This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Working Title: Dramatis Personae: From YKTTW
Zephid: Could use more work. I didn't know whether it was better to make a list of authors who often use Dramatis Personae in their books and list individual works separately or not, so I chose to just copy the YKTTW mostly word-for-word. I didn't know what Sybil was so I didn't include it.
Duckluck: This is another one of those entries that is just too short to be very meaningful. You don't want to write a whole essay, but the entry should at the very least say what a Dramatis Personae list is and what it's significance is -- something it's not doing a very good job of right now. I'd do it myself, but plays aren't my thing, so if one of you guys wants to help me out, I'd be much a obliged.
Zephid: I'd agree with you normally, except that there isn't much more to say about Dramatis Personae except what it is, and what it is encompasses its significance. It's a utility for people reading the book to keep track of the number of significant characters. To try and lengthen that would just make the entry unnecessarily verbose to me. I suppose there are some tricks utilized by some authors/playwrights that go unnoted...major characters not included in it, aliases used instead of real names, etc. But I've never encountered those personally, so I don't feel qualified to expound on 'em.
Micah: Removed examples where characters are listed in appendices/glossaries at the end of a book, which seems to me like a fundamentally different trope:
- The Wheel of Time books by Robert Jordan tend to include new characters and recurring major characters in the glossaries at the end of the books.
- No, they don't. The first few books did. Then Robert got lazy and the glossaries declined.
- George RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire has an extensive appendix at the end of each book listing most of the characters in the series. And their extended families.
- Charles Finney's fantasy novel The Circus of Dr. Lao ends with an extensive list of every man, woman, child and object which appeared in the story, often giving further information about what happened to them after the events of the story.
