Talk:Chronotis

Move page?
I always insist on naming things correctly, so... shouldn't this page be moved to Salyavin, as that is his original Time Lord name? -- NOTASTAFF  GPT ( talk )( eating ) 12:15, 22 August 2007 (UTC)


 * I disagree. Do we call the Master's page Koschei? OS25 (talk to me, baby.) 00:51, January 13, 2012 (UTC)


 * I believe this page should be re-moved to Chronotis. OS25 (talk to me, baby.) 22:41, January 16, 2012 (UTC)


 * You'll need a different admin to agree with you. I, for one, refuse to move the page to Chronitis.  It's not analogous to the Koschei/Master thing at all, in part because both Salyavin and Chronitis are given in the same story.  All due respect to the concept of all stories having equal weight, but Koschei came in the 1990s in one obscure novel.  By contrast, it's a critical plot point in Shada that the guy's name is Salyavin.  With these alternate names for the Doctor, the Master, the Monk and the Rani, they're not really crucial to the plot of a novel.  They're kind of incidental, if interesting, details.  And we don't have a declarative statement that These Are The Character's Real Names.  They come across to me as merely school nicknames.  Here, we are told unambiguously and directly that Chronitis' real name is Salyavin.  If he were to encounter Time Lords on Gallifrey, that's what they'd call him, in the same way that the High Council has repeatedly been seen calling the Doctor "the Doctor" and the Master "the Master".


 * In short, I agree with the original poster from 2007. 16:35: Sat 21 Jan 2012


 * Well, despite this, "Chronotis" was still the name he went by. He USED to be called "Salyavin," but now he goes by "Chronotis." The Doctor's real name is a plot point right now, but if in the next episode of the show, it was revealled that the Doctor's name was "Jim," we wouldn't change the page to "Jim," would we? No, it would still be "The Doctor." although, in hindsight, it propably doesn't matter that much. OS25 (talk to me, baby.) 20:01, February 11, 2012 (UTC)


 * I agree with OttelSpy. Articles should be titled by the most commonly used name, and when people refer to this character they generally call him Chronotis, not Salyavin. We don't find out that Chronotis was Salyavin until the end of the story; in story terms, he's Chronotis for ages before that revelation. And I think that article naming should be based on out-of-universe considerations. —Josiah Rowe talk to me 02:46, May 29, 2012 (UTC)


 * The difference between Salyavin/Chronotis and Koschei/Master is that "Chronotis" was a human alias of Salyavin, while "the Master" is a Gallifreyan alias of Koschei. A more accurate counterpart to "Chronotis" is "Yana" or "Harold Saxon", while a more accurate counterpart to Koschei/Master is Mortimus/Monk or (Doctor's name)/Doctor. Bwburke94 ~ Creator of All Things Brilliant! ~ 21:00, July 2, 2014 (UTC)


 * I would say that the perfect comparison is Kate Stewart. Now, we know that she was born with her father's more elongated name, but she goes by Stewart now so we changed it to that after one episode, even with five stories beforehand that did not know her in that sense, because that's the name that we know she prefers to go by. It's similar to MOS:IDENTITY in Wikipedia to me. Either we need to go with what they preferred to be known as or we go by what they were called in most of their appearances. In both cases, the answer is Chronotis.


 * Also, by no means is Chronotis a human alias taken by a Time Lord. It's the name taken by a Time Lord which he used in his society for years. OS25 (talk to me, baby.) 16:26, August 27, 2015 (UTC)

I can't believe I've kept a discussion going on for ten years. Curse my unhelpful meddling.

Anyways, we should totes move this to Chronotis. It's simply with the precedent. OS25 (Talk) 22:55, February 10, 2017 (UTC)


 * I agree that this page should be moved to Chronotis for the reasons given by OttelSpy and Josiah Rowe above. --GusF ☎  10:19, September 2, 2017 (UTC)


 * I also agree with the proposed move for the reasons listed above. For the majority of the story, he is called Chronotis, and that's the title he's given in the Dirk Gently novels, so both in- and out-of-universe, that is the name he is most commonly associated with, and the title of the page should reflect this. – N8 ☎ 04:19, September 3, 2017 (UTC)

Another reason to move this page to Chronotis: that's what he's called in Cambridge Previsited. – N8 ☎ 16:09, November 16, 2018 (UTC)
 * Well, the key problem is really whether we consider that Chronotis was an alias used by Salyavin on Earth, or that it is a name he took on after rejecting his Gallifreyan past. If it's the latter, the same principle that make us use "the Doctor" and "the Master" definitely suggests we use Chronotis, and it would be tidier, since that's the name he's best-known by. On the other hand, if it's an alias, I'm afraid it is indeed functionally equivalent to "Harold Saxon" and there'd be little sense in calling the page that.


