Talk:Ansillon

Merge
The reason I created this separate from K'anpo Rimpoche, at least initially, was that we should probably discuss how we want to proceed here first. The clues should be enough to point to him being the same character, but given the link is not explicitly made to K'anpo, how authoritative should this story be for reframing his narrative?

The thing is, if this is definitely K'anpo, this story tells us that he originally went by Ansillon, then came back to this name later in life. Sounds like Ansillon would be the more appropriate name for the Time Lord in general. On the other hand, this isn't used in any other story he's appeared in. (And this is a name the character also rejects, it would seem, when he breaks away from Gallifrey as K'anpo Rimpoche.)

Middle ground might be committing to the Hermit for the main page, with the understanding that he started out as Ansillon, went by a variety of names on Gallifrey (which aren't explicitly stated to be separate incarnations), then stuck with K'anpo Rimpoche while he rejected Time Lord society, before making peace with his background and practicing a kind of radical acceptance as Ansillon, back where he began.

Any thoughts? 02:29, 19 April 2022 (UTC)


 * It doesn't help that, while we currently treat K'anpo as the identity of the Doctor's hermit-mentor mentioned in The Time Monster, there are plenty of other identities proposed in valid sources, including Azmael, the Stranger, and the hermit (The Taking of Planet 5). In this light, Blood of the Time Lords has presented us with a golden opportunity to fix our coverage of this character. Here's what I suggest:
 * Move the "hermit on the mountain" material from K'anpo Rimpoche to The Hermit, which can serve as an in-universe disambiguation page like Time Lord messenger (Genesis of the Daleks) or The Doctor's mother.
 * Use K'anpo Rimpoche to cover the material from Planet of the Spiders. It can be treated like an incarnation page even though it covers two incarnations, removing the need for K'anpo Rimpoche 1 (Planet of the Spiders) and K'anpo Rimpoche 2 (Planet of the Spiders). (And shouldn't it be called K'anpo, since "" is an honourific?)
 * Use Ansillon as the page for the Time Lord of whom K'anpo was an incarnation.
 * This would let us fully incorporate Blood of the Time Lords into our coverage without deprioritizing K'anpo or the Hermit as "just a phase" or unworthy of coverage on their own merits. Just my personal proposal, but I think it would slice the Gordian knot and make our Hermit-related pages dramatically clearer. – n8 (☎) 04:06, 19 April 2022 (UTC)
 * I don't believe the Stranger is intended to be an identity for the hermit? The Patience story has him existing in the vicinity of a mountain on Gallifrey, but that's rather a thin argument to connect him to the Hermit. Per The Time Monster itself, the Doctor used to live in a "house halfway up that mountain", so in the wider context of who the Stranger is mysteriously meant to be…


 * (And about the The Taking of Planet 5 hermit, two questions: first, what's the in-universe evidence that he's the same as the Time Monsters hermit, aside from both being Gallifreyan hermits? And second, are we sure he isn't supposed to also be K'anpo? Which would make him and "Ansillon" different backstories for K'anpo, not just for the Time Monster hermit, which implies yet again slightly different coverage… It's like Russian dolls!)


 * Anyway, I like the spirit of this solution, but I'd want to fine-tune it. For one thing, not every account that gives him an identity treats "the Hermit" as an actual name he went by, as opposed to him simply being a small-H hermit, so while I do see the aesthetic appeal of The Hermit, I think the page should really be at Hermit (The Time Monster), which will also be more immediately legible.


 * And I'm not sure about putting the Kevin Lindsay K'anpo (who is of course a distinct entity from the Watcher-like projection Cho Je!) on the same page as the K'anpo we see the most of in Planet of the Spiders. The current titles are messy, but consider: if accounts seem to gravitate towards the idea that Ansillon/the Hermit/etc. only used the "K'anpo" name for a subfraction of his lives, rather than K'anpo having been his original name on Gallifrey — well — it strikes me that it's more speculative than not to say that any incarnations prior to George Cormack used the name K'anpo. Which frees us up to call Cormack First K'anpo (or K'anpo I, whatever) and Lindsay Second K'anpo/K'anpo II. Which seems perfectly sensible to me.


 * Oh, and I also think that although the Hermit (The Time Monsters) page should contain all the "hermit on the mountain" material, it should also be duplicated at Ansillon, much as Ferain's page duplicates the information from Genesis that is also present, "unattributed", at Time Lord messenger (Genesis of the Daleks).


