Talk:Watership Down

Gender over politics?

I find it shocking that this article deals with a few complaints against Adams about misogyny in rabbit culture in detail, but doesn't mention at all the many proposed allegories about political structures which are often analyzed, whether Adams intended them or not; the warren of the shining wires as communism, Woundwart's warren of fascism, or the idealized socialism of Hazel's new warren. Not even a whisper about WWII allegory, with Kehaar the air force and Woundwart the Hitler.

I'm not saying that these are clear cut or even crucial, but that there is considerably more debate and discussion about such allegories in a wide sense than there is any discussion about the does' place in the warren.

Expansion on the themes is very welcome; all we need are credible and significant sources and appropriate citations. Your help on this is invited. 71.171.109.2 (talk) 14:38, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

Absolutely agree. This article begs for expansion from those familiar with the proper sources. If you are aware of these, please list some. NJGW (talk) 20:38, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

The section on Gender issues doesn't belong here in an encyclopedia entry. It's like including a Mennonite critique of the book for its non-passivism. It is the imposition of a shibboleth of one narrow minded group upon the book.Cadwallader (talk) 12:30, 26 July 2009 (UTC)

Which narrow minded group would that be? NJGW (talk) 18:27, 26 July 2009 (UTC)

The same group which adds sections like these to a multitude of articles on Wikipedia. Wikipedia is NOT a political action platform, it is an encyclopedia. This gender section is not notable, is not a defining characteristic of the subject, is - as already said - a specific political view and as such goes against NPOV. I have removed it, if anyone wants to put it back that person should first explain which Wikipedia should ignore NPOV in this specific case and explain the notability of the section. Yetanwiki (talk) 18:19, 21 August 2020 (UTC)

@Yetanwiki: You replied to comments that were made before I edited this section to trim it down. See the section #Undue weight. above where this was discussed. I also was dismayed by the undue weight given to this topic until I spent much time a few years ago trimming it down. You can see how an early version looked in 2016 before I chopped it down: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Watership_Down&oldid=749892177#Criticism - mostly I trimmed the undue weight on Lane's critique.

The section is appropriate in the context of a "Reception" section, particularly when the criticism appears in notable publications, as was the case here. There isn't any NPOV violation; it's simply properly-attributed criticism grouped into a particular category of criticism that the book received. On that basis, I am restoring it.

After restoring, it's hard to see how it could be trimmed further. The New York Times review is appropriate and should stay, for sure. The Horn Book review... not sure, it's a well-known review of children's literature, so there a case to be made for keeping it. The final paragraph about subsequent works having more balanced gender roles could be removed, as it isn't really about the article topic. I trimmed some original research from it. ~Anachronist (talk) 21:27, 21 August 2020 (UTC)

"Fiver(WatershipDown)" listed at Redirects for discussion

An editor has identified a potential problem with the redirect Fiver(WatershipDown) and has thus listed it for discussion. This discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2022 April 22#Fiver(WatershipDown) until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion. Steel1943 (talk) 05:35, 22 April 2022 (UTC)

Character section needs a serious review

So I love this book, and have done every since I first read it in the 80s, so I'm not super excited about pointing out the issue I am about to raise, but I think it may be the simplest single thing to quickly and significantly improve the WP:READABILITY of the article: we need to drastically cut down the character section, I think. This article is already well over the WP:LENGTH advisory for a standalone article, and about a fifth of it is the character section alone. I appreciate that the way the story summary is structured is to delay the character section, do a bare bones summary of the overall plot, and then fill in the detail in the character specific entries. It's an interesting approach and I do think it serves the article well in this case.

But the section is still far too long. We don't need a standalone paragraph for virtually every last named character in the book--35 such characters listed in the section, with 34 paragraphs (for some reason Acorn and Speedwell have to double up--are they the Watership Down equivalent of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern?). It's just way too much. That said, there's little besides quasi-subjective assessment of the presence of characters in the book to inform a firm line of where a necesary vs. unecesary character resides, but I'd like to suggest removing the following (I'll also asterisk edge cases where perhaps a simple reduction of the content dedicated to them might be a better option):

• Bluebell*, Pimpernel, Haystack, Clover*, Boxwood, Hawkbit, Acorn, Speedwell, Thethuthinnang, Vilthuril, Vervain, Groundsel*, the Threarah, Prince Rainbow, Rabscuttle, and the Black Rabit of Inlé*.

Most of these might warrant a single sentence, either listed (admittedly awkwardly in such short form, compared against the others) in the character section or worked into a revised story summary. The edge cases might warrant 2 sentences, maybe 3. But others might easily be removed altogether; afterall, there are a very small handful of other unmentioned characters of similar levels of tertiary importance already (Lucy and the doctor; the cat; the faithful but cretinous dog from the El-ahrairah culture tales, forget his name; some additional rabbits at Cowslip's warren). In any event, this would still leave a robust number of characters with minimal to no trimming of their descriptions (I'll add the edge cases in here with asterisks again, for overlap):

• Hazel, Fiver, Bigwig, Blackberry, Dandelion, Holly, Buckthorn, Silver, Pipkin, Hyzenthlay, Kehaar, Bluebell*, Cowslip, Strawberry, Clover*, General Woundwort, Captain Campion, Blackavar, Groundsel*, the mouse, El-ahrairah, Frith, and the Black rabbit of Inlé*.