 * (In the interest of not confusing future editors on the matter, I'll make a note that the Master example earlier on this same page labored on the idea that Koschei was definitely the Master's real name. This was before some kind soul did some digging and found that the evidence for this was very flimsy at best.) --Scrooge MacDuck ☎  19:46, February 5, 2019 (UTC)


 * This is about as borderline as any naming debate can come under the policy of "whatever he is usually called." Assuming no further adventures in his life beyond what we've seen, almost no one knows that he and Salyavin are the same person.  Given that the only remaining people who do know allow him to continue living the rest of his life as Chronotis, I would say that's the defining factor.


 * One could argue that Salyavin is his most "notable" name since he achieved the most fame under it, but Chronotis was well-enough known that the First Doctor had heard of him, so we can't discount that the fact that Time Lords as a whole, likely the only people who remembered Salyavin, probably also knew of Chronotis. --Schreibenheimer  ☎  17:08, April 16, 2019 (UTC)


 * Having read the discussion above, I too think the page should be moved to Chronotis. -- Saxon (✉️) 11:07, July 29, 2019 (UTC)


 * I've just read the novelisation of Shada, and here are some even more damning arguments for renaming Salyavin to Chronotis: present-day Chronotis doesn't consider himself to be Salyavin anymore, the name having "died" when he regenerated from the body imprisoned in Shada into a new one shortly after his escape. (The Doctor further speculates that up until the events of the story rejigger his memory, Professor Chronotis had willfully forgotten that he was Salyavin.) Here are two of the relevant passages :
 * �����"You and I both know, Doctor", said the Professor, "the prisoners were sent there to be forgotten. It's not an excuse, but I paid a heavy price for what I did. The process almost killed me. In a way, it did. As far as I was concerned, it certainly killed Salyavin."


 * "Sorry", said Chris, "this 'coming back from the dead thing, is that part of your power?"


 * "Oh no", said the Doctor. "That's quite common. What the Professor meant was that he regenerated. He was reincarnated into a new body."


 * and:


 * "And I swore", said the Professor, "that from the moment I became Chronotis I would forget Salyavin (…)."


 * More prosaically, note that even in this scene, well after everybody involved (Doctor and Chris and reader and all) know that Salyavin and Chronotis are one and the same, the narration continues calling the present-day Cambridge professor Chronotis.


 * Oh, and to address CzechOut's earlier supposition that "if Chronotis went to Gallifrey, they'd still call him Salyavin," the novelisation also puts the kibosh on that and clarifies that he already went by Chronotis on Gallifrey, long before he retired:


 * "In his new body, [he] simply returned to Gallifrey — with a new name as well. With a little bit of less dubious mental jiggery-pokery, he managed to convince everyone he was the kindly old archivist Professor Chronotis, a man with no political ambitions whatsoever."--Scrooge MacDuck ☎  21:43, August 13, 2019 (UTC)

Image that appeared to Skagra
MagicManky wrote way back when:
 * The image of Salyavin displayed to Skagra in the Shada webcast bore a strong resemblance to the Time Lord seen in Genesis of the Daleks.

The image at right was what he was talking about but it was subsequently removed to tidy up the page. --Nyktimos 00:24, August 12, 2010 (UTC)
 * He originally wrote "strong" not slight. --Nyktimos 00:28, August 12, 2010 (UTC)
 * Interesting link to draw, but I'm not convinced that the resemblance was intended. The black silhouette behind the Time Lord's face does kinda look like the weird costume worn by the Genesis character (incidentally, another source tells us his name is Ferain), but that's because it's silhouetted in the B&W artwork, and therefore black; it looks to me like it's just the side of a Time Lord high collar.


 * As for the physical resemblance, the facial structures can be argued to be similar or identical, but clearly the most distinctive trait of the Shada guy is that big scar across his face, conspicuously absent in the Genesis Time Lord.


 * Bottom line, by my analysis, you have every right to personally decide to draw this link in your headcanon, but as far as this Wiki goes, it's nowhere near clear enough to even begin to suggest they might be the same person. (We are, let me remind you, the stubborn old sticklers for the rules still arguing that we don't technically have confirmation that Jack Harkness is the Face of Boe, the very same Wiki who needed a lengthy discussion to make sure that the Rassilon played by Timothy Dalton in The End of Time was the same old Rassilon as opposed to some other arrogant artifact-wielding Time Lord leading figure who happened to share his name, the cranks for whom the possibility that the Woman is the Doctor's mother and/or the same Woman as is later seen in Hell Bent is too wild to be put in the in-universe section of the relevant pages. …My point is, you never stood a chance, my poor friend.) --Scrooge MacDuck ☎  19:46, February 5, 2019 (UTC)