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Currently, our Standard Format for Team Profiles says this:
I am proposing to add an other, alternate standard to this requirement, for reasons I will be briefly going into:
Why am I proposing this change? Simple, JRPGs. Just about every single JRPG has a great focus on the party members available, and many, many of them bring great focus to the concept of teamwork and the power of friendship. If you've played any, you know this is true. And yet, rarely or ever are these teams ever explicitly referred to as such in-story. Don't get me wrong, they definitely are teams, but they get formed gradually and through circumstance, and after months of fighting and living together, when the threat is finally dispersed they go their own ways. They're almost never named, either. To my knowledge, nobody in FF7 ever goes "Team Final Fantasy VII wins again! Gee, Cloud, aren't you happy to be part of this official in-verse team?", but it'd be pretty insane to suggest that the party is not one of the most iconic teams in the entire medium of gaming.
So, I got thinking, and I realized this is an issue for much more than just this one genre. The current standards are clearly created around the superhero genre, which is indeed where some of the most notable teams in fiction come from, but it does have many blind spots as a result. There's several extremely obvious and notable teams that cannot be made because they don't hit these standards. Currently, making a team profile for many genres is an exercise in hoping there's some off-hand statement that gives some nick-name to be used as the "official name". I don't think this should be a deciding factor. Here's an example of some noteworthy teams that under our current standards cannot be indexed:
Agree (8): @Antvasima @Qawsedf234 @SamanPatou @DontTalkDT @Firestorm808 @LordGriffin1000 @DarkDragonMedeus @Ultima_Reality @Tllmbrg @Lonkitt @Planck69 @Kazuma_kuwabara @DaReaperMan
Disagree: 0
Neutral: 0
Additionally, teams must also be official in-verse i.e. referred to as such by characters within the verse, and possess a team name or an analogous term, as well as being notable and prominent.
I am proposing to add an other, alternate standard to this requirement, for reasons I will be briefly going into:
Additionally, teams must also be official in-verse i.e. referred to as such by characters within the verse, and possess a team name or an analogous term, or be extremely long-lived within the work and clear in formation, as well as being notable and prominent.
Why am I proposing this change? Simple, JRPGs. Just about every single JRPG has a great focus on the party members available, and many, many of them bring great focus to the concept of teamwork and the power of friendship. If you've played any, you know this is true. And yet, rarely or ever are these teams ever explicitly referred to as such in-story. Don't get me wrong, they definitely are teams, but they get formed gradually and through circumstance, and after months of fighting and living together, when the threat is finally dispersed they go their own ways. They're almost never named, either. To my knowledge, nobody in FF7 ever goes "Team Final Fantasy VII wins again! Gee, Cloud, aren't you happy to be part of this official in-verse team?", but it'd be pretty insane to suggest that the party is not one of the most iconic teams in the entire medium of gaming.
So, I got thinking, and I realized this is an issue for much more than just this one genre. The current standards are clearly created around the superhero genre, which is indeed where some of the most notable teams in fiction come from, but it does have many blind spots as a result. There's several extremely obvious and notable teams that cannot be made because they don't hit these standards. Currently, making a team profile for many genres is an exercise in hoping there's some off-hand statement that gives some nick-name to be used as the "official name". I don't think this should be a deciding factor. Here's an example of some noteworthy teams that under our current standards cannot be indexed:
- The Chrono Trigger party. Not only are all the party members and their relationships an extremely part of this seminal SNES RPG, but they have a lot of teamwork abilities: The entire gameplay system relies on pulling off combo moves between the characters.
- Final Fantasy 6 has one of the biggest and most ambitious parties in RPGs, with them sometimes almost working together like a task force by splitting up and tackling several parts of a dungeon at once where a smaller party would not be able to, so it came to my mind first, but as far as I know the great majority of the FF games, which heavily focus on their parties, never have an official name or acknowledgment of status.
- Terms like "The Z-Fighters" or "The Stardust Crusaders" are never spoken, or at least ever emphasized, in the actual series, to my knowledge, though some side material acknowledges them. If these were slightly less famous or expansive series, the profiles would not be possible.
- Cowboy Bebop is another example. I haven't seen it yet, but from my understanding, the series orbits heavily around the main group of characters, and a lack of an explicit name for them should not be a deciding factor in whether it can earn a team profile.
- The Harry-Ron-Hermione trio is an extremely major and iconic part of the Harry Potter books, and yet, they cannot be put side-by-side in a vs match together right now.
Agree (8): @Antvasima @Qawsedf234 @SamanPatou @DontTalkDT @Firestorm808 @LordGriffin1000 @DarkDragonMedeus @Ultima_Reality @Tllmbrg @Lonkitt @Planck69 @Kazuma_kuwabara @DaReaperMan
Disagree: 0
Neutral: 0
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