Board Thread:Inclusion debates/@comment-4028641-20170130104802/@comment-188432-20170131013310

This is very much like Death's Head or the Fantastic Four. We don't consider appearances in later solo titles (or earlier titles) as being necessarily connected. (The first) Death's Head came from The Transformers, but we don't consider the Transformers a part of the DWU. That character eventually makes it to an encounter with the Fantastic Four and Iron Man, but we've always quite firmly resisted going beyond the point in the narrative where the Seventh Doctor lands on top of the Baxter Building.

It's fine to point out in a BTS note that the characters went on to have a life of their own, but that's as far as we can reasonably go. If all you use are the "four little rules", I guess you can prove just about anything valid. But they are not the be-all, end-all of validity. Much too much has been made of that lately. T:VS is a much larger, more nuanced page, and the four little rules are just a quick summary that gives us something we can use in most cases to make a quick determination.

That's why it's important to remember that the Board:Inclusion debates description focuses on the four little rules not because they are the entirety of our decision-making process, but merely because board descriptions have a character limit.

As several participants to recent inclusion debates have pointed out, there's more to it than that. You have to ask yourself some common sense questions.

And one of the common sense questions we might ask here is whether the authors of the comic series genuinely meant their work to take place in the DWU. And they surely didn't. There would have been no financial inducement to do so. Why tie your fortunes to the BBC if you don't have to? And why would Epic Comics, the imprint that published the Sleaze Brothers mini-series, want to get entangled with potential BBC copyright problems?

Finally, the standard OS25 uses in his original post is not one we can reasonably use.


 * "It tallies with the characters' other depictions, with nothing indicating it's not the same universe."

We need positives, not double-negatives. The absence of a negative is not at all the same thing as a positive.

So, returning to Follow That TARDIS!: there is no new information provided by OS25 that would give cause to cover the Sleaze Brothers mini-series here at Tardis. The way things are set up, with a link to the Marvel Database's page on the Epic Comics' series, is completely adequate to meet the needs of our readers.