Board Thread:Inclusion debates/@comment-1432718-20170915033630/@comment-6032121-20181206234239

Amorkuz wrote: If I were to opine myself on why advertisements should be universally invalid, I would say that they actually break Rule 4. The main purpose of an advertisement is to highlight something out-of-universe rather than to tell a story (even if a story is present).

I don't know to what extent I can follow this reasoning, though. Authors are always going to have all kinds of unstated, real-world motives for decreeing that this or that is something that happened/exist in the Doctor Who universe.

To cite but one obvious example, the Curator exists because Moffat realized he could get Tom Baker into the 50th anniversary special, and invented the entire character and the concept of the "revisiting of old faces" as a venue for that. The main thing one is meant to get out of it is the return of Tom Baker — just like the main thing one is supposed to get out of the TARDIS-tuner story is that TARDIS-tuners are neat gizmos that the whole family should buy. Yet obviously, that doesn't mean the Curator's existence is invalid…

Amorkuz wrote: Various prequels are to me of the same ilk. In all these cases, there is a separate short story highlighting, and typically closely connected to, the main story. Seems important that the main story is standalone and valid on its own terms.

And there you hit the nail on the head. What we commonly call "trailers" (the disjointed shots and bits of floating text) does not always correlate with what the BBC/Big Finish/whoever are going to call "trailers"; whatever the advertising department calls them when they post them online, those few ‘trailers’ belong to precisely the same genre as 'prequels' and 'minisodes'. Objectively speaking, it's the same medium, the same artform.

To my mind, ignoring those two 'trailers' while keeping prequels and minisodes valid would be akin to declaring a given comic story invalid because our rules only mentioned 'comic stories' as valid sources, and all the advertising for the story at hand called it a 'graphic novel', and thus we legally couldn't call that spade the spade that it so obviously is.

It may be worth noting that another, older inclusion debate presents an example where Tardis Data Core chose to ignore advertising language that leaned one way in favor of the story's actual nature as described by authors and audience alike: the "Vienna solo series" inclusion debates, where, in the face of overwhelming evidence that the actual production team didn't think of it as a "spin-off" as we understand it on Tardis, we safely ignored Big Finish's referring to it as a "spin-off" on their website.