Forum:Iris Wildthyme: should she stay or should she go?

There's very little debate that the character of Iris Wildthyme, as used in her Doctor Who-labelled crossovers, is a part of the DWU, and therefore something to be covered by this wiki.

Where it gets murkier are the books and audios where she's on her own. I think these should be put well outside our borders, because they are explicitly not in the DWU as stated by the publisher.

Here are some selections from the IW submission guidelines Obverse Books have on their webite, which can be found at http://obversebooks.co.uk/guide/.


 * Iris’ origins are shrouded in mystery, which is the way Iris likes it. The most recent theory suggests that she comes from the Clockworks, the home of a race of powerful but indolent technologically advanced aliens, situated in a separate universe to our own known as the Obverse. Some have hinted that it is the manner in which the people of the Clockworks merely record and not intervene which caused Iris to leave in her bus, looking for adventure and excitement. There have also been suggestions that there is something rotten in the Obverse, something which scares Iris for some reason…

So, her people are the "Clockworks" and explicitly not the Time Lords. Yes, we all know what "Clockworks" is code for, but no, code language isn't good enough — as has been established at forum:How do we best include Faction Paradox on the wiki? We also have a named other universe from which she apparently comes. And it ain't the DWU.


 * The Doctor, Time Lords, Cybermen and all that Jazz


 * Nowhere to be seen. Not even in jest. Nothing whose copyright belongs elsewhere, either BBC or Big Finish or Telos or whatever.


 * You can hint if it’s sufficiently subtle and deniable, but that’s about it. And it’d have to be pretty damn subtle and deniable, so calling them Cyberons or introducing a mysterious time travelling boyfriend called The Dentist isn’t going to work.

Heh, I like the dig at Bill Baggs here, but it's also fairly conclusive evidence that Obverse aren't playin' the same game as BBV or even Bernice Summerfield. They're not trying to remain in the DWU using only characters to which they have a license. This isn't P.R.O.B.E. where they've got permission for Liz Shaw — but not Benton — so they just fail to include Benton. Iris Wildthyme stories, at least by Obverse, just aren't in the DWU at all. They're taking a character out of the DWU and building a wholly new, and largely parodic, universe around that character. Which, again, is very different than what happens with Bernice Summerfield stuff.

It's more akin to what happened to Lucille Ball when she went from I Love Lucy to The Lucy Show. Yes, The Lucy Show basically still features Lucy Ricardo amd Ethel Mertz — only now they're both divorced and neither talks about her ex that much.

So I think all of it should go — save, again, for those things that happen in stories clearly branded with the Doctor Who logo. What do we do with it? Create another mini-wiki, I guess. It'd be pretty easy, given the pace of development at w:c:factionparadox over the last week.

Objections? 19:19: Fri 25 May 2012

I used to wonder why Mary Tyler Moore had divorced Dick van Dyke -- clearly the marriage had crumbled when the boy had died and she needed to get as far away as possible. Why did she change her name though?

Here, though, Ms. Wildthyme has not bothered to change her name, not even to the extent that Lucy Ricardo did. It's still Ms. Wildthyme, even in those Big Finish productions where Katy Manning is voicing her and Jo Grant. Given the slovenly BBC attitude towards continuity, I think we have little reason to turn our noses up at Ms. Wildthyme and the issues of picking and choosing which set of adventures is canonical and which isn't. So, yeah, I object. Boblipton talk to me 20:56, May 25, 2012 (UTC)


 * I'm with Bob. The argument with Faction Paradox was that these weren't stories about Time Lords with TARDISes from Gallifrey, they're stories about members of the Great Houses with timeships from the Homeworld. The change in names was a sign of the change in universes.


 * That's not what Obverse is doing with Iris. they're just telling stories about what Iris is doing when she's not around the Doctor (or anything else owned by the BBC or anybody else). And Iris is still visiting the DCU on a semi-regular basis. To me, this seems very much like the Bernice Summerfield situation.


 * And it's worth remembering that the Clockworks backstory first appeared in a BBC-licensed Doctor Who novel, The Blue Angel. I'm not seeing the problem here. —Josiah Rowe talk to me 00:42, May 26, 2012 (UTC)


 * @Bob: Carol Brady didn't bother to changeher name for The Brady Bunch movies of the 1990s, but no one in their right mind would argue that Shelley Long is playing the same character as Florence Henderson.  Christopher Reeve and Tom Welling both played a guy named Clark Kent whose real identity was Kal-El from the planet Krypton.  That doesn't mean that Smallville is in the same continuity as Superman II.  Guys named Greene and Olomos have both played a Colonial leader named "Adama", but that doesn't mean that the two BSGs are necessarily in the same continuity.


 * Fiction is rife with examples of related characters with the same name. It's hardly fair to dismiss this thread's proposal simply on the basis that Paul Magrs didn't change his lead character's name. If he called her something other than "Iris Wildthyme", he would be losing a significant marketing asset.


 * @Josiah: Could you develop your last point a bit further, please? The word "Clockworks" does not appear in The Blue Angel.  The word "clockwork" does, but only three times, always in its ordinary English meaning. The word "clock" appears only six times, always in ordinary ways.


 * Also, this isn't at all like the Bernice situation, as far as I can see, because Bernice has had solo encounters with other elements of the DWU — Daleks, Sontarans, Braxiatel, whatever. AFIAK, there's no attempt to suggest that Benny is in some alternate universe to the Doctor.


 * Not so, Iris. The publisher specifies that Iris' people, called the Clockworks, come from another universe called "the Obverse". Yet, she's definitely a Time Lord from Gallifrey in the DWU stories.  I'm not seeing how that's compatible with being a Clockwork from the Obverse in the IWU stories.


 * Just as with other inclusion debates, I'm gonna need more info if I'm going to be able to integrate this into our "what this wiki covers" policy document. I need to know what the actual difference is between this and FP. As it stands, it really looks like Obverse are changing names to protect their asses, just like FP.  I'm not sure I'd be able to convincingly distinguish between the two cases.  15:10: Sat 26 May 2012


 * CzechOut could you give more information on exactly what you want to exclude from 'what this wiki covers policy' (we need a shorter name for it).


 * Are you proposing to exclude just the Obverse Books published stories? What of the Big Finish Productions books and audio? And Snowbooks' Enter Wildthyme? --Tangerineduel / talk 15:30, May 26, 2012 (UTC)