Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-6192846-20140612134000/@comment-6986530-20140912184748

I had one more issue I wanted to address in this debate, given the direction of most "against" arguments.

That is, let me rephrase the debate so you all understand how I have been seeing it:

For everyone on the non-merger side, not merging has all been justified with us "playing it safe," "waiting," and trying to avoid fanon. (Which is fine with me as sentiments go, I won't argue when something is blatantly obvious or not because that's subjective—no sarcasm intended.)

It's just that the idea going around here is that merging is "dangerous/risky" and not merging is as simple as "waiting for confirmation" but imo, we are going to input our new information and in doing so we have to make assertions both ways.

For me, it's a matter of implementing one of two narratives on our articles: or
 * That Hellish and Nemesis are the same person, in one case viewed through a (for whatever reason) distorted lens.
 * That Hellish and Nemesis are not the same person, but are parallel figures who do the same actions on (sometimes) the same plane of existence and may/may not share a connection.

Our decisions are not set in stone, but when we do this a fan going through these articles is going to either see:

A) a merged article, and think they are definitely the same person, or

B) two separate articles, and think they are definitely two people who are just insanely paralleled.

That fan is going to assume this is the most accurate information and that the narrative not used is incorrect. This hypothetical fan isn't going to see this discussion thread and know that we didn't merge them because most of you just didn't want to touch them.

For not merging you are still making assertions. You aren't "waiting for confirmation" any more than we would just be "waiting for confirmation" that they are two different people. You are necessarily saying, on articles, that we believe Gallerian went through two different deals, that there are two different women played by Gumi who got ahold of the/a golden key (and on that note, did Hellish get it before or after Nemesis if it's the same box and key? Or will we assume there’s two boxes and keys?) and both of whom are going to/want to destroy Evillious (albeit for Nemesis it would just be that she’s threatening to in a war, we can't guess her motives in this version.)

You are saying that Hellish is an entity that lived in the Hellish Yard (per JoC) and then came up to Evillious (per her song.) You are saying, to fans, that she is a parallel figure to Nemesis, but she isn't Nemesis. That is what you are doing by not merging but still adding info. It's fallacious to assume one assertion is more "fanon speculation" and is "safer" than the other. It is fallacious to say we are being faithful to the facts just by going with these assertions as opposed to those assertions.

(And this is me assuming that anyone not in favor of merging is saying JoC is telling the truth, because that seems to be the only issue on which people are stuck. And even then, to say that in JoC it was actually Nemesis but that there is still a Hellish out there somewhere is even more of a fanon speculation.) If you believe that they are the same person, not merging them and making parallel history sections says, regardless, that you don't and that this is the stance we have to look at information with.

There is the difference when it comes to cases like Master of the Graveyard and Irregular because with those articles not being merged (or even if they are merged,) we aren't creating a completely new narrative, we're just either leaving blank or filling in a gap in that narrative. We don't, by either option, create an entirely new character with entirely new sets of actions or alternately say it's the same character, same action. We just say that this character exists, they do this, they might be this character or this character exists, they do this, and is this character. (tdlr; There is no good precedent for this scenario that I can see.)

I, personally, believe that the "same" option is much more reasonable than the "parallels" option, and that it's even past the point of merely being fanon speculation. If you believe that the "parallels" narrative is more reasonable and actually believe in it, then okay. That's what we're actually debating.

But I disagree with the idea that "waiting" is just us being cautious when regardless we're making statements on the matter to the fans who come to the wiki. It's gonna be messy either way because these statements aren't stated in canon, they are just a logical extension of whatever stance we take. Mothy could confirm they are the same or not. Mothy could confirm they are not the same or not.

tdlr; Due to the situation at hand, "not merging" doesn't mean "safer" or "more accurate." Merging them and stating in trivia we don't know certain things about Nemesis sounds as safe, if not safer, to me than not merging and asserting all these things—that most of you admit you don't even believe—is the case.

It’s not about playing it safe or not, it’s about telling fans the narrative you think is true and is the most likely as a plot point.

Evil Food Eater Conchita wrote: "Save newcomers the confusion" you say? Based on what? Prove it is canon. Show me the reference. Show me when mothy said it. Even though it is most likely real, I'd say 90%, there is still 10%. As a wikia, I think we should be faithful to truth and facts, and even though it has 90% chance of being CANON, continues a HEADCANON.

Lyrics aren't 100% right. Allen didn't kill Michaela, for instance. If you believe Nemesis=Hellish is 90% likely then it is more reasonable to work with that then “Nemesis is not Hellish,” which is 10% likely.

Again, unlike other cases that have been brought up, it’s a different narrative with both decisions, not the same narrative with a small gap in it.

Again, by not merging the pages we are asserting it is FACT that they aren't the same person, that this is CANON when it is, by what I'm seeing, a HEADCANON people are using as the reason to not merge pages given all the evidence at hand. There is no way to put in all the info without doing one or the other. That is how I've been seeing it.

To use your argument; give me proof, give me a mothy quote, show me the reference, tell me what proves they are two different people and that Hellish isn’t correlating with the information of the album booklet. To my knowledge there's just JoC, which mothy himself has made unreliable, and Capriccio Farce, which has misrepresented another character in the past.

Tell me why it is more reasonable to say Hellish is a separate person who did all these things separate and the same from Nemesis than it is to say Nemesis did all these things and was perceived as/declared herself Hellish.

(And honestly the Allen example isn't a good comparison either because in that scenario, by not asserting if Allen killed Michaela, we would not be ruling out the possibility he killed Michaela or asserting any other possible culprit.)

(---; I am sorry that I have probably said the same thing more than once in this post or was not completely utterly clear.)