Thread:JonathanMarkoff/@comment-25626-20160901225653/@comment-25626-20170101172806

We never finished up this conversation. Do we want to go down the road of Minor Fictional Characters pages or not?

Short stories by definition don't have much room for inconsequential elements. Even a character with a quick line of dialog is can wind up being pretty important to the overall arc of the story. Additionally, a "MFC in "Short Story" may be limited to a character or two, which would just lead to irrelevance on top of irrelevance.

On the other hand, I do acknowledge that there are plenty of short story characters who don't do much beyond providing some "color" or "texture" to the piece, and so the articles aren't particularly interesting.

Further, there are some short works that are so short that I really don't know if do we need individual character pages. A good example is "Half the Battle", which is just a series of vignettes set over a few generations, and takes only a few pages. The characters are stock characters by design, so we have several articles that aren't terribly substantial, and I do wonder if it might be better to simply collect them onto a single page. Another example is that recent "The Mammyth" piece; I've read it, but I haven't written articles because I kind of feel that creating a bunch of articles that are going to be essentially identical is kind of a waste of time. (Well, that and it's really a joke that doesn't quite land.)

Anyway, there's a way to address the minor short story character situation, but I don't think approach we take to novels and series is appropriate.