Forum:Canonicity of NA novels

It seems to me that RTD has gone out of his way to invalidate much of the Virgin NA novels and, to a lesser extent, the BBC EDAs.

Despite the fact that all Gallifreyans (except maybe The Doctor) are birthed fully-grown from looms, The Master and The Doctor knew each other as 8-year-old children.

The Master was instantly driven insane upon viewing the Untempered Schism at the age of 8, he still managed to get into the Prydon Academy along with The Doctor and the rest of The Deca. And, although he was already insane, somehow his obsession with order later drove him insane.

The Doctor was well into his 11th century, and talked about it openly. Now, either he's forgotten, or he habitually lies about it--and he's perfectly consistent in those lies.

The 7th Doctor used a Chameleon Arch to become a human named John Smith and go to a boys school in Farmingham, where he fell in love with a woman named Joan Redfern and helped a troubled student named Timothy while fighting off aliens--and then, decades later, the 10th Doctor used a Chameleon Arch to become a human named John Smith and go to a different boys school in Farmingham a year later, where he fell in love with a different woman named Joan Redfern and helped a different troubled student named Timothy while fighting off similar but different aliens.

Iris Wildthyme really exists (and is a Time Lady, unless the post-BBC works are also canonical), and yet The Doctor never once wonders whether there might be one other survivor of Gallifrey out there, who almost certainly remembers that she's the one who destroyed Gallifrey at the end of the War.

The Doctor destroyed Gallifrey before, and it came back, and that's not even worth mentioning, but then he destroyed it a second time, and that's a soul-shattering event that he can't come to terms with, and he has no hope of things ever being made right.

And so on.

It's hard to argue that RTD and his writers didn't know about the NAs and EDAs considering how any of them wrote for those series. So, unless this is a deliberate attempt to drive the fanboy geeks nuts, the only reasonable explanation is that they've decided that the novels published between the old series and the new are not canonical. --99.170.146.147 09:02, December 28, 2009 (UTC)