User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-1451563-20181109023852/@comment-1451563-20181109092301

Ah, good to know! Well, it appears there wasn't much of a conclusion made at the time, so perhaps it is still good I brought this up. But you seemed to change your tune a bit in these five years, haha :P

Well it's good to know that we've at least got a basis for the spelled-out variant. But I guess my only response would be that from Days One and Two of Children of Earth - the only times the names are written on screen to my knowledge - we see "Torchwood 3" twice, "Torchwood 2" once, and "Torchwood 1" once. So it appears it's a bit of a stalemate between the two variants as far as numbers of uses go...

Of course, I would personally automatically defer to the original TV series, but I understand that that's not how the rules were set up here. However, it is worth mentioning that, while both the novel and these episodes feature four uses each, the novel you're saying seems to only include such usages for two Torchwood branches, while these files in CoE deal with three different branches, so in that sense the numerical variant is more prolific.

Additionally, I'm not sure what the exact context is in the book, but I'm assuming it is merely the text of the book that we out-of-universe readers see as representative of the actual words being said by the characters within the story itself. If that is the case - and this is about to get very meta, so forgive me - wouldn't text seen WITHIN the actual world of the show itself take precedence, since it is literally in-universe, while the words that merely CONSTRUCT the world are not in themselves inside that world, necessarily, like the words on these files are? It appears the user who spoke with you did touch upon this idea, but without going quite into the layer I am thinking right now. I don't think they are quite the same. It's like a novel might say X character wore a brown shirt, but that doesn't contribute anything more to what is actually inside the story's world itself regarding that shirt beyond its simply being brown. If it were a television episode, though, the actual article of clothing used in filming the story - perhaps a brown polo shirt with a specific brand symbol on it. What I'm trying to say is that sure it might be written "Torchwood Three" in the text of the fictional novel written in the real world outside the narrative that its story contributes to, but can that really at all override what is specifically seen within that world itself, as Lois' files are? With the files, we are seeing what the characters of that world see. With a novel, we're seeing a real-world author's text on a page that exists outside the Whoniverse.

This is extremely difficult for me to convey at the moment, but am I making any sense?