User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-6032121-20190106135143

OS12th recently removed a paragraph from The Woman's page, which described the presumption (as per A Brief History of Time Lords) that she "was taken from her family at the age of eight for the selection process in the Drylands and made to stare into the Untempered Schism as part of a Time Lord initiation rite".

Since the publication of Brief History, I've seen identical paragraphs pop up on a great number of Time Lord pages, such that I (and, presumably OS12th) have come to wonder if, perhaps, the Brief History just states that this happened to "all Time Lords", without naming names. In which case we would be looking at another "should every dead human ever be called a former Cyberman, what with Death in Heaven?" situation, where the clear precedent is no, we don't put it on every damn page about a Time Lord, even if the information is nominally about all Time Lords.

This goes double with the fact that we absolutely know that some Time Lords didn't have this background (Ace to name but one), so any "All Time Lords…" would be a generalization at best, and a "According to some accounts…" at worst. And as concerns The Woman in particular, if she really is the Doctor's mother, then 1996's Doctor Who suggests that she too has an unorthodox background.

Could someone with current access to the Brief History clear this up?