Animation Source Forums

Sorry if this is the wrong place for this; please move it if so.

Ok, so this is more of a suggestion than a question, really. But my point is: why are the official Spirit profiles so small? Perhaps the official characters should have actual bios like the fancharacters?

My worry is that we're always telling people to have a decent sized bio for their characters, but the official characters don't. And when new people come to the site, surely if they saw proper bios in the official character pages they'd be more likely to write proper bios for their characters?

I know that extensive bios probably wouldn't be possible, but even a simple bio, using a basic form, would be better than the couple of paragraphs, at best, that we have on their pages at the moment.

So, for example, Spirit's official profile currently reads:

"Spirit is a curious and fiery young stallion, very protective of his herd, and close to his mother Esperanza. Taking life for a game, he must learn during his trip to distrust but also to trust some men.

Considered an indomitable spirit, fighting to the last breath to keep his freedom, he reflects the image of the American West as still wild."

Now, if anyone wrote a couple of sentences for their character's bio, they'd be told to add more information, and they may even get that character deactivated. My suggestion is to have something like this for the official characters, only including facts, rather than opinions, about said characters, of course:

it is not like that on any other source and its hard cause alot of that info in fan info and some inncorrect spirit ISN'T a kiger he is baced off a kiger ,being bace don't mean it is, a way to tell is his parents kigers are only dun while spirit him self isn't a dun nor is essy or strider

also "no foals" or "no siblings" is also wrong as we don't know who sired the foals in the herd but they where most likley spirits

new members should bace bio off must-see's more then the movie characters,also its alot easyer to not to put fan ideas in it

I know it isn't done this way on other animation source sites, I'm just suggesting that it might be better if it was. After all, the whole point of a bio is to tell you about the character, and therefore the more information there is in the bio, the better.

Look at sites such as Concept:Mobius, for example. It's entirely a fan-made site, but it contains so much valuable, canon information about the official characters.

Ok, so just put 'Mustang' as his breed, if there's dispute.

That's why I put 'official' in.

^this.
A lot of facts about the characters from the movies are fan made. Spirit and Rain are said to have a filly named Geist because, when the Breyer made the models of our two main characters, they added a filly with them but, in the movie or in the archives, there's no sign of a daughter that Spirit had with Rain. Writing "Foals: none" or "Foals: a filly (Geist)" would cause some drama between other users, the ones who believe the two horses had a daughter and the ones who don't.
Sometimes, the creators of the movie don't give many informations about secondary characters so, it's hard to find everything. And this gives the fans a way to make the secondary/background characters a bigger history with their stories.

Plus, why should we add the personality or the history of the character in detail, like for the fan characters? You already know Spirit personality and history off the movie, there's no need to re-write it down, if not very shortly, like in the actual characters' pages. There's also a problem that some informations are given differently in one site or in another. It happened to me when I made all the missing Brother Bear characters, mostly with some background bears like the two lover bears, different sites where giving me different official names for them. I had to take the ones that were from a more "famous" site and so, I was sure it was a more reliable source.
Same thing with the missing HTTYD characters. I also had to choose if it was right to add some facts from the books, since the movie was based off several books but, in the end, since it was a site about the movie, I decided to cut off the books from the informations, if not for little fun facts (Astrid's dragon for example).

There's no need to write "complicated" bios for the movie characters because, all you need to know is in the movie. The character pages are a way to let you know some facts about Spirit, Rain, etc but not everything because you just need to take your DVD of Spirit to know everything.
Fan characters have longer bios because they don't have a movie that shows their stories, relations, etc and the bios are the only way to know such details. Of course, fanfictions, images, art comes later, to explain and explore even better those details from their stories.

Well, what if people don't know the official characters' personalities very well? What if they don't have a DVD of the movie to refer to, or they're away from home, or they simply don't have the time/patience to watch the movie through all over again to try and find out some detail that they need for their character's history/story etc? I just feel that Spirit Source (and perhaps the other animation source sites as well) could be a valuable hub of information about the movies and the characters, rather than just somewhere for people to post their fan characters.