Talk:Muv-Luv

Article Overhaul
In Anime News Network's Winter 2016 preview guide, editor Jacob Chapman wrote this of Schwarzesmarken:

"In addition to reviewing first episodes for the preview guide, I've also been in charge of writing all the little plot summary paragraphs you see at the top of each show page. I bring this up now because Schwarzes Marken far and away wins the award for 'most troublesome and time-consuming plot to decipher.' I had to traipse through at least two wikis to make sure I had my facts straight on this show's continuity within the greater Muv-Luv universe (what a phrase), and I'm still pretty sure I got some minor details wrong. Mea culpa, Muv-Luv fanatics."

That Chapman would struggle so mightily with this wiki page (presumably muvluv.fandom.com is the other wiki he mentions), and still proceed to catastrophically miscomprehend and misrepresent the premise of Schwarzesmarken, it suggests this page was unhelpful even to an experienced anime website editor.

With âge planning a major event for 2019-Oct-22, we have got to do better. If news comes out of that event and people come to this page for more info on the franchise, we need this page to be much better. Furthermore, we need this page to have a cleaner structure that would be suited to any news items that come out of the event.

This talk page reveals we have gone around in circles for years talking about fixing this page without actually doing so. So, I have taken a swing at restructuring the page so it surfaces important information and doesn't bog down in screen after screen of minimally-valuable details. Specifically, I've done the following:


 * Moved the list of Total Eclipse characters back to List of Muv-Luv Alternative: Total Eclipse characters. As I argued earlier, this was a huge distraction on this page, and so poorly done that there was still a non-functioning link to that page here on the main ML page.
 * Moved the list of books and their ISBNs to a new page, List of Muv-Luv books. I don't know if there's genuine value in the English-language Wikipedia having a list of 30+ books by ISBN when the books are in Japanese and only available in Japan — there's not even a similar list on jp.wikipedia.org, as far as I can tell — but certainly that wall of details doesn't belong on the main page.
 * Simplified the opening by moving stuff about 'Total Eclipse' and 'Schwarzesmarken' into a new section about spin-offs, and adding a new graf that describes the games' genre shift, similarly to the article on Doki Doki Literature Club!.
 * Adding a spinoff section also allowed me to add the point that Muv-Luv itself is a spinoff of Kimi ga Nozomu Eien and Akane Maniax. This section also mentions photonflowers and photonmelodies, which is how English-language readers will most likely experience spin-off material in the near future. However, the way I copied and pasted the stuff Muv-Luv Supplement and Muv-Luv Altered Fable doesn't quite gel with my sentence about Muv-Luv Alternative Chronicles, and that could use some work.
 * Expanded the Development and Release section to provide more information about the English-language Kickstarter, as this is the English-language wiki. I also added a sentence and a citation for the infamous story behind the EN fan translation.
 * Added a section on Merchandise, which can speak to the Kickstarter merch (I added a picture here for novelty).
 * Added "Carry On" to the Music section, because come on, why wasn't it there already?
 * Added VNDB score to the Reception section, plus Metacritic scores and review quotes for the English version.
 * I also updated the âge page to explain the nature of ixtl/aNCHOR as its parent company, and the 2017 acquisition by avex pictures.

When I could, I moved content rather than deleting it. I don't want to step on toes or tear people's stuff apart, but what we had here was very hard to read, and missed a lot of forest for trees. I believe simplifying things into shorter sections helps. Long term, though, we should resist the urge to bog down in trivia and arcana… natural though that is in this franchise.

Invalidname (talk) 01:51, 14 October 2019 (UTC)

Oh, I forgot, I also finished writing capsule synopses of all the Schwarzesmarken episodes on List of Schwarzesmarken episodes. Invalidname (talk) 02:20, 14 October 2019 (UTC)

2021 Developments
With all the recent developments -- the anime, Project Mikhail, Immortals, etc. -- this page is likely to grow, so editors should be thoughtful about where to put things and not just shovel them in. That's what got us in trouble before, when editors were just dumping in tables of Total Eclipse LNs by ISBN number.

In particular, growing the list of anime episodes every week is going to bury this page in capsule summaries after a few more weeks. Those should almost certainly migrate to a new List of Muv-Luv Alternative (anime) episodes page, which is the format used by nearly all other franchises with anime adaptations, and is already used here for List of Muv-Luv Alternative: Total Eclipse episodes and List of Schwarzesmarken episodes. I'm hoping the people writing those episode summaries (such as User:Winter04 and User:Harushiga) will take on the responsibility to do that.

Invalidname (talk) 01:54, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

A Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion
The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion: Participate in the deletion discussion at the. —Community Tech bot (talk) 21:53, 20 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Muv-Luv Kickstarter merchandise (dakimakura, Codex, figma, BETA plush).jpg