Board Thread:Inclusion debates/@comment-33695797-20200703215633/@comment-33695797-20200703231449

Hmm, so maybe TBotW isn't the best analogy. Anyway, I still think this book has a narrative, it's just unusual. It's actually kind of split into different sections each with their own narratives, but they definitely are that. For an example, let's look at the section about the Desktop theme. It does start by saying what it is— but then it basically details a history of how the Doctor changed the inner appearance of the TARDIS. To summarize part of it: The Doctor's TARDIS started out with the default control room. Since then, it has changed many times. During his exile on Earth, the Doctor made several adjustments to the desktop theme, changing the panels. In his fourth incarnation, he used the secondary control room. And it continues describing the history of the TARDIS interior to the Thirteenth Doctor's time. (Note this isn't the same as the case studies, which are summaries of specific episodes.) Essentially, it goes through the various aspects of a Type 40 TARDIS using specific stories from the lifetime of the Doctor's TARDIS.

Now I’ve thought of a rather good analogy, hopefully that others will be familiar with. It's like if you took the novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but only the parts that are excerpts of the in-universe guide. While it starts on a specific subject, it uses examples to tell the story of that subject, and ultimately the story of the Galaxy. This book is rather the same, and here's how I'll describe it: It tells the story of the Doctor's TARDIS using its components, in the format of an instructional guide.