User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-24894325-20170121220436/@comment-28349479-20170122211314

Thanks to Amorkuz for their apology and SOTO for their clarification on T:BOUND and current infobox policy. Frankly, I don't see a point to this thread now that those points have been concluded, but I'd like to clarify some things said about Faction Paradox in this thread.

Amorkuz wrote: UPD: NateBumber himself discounted the link between the Ship and the Doctor's TARDIS as invalid for this wiki here: (it lacks an asterisk). As it happens, I stopped updating that link when I created this easier-to-find page, which does (correctly) have an asterisk next to the Ship; I've removed the outdated link from the other thread. Thank you for this reminder!

Toy Story was originally published in a fan anthology, so it was allowed to use the names "Doctor", "TARDIS", "Fitz", and "Compassion". However, it didn't. This has nothing to do with licensing: Lawrence Miles owns the character of Compassion, and he still only describes her as "the redhead female passenger with the ear implant" in the official release of Toy Story. Why? Because the story is told from the point of view of Lolita and the Ship. Of course they wouldn't use the Time Lords' names for themselves! Renaming and unnaming through perspective shifts is a fundamental part of the Faction Paradox series. No, the Ship isn't referred to using the words "the Doctor's TARDIS". But it's a blue police box that's bigger on the inside and can travel through space and time, carrying a redhead with an ear implant and a male who's been replicated by the cuckoo pilot.

(I'll note that I was accused of using "using authorial intent in in-universe articles outside of 'Behind the scenes'", which is patently untrue. None of the evidence that I've cited has anything to do with authorial intent, and depends fully on the actual text of the stories at hand. In contrast, identifications that do depend on authorial intent, or are only ambiguously confirmed in-text, like War King and the Master, have been kept completely separate, except in the "Behind the scenes" section as specified. The last few posters have been collectively addressing "FP editors" as if we're some sort of coordinated clan. Please don't trivialize my individuality; there's no conspiracy going on here.)

If we're to deny this and decide that unambiguous physical descriptions and identifiers aren't enough to establish identity (and this is what we would be deciding, since one of these cannot come without the other), a lot of this wiki needs to be drastically changed. To begin with, in Short Trips (series), the Doctor is never identified by number, just physical description; therefore, we must create individual pages for each character, since "the Doctor with the technicolor dreamcoat" is only implied to be the Sixth. Similarly, every single uncopyrighted reference to the Daleks in the Virgin New Adventures must be removed, as must the appearance of K9 in Kept Safe and Sound (which is a perfect analogy for Toy Story, since it was both published officially and in a fan anthology without BBC licenses).

It's ironic to me that, considering the relevance of T:BOUND in this debate, Amorkuz has gone ahead and edited Lolita to link her species to "timeship" instead of "TARDIS". I had no idea that the other thread existed, since it lived and died during my vacation, but it was completely redundant to the decisions already proposed in the OP of Thread:206566 and affirmed in Thread:208233. The dissenting arguments all seem to boil down to Thefartydoctor wrote: The name "time ship" is too ambiguous for us to simply leap to conclusions. The Daleks have time ships, but they're not TARDISes. In The Empty Child, I think it's safe to assume that Jack's stolen ship could travel in time, but that time ship isn't a TARDIS. But as I have clarified multiple times, even in this thread, the word "timeship" is only being linked to TARDIS in the context of the Great Houses, which have been repeatedly and explicitly confirmed to be the Time Lords. Similarly, TARDISes have been referred to as timeships before (as pointed out in the original thread), for instance, in the case of Brax in the Bernice Summerfield novels. If the Faction Paradox has a timeship, it's not linked to TARDIS; if the Remote has a timeship, it's not linked to TARDIS. It's only the timeships of the Time Lords that are linked to TARDIS.

If anyone has any arguments against this policy besides just saying "It's speculation", I would love to discuss them. Until then, I think the matter should stay settled (as it was by CzechOut in the original thread).