FAQ – Gisted profiles & emergent history profiles

What’s the matter with characters ?

Writeups.org is mostly about profiling characters. There’s other entries such as spaceships, organizations, teams, robots, etc. – but mostly it’s characters.

Howbeit, “what is a character ?” is a really complicated question. Especially since we chiefly deal with serial media, which includes elements such as :

A box full of action figures !

Such fictional characters are more like… a box. From a distance it might look like a single object. But if you examine it and open it you realize that it’s just a container with lots of things within.

For instance, Catwoman. There isn’t really “a Catwoman character”. It’s a box containing :

So, from the point of view of the profiler, “exactly whom am I writing about ?” is an important question.

The writer opens the box and looks at the versions within – but usually it’s a complete mess. A bit as if the box were holding action figures, but the limbs and heads and accessories are mostly detached and you’re not quite sure what goes together.

Playing favourites

Another aspect is that comic book readers, video gamers, etc. often grow attached to a specific version of a character.

Hence the DC Comics cliché joke – “everybody’s favourite version of the Legion of Super-Heroes is the one they read at age 12, all other versions are clearly wrong”.

So when somebody would like to feature, say, Daredevil in a story they often mean their favourite version.

Approaches

There are multiple ways writeups.org approaches the issue. It really depends on the character. In this article, we are going to cover the two least nuanced ones.

The gisted approach (and benchmarks)

This is the “awww, bro… screw this, bro” approach. It ignores *all* nuance and only tries to capture the spirit, the essence, the gist  of a character throughout their lengthy career.

It is often based more on recollections and some discussion than on the usual detailed research.

“But, bro… why, bro ?” some may ask. Because this is a good first step, especially when it comes to the game stats. A gisted approach seeks to establish the right ballpark for the character’s Attributes, Powers, Skills, etc..

This serves three main objectives :

The latter is useful when researching other characters. Imagine that the Golden Platypus fights Green Lantern (Hal Jordan), and we haven’t researched the specific version of Hal that fights him. Well, we can still use gisted Green Lantern stats as a reasonable approximation to gauge the Golden Platypus.

If a gisted profile on writeups.org is almost entirely about establishing and sharing such rough game stats, it will often be called a “benchmark” or “stats benchmark” or “technical notes” or somesuch.

Note that gisted profiles/benchmarks tend to be the oldest entries on the site, due to their trailblazing role.

The emergent history approach

This is kinda the opposite.

Here the approach is to isolate a precise “slice” of continuity… and ignore everything else. Well, as much as feasible.

For instance, a Scarlet Witch profile that ignores everything that happens after Avengers Vol. 1 #44. Or a Luke Cage profile that only covers the 16-issue original run of Luke Cage, Hero for Hire.

Every later flashback, every later retcon, etc.? Ignored by this specific profile.

As some profiles state, “just imagine that this profile was written in May of 1951”. Since anything after the cut-off date doesn’t exist.

This has three advantages :