Board Thread:Administrative/@comment-1009000-20140112015118/@comment-61371-20140129023033

Edkaufman wrote: is that a vote for leaving things as it is or do you have another suggestion? hi again, btw. B-)

Howdy, sir. Glad to see you're back.

Honestly, it's tough. ADour's idea of adding parameters and allowing dating is sound, in theory, but the more parameters we add, the more issues we potentially run into. The more rules you have, the more likely people are going to break those rules. The more parameters that have to be fulfilled, the more there are to be ignored.

I've never liked the idea of a dating category or auto-categorization in the Marital Status field for the simple fact that it's so freaking hard to verify characters that are "dating". I mean, look back at this last Young Avengers series. Would you say Prodigy and Hulkling were dating for an issue or two? And let me point to the Storm/Wolverine thing again. Doc Ock/Spider-Man and Anna are clearly dating (and that's pretty damned easy to prove), but are Hawkeye and Spider-Woman still together? I don't recall an issue showing them breaking up, but when was the last time there was ANY serious interaction between them? I think, at most, she was referred to as his girlfriend in a panel of Hawkeye from months and months ago. How do you determine when characters have broken up versus a writer just not highlighting the relationship (great example would be the last New Mutants volume and the Dani/Cannonball/X-Man sort of love triangle that existed, but not really)? And what about Cyclops and Emma Frost? They seemed to break up post-AvX, but they're on the same team...but aren't really showing any signs of a relationship. I could go on and on. My point being that the biggest parameter we would need is a source, but to pull a little from my limited shipper knowledge, isn't every appearance of two characters together a potential relationship barometer? How do we judge one issue from the next? Especially when a character makes multiple appearances each month and is written in very different ways (not to mention multiple appearances in one month taking place over different points in time, see Wolverine in ANY month for an example. Especially lately where, issue to issue, he may or may not have a healing factor...let alone a girlfriend). And what if a character dies in a relationship? Are they now single? Still dating? What about the living party? Single? What about two characters who reignite a relationship for a brief period before one or both die (Wonder Man/Scarlet Witch, I'm looking at you)?

It's just...crazy complex. It's almost Immortus/Kang/Rama-Tut/Iron Lad-level complex. By not having "dating" as an option, we eliminate a crazy amount of potential debates and one gigantic headache. I say we just don't change anything and keep changing "dating" to "single." Leave non-legal relationships to the history, notes, trivia, and talk pages, all of which are great places for it owing to the high levels of detail that can be added.