Talk:List of The Thundermans characters

Dark Mayhem is a Recurring Character

Dark Mayhem should be listed as a recurring character. He was in 5 episodes; 6 if you count when Phoebe pretended to be him. The entire season 3 + 2 s4 episodes basically revolved around him. Starforce¹³ 04:52, 15 June 2019 (UTC)

The problem here is that all of his appearances received nothing more than a featuring credit, which is a lower-level credit than even co-star. He has received no guest star credits. If we had a case like Timmy, who has had guest star crediting for three of his seven appearances thus far, that would be different. Although I think anyone would agree that crediting aside, he was not a minor character. Amaury • 04:58, 15 June 2019 (UTC)

Dr. Colosso gets "featuring voice of" credit too because it's voice acting. Being a voice actor doesn't make you any lesser. Starforce¹³ 05:11, 15 June 2019 (UTC)

He also received guest star crediting a few times for his human appearances. I agree and don't think that Dark Mayhem—or, rather, his voice actor—is lesser just because he received no guest star crediting, but per current guidelines, he would not count as recurring. However, since guidelines are just general best practices and not top-down rules, there are always cases where we can deviate. We should have other editors commenting here soon. See Talk:List of Raven's Home episodes#Curtis and The Guntz for a similar discussion, where the characters were ultimately added under the "Recurring" section at the parent article. Amaury • 05:17, 15 June 2019 (UTC) (Add: For reference, there's another discussion about this article here: User talk:IJBall#List of The Thundermans characters. Amaury • 05:34, 15 June 2019 (UTC))

Being a "co-star" in some episodes doesn't take out the fact that your character is recurring. The significance of a character should be determined by their significance in the show, not by black and white logic using how the actor is credited. Since this is a list of characters, it should focus on significant characters more than cast. For example, people reading the article are more likely to be interested in significant characters like Dark Mayhem, note some nameless cutest baby contest judge. Starforce¹³ 05:23, 15 June 2019 (UTC)

Level of credit generally reflects the significance in the show the production team places on the role the actor plays. I would have expected that in an arc where the actor played a more significant role that they would have gotten a higher level credit for those episodes to reflect that. The character is listed under notable characters so is covered in the article as being a notable character. No need to classify it as recurring to bump up importance. Geraldo Perez (talk) 05:52, 15 June 2019 (UTC)

Credits don't always reflect the significance of the character. Sometimes a more popular actor will get a guest star or even special guest star credit while someone who plays a bigger role gets co-star. It's just contracts. Either way, the only reason Dark Mayhem isn't "guest star" in some episodes is because it's voice acting, for which they use "featuring." I think for characters who are primarily voiced like Dr. Colosso and Dark Mayhem, the primary actor/appearance should be the voice one, not the live-action one. And since their voice roles are always credited as featuring, that should have the same weight as guest credit. Otherwise, if Colosso was never turned human, he would be left out of this list completely despite being a major character who has appeared in almost all the episodes.
I just think Dark Mayhem is too significant to the show to be mixed with one-time guests who got only one-two lines. The only question should be: what counts as his first appearance? Is it in "Phoebe vs Max" when it turned out to be Phoebe, or is it "Phoebe vs Max : The Sequel". Starforce¹³ 06:03, 15 June 2019 (UTC)

On your question, I would say "Phoebe vs Max: The Sequel," unless Dark Mayhem's voice actor was credited in "Phoebe vs. Max." Amaury • 06:04, 15 June 2019 (UTC)

Yeah, he's not credited in "Phoebe vs Max", so we can start with "Phoebe vs Max: The Sequel." Starforce¹³ 06:14, 15 June 2019 (UTC)

Remove Unnamed Characters, Add Notable Characters

Since it's not just a list of notable guests, I think we should include other notable characters especially Madison. She guest-stars in 3 episodes which would actually be considered "recurring" in most circles. Leaving out a significant character like her but listing unnamed characters with nothing but glorified cameos just doesn't feel right. The article is a list of characters - not list of cast members.

I think the criteria should be:

• The character is played by a notable actor/celeb, and at least has a name OR
• The character has appeared in at least 3 episodes and has enough noteworthy content.

If we still care about insignificant unnamed characters like cutest baby judge, math teacher, pageant judge... we could have a section for Notable Cameos with just a simple list... instead of giving them sections/headings with zero useful content. Starforce¹³ 19:40, 15 June 2019 (UTC)

We could probably remove some of the unnamed characters or create another section for them, as you suggest. The criteria for who is notable usually works like this:

• Anyone who receives a special guest star credit—for example, Marla Gibbs—is instantly notable.
• Since this is a Nickelodeon series, anyone who is main cast in other Nickelodeon series is notable—for example, Math Teacher is notable because the actor Kelly Perine is main cast on Knight Squad.
• If actors/characters fall into neither of the above criteria, it generally depends on the actors and their roles on the series, so it's 50/50 on whether they're notable or not. Malcolm Kelly and Tony Oller, for example, don't fall under either of the aforementioned criteria, but are notable because they're part of the famous MKTO band.

As another example, see List of Lab Rats characters#Notable guest stars. Scott (Dustin Ingram) does not fall into the first two criteria and is not part of some famous entity like a band, but he is notable because of his fairly significant role on the series, being the manager of a tech store. Amaury • 19:58, 15 June 2019 (UTC)

Yes, I agree. They're notable because of the actor's status. But if the character doesn't really have anything important to justify a section, they could just be collapsed into a "Notable Cameos" list. I think we should consider changing Lab Rats list too. I think iCarly has the best format in my opinion.

If we were to follow the iCarly format we could do: Main and Recurring where every body gets their own section; then list sections like Hiddenville High, Villains, Heroes, Minor Characters and Notable Cameos. This would open room for other significant characters to be listed as well. Other shows like The 100 use a similar format. There's also another format used by shows like Riverdale and The Flash where they group them by season sub-sections. Starforce¹³ 20:41, 15 June 2019 (UTC)

I can see a separate section for notable cameos, but to have additional separate sections for villains, heroes, etc. would become too much WP:FANCRUFT—that's what the Wikias are before—and it is the reason IJBall removed the Villains section and just merged anyone who qualified to Recurring here, just shortly before I split that out to an LOC. Amaury • 20:55, 15 June 2019 (UTC)

They don't have to be grouped by their in-universe groups like Villains etc especially since some of them change sides and some don't belong to any group. But I still think only main and recurring characters should get their own sections. The rest should be grouped into lists which can be expanded to cover other important characters. If we're spinning off a page for the characters, we might as well make it useful with relevant character information that people are likely to be searching for. We can do sub-sections by seasons the character was introduced - like the ones I mentioned used in Riverdale, The Flash.Starforce¹³ 22:00, 15 June 2019 (UTC)