One of my pet peeves in mmos is when NPCs address your PC in a way that doesn't make sense, gramatically. For example, no one would walk up to The Punisher and say, "Hey, The Punisher! I wanna talk to you."
What I suggest is, in addition to our normal PC name, we have a nickname that in game NPCs use when addressing you directly. That way, the president can refer to Drax The Destroyer as simply "Drax", for instance. Or if your player name already works, you can have a fun nickname anyway ("Spidey" for Spider-Man).
I like this idea.
There could even be categories, such as "friends call you this," "news organizations call you this," "fans call you this," "people who don't know you call you this," and so on.
Back to your example:
Characters should be able to make "The" an optional prefix title. Then the game would know exactly what to do with it whether to drop it or not, depending on context. And I hope CoT has this. [url=https://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Titles]In fact,"The" was a free title in CoX.[/url] Or you could make "The" part of your name like the character "The Dark" a character from Continüm Comics in the early 1990's.
I would expect that if you made "the Destroyer" part of your name, then suffix-titles would be awkward for you. You'd probably have to do without suffix titles, unless you wanted to be one of those Drax the Destroyer, the Bringer of Death, multiple title kind of things. I guess there's a time and place for all things.
[hr]I like to take your ideas and supersize them. This isn't criticism, it is flattery. I come with nothing but good will and a spirit of team-building. If you take what I write any other way, that is probably just because I wasn't very clear.
This would be a pretty simple way to handle multiple dialog situations like this. We could assume all of these would default to your basic name if you didn't feel like coming up with anything unique and the game could even include things like "your sidekick would call you this", "your significant other would call you this" and "your mother would call you this if she was upset with you". ;)
There was a vaguely similar suggestion first made years ago to allow each costume slot of a character have its own "nickname" so if you were wearing your "secret identity" outfit the game would refer to you using your secret ID name. Perhaps these ideas could be folded together somehow.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
Pretty sure CoH had a thing that you could make the 'The' not part of your character's actual name.
I do like the idea of nicknames for characters/costumes though.
Though if you want to know the proper placement of the the's here is the helpful video to do the explaining.
[YouTube]EPSHQL6Zo74[/YouTube]
"Let the past die. Kill it if you have to."
In "Wearing the Cape", a reporter addresses The Harlequin as "The", because he knows her well enough to be on a first-name basis. ^_^
Foradain, Mage of Phoenix Rising.
[url=https://cityoftitans.com/forum/foradains-character-conclave]Foradain's Character Conclave[/url]
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Avatar courtesy of [s]Satellite9[/s] [url=https://www.instagram.com/irezoomie/]Irezoomie[/url]
In City of Heroes, the "The" was an optional [url=https://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Titles]title[/url] field you could add. So if your character was named "Double Devil", and you selected the "The" title, it would show up over your head as:
[center][size=12]The[/size]
[size=16][b]Drunken Dragon[/b][/size][/center]
Then when you made level 15, you could add a title word, which was picked from a common list and had one word for each letter of the alphabet except for J, K, N, Q, X, Y, and Z. (And yes, I'd like to buy a vowel.) So let's say you picked Daring:
[center][size=12]The Daring[/size]
[size=16][b]Drunken Dragon[/b][/size][/center]
Then with level 25, you could add another one based on your origin. So, for example, if you were Natural origin...
[center][size=12]The Daring Death Defying[/size]
[size=16][b]Drunken Dragon[/b][/size][/center]
You could change these every five levels. In the text, NPCs would leave off the titles and just use the main name.
That said, I don't recall how we're managing titles. But in the text, at least, we've got "put this pronoun here" flags so we don't have crazy stilted writing that avoids any words keyed on, say, gender. (And though I have no say in it, I'm hoping we manage some fill-in-boxes facility for "other" pronouns, too, not just the two big ones.)
[i]Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...[/i]