Talk:Legacies (short story)

Licensing
Here's an important question -- does this story hold the proper rights to illustrate characters like The Doctor's TARDIS and Jamie McCrimmon? Does it literally use the words TARDIS and Jamie? If not, we must follow the precedent of stories like AiaPU. OS25 (Talk) 12:18, April 29, 2017 (UTC)


 * Not at all! With regard to the TARDIS, it mentions a blue police box which transforms into a woman with the ability to manipulate time. Jamie isn't actually in it - a "Scottish boy" is merely mentioned. Victoria is in it very briefly, where she's referred to simply as a young girl with a surname to do with "water" and the first name of a famous English queen. All above board as far as I can see. Mythicia77  ☎  16:01, August 13, 2017 (UTC)


 * Yeah the story doesn't mention any character by name, but through very clever description you can clearly tell who each character is in the story. Licensing doesn't really come into it as the words "the Doctor" and "TARDIS" are simply not present in the story. It's identical to PROSE: Toy Story, in that regard. --Revan\Talk 16:27, August 13, 2017 (UTC)


 * Thank you for explaining. This looks like the case of Schrödinger Victoria. When a BBC lawyer looks at the book, she's not there, but when a reader pops their head she appears in all her glory. This frankly cannot stand. As correctly pointed out by OttselSpy25 (whom I sincerely thank for being the first to note the problem), the wiki has long ago developed a way of dealing with these wink-wink characters, which is nicely summarised at Adventures in a Pocket Universe (audio series) We have separate pages for
 * The Mistress (The Choice) who is not Romana II
 * War King who is not the Master
 * The Imperator who is not Morbius
 * Clockworks who are not Time Lords
 * Ecto-Space which is not E-Space
 * Very Fabric of Time and Space which is not Time Vortex
 * etc. etc. etc. As tempting as it might be to take the Faction Paradox (series) situation and apply it here, we cannot for several reasons.
 * Faction Paradox was debated on Panopticon at least 4 times. And the amount of effort NateBumber put into the a) justification of established connections and b) delineation of cases that are less clear is both commendable and mind-boggling. The eventual argument that won the day was not that we accept every license-bending description if the authors said they would like us to. It was nowhere near that simple. The reality of the FP is that authors zig and zag in and out of Doctor Who licensed properties carrying their characters with them. NateBumber has developed an elaborate web of connections that reach some of the descriptions but not all (as the list above shows).
 * And this is a second reason we can't apply the FP treatment to this series. There is no treatment. It's tedious case-by-case analysis, aiming to trace a character or element through licensed properties to the place it was only described.
 * When we have a properly licensed appearance of Victoria, Jamie, etc. referring to the events of this story, then Victoria may be brought back onto this page. For now, the connection should be mentioned on the story notes and the legal situation explained, as is done on many pages provided for comparison above. The page of Girl (Legacies) or whatever you might wanna call her based on the text of the story should mention the intention of her being Victoria Waterfield in the BTS section and explain the reasons. But Victoria Waterfield be she cannot, as Rule 2 of T:VS it violate will. Amorkuz ☎  12:59, August 15, 2017 (UTC)

Over the past few weeks I have read the first six novels in the Lethbridge-Stewart series, in addition to several of the short stories. As you note, the series does not hold the license to use "the Doctor" and "TARDIS" as concepts, like a number of similar spin off series that have popped up over the last few years. The unique situtaion about the Lethbridge-Stewart series is that it has made the effort of obtaining the license to other characters and concepts from the Doctor Who universe in order to truly establish itself as taking place within the same universe.

In regard to the question of "is the Cosmic Hobo the Doctor?". The short answer: of course he is. The Beast of Fang Rock contains several scenes where characters mention "the Do-" or similar, before the "Cosmic Hobo" alias is used, which is explained in-universe as a government alias for the Doctor, who they have noticed popping up several times over the course of the 20th century. While Amorkuz, you may stipulate that this is cannot be the Doctor due to rights reasons, the story (and others) specifically state that the "Cosmic Hobo" was the man whom Travers and Lethbridge-Stewart encountered in the London Underground, and who also appeared at Fang Rock in relation to the Horror of Fang Rock TV story. The series does hold the rights to the concepts and characters from these stories, and leave no shadow of a doubt that the Doctor is the character to whom they are referring.

The sad truth is that while we can go along the argument that "no rights = no appearance", we are doing the factual accuracy of this wiki a sad disservice by doing so. The people at Candy Jar are doing nothing wrong by including references to the Doctor in their stories, by all rights they should, considering that their stories take place within the DWU. The references to the Doctor are all what they should be, merely references, and leave no room for doubt that they are meaning the Doctor, with very clever use of the English language to emphasise this without violating copyright law.

If you were to read the stories for yourself, you would certainly see the way these references are put across. In the past I have been skeptical about how the series can hold its own without a full license to Doctor Who, yet after reading them, their validity is very much there. --Revan\Talk 19:41, August 15, 2017 (UTC)