User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-26285319-20170104192003/@comment-4028641-20170607224907

This thread has gone off-the-rails, to the point that I'm not even sure what we're going for here anymore. It seems the original poster wanted to change the wording of T:VS to make currently invalid stories more invalid, and now we've gotten to the point where we're talking about adding to the 4 rules almost all based around that Glam Rock fellow. i don't disagree with the suggestions -- in fact I totally 100% do agree with them.

However, I feel like we should all either embrace or reject OP's original suggestion before moving any other discussions to another thread just for the sake of simplicity. Currently, this thread has devolved into an area where we all just listed something we didn't like about rule 4, and this really wasn't extremely helpful towards finding any sort of goal to reach.

So here's my opinion.

Personally I see no point in adding a clause that removes authorial intent, the most important factor to deciding if a story is valid or not, to any stories.

As far as I can tell, this thread was created because some users argued around this time that since some of these "parallel canon" stories were written to be legit continuations at the tine, they should be valid. This user suggested that we should add a line to suggest that this opinion isn't important.

This rule would only cause a change in one story -- that is, The Infinity Doctors, which we only call an alternate dimension because of out-of-universe information on the intent of the book. If we eliminated authorial intent when it came to just non-continuous stories, then this book would then be invalid.

I think that if you wanted to talk about the foamy top layer of stories that we consider invalid and why, it would be needed to be in its own separate and organised thread. But I do not believe that the specific case to be made here, that we should remove authorial intent only for these four or five stories, have much potency.