Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-1296654-20200616211544/@comment-50.37.28.47-20200627180038

Never Forget The Day The 456 Arrived wrote: I'd personally be in favor of a policy allowing us to assume, unless otherwise stated of course, the last names of blood related siblings.

I wouldn't be in favor of such as policy as it would rely too heavily on and reinforce a "traditional family" stereotype. Take the aforementioned thought experiment as written:

Scrooge MacDuck wrote: I don't know, is there any interesting precedent on this? I feel like if we were told that (say) Amy Pond, daughter of Augustus Pond and Tabetha Pond had an offscreen older brother called Preston, we wouldn't actually need a confirmation of the full name to put it at Preston Pond rather than Preston (Doctor Who and the Thought Experiment). I could be wrong. If a case like my thought experiment could be found, presumably not about as high-profile a character as Amy, that'd be grand, but I have no idea how to even start searching.

So all the hypothetical story does is reveal Amy Pond has an older brother: no other information/context. Is he a half-brother? We know barely anything about Amy's parents' backgrounds and never saw him in the scenes of Amy growing up. He could be a retcon full brother. Fine. But with so little information he could equally be a half-brother, foster brother, adoptive brother, and any of those could have a different last name. Heck, even a full older brother could be married and not have the last name Pond.

Amy herself is a funny example because she took Williams as her married name, yet when her and Rory had their biological child well after their wedding, she made their daughter's last name her maiden name.

I don't know enough about John's and Gillian's stories to know what the right course of action on the naming of her page is (I am glad the decision was made to separate though, I never understood why they shared one), but if the decision to make her Gillian Who is made, I wouldn't want that to become a precedent that opens the door to assuming surnames on future pages.