Board Thread:Policies/@comment-20551-20190224085917/@comment-3361105-20190225023728

This is a matter of perspective.

It has always irked me when people use 1st on characters who are quite obviously never going to be seen again, whether that is signalled by their death or by patterns/clichés recognized through decades of experience reading comics.

Which is not to say that you aren't correct in pointing out that these obscure characters are occasionally brought back - sometimes (and typically) decades later. But that is no more provable until it occurs than labelling the comic as their only appearance. Six of one, half a dozen the other.

Except, that "first appearance" implies a second, just as "last appearance" implies at least one previous appearance. So, in the event that a character tagged with 1st never does appear again (or can't appear again, such as in licensed series that DC no longer has the rights to, or creator owned projects, or limited series with defined endings) 1st would be both presumptive and incorrect. Whereas Only would, under many circumstances, be most appropriate and most correct.

With the caveat that we acknowledge that continuity shifts around as it does, we can accommodate for that by retroactively changing things, rather than falsely assuming that continuity is so fluid as to never have a character who could only appear once, across all time and space.

Which is why the "all or nothing" argument that you very definitely made by recommending deletion in the first place doesn't work. 1st is not an adequate replacement for Only. Only serves a very particular purpose, just as Only Dies, AppDeath, Last, and Possessed do. There's no reason we can't use all of them for the purposes they are intended, and there's no reason to misuse 1st to unnecessarily replace a perfectly functional template that ain't broke.

Those "some instances" you spoke of do exist, which is why the template exists, and should continue to.