Meanwhile, over on FFN
Nov. 28th, 2009 12:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
farlaSo I poked my head into the Pokemon category, since I'm planning to go around reviewing everyone come December.
I'm pretty sure character list is even longer than it was last time. This is sort of why I never tried submitting character lists back when the feature was first introduced - there's just so many guys, and when you start adding in some of the pokemon... They've also introduced setting world at some point, which is cool. I went through and chucked my stuff into various subdivisions. A lot of it was pretty arbitrary, because the nice thing about Pokemon has always been that it's got pretty fluid canon boundaries. I ended up putting a lot of my early stories into anime, under the reasoning that I was thinking in anime-verse for them, even if they're often too short to be referencing anything specific to a single setting. A lot of the trainers being friends with pokemon bitching got listed as anime, while stuff that focused more on pokedex info was game. I may go through and undo some of it as I think - aside from stuff that's basically taking place in its own little universe (Ice, that thing where there was the community of eevee, etc) I wasn't sure where to draw the line between anime/gameverse and none. There's a couple things I included on the basis that they referenced Ash, but I may change my mind.
Who is and isn't included in the character list is interesting. I suspect that the pokemon mainly are those who belong to a canon character or show up in Mystery Dungeon on the main quest. More, the cast list is almost all focused on the fourth gen, with occasional inexplicable holdovers from first. So we've got the first gen starters (and the magikarp salesman), and the third/fourth gen starters, but not the second gen starters, and we're missing a bunch of characters from the first season (remember when everyone liked to use Damien as a stand-in for evil trainer of the week? (I think it was just because he had such a great name for it) Well, he's missing, as, incidentally, are magikarp/gyarados and houndour/houndoom.) It's generally quite ambiguous if the pokemon options are supposed to be particular characters or not, which is only further confused by the fact that at least a couple have representations in multiple canons, including across the current anime/manga/game divide. There are a couple explicitly listed as So-and-so's whatever, which resolves that but just adds to the character list bloat. And there's similar issues with characters like Red, who is a manga character/default game protagonist/second gen NPC/name for your rival if you're playing the other cartridge.
The best solution would probably be to have general sub-classes of characters. Mystery Dungeon pokemon, rockets, game protagonist/game rival, minor characters, that sort of thing. And cut out all individual pokemon, since really, that way lies madness. Since FFN has yet to bite the bullet and include an OC option (at least, in any category I've seen), they probably won't do this for a while, but I'm going to bet they will eventually (a quick count got me to a hundred characters by the D section. This on a cast list that not only is missing a chunk of the older characters, but from a canon that is still going on.)
Anyway, it's interesting to look at this after the Archive of Our Own setup, because at first glance that should resolve most of what I'm discussing, since I could just add whatever I wanted. But to me the problem is more the character bloat. Everyone's going to keep trying to get their particular favorite one-episode character added, but there's no point in including something with one example in a search category. The fix is more to create general groupings that include all potential characters, and then add a couple of the most major ones.
Because, come on, the system doesn't work this way. If your favorite character is a minor character, you're probably interested in a couple other minor characters, and like reading about fic with minor characters in general. Rolling all the guys with one story to their name into a one page listing isn't making it that much harder on you, and it's making it so people interested in various minor characters don't have to search them all one by one. If something's a filter, it should be used to filter things to the point you, the human, can find what you want within it. If you want to see if there's fic about a particular character, use the search engine for summaries that mention the character's name, like god intended.
But people don't work that way, and people tend to use specifics over general categories. If you give people a list of options, they'll pick one, but left to their own devices it's "Mystery Dungeon Blue" this and "Baby Pikachu from the pikachu herd in that one episode" that.
And the more people emphasize this over their summary, the more vital it becomes to make your own super specific classes for your own story, because people are getting to fic based on imputing a specific series of things, and if they don't see the tag for Random Guy Appearing in the Background of Episode 543, they'll never click it and see your story at all. Which is why I'm looking at this thinking stuff needs to be chopped out, not thinking I really need magikarp on the character list because I've got like five stories focused on them, and why I'm okay that plenty of my stories are still setting agnostic. Because the main setup is still click category -> look through summaries, and I don't have to worry about getting filtered into nonexistence if my stories don't contain one of the existing character options.
Come to think of it, that's why I tend to ignore plenty of FFN stuff that doesn't work right for me, because it rarely gets in the way of the basic title + summary = readers setup. The current system doesn't quite work for how I'd generally use the filters, but either by design or incompetence, neither are other people going to be primarily using the filters and making it vital I class everything within them.
