Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-25117610-20160904150521/@comment-188432-20161005044553

Hey guys :)

Sorry I'm a bit late here. But I have a huge objection to this move, and think that all the work done to split this thing off into 12 "stories' needs to be undone.


 * These aren't stories, but quite explicitly "chapter titles". Every issue begins by saying "Chapter X: ", and every issue ends by saying "End of Chapter X".
 * The first eleven chapters each end on a cliffhanger leading into the next chapter.
 * The story is centrally about the same villain(s) perpetrating a crime upon the Doctors and his companions, which we see unfurl in a chronological way, from the Doctor's perspective. Look at the events from the perspective of the villain(s), and it's obviously a single story.
 * By the time you get to around the Tenth chapter, the story starts to wrap up, and the chapters are less able to stand on their own.
 * Chapter 12 completely cannot stand on its own, because it's the conclusion to a now-obvious single story. References to past chapters bind the previous issues together.

Breaking Prisoner of Time (comic story) into 12 separate stories is fundamentally disallowed by many of our policies, particularly those which forbid us from having separate pages on individual Hartnell episodes. But it's more fundamental than that even. It's like -- indeed, exactly and explicitly like -- giving each chapter of a book its own page.

Sometimes narratives are neat and orderly, and we would never think for a moment that we should split off individual parts. And sometimes they tell their tales in unexpected ways. But you always have to make it to the end and consider what the end is saying about the whole.

A roughly analogous work in DW fiction is The Romans (novelisation). It's split up into about 20 chapters, each with their own name. But it's very different from the TV story, and isn't told in anything like a straightforward way. There are definitely points where you might think that one part doesn't relate to another. But by the end, even if you haven't seen the TV story, it becomes clear that they are all telling the same story.

And it is no more an anthology than Prisoner of Time.