Forum:Iris Wildthyme: should she stay or should she go?

There's very little debate that the character of Iris Wildthyme, as used in her Doctor Who-labelled crossovers, is a part of the DWU, and therefore something to be covered by this wiki.

Where it gets murkier are the books and audios where she's on her own. I think these should be put well outside our borders, because they are explicitly not in the DWU as stated by the publisher.

Here are some selections from the IW submission guidelines Obverse Books have on their webite, which can be found at http://obversebooks.co.uk/guide/.


 * Iris’ origins are shrouded in mystery, which is the way Iris likes it. The most recent theory suggests that she comes from the Clockworks, the home of a race of powerful but indolent technologically advanced aliens, situated in a separate universe to our own known as the Obverse. Some have hinted that it is the manner in which the people of the Clockworks merely record and not intervene which caused Iris to leave in her bus, looking for adventure and excitement. There have also been suggestions that there is something rotten in the Obverse, something which scares Iris for some reason…

So, her people are the "Clockworks" and explicitly not the Time Lords. Yes, we all know what "Clockworks" is code for, but no, code language isn't good enough — as has been established at forum:How do we best include Faction Paradox on the wiki? We also have a named other universe from which she apparently comes. And it ain't the DWU.


 * The Doctor, Time Lords, Cybermen and all that Jazz


 * Nowhere to be seen. Not even in jest. Nothing whose copyright belongs elsewhere, either BBC or Big Finish or Telos or whatever.


 * You can hint if it’s sufficiently subtle and deniable, but that’s about it. And it’d have to be pretty damn subtle and deniable, so calling them Cyberons or introducing a mysterious time travelling boyfriend called The Dentist isn’t going to work.

Heh, I like the dig at Bill Baggs here, but it's also fairly conclusive evidence that Obverse aren't playin' the same game as BBV or even Bernice Summerfield. They're not trying to remain in the DWU using only characters to which they have a license. This isn't P.R.O.B.E. where they've got permission for Liz Shaw — but not Benton — so they just fail to include Benton. Iris Wildthyme stories, at least by Obverse, just aren't in the DWU at all. They're taking a character out of the DWU and building a wholly new, and largely parodic, universe around that character. Which, again, is very different than what happens with Bernice Summerfield stuff.

It's more akin to what happened to Lucille Ball when she went from I Love Lucy to The Lucy Show. Yes, The Lucy Show basically still features Lucy Ricardo amd Ethel Mertz — only now they're both divorced and neither talks about her ex that much.

So I think all of it should go — save, again, for those things that happen in stories clearly branded with the Doctor Who logo. What do we do with it? Create another mini-wiki, I guess. It'd be pretty easy, given the pace of development at w:c:factionparadox over the last week.

Objections? 19:19: Fri 25 May 2012

I used to wonder why Mary Tyler Moore had divorced Dick van Dyke -- clearly the marriage had crumbled when the boy had died and she needed to get as far away as possible. Why did she change her name though?

Here, though, Ms. Wildthyme has not bothered to change her name, not even to the extent that Lucy Ricardo did. It's still Ms. Wildthyme, even in those Big Finish productions where Katy Manning is voicing her and Jo Grant. Given the slovenly BBC attitude towards continuity, I think we have little reason to turn our noses up at Ms. Wildthyme and the issues of picking and choosing which set of adventures is canonical and which isn't. So, yeah, I object. Boblipton talk to me 20:56, May 25, 2012 (UTC)


 * I'm with Bob. The argument with Faction Paradox was that these weren't stories about Time Lords with TARDISes from Gallifrey, they're stories about members of the Great Houses with timeships from the Homeworld. The change in names was a sign of the change in universes.


 * That's not what Obverse is doing with Iris. they're just telling stories about what Iris is doing when she's not around the Doctor (or anything else owned by the BBC or anybody else). And Iris is still visiting the DCU on a semi-regular basis. To me, this seems very much like the Bernice Summerfield situation.


 * And it's worth remembering that the Clockworks backstory first appeared in a BBC-licensed Doctor Who novel, The Blue Angel. I'm not seeing the problem here. —Josiah Rowe talk to me 00:42, May 26, 2012 (UTC)