Currently, all ability animation techniques are of the form "Character performing technique in world."
I agree with Erry that in many cases, it is unnecessary to specify the game that the animation is from, as it is often obvious from the section or article title which game it has to be. For example, Transcendence says that it only appears in BbS -- there is no need to specify the game, or honestly have a caption at all. For Aero, each image is neatly arranged in a section devoted to its game, large enough for the image to be appropriate -- for these, all that needs to be specified is if the animation is Aero, Aerora, or Aeroga.
However, because we do have techniques that vary by character and world, and we are not in the habit, or ever likely to be, of having images for every possible variation of a technique, or even making sure to detail every single facet of the mechanics, listing the character and world is not only totally irrelevant fluff, but it has the potential to imply to new readers that the animation is specific to that character or world.
Finally, having these qualifiers, which are totally arbitrary niggles at the throwaway discretion of the photographer, mean that we have to change the caption if we ever change the image -- an issue we have already seen.
It is also not enough to excuse this with "the reader can tell from the character or world". This is hideously false in almost all cases (we have almost four games with the same character-world combinations), and requires that, for the reader to accurately read the image, they must have already read and be familiar with the character, world, and game articles. This is the opposite of what captions are for -- to make the subject of the image more accessible to the reader, and clarify why it is relevant. There is a reason that we don't, for example, note that the character has a certain Keyblade or Form/Command Style equipped at the time.
Having these in the caption, where they do not purposefully denote a variation of the technique, is dishonest, irrelevant, creates more work for us, and subverts the purpose of the caption for the reader. Leaving out the game, in some cases, leaves out the actual relevant information.
I propose that technique animation captions list
- the name of the technique if any of the below apply, or if there are multiple versions of the technique.
- the game the technique appeared in, if the image is not clearly placed in a game-specific section, or appears in multiple games.
- the character of the technique, if it varies based on the user in that game (Break Time is one of the few that would qualify here)
- the world of the technique, if it varies based on the world in that game (Pride Lands and Atlantica should be the only ones that apply here)
To clarify: This would not at all limit what can be mentioned in the caption. It would actually be perfectly appropriate to say something like "Transcendence summons several spherical spatial distortions, then expands them to cover the battlefield." If we all agree to it, we could even say something like, "Transcendence summons several spherical spatial distortions, then expands them to cover the battlefield. In this instance, Terra uses the technique to eliminate a Chrono Twister and several Tank Topplers in the Central Square." However, for these parameters, which do have a strong potential to mislead, we need to be incredibly careful in how we use them, if it all, to make absolutely sure we don't create a false interpretation of the image.
Not too much to say on this issue, looks like you hit the nail on the head. The only thing is that I think that the caption should always have the name of the technique. I just hope that that ridiculously long caption example you used was hypothetical, since that's frankly a terrible way to caption images. EDIT: I was talking about the one that described what enemies and where, the last example you gave.
