User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-26285319-20170104192003/@comment-4028641-20170305041438

Thefartydoctor wrote: Okay, I understand your stance. Let's get this back on track. The proposed Rule 4 was: "Those things which don't have the permission of all relevant copyright holders, or those which were never meant to be continuous with the established DWU, are excluded, no matter the authorial intent at time of production."

Surely then there are many characters in the Bernice audios that were once meant to be sly references of unlicensed things that were then fully validated when BF actually got the rights. It's all or nothing -- if Big Finish can do it, anyone can.

Thefartydoctor wrote: Let me get this straight. The emboldened text basically states that if something comes along tomorrow that is valid, and states that Dimensions in Time is totally valid, then nobody can come along and state "but the authorial intent at the time was that it was invalid"? Do I have that right? If so, I'm not for it. It means some big shot writer can walk on the scene and turn a laughably invalid story, that was never meant to be taken seriously, and squeeze it into our multiverse.

That's a silly stance with no real backing. Nothing personal -- I just don't get this point.

Each of the four rules stand for different issues and stances. DiT isn't invalid just because it has some discontinuity. It's invalid because the licensing is weird. No story is going to take that away.

A Fix With Sontarans was considered invalid because it broke the fourth wall at the end. The segment doesn't end before it turns back into a Jim'll Fix it segment, it just bleeds into the real-world ending. So even a Short Trips story that says "Oh it's an alternate universe" can't change the fact that it ends with a scene set in the real-world. At the same time (disagreeing with myself from the past here I know) I don't think we can call that Short Trips story invalid just because it's a sequel to a story that ends with a fourth-wall bend.

There are stories out there tho which are only invalid because we haven't been told that they are valid as of yet. The Unbound series, up to recently, were an example of this. All Unbound stories were always stories, they were always licensed, they were always released. It was just never clear if they were an alternate universe or just "something that wasn't meant to 'count.'" And then a story said that they did count, and it was an alternate universe. So now all Unbound stories are valid as alternate universes.

If a Titan comic came out tomorrow and showed a rag-team of alternative-universe Doctors -- teamed up with Rose Tyler, the clone Tenth Doctor and Rose-the-Cat -- and if that team showed off any invalid incarnations that we had deemed invalid simply off of a lack of information on the fourth rule, then all of those stories would be valid.

Just to be clear, I would say this would include stories like the 1960s Dalek Films, the Lenny Henry skit Seventh Doctor, the Curse of Fatal Death, and many others. They're all a simple explanation away from being valid as an alternative-universe.

This rule, would disqualify this. Thus I'm against this.

Thefartydoctor wrote: ...take the most invalid story you can. Take the story that you'd hate to be valid and assign that rule to it. And then imagine someone waltzing in and writing it valid by means of "oh, it was a parallel universe" or "it was a dream world created by the Dream Lord"...

If they did it with proper narrative backing, then I'd be fine with it. If someone printed a prequel to Doctor Who and the Fangs of Time where the Fourth Doctor lands in our universe and then gives tips to that stories character on how to make one of his adventures fun, then I'd say "call it valid." I think it's silly to try to amend rules simply because we'd rather stories stay invalid even after there's been a valid call to move it to the other side.

I don't like the idea of making up rules just to fight off change.