User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-39450671-20200330222925/@comment-6032121-20200330230539

A lot to unpack here. I think everyone would do well to read through Thread:181963, where we discussed a lot of similar ground in the process of trying to fix the Template:Master_stories navbox; a readthrough will, for example, demonstrate that no, there is no real "commonly-accepted" answer on whether Roger Delgado's Master and Geoffrey Beevers's Master are the same regeneration. And there is at least one source that terms Ainley a "regeneration" from Pratt/Beevers, albeit an unconventional form of regeneration.

All in all, I support the proposal of splitting the Master again, especially if, as User:Shambala108 suggested on other talk pages and threads, we want to cut down on unwieldily-long pages out of concern for mobile users.

But I think trying to be so scrupulous over which Masters are "regenerations" and which Masters are "bodies" is not the way to go about it.

Let's look at Doctor pages: we have the Meta-Crisis Doctor and the Valeyard and the Watcher and the Dream Lord and even bleedin' Popplewick. It doesn't matter that none of these guys were created by conventional regenerations in the Gallifreyan glowy-stuff-pours-out sense of the term. They're played by different actors, and treated as different versions of the Doctor, so we have different pages.

I think the only way to split the Master again and keep our sanity would be to do the same. Every new body gets a page, whether or not it's a stolen body. The Master (Doctor Who) for Roberts, The Master (The Fallen) for the "Preacher" Master, and so on and so forth.

The thing is that the impossibility of figuring out the exact order and mechanics of the Master's body-hopping is a point in favour of splitting the page. Trying to cover the Master's life as a linear biography on The Master is getting harder with every passing month, especially with all the multi-Master stories Big Finish has been putting out.

("Multi-Master stories", I might add, which star Roberts and Beevers as different versions of the Master as part of that gimmick; in-universe there may be no regeneration, but even Big Finish, they who push the "all the Wilderness Years Masters are Beevers stealing bodies" idea so hard, acknowledge that those are for all intents and purposes idfferent Masters.)

Whereas if we have a new The Master (Story X) page for every body of the Master, we no longer have to try to figure out a way to linearly account for every potential post-Survival fate of the Ainley Master. We can have The Master (First Frontier) for the Tzun Master, and Old Master (Doctor Who) for Gordon Tipple's ambiguous Master, and so on and so forth!

…Oh, your original post mentions the War Chief. I think there is room for a discussion reevaluating his relationship to the Master, now that novelisations have been made fully valid rather than subaltern to original works. Because there are novelisations which identify the Master and the War Chief pretty strongly; there is plenty enough justification for us drawing the links the in-universe sections by now, not just the BTS sections.

But that is a rather different discussion from whether to split up The Master in the first place, and I think it should be the subject of its own thread.