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wingedcatgirl MOD (Holding A Herring)
2021-01-04 05:53:14

Wild guess: Do these happen to have have been copied and pasted from Wookiepedia, which enforces past-tense writing as policy? note 

Suddenly I'm... still rotating Fallen London in my mind even though I've stopped actively playing it.
ccorb Since: May, 2020
2021-01-04 05:53:37

Well, it's a thing in Star Wars canon to write in the past tense because it takes place "A Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far Far Away". ninja'd.

Anyway, writing in past tense gives a fancrufty vibe to the articles, so I suggest changing it to present tense.

Edited by ccorb Rock'n'roll never dies!
rjd1922 Since: May, 2013
2021-01-04 10:35:04

Is it OK to write in past-tense if it happened in backstory? That's Wikipedia's rule on it.

Keet cleanup
GnomeTitan Since: Aug, 2013
2021-01-04 12:01:56

You mean like this: "Alice and Bob are getting married. The year before, while he was abroad, Bob received a letter..."?

The main tense of the description is the present. It switches to the past tense for the back story. It seems the natural way of doing it to me.

EDITED: If you're just describing the backstory, then it's probably better to use the past perfect: "Bob has received a letter in which his ex-girlfriend tells him she's pregnant." This indicates the past viewed from the present, as it were.

Edited by GnomeTitan
Dirtyblue929 Since: Dec, 2012
2021-01-04 13:20:59

Yeah, worth noting that it's just the brief character biographies above the example line that are written this way, which IMO reads better. AFAIK example-writing policy only applies to examples. From what I can tell all actual trope examples are written with the proper tense.

EDIT: I do agree that a lot of these are especially and unnecessarily long and read like a lazy paraphrase of a wookiepedia article, but I'm still of the opinion that past-tense writing in non-example character descriptions is fine for an ongoing series set in multiple distinct historical eras.

Edited by Dirtyblue929
Serac (Troper Knight)
2021-01-04 14:10:29

It's not a complete copy-paste from the Star Wars wiki, but it feels like someone copied the text and reworded the sentences slightly. Compare the folder for Barriss Offee on Characters.Star Wars Fallen Jedi to their page for her.

Viira (Veteran)
2021-01-05 13:30:10

So, it would be ok to change them to the present tense.

Dirtyblue929 Since: Dec, 2012
2021-01-05 15:10:27

I'm still not sold on the idea that example guidelines on what tense to use apply universally, to all writing on the wiki. Past tense writing is ideal for above-the-example-line descriptions of plot and backstory IMO, though I'm 100% down for rewriting a lot of these descriptions.

Edited by Dirtyblue929
crazysamaritan MOD Since: Apr, 2010
2021-01-06 01:26:52

examples should use present tense,
Historical present, which is slightly (and relevantly) different. "At any particular point of the story, as it unfolds, there is a now, and hence a past and a future, so whether some event mentioned in the story is past, present, or, future changes as the story progresses;" an event in the Backstory is a past event when written in historical present.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.
GnomeTitan Since: Aug, 2013
2021-01-06 03:42:25

Plot should definitely be described in the present tense. Think of it like this: when the audience watches a show (or reads a book) plot events are unfolding in present time for the audience, even if they take place in the objective past. When I’m reading abook about the murder of Julius Caesar, in my mind’s eyes I see Caesar being stabbed in the narrative present. It’s as if I’m transported to 44 BCE; I’m not experiencing it as something that happened in the past.

And that’s true even if the book is written in the past tense! Tenses and the perception of time are much more complicated than one may think.

Edited by GnomeTitan
Dirtyblue929 Since: Dec, 2012
2021-01-06 16:58:12

I mean, this still raises questions. We're talking about summarizing the background of characters who, in some cases, appear in multiple works across multiple eras of a fictional timeline.

Do we write everything about them in present tense, even if it's events that don't actually take place during the story, but are described in it as backstory? What about events that occur in a prequel to the "meat" of their personal storyline? Where do we draw the line of what is past-tense "backstory" and what is present-tense "story"?

Again, I agree that the way that many of them are currently written is bad and encyclopedic, and could do with rewrites to be less "summary of everything this character does" and more "summary of who this character is", but still.

Edited by Dirtyblue929
SeptimusHeap MOD (Edited uphill both ways)
2021-01-08 02:10:54

I think discussions on which tense to use on TV Tropes are better suited for Wiki Talk than Ask The Tropers.

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