Forum:Literary Comments

I think we need to formulate a policy on this issue once and for all. This is in response to the recent additions and subtractions in Kingdom of Versailles. I saw the comment before TF deleted. Personally, I found it way overlong for a really minor part of In High Places, but it was also doing no particular harm, so I wouldn't have deleted it.

If I had written it, on the other hand, I would have simply said "Turtledove never defines the exact borders of the Kingdom", and leave it go at that. (Some of what the comment was saying seemed to be reasonable fodder for the inconsistencies page, but let that bide.)


 * I judged that the comment was building up to pure speculation. I considered removing only the speculation part and leaving the rest but it was so geared toward making the speculative point that without said speculation it looked like building a bridge halfway across a river. Rewritten, some of it might be valuable as an OTL intro, which I see the article lacks. Turtle Fan 20:15, July 7, 2010 (UTC)


 * Was there a Kingdom of Versailles in OTL? TR 16:59, July 7, 2010 (UTC)

When we initially implemented the LC idea, my personal feeling was that the LCs would be a "release valve" for everyone who just had to point out facts like Jake Featherston is the Adolf Hitler of TL-191 that really had no place in the body of the article. But...even then it still seems like pointing out the obvious to users. Alternatively, I'm not sure lengthy speculation about decisions HT made in his works is terribly helpful to users in the LC format. TR 17:29, July 7, 2010 (UTC)


 * I had tried to pilot a new series of Parallelism articles in the Parallelism in Southern Victory article, which remains unfinished. If those work out, they would, in my judgment, be a much more appropriate venue for discussing parallelism. Meanwhile I continue to believe speculation has no real place here, except for instances when it's necessitated by the story itself, and then made as conservatively as the story will allow. For instance, "FDR went from Democrat to Socialist at some point between 1933 and 1940" as opposed to "FDR's being countermanded on the idea of a public works project in Utah was the first in a long line of increasingly major policy disagreements with the rest of the Hoover Administration; others included Hoover's slackening of arms restrictions against the CSA and the rejection of Roosevelt's proposal to create a Securities and Exchange Commission to monitor the stock market and prevent reckless speculation and fraud. In February of 1936 Hoover finally dismissed the troublesome Roosevelt, and in the summer of that year Roosevelt officially left the Democratic Party and campaiged for Al Smith."


 * We need to make the Parallelism articles very obvious somehow, so we can chanel at least some that "point out the obvious" energy somewhere useful. TR 16:59, July 7, 2010 (UTC)


 * I would like to see a tightening of standards as to what does and doesn't belong in the Literary Comments. If these standards become very narrow it would always be possible to create another category for out-of-universe sections. Literary comment always struck me as a fairly odd name for what we were using it for, more appropriate for a section that said something like "The unexpected arrival of an American FTL starship in the Tau Ceti system--a technology which human and Lizard characters alike assumed to be impossible--as attempts at diplomatic relations came ever closer to reaching an impasse might be considered a use of deus ex machina." Turtle Fan 20:15, July 7, 2010 (UTC)


 * I think some of the first times we used the LC concept was precisely for "Such and such is foreshadowing" type of analysis. I also remember wanting to make it clear to users that this was not just part of the body of the article (which is why it isn't "Historical Comment").  TR 16:59, July 7, 2010 (UTC)