 * But lest this look like negation by a hundred papercuts, I agree with the fundamental idea of making Ansillon an "overall Time Lord" sort of page, treating the K'anpo page(s) as incarnations, and of making a separate "accounts-overview" page for the Hermit's identities; it's about time we acknowledged the Azmael connection. So my proposal:


 * Hermit (The Time Monster) will house a copy of all information about "the hermit on the mountain", as well as a list of the proposed identities in valid sources: Ansillon/K'anpo, Azmael, and potentially the Hermit (The Taking of Planet 5).


 * Ansillon will be the overall Time Lord page for one of those identities, with K'anpo I, K'anpo II and Ansillon (Blood of the Time Lords) as incarnation pages. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 12:38, 19 April 2022 (UTC)

NOTE: THE BELOW WAS WRITTEN BEFORE SCROOGE'S POST ABOVE, WHICH ALREADY COVERS MOST OF WHAT I SAID HERE. I AM REPOSTING IT ANYWAY MOSTLY FOR COMPLETIONISM BUT ALSO NOT EVERYTHING IN IT WAS SAID BY SCROOGE

OK, admittedly i haven't read the books in question in a while and even when I did read them I barely understood them due to accidentally jumping into them without realising how arc heavy they are (I'm planning eventually to read through the series actually in order for this very reason), but was the hermit from The Taking of Planet 5 really intended to be a separate account from K'anpo? I got the impression that was supposed to be him. Could be misremembering or have misunderstood though, for the reasons I said earlier. Also, was the Other actually intended to be the Hermit from The Time Monster, or were they just supposed to have "linked" in some way? Finally, do any valid sources suggest Azmael is the hermit? I know that was the original plan but I don't think that ever made it in anywhere. Is it in the novelisation or something?

I also don't see any point in merging the incarnations, when every other Time Lord has different pages for their incarnations (except The Master, but we're working on that).

I agree the name should change though, whatever happens. I genuinely think this wiki is just too white and British and ignorant of what a "Rimpoche" actually IS, so assumed it was a surname.

As for the main topic of whether we should merge this page... idk I haven't listened to that particular audio. NightmareofEden ☎  12:45, 19 April 2022 (UTC)


 * In The Twin Dilemma itself the Doctor describes Azmael as "my mentor". I suppose we could quibble with whether the contradiction is "According to one account, instead of the hermit the Doctor had Azmael as a mentor" versus "according to one account, the hermit who was the Doctor's mentor was Azmael rather than K'anpo/Ansillon", but that seems like splitting hair insofar as we know which of the two was intended. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 12:54, 19 April 2022 (UTC)

Hmm... I seemed to remember that Azmael was ultimately described as the Doctor's mentor at the Academy, as in, a school tutor, and many reference sources including this very wiki back up my memories, but I just control F-ed the transcript and no you're right they don't even say the word "academy" anywhere in the story. He's just referred to as the Doctor's "mentor". Weird, like a Mandela Effect. NightmareofEden ☎  13:02, 19 April 2022 (UTC)


 * I think that's the post hoc interpretation people settled on to resolve the apparent contradiction with K'anpo. (Though in doing so it introduces a new contradiction, which is that there is already such a person as "the Doctor's personal tutor at the Academy and a mentor figure to them": namely, Borusa.) Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 13:12, 19 April 2022 (UTC)


 * Scrooge and Eden, thank you for your feedback, and these amendments-in-parallel are broadly amenable to me.


 * The only issue with a K'anpo I/K'anpo II/Ansillon/Hermit (The Time Monster) page structure is backwards compatibility: to which page will the current much-linked page title K'anpo Rimpoche redirect? The idea with merging the incarnation pages into K'anpo isn't just that we could avoid speculative incarnation numbering, it's also that we would retain a single page for the aggregate character from Planet of the Spiders, separate from decades-later continuity. Even if we have to use the "other actor" variable somewhat awkwardly, this seems obviously useful if we have to play the "According to one acount, K'anpo was a pseudonym of the Time Lord Ansillon; according to another account, he was a former member of the Celestis…" game, as you both suggest.


