User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-197.86.143.126-20200606192351/@comment-6032121-20200607090005

I don't know about that, User:Najawin; you seem to be falling into the same trap of looking too much at authorial intent. If there are sources which seem to say that the War Chief is the Master, but do not say so quite in so many words, it's important to check that such really were the intentions of the writers of those sources. The place these authors also played in the TV story debuts of the War Chief and the Master is largely superfluous icing on the cake. Don't forget that Holmes likely also had on his mind the idea that (whether Brayshaw had been playing him or not) the Master might be some sort of yin-yang emanation of the Doctor's dark side, or what-have-you.

In point of fact, we cover Mondas on Marinus on separate pages, but only because we have sources which disagree with The World Shapers on the relationship between the two planets, not least The Doctor Falls citing Mondas and Marinus separately in a list of Cyberplanets. I reckon that if we didn't happen to also have Spare Parts and The Doctor Falls to murky the waters, we very much would have merged Mondas and Marinus long ago on the faith of The World Shapers, like it or not.

And as things stand, the connection is very much mentioned in the in-universe portions of the relevant pages — much, you might say, as you'll find the word Time Lord on "The Monk" even though Time Lords didn't exist yet at the time The Time Meddler was released, and by all accounts Peter Butterworth's character was intended to be a member of a future human civilisation, like Dr Who.

Yet due, I think, simply to the overlooking of novelisations as sources, this is not currently the case with The Master and The War Chief.

Now, important update: Thread:269689 has just been closed negatively by User:Shambala108. She understandably asks not to be "bombarded" with talk page messages on the matter, so I'll note my staunch intellectual disagreement here, instead; I think her closure fails to account for a lot of the new reasons we had presented why we might want to split The Master, of which this is one of them. But T:BOUND means we must simply deal with it, like it or not.

So in terms of dealing with it, I'd say that it is unreasonable to ask for The War Chief to be merged into The Master. However, it is equally unreasonable that we do not mention the connection between them in many accounts in in-universe sections.

Thus, I'd say the proposal we should be laboring towards is something similar to the current Mondas/Marinus setup: prominent notes in the relevant leads that…

"According to several accounts, the Time Lord whom the Second Doctor encountered on the planet of the War Lords using the alias of the War Chief (TV: The War Games) escaped justice and, after regenerating, (PROSE: Timewyrm: Exodus) became the individual the Doctor knew as the Master. (PROSE: Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon, Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons)"

- My proposal