that point, if the stats aren't relevant beyond contextualizing a few examples, it's redundant to have them in both, IMO

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Articles already have a cap for quotes to one, and they are also optional. I'd apply the same to character folders.

TroperWall / WikiMagic Cleanup

I tend to see multiple quotes pretty often but only because people include them as image captions as well, such as on Dream SMP: Quackity where he has a normal page quote and then a relevant quote as the caption to each image

I'm confused on if that's what's being described here or if we're talking multiple indented page quote style quotes because I have no issue with the former but am very bothered by the latter, personally?

Edit: I see now that it's the latter. Yeah, I'm not fond of that.

Edited by Serilly on Nov 9th 2023 at 10:06:03 AM

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Height, weight, and position makes sense for a sports series. If you look at any college's roster page for their basketball team you'll see that right next to their name and picture.

I'm also operating under the assumption that every character page gets a couple of pieces of biodata "for free", and any additional pieces above that need increasingly stronger justification to be there.

Another related thing that came up just after reading this reply is that... regardless if full names, other names, and real names are information considered parts of a "biodata", names in general are also indeed prone to being "redundant" in the character descriptions and in some of the trope examples.

This begs yet another question. The pinned comment on this Wiki Talk currently says that optionally, "The header can list the full name and secondary names." What does this mean then for character pages (with lengthy descriptions) that use tropes like Canon Name in the header/description and in the trope examples?

Characters.Persona 4 Yu Narukami is titled as such on this wiki because "Yu Narukami" is the protagonist's Canon Name. However:

• The Canon Name trope is potholed in the character's header which also lists their several names from other adaptations.
• The first paragraph of that character-specific page explains/talks about the character having a Canon Name.
• There's an actual Canon Name example in the trope list below, albeit with a longer context than what's on the first paragraph.

Hypothetically, how would the "Cleaning Up Lengthy Character Descriptions" project specifically handle redundant info regarding character names, such as what's on Yu Narukami's page? Should the header be trimmed to one name only because the other names are already troped below? Or should all other names be kept in the header because this Wiki Talk currently says "The header can list the full name and secondary names.", even if there's a risk of redundant info bloating the character description/header?

With Great Power, Comes Great Motivation

What counts as "a couple"? How do you determine what's "for free" and then what "needs justification"? That's sort of an issue here. We can't set vague guidelines because there's no actual answer as to what would be acceptable or not, and having even just "a couple pieces of free biodata" will just lead to people trying to add more and more and more while also kinda defeating the purpose of trying to make everything in the description relevant and purposeful.

Current Project: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

There are two things here -

• It needs to be relevant
• It needs to be concise

So if there are only two lines... but they're favourite color and date of birth... I think we'd still challenge them on relevance grounds.

A couple means two, I thought that was a pretty standard phrase. If I'm being too vague I'll try to be more explicit but you're also focusing on the exact phrasing I'm using instead of the overall suggestion, which makes me not want to use specific details.

My point is that there isn't really a single set of guidelines that makes sense for every work, so it'll have to come down to a discussion or something like that on a case by case basis. Every piece of biodata should have some justification to its inclusion, but as the amount of biodata on a page increases the amount of justification required should also go up.

I disagree; everything on there needs justification. The amount on the page should not alter now necessary each item needs to be. In fact I'd say that the less there is the more justification we need — because the small amount would stand out more and have to carry more weight.

As for the wording, I know that "a couple" means two; however I also hear it be used for "2+" of something quite often, so I wasn't focused on exact wording so much as just using a different more casual definition of the word. In my mind I never use it to mean "exactly two", more as a synonym for "a few".

Edited by WarJay77 on Nov 9th 2023 at 7:45:42 AM

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This thread reminded me that it's been bugging me that there doesn't seem to be any guidelines regarding when character sheets get split into group pages... Only for splitting Character-Specific Pages. I've only been able to find general handwavy "when it gets big enough" or "if there's a ton of characters"... which leaves me, who is very nervous about accidentally breaking rules I didn't know existed, too nervous to even think about potentially breaking up a character sheet for a series even when it does have a giant cast.

Edited by Serilly on Nov 12th 2023 at 3:10:04 AM

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So do we have anything specific in mind aside leaving it for work's editors?

It seems nobody objects to production information like voice actors or illustrators.

There wasn't enough discussion on character appearances in cinematic universe.

Info cards with character's biological and personal information leans on not being useful.

Gacha rarity and class is debatable.

There's been a repeated argument that if it's officially provided, it's fine to copy it.

TroperWall / WikiMagic Cleanup

Yeah, I have no problem with including voice actors. Illustrators I'm less sure of.

