Talk:The Castellan has returned and has brought a message from Gallifrey! (fan work)

INvalidity
Why does breaking the fourth wall on its own make this invalid. Off the top of my head; The Feast of Steven, The Invasion of Time, The Caves of Androzani, Death in Heaven, Before the Flood, Torchwood_cascade_CDRIP.tor, Dead Air, The Thief of Sherwood, every single story featuring The Shift, Terror of the Umpty-Ums, In the Forest of the Night, Remembrance of the Daleks, Conundrum, Head Games, Legend of the Cybermen, The Mind Robber (and all other land of fiction stories have inherently meta-premises, just those four openly and specifically do so), any time the Weeping Angels keep still because the camera is looking at them, Adam, many 60s comics, many Faction Paradox stories, Heaven Sent, A Deatu in the Family, any story where the narrator is treated an an actual character but there’s no in-universe reason for them to be recounting the adventure, especially when the narrator is addressed Tom Baker every time the Fourth Doctor is companionless, From Wildthyme with Love, a lot of Wildthyme stories actually, and quite a few short stories and.... you know what I’ll stop now because I can think of an unlistably large number even just off the top of my head. So why should this one breaking the wall make it invalid? Sure, some, like Heaven Sent and Baker, can just be interpreted as the Doctor talking himself, and Nobody No-One claiming that he has become aware that the Doctor’s universe is fictional too could have been a desperate lie to stop the Doctor killing him, which the Doctor and Evelyn speculate on just before she dies, with both admitting they’re not sure either way. I’ll accept that. But examples like Steven, Torchwood, and Wildthyme are very explicit. What else did the Doctor mean by ‘at home’? The Torchwood example - even the title and premise are completely unambiguous fourth wall breaks! And Wildthyme might be biggest break in the show’s history, certainly amongst the ones we call valid, but a lot even more than the ones we don’t -I would say probably including this one- Wildthyme ends up in the Feast of Steven and acknowledges, in those words, that the episodes she’s in has been junked, having its tape wiped. Yes, using the words ‘junked’, ‘episode’ and the phrase ‘well, you can still listen the soundtrack and look at some black and white telsnaps to see what’s going on’. She then acknowledges the fact she’s breaking the fourth wall, sees an old man who they legally can’t call such but it is clearly as even this wiki acknowledges The First Doctor in the aforementioned The Feast of Steven and climbs out through the fourth wall itself, escaping via a shortcut through reality. Throughout the book, Iris and Panda rampage throughout this history of our little show, demoliting all sixteen walls in the process; acknowledging actors, rattling off different historical genres, wondering out loud (well, not out loud actually because it’s an epistolary novel but you catch my drift) if any ‘old footage’ (again, using those exact words) of them has been ‘edited in’ (again... well you get the the idea). The only way this story could heap the fourth wall harder is if the characters ACTUALLY DID climb out of the pages of the book and stab you to death! Also pretty our four little rules don’t mention the fourth wall, nor does any other part of T:VALID. Jusssssst sayin’.NightmareofEden ☎  12:21, April 26, 2020 (UTC)
 * Aaaah… please cut down this unspeakable wall of text! This is nigh-unreadable.


 * Personally I do think the Wiki's policies should be more lenient with this sort of thing, but the relevance of fourth-wall-breaking is Rule 4. We can fairly surmise from some kinds of fourth-wall-breaking that there was no intent for the story to "count" as part of the DWU. With Iris, and most anything Magrs-related, we know full well it's intended to be in the DWU whatever happens, because it's part of the point that Iris is, in-universe, a metafictional being.


 * On the other hand, there is no sign that anyone involved in the production of The Castellan has returned and has brought a message from Gallifrey! had an in-universe explanation/rationalization in mind for the Castellan seemingly reaching out of N-Space and talking to the viewer in our universe. There are many precedents for stories whose method of fourth-wall-breaking is that it implies that you, the reader, are somehow a character in the story, to be invalid on that basis; The Runaway, to take a recent and high-profile example. (And, mind you, one where I personally argued otherwise! But policy is policy.)


 * And you have no authority to rule edge-cases like these valid without an inclusion debate. Stories which look a bit shifty are invalid till proven otherwise in the Forums. I am reapplying the Invalid tag for now and I dearly ask you not to remove it again out of hand. --Scrooge MacDuck ☎  12:44, April 26, 2020 (UTC)