Talk:Simon

Questioning several facts
There are several facts that I'm having a hard time corroborating from the transcripts. I've also been through the texts and haven't gotten anything out of them. We can probably assume that much of what the goblin is saying is true of Simon, but what is he saying of Simon and what is he saying of himself? Those first few challenges, of course, come down to knowing when Simon was killed. An attractive possibility was in the raid that killed his fiancee, but do we know that? The Ultra-Mind 11:48, 21 October 2011 (PDT)
 * 1) I assume the stuff about him being orphaned was true, since it's probably safe to assume that he was killed much later in life.
 * 2) What about the Test of Knighthood? Do we know that it was Simon who did that or the goblin?
 * 3) What about everything involving his girl? The article asserts that Simon died in the goblin attack, but how do we know this?
 * 4) I can't find anything about how the goblin maintained his disguise. (Do we have a "citation needed" template?) I've looked for a lot of keywords in the transcript but can't find anything so detailed. I also can't find anything useful searching for "black obelisk" or how the attack on Fawn Tower is related.
 * 5) The dialogue shows nothing of the goblin's swan song. The only thing I see is the Avatar accusing him of lying, and confessing to being found out.

Article style questions
This article leads the reader through the deception, saying things that we know aren't true, but the player is lead to believe at the time. Then, in the following paragraph, there's the revelation of what really happened. Is this the way such articles are to be written? Is it ok to give false information, so that the reader experiences the same deception that the player experiences? This question runs even deeper, of course. Should we even be calling this article "Simon" and the goblin "Simon" since we never get to meet Simon?

The tense is also inconsistent--it starts present, but all subsequent paragraphs are "was". I didn't get very far into the debate about tense last year, but I'm pretty sure that this inconsistency is wrong. The Ultra-Mind 11:48, 21 October 2011 (PDT)


 * The tense split is intentional. The first paragraph always is a short statement who this character actually is, thus written in present tense. The rest of the description is always retrospective, thus past tense. That's convention in all character articles.--Tribun 12:55, 21 October 2011 (PDT)


 * I've been writing with the tense split (which has never made any sense to me) because there was never any consensus in the tense article, and because I found that my early attempts to correct it were immediately reverted. It's not established style and I think most people voiced a distaste for it.--Blu3vib3 14:33, 21 October 2011 (PDT)

Identities and Pseudonyms
In the absence of any input, I think I'll make a decision on this.

There's something to be said for giving an article a flow that approximates the player's experience, but that thing is not "consistent with our mandate as a wiki". I don't think a reference of this kind should be so artistic as to mislead the user in the short-term and then settle the issue later. However... I don't think it's necessary to deny that the goblin is "Simon". Since he took on that identity and pseudonym, and everyone knows him as Simon, his name becomes Simon as surely as Gordon Sumner is Sting and Bernard Schwartz was Tony Curtis (seriously!).

Nevertheless, I think the article still needs rewritten so as to be forthcoming right away. If no one has anything to say on the issue, I'm going to do that when I get around to it.

BTW, there're a lot facts that are still in question. The Ultra-Mind 19:37, 20 November 2011 (PST)


 * Ok, I've made the rewrite. Now it is clear from the beginning that the Simon in the game is really a pretender from the start. I also removed what I believe to be (admittedly attractive) speculation on when the switch was made. I'm going to assume that the outlandish flights of fancy I noted in the first section are really facts that have eluded me in my fairly exhaustive search. The Ultra-Mind 15:14, 29 December 2011 (PST)