Talk:Shaman

Don't class the Paper Mario characters as Shaman
The only link that seems to be here is they look vaguely similar. That's it. That's the only evidence to suggest that Merlon, Merlee, Merluvlee, Nolrem, and all the other lot are all Shamen. No in game dialogue, no supplementary material, nothing. Just raw speculation. This, honestly, is just absurd; we're a wiki for what's concrete and canon, not for haphazard speculation. And it's especially bad in this case, too, since SMRPG and Paper Mario are two completely different series, made by two completely different developers.

I don't know what we'll disjoint their species off to if this passes, but I know this; it shouldn't be this article, because nothing states they're actually Shamen.

Proposer: Deadline: September 30th, 2017, 23:59 GMT

Support

 * 1) - There is not one statement in these games that suggests they are shamen. Not one. This honestly only makes me question how on earth this was undetected for so long.
 * 2) - Yeah, the SMRPG characters and enemies appear to have different roles than the unrelated Paper Mario characters.
 * 3) I believe all the non-Mario-related characters and enemies belong or belonged to Square Enix, which is exactly why Paper Mario turned out to be more of a spiritual successor rather than a true sequel. Given that situation, it becomes a leap to say that Merlon and co. are directly members of the Shaman race. Due to this likely copyright barrier coupled with the fact that the Paper Mario series does not refer to the original Super Mario RPG species at all, I think the article should just be amended to only note the similar designs of these characters, and keep info a bit stricter rather than loose.

Oppose

 * 1) See my reasoning below.
 * 2) Paper Mario 64 originally began as a sequel to Super Mario RPG, and as a result, it has a lot of callbacks and references to that game. Keeping that in mind, and considering that the Paper Mario wizards look exactly like Shamans, there's no good reason to arbitrarily treat them as different.
 * 3) Per all.
 * 4) Per all, especially since they're more commonly NPCs than enemies.

Comments
Paper Mario actually began as a sequel to Super Mario RPG. 14:05, 16 September 2017 (EDT)

We could just remove the Paper Mario stuff altogether. 14:07, 16 September 2017 (EDT)
 * If we do that, what species are they then? The closest match we have is Shaman. They can't be Flip-Flop Folk as the infoboxes proclaim. We can say they are those by nationality, kind of like me living in the United States and calling me an American, but I am of European descent. -- 15:52, 16 September 2017 (EDT)
 * My original comment was seeing if maybe we could call the Paper Mario ones, but then I wondered if they were actually called that in the game. Are they? Second question, is this page meant to be about the shaman class/trait/job/whatever as a whole? If so, I may change my vote. 21:35, 16 September 2017 (EDT)
 * Flip-Flop Folk wouldn't even work, seeing as how over half the Shaman NPCs appeared in PM64/TTYD. Niiue (talk) 17:00, 16 September 2017 (EDT)
 * @Alex Why do you keep referring to this as an "enemy?" Yes, it appears as an enemy at one point in the game, but normally they're NPCs, like the one that sells items near the sea and the one that runs the jumping minigame at Land's End. Doc von Schmeltwick (talk) 17:30, 16 September 2017 (EDT)
 * Because I goofed, that's why. :P 21:35, 16 September 2017 (EDT)
 * Keep in mind that we already have a system in place if we don't know the actual species... we simply put it as "Unknown" in those cases.  ~Camwood777  (talk)  19:31, 16 September 2017 (EDT)
 * Unfortunately, Shaman is more descriptive than unknown. The strongest piece of evidence to support the Shaman claim is what said. -- 21:31, 16 September 2017 (EDT)