Talk:Reason

Citations

Context: A few days ago, I made an edit to this page that removed most of the References, in addition to rewriting the sections for each individual Reason to something that I believed would be better. Since some 60 citations were removed (leaving only the ones for Novel Appearances, Trivia and Nomenclature), I put in an edit summary of "Surely we don't need that many citations" because I knew a large amount of text being removed would draw someone's attention, but that day I just felt like writing something different on the summary, and I figured people would do what I usually do, which is check the diff and the old version and come to the same conclusion I did: the page has too many citations that don't meaningfully add to the text. The edit has since been reverted, and I accept that I should have brought it up before making such a sizeable change, and also been less neglectful with my summary.

I will at least bring the topic up here to demonstrate my perspective. To avoid discussing every one of the 74 citations individually, I loosely grouped them by their content:

1. There are citations of external (to the SMT3 game) texts. These should stay, and I did keep them in my now-reverted edit.
   • These are nos. 68 - 74. 7 in total.
2. There are citations that are in-game text that the player has to see by progressing through the story. I find it hard to believe that these are to the benefit of confirming information that is "questionable or would otherwise be difficult to verify offhand" when the player can't beat the game without it being displayed (glitches notwithstanding).
   • These are nos. 1, 5, 6, 8, 10 - 12, 14 - 16, 19, 22, 26, 29 - 31, 34, 37, 45, 48, 51, 55 - 60, 62 and 63. 29 in total.
3. There are citations from route-specific dialogue, which are obviously missable, but being part of the story means that it should be easy to find, in the wiki itself or elsewhere.
   • These are nos. 2, 3, 7, 13, 20, 24, 25, 28, 39, 42, 43, 46, 47, 53, 54, 61 and 64 - 67. 20 in total.
4. There are citations from NPC dialogue, which tends to be fully optional and not under the scope of something like a Plot page. I believe these types of citations should stay if it adds something that is not seen in the main story, like the one dialogue from Heat where he says he likes listening to metal in DDSAT1.
   • These are nos. 4, 9, 17, 18, 21, 23, 27, 32, 33, 35, 36, 38, 40, 41, 44, 49, 50 and 52. 18 in total.

At the very minimum, I believe citations like those in groups 2 and 3 do not meaningfully add to the content of the page due to not verifying otherwise unreliable information. Of the NPC citations, I believe nos. 18, 21, 23, 32, 33, 36, 38, 40, 41, 49, 50 and 52 do not add information or context that is not already readily present in the main story. These total to 61 citations, which I propose should be removed for the sake of brevity.

To mention the remaining NPC citations:

• No. 4 says that the three stones of treasure are "proof of Reason", which is not elaborated upon in the main story and relevant enough to the topic. This is not brought up in the main text of the article, though I think it should.
• No. 9 says that Demi-fiend is the one that will create the new world. This is stated outright by Hikawa and Chiaki's dialogue in the Yosuga ending implies it, but it being said by a random Soul is arguably interesting.
• No. 17 provides a point of comparison between the pre-Yosuga Mantra and Yosuga proper, specifically on how the Mantra used jails and trials by combat, while Yosuga may forego that entirely. This point should be brought up in the article.
• No. 27 implies that there is an intragroup division within Yosuga followers to some extent, which is not implied by the main story or brought up in the article.
• No. 35 implies that there are Musubi followers that see solitude as strength, something that is not stated outright in the main story and is at best implied in the article.
• No. 44 uniquely has a Musubi-following Soul offering their perspective on darkness, which is also potentially interesting.

GabrielSemicolon (talk) 19:17, 4 August 2026 (UTC)