Talk:List of adulthood backstories

The information below is no longer valid, please check Mehni's reply before.

Posting this brief guideline here, since it was a suggestion over a Steam message to myself.

In the definition files, the game uses keywords like HECAP and HIS to insert a pawn's pronouns into a backstory description. Some official language translations, like French, use conditional statements like {PAWN_gender ? he : she} to select pronouns for text.

A typical backstory might read like this:

HECAP found himself stranded on a rimworld with nothing except for HIS dog.

Anyway, for wiki readability it's nice to translate these programmer keywords to regular words. Instead of deciding all the the backstories should be male pronouns, female pronouns, 50-50, or at random; gender neutral pronouns should be used.

HECAP -> They

HE -> they

HISCAP -> Their

HIS -> their

Some additional discretion needs to be used for some statements like 'he is', because 'they is' isn't grammatically correct.

HE was -> they were

HE is -> they are

I strongly disagree. Some of the backstories on this were written purely for male or female characters: some of the characters went through a gender change in their backstory. Neutering it all removes this information, and removes valuable parts of the story. A lot of these were written by fans, who obviously wrote it with a purpose.

Race modders also copy-paste these descriptions to make mods. They're a valuable source of info for them, and modifying them from their original absolutely destroys their value.

That's not to say HECAP etc is correct either: the base game now uses [PAWN_pronoun] and [PAWN_possessive] in place of HE and HIS. I noticed the vandalism yesterday and was planning on creating a script to extract the backstories from the game and format it all for the wiki. Here are the backstories; the script to format it will come later. https://www.dropbox.com/s/k4ie7h4lc2hhpid/rw_backstories_build_2231.zip?dl=0

I propose to use the values as they are in the game: [PAWN_pronoun] and [PAWN_possessive]. It is gender neutral, it retains all info, it is adaptable and it is true to the original.

That seems like a good solution. Apologies for contributing on some out of date information, and I did not realize some of the stories were gender-specific.

Great to hear. I've started on the childhood backstories, but for some reason I can't overwrite them all in once. I have to do it in batches, or the wiki won't load.

If anyone wants to give me a hand; https://www.dropbox.com/s/qkrw005bmebjuuo/rw_backstories_build_2231_wiki_formatted.zip?dl=0

Edit: won't load at all anymore. idunno what's up, it's not on my end.