Thread:TsukiYaksha/@comment-27702860-20170311015806

"What we've got here is . . . uh . . . FAILURE to . . . communicate!"

I notice in cleaning up some articles--a few new edits had misspellings, sentence fragments, and general lack of FABULOUS!--that most are written in the past tense. In English, in a story that unfolds up to the ending where principle characters are still "alive," the use of the past implies that such actions are completed. So if someone writes: "Sango and Kagome were friends" it means that they are no longer friends since they are both alive in the storys conclusion.

Usually, one uses the "historical present." Now, when you write "Thomas Jefferson and John Addams were best-bros before hoes," since you write about dead people 200-odd years in the past, we understand that they were friends in their time period. However, if you know your USA!USA! history, they ceased being "best-bros" for the last few decades of their lives. In the case of fiction where the time of the story continues at the conclusion, it is usually better to use the "historical present" with the past used to describe completed actions, progressive tenses to describe continuing actions, et cetera:

Example: "While Inuyasha and Sessh ōmaru are half-brothers,  Sessh ōmaru was a mature demon at Inuyasha's birth, he never recognizes him as his brother until the very end, and when they were together in the past, they frequently fought. After Inuyasha stole  Sessh ōmaru's X-Box, girlfriend, then drank his beer,  Sessh ōmaru swore before all on his Facebook page that he would be the one to kill his half-brother. During the course of the manga and anime,  Sessh ōmaru frequently updates his Twitter-feed denigrating his brother while extoling his FABULOUSness.

"For his part, Inuyasha continues to blame his half-brother for wrecking his Lamborgini and rooting for the New York Jets. They fight whenever they meet, but by the end of the series, they develope a deep, forbidden love for one another that transends filial affection and violates FCC Standards and Practices, and they decide to move to New Zealand and start a leper colony together."

I am NOT proposing to change the tenses of every [CENSORED--Ed.]ing article, but perhaps it is something to consider when updating/editing paragraphs.

--J.D. 