Probably excessive IMO, although this would probably only be an issue with the MCU and possibly Star Wars.

This is something I would judge case by case. My guidelines for the character sheet for a game would be stuff that has story and gameplay impact, and keep it as brief as possible. (I again point to Characters.Pathfinder Wrath Of The Righteous as an example of my preferred way to do it.)

I disagree. We're interested primarily in the story and the tropes in it. Nitty-gritty details like blood type aren't inherently tropeworthy.

Edited by StarSword on Nov 20th 2023 at 1:36:51 PM

A little late to the discussion, but agree with what says. Voice actors and illustrators are fine in my book, but nitty gritty details (like height, weight or hobbies) shouldn’t be listed unless they are truly necessary (which are often not).

Speaking of data, several pages on Characters.Senran Kagura don’t have lengthy character bio data on the descriptions but they have a box bellow the character pics about their trivia. Is this allowed?

She/Her | Currently cleaning Char Clone

Yeah, that's pretty much the exact kind of thing I'm talking about nuking. I took a look at the first subpage in that, and the only thing even mildly tropeworthy in that infobox is the weapon they use—and we've already broken up the majority of the Weapon Of Choice trope family for un-tropeworthiness. We're not the wiki for Senran Kagura, we're the wiki for the tropes that are used in it.

ETA: Screenshot for reference:

Edited by StarSword on Nov 29th 2023 at 6:56:17 AM

I agree that not all the details are important, but the details that are relevant/referenced in the work itself is important and thus should be listed.

Then aside of the weapon which ones are they?

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I think that should be left to those who know the work better?

Generally BWH isn't exactly worthy of listing because it'd be rare for the work to actually acknowledge it (unless if they're advertised and not just put in the "manual")

Again: we are not the wiki for Senran Kagura. We are the wiki for the tropes it uses. We have tropes for most of that; we don't hardly need to list any of that trivia above the example section.

• Birthdate? Not really relevant to anything unless they have a Significant Birth Date.
• Age? Can be handled by numerous tropes if relevant to something, otherwise write it in-line in the description.
• Blood types? Not generally important outside of AB Negative, where it has a storytelling purpose of being nearly impossible to get a donor for. ETA: You could also maybe work in an example for Personality Blood Types.
• Three sizes? We have Impossible Hourglass Figure, Buxom Beauty Standard, Hartman Hips, etc. If there's anything of storytelling relevance besides pure fanservice, a description of the character's figure can go in one of those tropes.
• Hobby? Hobby and Pastime Tropes.
• Favorite food? Trademark Favorite Food if it has storytelling relevance, otherwise not worth mentioning.
• Ninja animal? Animal Motifs or something of that nature.
• Their weapon? Dual Wielding and Named Weapons. (Katanas Are Just Better is more of a story trope.)

Edited by StarSword on Nov 30th 2023 at 10:27:44 AM

Compare to the character entries for Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous:

Race, Character Class, Character Alignment, Patron God, and voice actor. All of those things (except the voice actor) have significant story and gameplay impact: Arue is a literal succubus who's trying to become an Ascended Demon (and is Purposely Overpowered as a party member as a direct consequence, even after getting a significant Nerf from her tabletop version), she's a ranger in gameplay, it's D&D 3.X so character alignment can be objectively determined In-Universe and has significant gameplay impact (and in her case, can change depending on player choices), and the fact that she worships Desna, the Chaotic Good goddess of freedom, is extremely significant in her character arc.

Edited by StarSword on Nov 30th 2023 at 10:28:30 AM

That's actually a pretty good standard for that. With that in mind, do you think FGO's data (namely the alignment and stuff like that) would be appropriate or are they just fluff?

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Well, Characters.Fate Grand Order has a pile of extra images for all the various ascensions, which seems a little excessive to me, but as far as text, they pretty much just have the voice actor, a descriptive quotation, and a couple paragraphs describing the character's story and gameplay, which seems fine to me. The longest one I've found so far is for EMIYA, which is kind of understandable since he's literally Shirou Emiya from Fate/stay night and is apparently a Mechanically Unusual Fighter by Archer standards.

They also had the illustrator at one point, which was pretty useful because there's a lot of guest artists and some of them tend to do specific character groups (so you can start doing cast herds just based on that), but I think somebody went through and removed them.

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One unrelated issue with Arue: there shouldn't be spoiler tagging above the line. Either we delete the spoiler or we reveal it.

On the point about artists, we're generally in favour of crediting creators.

That gets trickier when you've got something like the DCU where dozens of creators may have contributed to the character we are profiling.

But where you have a game where a single artist designs and illustrates a particular character then (mod hat firmly off) that feels worth listing.