and i'd like to make a suggestion, if i might. while i get the humor value of tossing in really obscure characters (and i'm afraid a great many of us aren't total anime freaks), there are a couple of problems with it.
first, the last list was very, very long, but still a lot of people complained they couldn't find a pairing in which they knew both characters.
second, even if someone did know both characters well enough to write them, it's hard for the rest of us to appreciate the joke when we don't understand what's supposed to be so funny about the pairing.
IMHO, this exercise works better if we stick, for the most part, to characters the majority of us have at least heard of, even if we're not all that familiar with them.
so as much as i'd like to see someone write Quintus Bland/Jack Skellington (okay, i wouldn't, but it made a good example), i wouldn't submit Quintus Bland, simply because there might be two or three people here who recognize the character, and it wouldn't be especially interesting for
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"IMHO, this exercise works better if we stick, for the most part, to characters the majority of us have at least heard of, even if we're not all that familiar with them."
Yeah, but how do you tell? I've never watched or read Full Metal Alchemist, but clearly there are a lot of people that have. I know and love Firefly, but I know it didn't last a full season and many people may be unfamiliar with it. Despite the movie. Most people are going to know Harry Potter, but is Padma Parvatil too obscure? (If I'm spelling that right.) How do you decide?
I've enjoyed stories that have characters I'm not familiar with, though I admit I enjoy stories where I know who's who and what's what more. I dunno. *shrug*
It's padma patil. Why don't we have a friendly reminder in the userinfo that if you're a fan of things you KNOW are obscure, you should try to limit the amount of characters from those things that are on your list. It would be too hard to make aq rule about it, but just asking people to think before submitting thirteen characters from Mirrormask might make the problem less pronounced.
Agreed on limiting obscure characters. It's a pain in the ass to have the list flooded with these. What we might do is arrange things so we have two lists of characters when submitting stuff: Common and Obscure. Perhaps include a cap on the number of obscure characters out of the grand total we're each allowed. (Say, no more than 30%-40
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Also, I might have written a small program which would (within some limits) automatically read the characters from the comments and then make the random pairings.
Comments 5
and i'd like to make a suggestion, if i might. while i get the humor value of tossing in really obscure characters (and i'm afraid a great many of us aren't total anime freaks), there are a couple of problems with it.
first, the last list was very, very long, but still a lot of people complained they couldn't find a pairing in which they knew both characters.
second, even if someone did know both characters well enough to write them, it's hard for the rest of us to appreciate the joke when we don't understand what's supposed to be so funny about the pairing.
IMHO, this exercise works better if we stick, for the most part, to characters the majority of us have at least heard of, even if we're not all that familiar with them.
so as much as i'd like to see someone write Quintus Bland/Jack Skellington (okay, i wouldn't, but it made a good example), i wouldn't submit Quintus Bland, simply because there might be two or three people here who recognize the character, and it wouldn't be especially interesting for ( ... )
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Yeah, but how do you tell? I've never watched or read Full Metal Alchemist, but clearly there are a lot of people that have. I know and love Firefly, but I know it didn't last a full season and many people may be unfamiliar with it. Despite the movie. Most people are going to know Harry Potter, but is Padma Parvatil too obscure? (If I'm spelling that right.) How do you decide?
I've enjoyed stories that have characters I'm not familiar with, though I admit I enjoy stories where I know who's who and what's what more. I dunno. *shrug*
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Also, I might have written a small program which would (within some limits) automatically read the characters from the comments and then make the random pairings.
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