Board Thread:Administrative/@comment-61022-20190311013206/@comment-61022-20190321145801

I think that generic races (or to term it better, real-world species) should generally speaking be considered minor appearances at best as their "appearance" is not of any concern to the plot.

Case in point, the example above, the only "major" animal appearances I would even contemplate putting would be pigs and seals. All of the other animal characters that appear in the story are all background characters. Very few say anything or do anything to advance the plot other than being "extras" hanging around in the background.

Case in point: Page 8 is a splash page at a back alley comic book convention. There is a pair of pigeons, an alligator, a chicken, and a rat among the various background characters. If I was writing a summary about this comic, I wouldn't be making specific mention to these things as they are no importance to the plot, their presence or absence in the story is not relevant. They could be interchanged with any other generic character.

If they aren't important to the plot, why are they getting "top billing" with everything else?

That all said, this is all part of the larger problem of the appearance section being too rigid. That's how appearance sections are ballooning to 200+ lines as contributors are trying to add and categorize everything and I'm telling you, scrolling through a list of -- perspectively -- irrelevant things is off-putting.

To put it to a finer point: Nobody is going issue-by-issue and going through the appearance section to see what insignificant appearances are on an issue to issue basis. They're going to the category page to find all the issues in one shot. So again, it raises the question: Why do these items need to be at the top of the page?