That's still potentially well more than 20 paragraphs for a character section, which would still make this one of the largest such sections for any novel on the project, I think. Any thoughts on this? SnowRise ^{let's rap} 10:18, 12 August 2023 (UTC)

I don't know. I look at Watership_Down#Characters, and it doesn't look any different than other books, TV shows, films, pages with character cast lists. Treasure_Island#Characters, The_Count_of_Monte_Cristo#Characters, Anne_of_Green_Gables#Characters, are just a few examples. (And this without even talking about Tolkien's works...)

It seems to be right in the middle between having the list stay on this page or be a separate list of characters. And in this case, I think we're currently doing just fine keeping the list on this page. - jc37 15:44, 12 August 2023 (UTC)

Well, all of those examples you list are about 1/3 to 1/5 the size of this one (and even smaller in terms of relative size to their own articles) and focused mostly on principle and major secondary characters, as far as I can tell. I've never seen thirty-five paragraph character section (or even one half as large) anywhere on the the project, and I must have looked at at two thousand such sections over the years. Even for vastly longer and/or much better well known (and thus much more to say about the critical reception of characters maybe, though that tends not to be what goes in these sections), you'd still only expect maybe a third of what we have here. This is definitely a WP:SUMMARYSTYLE issue that is unbalancing the whole article: in order to get a competent encyclopedic summary of the story, we definitely don't need to know the names of all the identified hutch rabbits, for example (who appear in two 1-2 page scenes, contribute maybe six or seven lines of dialogue total, and otherwise have little impact on the plot). I hate saying it, because this story is so near and dear to me, but a good portion of this veers into fancruft. SnowRise ^{let's rap} 18:15, 12 August 2023 (UTC)

1/5? You have me wondering if were looking at the same pages. That said, I agree that minor plot characters of a couple pages probably could be handled in the summary. - jc37 18:39, 12 August 2023 (UTC)

You're partly right: when I crunch the numbers it turns out that your examples fall around the 7KB mark, whereas the character list here comes to a little over 12KB. Still, when you consider that's about 15-20 paragraphs of content, that's still a substantial difference over three examples that are themselves well above the norm. I just did a random census of 15 major works from different genres and eras of literature that I pulled randomly from my brain and book shelf trying to be as diverse as possible, and their summaries vary from between 1-7KB, with an average of around 3.75KB. Not the most empirically rigorous or precise method of arriving at a typical figure I will grant you, but I do think it's roughly accurate, based on my experience of looking at a lot of such articles.

But no matter how you slice the numbers, there's an issue here: the characters section is roughly 20% of this article, which has to cover a lot of territory, between internal and external discussion of the book. And which already exceeds the maximum value before we are meant to seriously consider shrinking the article or spinning content off of it by more than 15KB. The character section just has the most (and some the easiest to lose) fat to cut, at the end of the day. I feel our hands are a little tied here, is what it comes down to. SnowRise ^{let's rap} 21:56, 12 August 2023 (UTC)

I think some of that comes from being a so-called "epic work", in which there is quite a bit of world building. This book could very easily have started a series or franchise, similar to Harry Potter, or the Hobbit.

I went through and pruned/pared some. Trying to focus on the characters themselves (and where they were initially introduced), rather than on things that may have happened "to" the characters. - jc37 01:32, 13 August 2023 (UTC)

I just reviewed those cuts/rearrangements and they look productive to me. I had the same impulse/suspicion as you of these extended descriptions of characters being down to the 'epic fantasy' aspect of the story, although oddly, I'm not seeing the same pattern repeated in other stories with a similar constructed world element.

For example, when doing my little census while trying to get a sense for what the average of these sections for novels would look like, I went out of my way to try to include selections with large casts of characters: and I could think of no example more extreme than Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time, a fifteen book (and roughly 15,000 page!) fantasy series pretty much defined by it's world building, and which famously has thousands of named characters. I checked the character sections of our articles for a couple of the books in this series, thinking it would tip the scales, but instead the first book's section was 1.7KB and the others I reviewed had no character sections at all. There is an independent list page for characters mind you, but for the whole series it tallies up to about 36KB, or roughly three times the size of the character section here, despite covering 30x as much material by raw page count.

I saw a similar situation with the other fantasy-ish book in my test sample and the two sci-fi books I utilized, so oddly, not the 1:1 relationship you'd expect for books that rely heavily on their constructed realities. Again, none of this is particularly robust in terms of controls, with a sample size of 19 books, but I find it interesting nevertheless. It seems to come down more to the idiosyncrasies of the main editors of the articles in question more than any other contributing factor, I think. Anyhow, I may do some extra trimming and re-arrangement myself (following your small tweaks to the structure) in the next few days, but will go slow and use a light touch so we aren't over-correcting. SnowRise ^{let's rap} 05:06, 13 August 2023 (UTC)

Prologue addition?

Shouldn't the prologue be added to the plot summary? I have a feeling that it should be included... Visokor (talk) 19:50, 18 March 2024 (UTC)