Template talk:The Hermit

Reformatting notes

Although this template's creator explicitly invited changes, for posterity's sake I want to post an explanation for my revision, to justify the divergence from usual practice and help futureproof lest future stories muddle things further. The Hermit continues to be a headache-inducing thought-provoking special case for a lot of our usual precedents!

By my accounting, we have a few distinct categories of Hermit-related pages:

• mutually exclusive titles which the Hermit assumed for one or more incarnations: The Hermit, K'anpo Rimpoche, Kuan Yin, Uba Danth
  • Yes, "one or more": since the Hermit used the title "K'anpo Rimpoche" across two incarnations (K'anpo and Cho-Je), we can't assume that Kuan Yin or Uba Danth were single incarnations, either.
• non-mutually-exclusive overarching identities that apply to the character as a whole: Ansillon, Azmael, and (given the lifetime-spanning nature of his "game") One-Eyed One
• individual incarnations: K'anpo, Cho-Je, Ansillon (Blood of the Time Lords), Azmael XIII
• ambiguous: Hermit (The Taking of Planet 5) / Hermit's new incarnation (The Taking of Planet 5), Old man (Gone Too Soon)

My suggestion is that "individual incarnations" simply aren't the best structure for understanding the Hermit's life and conflicting accounts. Rather, we should think of him in terms of identities and titles, with incarnations included as parenthetical additions to the associated titles. While it may seem very odd to not have an "Incarnations" section on a template called {{Incarnations of the Hermit}} – a rename may be in order, here – I think the result fixes a number of shortcomings in the prior design.

Where this design would fall short, which made me want to write this note, is if we're introduced to an individual incarnation of the Hermit without any further identifier. So far all of our individual incarnation pages are associated with broader eras of the character's life, such as K'anpo and Cho-Je being incarnations of K'anpo Rimpoche (an association not drawn in the prior design), so parentheses are sufficient. But if there are exceptions – and arguably there already are, in the One-Eyed One and Old man (Gone Too Soon) – it might be best to restructure and create another "Incarnations" section, albeit one which would messily lack most incarnation links. Here I'll just note that, while I chose not to link to The Hermit as one of the Hermit's identities under the logic that it would be like linking to The Doctor under "Widely accepted incarnations" on {{Doctors}}, choosing differently might provide an alternative solution in this hypothetical case. – n8 (☎) 18:21, 25 September 2023 (UTC)