Discussions on Fictional Character
Does it apply to figures from mythology?
Hi, is this the right place for adding the various gods and goddesses from Greek mythology? Technically they qualify as "fictional", but most of the time we tend to think of them as "mythological" instead. Would a new type just for figures from myths and legends make sense? They rarely have a known creator, but are usually associated with a culture, properties that are not currently in Fictional Character.
That would open a whole can of worms. Which religions are fictional?
Hmm, Greek mythology is considered a religion? My apologies then. I was taught myths and legends in literature classes.
Anyway, what I was trying to get at, was a type to assign to figures such as Zeus and Apollo and Hercules and Paris. Perhaps if the topic that applies to the goddess Paris has a person-like type, people would stop mistyping it as a City/Town.
How about a "Mythological Figure" type outside of the Fictional Universe then? Either in Religion or Book/Publishing?
Modern day neo-pagans often worships "mythological" gods.
Anyways, it may make sense to distinguish between "fictional" which are stories that are expressly said to be untrue by the author, and "mythological" which are stories tied to religions that people may or may not practice any more.
Tristan: FSM worship, and if one were to look at a fantasy book in which made up gods are worshiped then I think that is another (different) type of fictional relgion. Is the FSM a fictional creature or mythological?
To follow up on this thread, we have since created the
Religion Domain
, with a general purpose Deity type. Feel free to co-type "mythological" gods as instances of Deity, if they're worshiped as such.
I don't think fictional religions or fictional gods should belong in the Religion Domain. To me they are fictional first, and as such are part of the Fictional Universe Domain. So the FSM (which immediately made me think of
Finite State Machines
...) would be considered a fictional creature.
Gender
I accidently put in as a gender Male (the album by some obscure band), instead of Male the actual gender. Shouldn't this limit this (or at least deambiguate) to only the acceptable topics? Else there are going to be oodles of people mucking that up.
You can mark the property as enumerated, as /people/person/gender does. When the values of a property are from a closed or at least very small set, enumeration makes sense, as users are presented with a fixed list of values from which to choose, with no option to create a new one. If they really need a new value, they must go and create it separately.
I see: it's nice and easy to do it for people, but trickier for fictional chars. Why if it is done for people/person, is it not done for fictional universe/fictional character?
Seems like it should be changed to an enumeration. I'd do it but am not an admin for this domain.
wbecker: "Why if it is done for people/person, is it not done for fictional universe/fictional character?"
Probably an oversight. The longer answer is that similar types may be developed by different people, and may not initially have the same schema. When we see two types that could be modeled the same way, we can get the two type creators talking to each other to decide whether there's a good common model.
Oversight I believe, corrected to be an enumerator with values female , male and none.
More on species
I've noticed that when folks type a character as human, they seem to be frequently confused which Human topic to use. As an example, Trillian was typed as a human from the Star Wars universe...which, while not impossible is highly improbable. I'm guessing that many folks want to just be able to say "Trillian is a human", and not wade through a quickly growing list...only to find that Human - Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy isn't on the list, and they'll have to create a new topic for humans in that universe. I'm not sure what the solution is here - there are detailed articles about, for example, the qualities of humans in the Dungeons & Dragons universe, v. humans in the Babylon 5 universe. These seem like very appropriate topics...but there are many more universes where humans have not yet been described. Do we want a generic fictional character species 'human' that can be used when the universe doesn't need it's own article describing humans? (e.g. the 'West Wing universe IS different from the A-Team universe...but I'm not sure we'll ever need topics to describe humans in each of those universes). Conversely, if we DO want each of {West Wing, Diff'rent Strokes, A-Team, Days Of Our Lives, 24, Law & Order,...} to have it's own fictional universe, and we want a 1:1 ratio of fictional universes to Human topics, we'll need to find a better way for someone to wade through the hundreds or thousands of human topics - something like filters on autocomplete. What do folks think is the best solution here?
