User:OttselSpy25/What If OP

Intended title: Removing the blanket ban on "What If" stories

Introduction
So one of the things that I think continues to be a massive problem on Tardis Wiki is that on the landing page for T:VS, we have numerous rules still listed which are... fundamentally obsolete. That is, these rules were created specifically to invalidate one specific story. Then, later in history, said story was validated. So the story was moved from the invalid section of the page to the valid one. But the rule, which existed exclusively to deny that story, stays in place.

In my opinion, no example of this is more obvious that this one, listed under the subsection "What doesn't count":

Now, what stands out to you the moment you look at this table? To me, it's that the story currently listed for it, An Adventure in Space and Time... is not actually an example of the topic. An Adventure in Space and Time is not a what-if story, and it's certainly not a what-if story tangential to the Doctor's universe... Which is what this rule is clearly here for.

So why was this part of the table added? Well, we only have to rewind a few short years to find our answer:

Yes, this was a rule introduced exclusively to disqualify the Big Finish audio series, Doctor Who Unbound. This series was eventually changed to valid in 2017. However, the rule remained, meaning that we still have a few lingering stories effected by it, despite this generally being seen as a former rule which we no longer enforce.

Today, I would like to discuss with all of you why I am in favor of deleting this rule from T:VS, which three stories I think are still invalid because of this rule, why I want those three stories valid, and the theory of coverage that I would suggest. Let's begin!

History of validity
So in late 2009 and early 2010, our wiki's history with finding a "list of valid sources" really started to kick into high gear. This was partially caused by User:CzechOut, who rapidly began adding Template:Nc to pages (this was later renamed Template:Notdwu and then Template:Invalid). 1 2 3 4

This was notably done unilaterally, without discussion, and in spite of the site's official rules, located at T:CANON. For instance, the official policy of the website going back half-a-decade was that the 1960s Dalek films starring Peter Cushing should be covered as "valid" but as an alternate universe. Czech added the "non-canon" template to the films in spite of this, again without any debate I can find. This represents that absolute allegiance to precedent and the rules written down on-paper hadn't quite been invented yet.

In 2010, an argument breaks out at Talk:The Curse of Fatal Death (TV story) over if the story was non-canonical or a potential alternate future for the Eighth Doctor. The evidence of the Tomorrow Windows is cited, although others still think it was never meant to be canon. User:Tangerineduel rules that the story should be covered but as an alternate reality.

A similar debate then begins at Forum:More canon questions. Here, a user complains that the Tardis Canon policy isn't nearly as specific or strict as they would like. One specific brought up is that T:CANON states that "all Big Finish audios" are canon, in spite of this including Unbound. The user things that T:CANON should specify the difference between canon stories set in the main Doctor Who Universe and stories which are set in some other universe (as examples, they list the Cushing films, Unbound, and Iris Wildthyme novels).

User:Tangerineduel enters the scene and states that both Unbound and the Cushing films are canon but only as alternate universes. User:CzechOut appears and questions the Dalek films being alternate realities. "How can they possibly be canon?" he asks. "They're non-canon, full-stop."

In spite of this, User:Tangerineduel does not remove the five-year standing official validity of the Dalek films. Instead, he makes this specific alteration to T:CANON, expanding the "alternate universe" defense used for the Cushing films to numerous other stories.

This includes The Curse of Fatal Death and, shockingly, Do You Have a Licence to Save this Planet? and Tonight's the Night, the logic being that both are intended to be set in alternate Doctor Who universes (I think it's hard to make that case for Tonight's the Night but I can only imagine that wikifying that story was more popular in 2010).

BUT most importantly, I believe it is here that the site created its first, written down policy about Unbound.

The audio series is listed in this new section, officially canon but only when wikified as a series of alternate universes. This would stay on the page through 2012.

However, this policy seemingly was never acted on in spite of being written down for several years. You can see here that Czech had added Template:Nc to all of the Unbound story pages by this stage, and these remained for the time.

In February 2011, Forum:Should we class Big Finish's Doctor Who Unbound series as non-canon? is held, being the only stand-alone debate the series had at the time. The forum starts with User:Revan attempting to argue for the stories still being canon.

"I don't think these stories should be classed as non-canon by the wikia as they simply are "what-if?" stories that take place in parallel universes and do not attempt to take place within the main universe as non-canon stories do. Even The 100 Days of the Doctor depics the Sixth Doctor travelling to another universe to meet one of the unbound Doctors. Therefore I believe that we should class the unbound stories as canon but existing in other universes to the main Whoniverse."

- User:Revan, on why Unbound should be canon.

After this, User:The Thirteenth Doctor entered and stated that he did not believe that Doctor Who has a canon, and thus the site shouldn't try to establish one. However, User:Tangerineduel enters the picture and notes that it is the wiki's job to set boundaries. His main issue is that the Doctor Who Unbound series does not go out of its way to establish that the stories all take place in splintering universes. Because no stories turns to the viewer and whispers "This story is set in a universe, but it's a parallel universe to the one that was featured in the TV show," we can't say for sure that this was the intention.


