Office of Continuity Verification
Policy on Depictions of Real Historical Persons
Plain language, no Bureau voice
Real historical people appear on this site as the historical record has them, and no further.
The rule
- No invented quotations. We do not write a line of dialogue for a real person, and we do not paraphrase one into quotation marks. Where a real quotation appears, it is a real quotation and the source note says where it comes from.
- No invented motives or interior states. We do not tell you what a real person wanted, feared, believed, or intended beyond what the record supports.
- No in-world participation. Real people do not talk to Bureau staff, file Bureau forms, sign Bureau documents, or appear as characters in a case. The Bureau’s paperwork happens around them. That distance is deliberate and it is also where most of the comedy lives, because the Bureau’s certainty looks worse next to a person it cannot actually reach.
- No living private individuals. They do not appear at all, in any form.
- No fictional records attributed to real institutions. We do not claim a named museum, archive, university, or agency holds a document it does not hold.
Why the rule is drawn here
A fabricated quotation is the one kind of fiction that survives being pulled out of context. Someone can screenshot an invented Jefferson line, or an invented sentence from a disaster victim, and it travels without the satire attached to it. That is a real cost paid by the historical record for a joke that was never worth it.
Bureau staff are invented, so they can say anything. Constance Vale, Milton K. Wren, Dr. Lena Or, Spencer R., Elias P. Thorne, and R. Morrow carry every line this site needs spoken.
Victims are never the punchline
Where an artifact touches a real death, a real disaster, or a real persecution, the target is the institution processing it, and the prose stays respectful. A historical victim is never portrayed as stupid, gullible, primitive, or deserving. We do not use graphic suffering as atmosphere, and we do not reproduce slurs for period texture.
If we have crossed the line
Tell us. The correction requests page explains how. A depiction that reads as putting words in a real person’s mouth is a defect regardless of what we intended, and it gets removed rather than defended.