I think that in universes where there is a species called "human" that is not the same as the real-world species of Homo sapiens, it's not unreasonable to have a separate type for that species (although it is a bit messy). But most universes that involve humans really do just imply the actual species, and therefore we shouldn't have separate types for each of those universes. The same would apply for dogs, cats, etc. The problem remains of preventing people from typing a character as the wrong type of human, and I'm not sure what the best way to do that is.
Rank vs title
I thought the "what do I input" description for rank on fictional characters could do with being clarified to note that it is the place for titles of nobility as well. Although a separate property for titles might be another way of looking at it.
Good suggestion. It can probably also be used for various other types of ranking systems that might exist in some fictional societies. I've updated the "what do I input" text to reflect this.
Add property: Date of Birth
Can you add a Date of Birth property (and maybe Date of Death too)?
The problem here is that lots of fictional characters exist in universes that don't use the Gregorian calendar, so we'd need to find a way to capture Gregorian dates, Stardates, Middle-Earth dates, years A.F. (After Ford), etc.
This came up on a couple Fictional Character topics where someone wanted to give a birth date so they had to make the character a Person too, which is a no-no. To beat the same drum again: This problem is solved by allowing users to use the existing types for Person, Education, Politician, Author, etc. etc. on a fictional character - just put the assertion for the bithdate or "term of office as president" in the context of the fictional universe. In everyday life, people put properties, not only on topics, but on assertions. Quotation: "President Bush says there are WMDs but the French prime minister says there are not". Citation: "According to the US Census, the population is 100,000". Fictional assertions about real things "In the universe the 'Independence Day' movie, the Empire State Building is destroyed on July 2, 1996". (Wouldn't it be great to put this assertion on the real Empire State Building topic without having to create a separate type for 'Fictional Building' when we have to make a separate topic?)
I don't think this example would actually be solved by assertions, since regardless of whether we implement assertions or not, we still need a type to hold the data, and we currently lack a type that could be used for both real dates and dates in fictional calendar systems. It does seem like people want to enter this data for fictional characters, so it's worth trying to model a type we can use. A compound-value type with two properties might suffice -- one of type "datetime" for fictional characters in universes using the Gregorian calendar (AND who are born within the range 10,000 BCE - AD 9999), and one or two for all others. I have a bazillion things on my plate right now, but if I have time, I'll play around with it.
In this thread, they even have the same problem for real historical persons: "Take "Person": where their dates of birth and death are not known, the dates in which a person flourished is standardly used to disambiguate them." They want to specify the birth date as "Qing Dynasty". This will probably be solved by splitting out a separate type (like Living Thing) that defines Birth Date and which the Person type includes. (Then you could mix in a different type that defines the different kind of birth date that you need.) The relevance to "contextual assertions" still applies. If you have a type for real Living Thing (with a birth date), will a user be afraid to use it on a fictional character? Right now, they should be afaid because it implies the character is real like all the other topics with the property. But the problem is solved if the character uses the same type as real things, but asserts the birth date in the context of the fictional universe (so it doesn't come up ono searches for "real people born on this date").
(Sorry, meant to link to the other thread on historical persons.)
How about an alter-ego property? This would come in handy for superheroes. Seems that this is being stuck on as an alias right now, but there are enough superheroes that it might as well be a property, right?
Well there is somthing like that by user duck1123
Should it be a topic-based property or simply a text-based propert (there are some topics existing for some of the more well-known alter-IDs).
Education?
Could we have some way of linking in the educational background of a character? i.e. an education property.
My first thought was that we would need a 'Fictional Educational Institution' type, but that would not cover characters who were educated at real world institutions. e.g. James Bond at the University of Cambridge.
I think we therefore need an 'educational institution for fictional characters' type for the property.
An "educational institution in fiction" type could work -- we've used that locution a few times for types that can have both fictional and real-world instances.
I would prefer that the fictional topic be seperate from the real-world topic. i.e. University of Cambridge in the James Bond Universe be a seperate topic from the real University of Cambridge.
Perhaps 'educational institution in fiction' could have a 'based upon' property to link the fictional and real-world topics?
