User blog:Ahalosniper/Thought on an Infobox Field

Greet'ns,

So, thought that I've had for a long while, why do we even bother having Eras in character infoboxes? Granted, we do have "Eras" in the Halo Universe, ie the Insurrection, Human-Covenant War, Post-War, and for some Necros or other far-future post-2600 stuff, but a lot of our characters cross over because they take place within the same couple generations worth of time.

The reason I see it as a strange thing is because of where we inherited it from: Star Wars. The site actually owes a lot of its early models for things on Star Wars Fanon, our default Character Infobox basically being copied from what one of their old ones was, and that's where we got the "Era" field in most infoboxes from.

Thing is, Eras as they exist in Star Wars don't translate that well to Halo. Star Wars has them because there are Eras in the old Expanded Universe that reach as far back as thousands of years to the Old Republic or further, and as far forward as Cade Skywalker and Darth Krayt thousands of years after the movies. So for them, Era is useful in the quick character-reference-sheet that is an infobox, because it tells you what setting and what characters are likely to be interacting with them.

Halo, though? I mean, if you have a Forerunner character, we're probably going to guess without too much trouble they were around in the Forerunner Trilogy era. Spartan-Is were all from the Insurrection days, S-IIs from the 2511-born class, S-IIIs etc. etc. So do we really need Eras in our infoboxes? I'm not saying we should do away with them, though, as I'm sure there'll still be some people who want to use them, I think I just wanted to make a little opinion blog about it to explain why I, personally, don't use them in my infoboxes.

Thoughts welcome, That Damn Sniper