Board Thread:Inclusion debates/@comment-4028641-20170222073756

So Daleks are in the Lego Batman Movie. We should probably talk about if the story is valid or not.

Right off the bat I know that many people are going to be making the case that this isn't a debate that needs to be had at all. You'll say that it's obviously invalid based off of how silly it is. You'll also likely quote precedent. And all I have to say is that it isn't that simple.

I have to politely ask that no admins reading this post try to close it prematurely with little to no apt discussion. This isn't a clean and easy thing, and it should be left up to no single person to decipher the issue.

On this wiki, we have previously decided that the video game Lego Dimensions isn't a valid resource. To many it would thus seem that it would be a no-brainer that The Lego Batman Movie and all further LEGO films and shorts featuring Doctor Who imagery are also invalid. Simply put, the actual discussion on the topic does not support such a hasty decision.

Reading through the initial mumblings of Thread:176459, it may seem that we deemed the game invalid because "legos are stupid, shut up." This was very much the emotions that were spread by people who had seen little more than promotional box art for the product. The thread was started in July, and it wasn't until September that anyone actually got to play the game. As soon as there were people in the thread who actually knew anything at all about it, the tides of the conversation very much changed course.

The basic findings of the thread was that -- speaking on a story-basis alone -- Doctor Who was treated fundamentally differently than anything else in Dimensions.

If this were a Back to the Future wiki, then we'd easily have been able to call the story invalid based off of how the game treated that franchise. The Back to the Future DLC levels featured an entire re-telling of the first movie. This was the case with many other DLC levels. With Doctor Who however it was clear that they were trying to simply make a story within the DWU that just happened to look a bit like LEGO. LEGO Doctor Who mainly tried to play the stories as if they were set in the real DWU and not a "reboot" version with slightly different characters and jokes. It was almost played like the creators of the level wanted us to forget that everything kinda looked all-Lego-ey, and instead they just wanted us to enjoy a fun adventure with the Twelfth Doctor fighting Davros.

The ultimate reason that the discussions ended with the story being deemed invalid was, by Czech's own words, basically that the video game was a video game.

"This wiki long ago determined that most video games weren't allowed because there are multiple pathways that players can take, ensuring that there would be dispute over which is the "correct" way to play. Since we have no mechanism for determining "correctness" (unlike the Star Wars franchise, for instance), we can only really write an article about the game as a product on the market, and not as a valid source for articles here."

- CzechOut, Destroyer of Worlds

Basically if Lego Dimensions didn't have an RPG hub world with each DLC and if the game didn't have so many specific easter eggs and if the game didn't let you play as whoever you want to, it'd be a fully-valid story on this site.

So our findings in the Lego Dimensions thread, if anything, only point towards us counting the Lego Batman movie.

Now many people are going to point towards the fact that Lego Batman is satire. It's been a long-standing rule that in most cases parodies can be easily deemed invalid because they are rarely ever set with the DWU.

An important clarification is that that rule is in place for satire of Doctor Who, not Batman. Lego Batman makes fun of Batman and makes it clear that it's not set in any official Batman universe seen so far. If we were a Harry Potter wiki, a Gremlins wiki, a Wizard of Oz wiki or any wiki but this wiki; then we'd have no pause in deeming the story totally invalid just based on how the featured characters are portrayed. Most of them are clearly unique versions of the characters from their own rebooted timelines. For instance, in the movie Superman has his own history that's different from the comics.

But with the Daleks, they're kinda just the Daleks. No big twists, no gags, nothing breaking from what we would expect from regular ol' Daleks. This basic difference to how Doctor Who is treated can not be emphasized enough.

If there was a Lego Voldemort movie, then the universe would be totally different from the real Harry Potter films. If there was a Lego Superman movie, the universe wouldn't even look similar to any other version of Superman. Same for King Kong, Kite-Man or anyone else in the movie.

But if there was a Lego Doctor Who movie, they'd just do a stand-alone, unique adventure with the Doctor while keeping almost everything in the universe exactly as it appears to be in the BBC TV show. It's an important distinction.

Blocking out all of the non-Doctor Who parts of this movie (and thus the parts that are irrelevant to this discussion), it's hard to easily say "oh, this is a Doctor Who parody. So it doesn't count."

In fact, one could easily make the case that Lego Batman isn't the most silly thing we've ever seen cross our radar. The early 1960s comics treat the Daleks with much less respect, and are much less connected to or concerned with the actual show.

The back-up Titan strips are often just as silly and outgoing as this movie. There are fourth wall jokes in the movie (the opening and closing narration basically) but in the end it's no better than the intro to Before the Flood. Wholloween arguably is much worse than Lego Batman in terms of how far it takes this aspect.

If there isn't much cause to call it invalid, the question would next fall to how we would cover it. This is more difficult, as it's slightly silly to imagine us writing entire pages on Lego Joker and Lego Batman just because there are Daleks in the movie. It is, however, only slightly more silly than writing articles on Spock and Carnell.

This is a first for us as a wiki -- in the past all crossovers we've dealt with as a site have had our franchises plastered over the front page. There was never any confusion about how we would cover Assimilation^2 because it was its own stand-alone storyline with DOCTOR WHO over the top. IDW never had the Doctor wander into a different comic for two pages as a cameo. But if IDW had done this around the same time, it would technically still be a licensed appearance and thus a valid story.

I would like to suggest that this wiki treat the Daleks appearing in this story just like it would Erimem appearing in some random non-Doctor Who audio thing. It's gonna be a bit silly, but we're a wiki built to accept tons of silly stuff and I feel like we'll get used to it somehow.

Thanks for reading this and considering my point of view, I hope to speak to all of you very soon.  