 * Secondarily, there's also the issue of The Time Monster not actually being the Hermit's first appearance, hence my suggestion that he be treated as a primary topic – but you both know that my attitude is that the rules should obey the needs of the wiki, not the other way around, and I'm more than happy to bend T:DAB in this instance. – n8 (☎) 13:20, 19 April 2022 (UTC)
 * For the record, I agree with Nate here: the Hermit does make a good bunch of sense as a primary topic, even if we have to mention lower case is also used in the lead (see: the Other), whereas hermit (The Time Monster) is potentially misleading. We generally try to avoid dabbing by first mention. 16:58, 19 April 2022 (UTC)

What a delightful conversation! Love this energy. Personally, I think its nice to have individual pages for the different incarnations of K'anpo, but also that we should keep the combined K'anpo page, but also that the most neutral page for this web of a Time Lord as a whole would be The Hermit. This new Ansillon lore emphasizes shifting names and identities, and I think that can offer a solution -- i would suggest making pages for "Ku'an Impe" and "Uba Danth" as distinct identities (even if they're not necessarily incarnations), and treating the "K'anpo" as another sort of identity which was a form of The Hermit (with his incarnations being treated as K'anpo I and K'anpo II, as Scrooge argues above). Ansillon could function similarly, with there being a page for the identity and a page for the incarnation himself who appears in the story.

One more distinct incarnation of the Hermit who I would suggest to get his own page is Paul Cornell's one-eyed hooded Hermit who appears in Timewyrm: Revelation (novel) and The Three Paths (short story). Even though that Hermit is indicated to be the body which mentored the Doctor and did the "daisiest daisy" thing from The Time Monster, Cornell brings a distinct interpretation and physical appearance to the character which isn't seen in other interpretations of the Doctor's childhood and therefore I think should get its own page. Come to think of it, that version of the hermit is rather similar to The Taking of Planet 5's... CoT     ?  19:20, 19 April 2022 (UTC)


 * I like the idea of keeping a K'anpo page, and making ones for the other identities namedropped in Blood of the Time Lords, using the precedent of Harold Saxon and its ilk — but we can't just make "The Hermit" the Time Lord page that runs with the K'anpo and Ansillon lore, because that leaves us short of a Time Lord messenger (Genesis of the Daleks)-style page for "just the basic hermit-on-the-mountain, sans later backstories" on which we could document Azmael, and other potential non-K'anpo-aligned elaborations on the concept. Or else we'd be back to having to put that on Hermit (The Time Monster), separately from the "The Hermit" page being about the Ansillon/K'anpo/etc. Time Lord of many faces? Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 19:42, 19 April 2022 (UTC)


 * Another option, if we're to insist on splitting Old and New K'anpo, is to cover New K'anpo on Cho Je. While in the transcript of the aired episode New K'anpo appears to reject the name Cho-Je – "No, Tommy. I am K'Anpo." – in the omniscient truthful narration of the novelisation, he retains the name, in this line and for the remainder of the book (emphasis mine):

"The glow faded and now Cho-Je sat in the chair, beaming at them. 'I was not dying, you see, I was merely regenerating.' Tommy shook his head in amazement. 'Cho-Je -' Cho-Je shook his head and held up a warning finger. 'No, no. I was Cho-Je, I am now K'anpo. Or, if you prefer, I am both! '"

- Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders


 * Now, recognising that Cho-Je is K'anpo II may be unsettling for those of us who like to canonweld him with the Watcher, but the inconvenient truth is that the novelisation is very clear:

"Sarah shook her head, baffled. A thought struck her. 'What about Cho-Je? Is he a Time Lord, too?' K'anpo smiled. 'Cho-Je is merely a projection. You might say he was my other self.'"


 * [Edit at 23:06 (UTC): In fact, a friend notes to me that when K'anpo regenerates, he literally finishes the sentence he started as Cho-Je! When you regard the story on its own merits, independent of later continuity about regeneration, it couldn't be clearer that Cho-Je and "New K'anpo" are one and the same character.]

"CHO-JE: Dear friends, please don't. Please don't (Cho-Je vanishes.) SARAH: What's happening? (K'anpo becomes Cho-Je.) CHO-JE: Please don't. Please don't concern yourselves. I am not dying, merely regenerating."

- The Planet of the Spiders


 * So we don't need speculative titles at all! Old K'anpo is K'anpo, and his second incarnation is Cho-Je, which will cover his pre- and post-immanentization appearances. (Note also that Cho Je is actually spelled Cho-Je, which makes for another rename template I'm adding to a page as the result of this discussion.) – n8 (☎) 20:56, 19 April 2022 (UTC)