(Also jesus I don't recognize half the listed characters. I feel old.)
I'm pretty sure character list is even longer than it was last time. This is sort of why I never tried submitting character lists back when the feature was first introduced - there's just so many guys, and when you start adding in some of the pokemon... They've also introduced setting world at some point, which is cool. I went through and chucked my stuff into various subdivisions. A lot of it was pretty arbitrary, because the nice thing about Pokemon has always been that it's got pretty fluid canon boundaries. I ended up putting a lot of my early stories into anime, under the reasoning that I was thinking in anime-verse for them, even if they're often too short to be referencing anything specific to a single setting. A lot of the trainers being friends with pokemon bitching got listed as anime, while stuff that focused more on pokedex info was game. I may go through and undo some of it as I think - aside from stuff that's basically taking place in its own little universe (Ice, that thing where there was the community of eevee, etc) I wasn't sure where to draw the line between anime/gameverse and none. There's a couple things I included on the basis that they referenced Ash, but I may change my mind.
Who is and isn't included in the character list is interesting. I suspect that the pokemon mainly are those who belong to a canon character or show up in Mystery Dungeon on the main quest. More, the cast list is almost all focused on the fourth gen, with occasional inexplicable holdovers from first. So we've got the first gen starters (and the magikarp salesman), and the third/fourth gen starters, but not the second gen starters, and we're missing a bunch of characters from the first season (remember when everyone liked to use Damien as a stand-in for evil trainer of the week? (I think it was just because he had such a great name for it) Well, he's missing, as, incidentally, are magikarp/gyarados and houndour/houndoom.) It's generally quite ambiguous if the pokemon options are supposed to be particular characters or not, which is only further confused by the fact that at least a couple have representations in multiple canons, including across the current anime/manga/game divide. There are a couple explicitly listed as So-and-so's whatever, which resolves that but just adds to the character list bloat. And there's similar issues with characters like Red, who is a manga character/default game protagonist/second gen NPC/name for your rival if you're playing the other cartridge.
The best solution would probably be to have general sub-classes of characters. Mystery Dungeon pokemon, rockets, game protagonist/game rival, minor characters, that sort of thing. And cut out all individual pokemon, since really, that way lies madness. Since FFN has yet to bite the bullet and include an OC option (at least, in any category I've seen), they probably won't do this for a while, but I'm going to bet they will eventually (a quick count got me to a hundred characters by the D section. This on a cast list that not only is missing a chunk of the older characters, but from a canon that is still going on.)
Anyway, it's interesting to look at this after the Archive of Our Own setup, because at first glance that should resolve most of what I'm discussing, since I could just add whatever I wanted. But to me the problem is more the character bloat. Everyone's going to keep trying to get their particular favorite one-episode character added, but there's no point in including something with one example in a search category. The fix is more to create general groupings that include all potential characters, and then add a couple of the most major ones.
Because, come on, the system doesn't work this way. If your favorite character is a minor character, you're probably interested in a couple other minor characters, and like reading about fic with minor characters in general. Rolling all the guys with one story to their name into a one page listing isn't making it that much harder on you, and it's making it so people interested in various minor characters don't have to search them all one by one. If something's a filter, it should be used to filter things to the point you, the human, can find what you want within it. If you want to see if there's fic about a particular character, use the search engine for summaries that mention the character's name, like god intended.
But people don't work that way, and people tend to use specifics over general categories. If you give people a list of options, they'll pick one, but left to their own devices it's "Mystery Dungeon Blue" this and "Baby Pikachu from the pikachu herd in that one episode" that.
And the more people emphasize this over their summary, the more vital it becomes to make your own super specific classes for your own story, because people are getting to fic based on imputing a specific series of things, and if they don't see the tag for Random Guy Appearing in the Background of Episode 543, they'll never click it and see your story at all. Which is why I'm looking at this thinking stuff needs to be chopped out, not thinking I really need magikarp on the character list because I've got like five stories focused on them, and why I'm okay that plenty of my stories are still setting agnostic. Because the main setup is still click category -> look through summaries, and I don't have to worry about getting filtered into nonexistence if my stories don't contain one of the existing character options.
Come to think of it, that's why I tend to ignore plenty of FFN stuff that doesn't work right for me, because it rarely gets in the way of the basic title + summary = readers setup. The current system doesn't quite work for how I'd generally use the filters, but either by design or incompetence, neither are other people going to be primarily using the filters and making it vital I class everything within them.
(Also jesus I don't recognize half the listed characters. I feel old.)
