Talk:Spiral Yssgaroth

Rename

In reply to Thread:225477#6: The Pit never uses the phrase "Yssgaroth's universe" and never gives a proper name to it. The Book of the War uses "Yssgaroth universe" early in its discussion of the Yssgaroth:

The beings referred to in old House lore as the “servants” of the Yssgaroth - small fragments of its mass, or the genuine gigantic, misshapen occupants of the Yssgaroth universe? - began to swarm into the structure of history even as that history was being born.

Here, the universe is being referred to by the fact that the Yssgaroth come from it, just like an outsider to N-Space might refer to it as the "Time Lord universe", even though that's not what it's actually called. Two paragraphs later, the Book introduces the term "Spiral Yssgaroth" as, in context, a better phrase for the same concept:

Though no pure matter from the “Spiral Yssgaroth” survives, Yssgaroth biomass can hybridise and corrupt by its very presence.

This edit summary is correct in that "Spiral Politic" is not fully equivalent to "N-Space", but that's no reason to disqualify "Spiral Yssgaroth" as a name for their universe, since "Spiral" is never defined and the Book frequently uses it to refer to N-Space as a whole.

I suppose that the alternative to renaming Yssgaroth's universe would be to (1) create a page called Spiral Yssgaroth to hold all of the information currently on Yssgaroth's universe; (2) rename Yssgaroth's universe to Yssgaroth universe, since that's a term from a DWU source; and then (3) change Yssgaroth universe to just say "The Yssgaroth universe was the universe containing the Spiral Yssgaroth. (PROSE: The Book of the War)"

Or, even easier, (1) move Yssgaroth's universe to Spiral Yssgaroth, and (2) create Yssgaroth universe to say "The Yssgaroth universe was the universe containing the Spiral Yssgaroth. (PROSE: The Book of the War)" I'll leave it for an admin to decide which option is easier. – N8 ☎ 18:03, November 12, 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for the explanation. Here is what bothered me: is "Spiral" only a part of the universe and why is it Spiral when the other Spiral is not the universe. The quotes provided resolve that in two ways:

1. pure matter is more likely to come from a universe than from something akin to the Web of Time.
2. if Spiral Politic is frequently (metonymically again?) used to apply to the N-space, then the use of Spiral Yssgaroth in relation to their universe becomes more natural.

You are, of course, right that the characters often don't get a proper name of some other universe for precisely the same reason we often don't get an in-universe name for things. CzechOut some long time ago (in post so far away I can't find it) pointed out that what we call Category:Individuals with unknown names is really those whose names we do not know. In most cases, they do have some name and probably know their own name.

What I mean is that, like us, faced with some external phenomenon that did not formally introduce itself, DWU characters resort to descriptive names. And now you have persuaded me that they do use "Spiral Yssgaroth" as one such and Yssgaroth universe as another.

While I am generally all for distinguishing things and having a page per thing, here there does not seem to be enough information at the moment to make both pages informative. You know this better than me, but I get a feeling these are just terms for "the place from which Yssgaroth came to haunt us". So I don't see the point of creating two different pages.

That said, a page starting from Yssgaroth is more likely to be searched for. It seems that the most prudent thing to do would be to take one of these terms as the page title and use the other as a redirect.

When I started writing this post I was ready to agree to the primality of the Spiral. But here is my last hesitation. Some things in TBoW are boldface and others are in quotation marks. What does one and the other mean? In other words, is the use of quotation marks around Spiral Yssgaroth the sign that this is an official term being coined or that it's a euphemism? Is it more like---He is also the one who gave them the name "X-rays"---or more like---The "czars" have various official titles? I can imagine, for instance, that boldface is reserved for titles of other articles in the book, which would make it reasonable to delimit terms by some other means, such as quotation marks. But this really requires someone who read the book to know for sure. Amorkuz ☎ 22:28, November 12, 2017 (UTC)

Your imagination is correct: the Book uses boldface to refer to other articles, not for emphasis or definition, so the "x-rays" example is the analogous one to this scenario. After thinking about what you said about metonymy and the pages being redundant, I think you're absolutely right that one should just be a redirect to the other -- in this case, Yssgaroth universe being a redirect to Spiral Yssgaroth, I think? – N8 ☎ 18:49, November 13, 2017 (UTC)

Ok, then. Moved. Amorkuz ☎ 19:49, November 13, 2017 (UTC)

Wonderful! Thank you :) – N8 ☎ 00:44, November 14, 2017 (UTC)