 * (Confusingly, Tangerineduel seems to ignore here that he himself wrote Unbound being a series of alternate universes into policy a year earlier)

Czech soon enters, and defends the site's historical use of the term "canon." He notes that the idea of Doctor Who not having a canon is a new idea, and this is why he had recently moved Template:Nc to Template:Notdwu, because...

"It is better and less confusing for us to now move away from using "canon" to describe things. That's why notdwu no longer includes the word "canon", and stresses the fact that it's a decision of our wiki that the topic isn't part of the DWU."

- User:CzechOut, on why saying something "isn't Doctor Who Universe" is different from saying something "isn't canon"

"Put more simply, our current use of the word, "canon", is actually used in two ways. We need o phase out our use of the word "canon" entirely, in favor of two different expressions. Tangerineduel has usefully coined the phrase "what this wiki covers" as an expression to help draw the line between articles that can be on the wiki and those that can't.  Thus, The Stranger isn't "non-canon", it's simply something we don't cover.  And Doctor Who Unbound is something we cover (because it's derived from a full BBC license), but it deserves notdwu because it's clearly, purposefully outside the narrative continuity of any other Doctor Who stories."

- User:CzechOut on why Doctor Who Unbound should be called non-DWU

Now, it is my opinion that at this point in the site's history, by moving "canon" to "Non-DWU" Czech really fixed one or two issues and opened up a whole bunch of new ones. The largest one being Czech's clear reading here that stories set in a universe parallel to "N-Space" automatically fail his litmus test of being set inside "the DWU." Thus, stories which were then-currently listed as valid in T:CANON were not considered DWU.

This issue was fully represented at the controversial Forum:Is The Infinity Doctors canon?

Here, while discussing if the Infinity Doctors should be canon, non-canon, or covered as a semi-parallel universe, Czech states:

"And I'm not lumping this into "licensed but parodic" works. I'm saying it's a part of the "licensed but outside continuity" gang, which includes not just parodic stories but also Unbound, Shalka and other "serious" stories. The things we exclude are deliberately very limited. We don't count the 1960s Dalek movies because a) the Doctor's a human who invented the TARDIS, and b) it's a remake of a television story. We don't count the "Unbound" Doctors because they're deliberately outside of Doctor Who continuity. We don't count The Curse of Fatal Death and Scream of the Shalka because, among other reasons, the narrative of the TV series from 2005 on clearly doesn't follow the Doctor(s) depicted therein. And that's about it. And that leads us to the question of whether we must treat TID as an individual case, or if there are other works which should be treated the same way. I think that depends on what decision we make about TID. There are other works whose canonicity may be disputed, but I don't think that there are any which were consciously created with an ambiguous relationship to the ongoing narrative of Doctor Who. Of the works we already exclude, they were either not intended as a link in the narrative chain (e.g. the Unbounds, Curse of Fatal Death) or were superseded by other developments (Shalka). The former in a sense cut themselves off from the canon upon their creation; the latter was cut off by diktat. Death Comes to Time chooses to ignore a major strand of the ongoing narrative (the Eighth Doctor) and attempts to strike off on its own, but such an attempt is by its nature not going to be part of the strand which it denies. TID is different from any of these. TID sticks its tongue out at continuity and says, "You don't know if I'm in or out.""

- User:CzechOut

Now, here's the interesting thing to me. Czech will later cite the lack of anyone disagreeing with him here about Unbound as the reason why consensus says it was made invalid. However, in this debate, Czech speaks of Unbound being non-canon as if it site policy... When it had never been written down as such. The closest thing to it being site-policy was that he had added the non-canon templates in 2010 and it hadn't been taken down yet.

This entire time, the rule about parallel continuities remained at T:CANON now being live for two years despite being widely disregarded. And it wasn't removed because someone caught this - it was removed because T:CANON was taken down and replaced by the version we have today. Then, User:CzechOut created Tardis:Valid sources to replace T:CANON.

And so on the 8th of June, 2012, in this specific edit at wikia time 14:53... Czech added the rule "No what if stories" to T:VS, which he had written from scratch. From this moment forwards, it was official site policy, and still is today.

Now one thing that I think is instantly offensive about this rule, once you see it in context, is the implication it carries. "Some completely serious works of fiction have been explicitly tagged by the publisher or author as being outside the DWU." Now, to me, what this implies is that the "Doctor Who Universe" we describe in Rule 4 is literal. That it, the Doctor's universe, and specifically the version of the Doctor that we see on TV. So a story which is set in a universe not populated by the "TV Doctor" fails rule 4, at least according to the blurb given on this post. This is mirrored by the removal of Faction Paradox content around the same time, as some admins decided that the series splintering into an alternate timeline meant it was no longer the "real" DWU.

I think this is representative of the post-canon mentality of the time, and how this is far less in-line with our current mindset and standing precedent.

Around the time I joined the website and I had several chances to debate the validity of Unbound with Czech in the wikia chat window. His argument remained that because the Unbound series never directly stated "This is an alternate universe, and not simply non-canon," it was the job of the wiki to cover this as not congruent with the DWU and thus invalid, rather than a universe parallel to the DWU. It was always my stance that it was blatantly obvious that the stories being a series of splintering universes was always the intention. But, he argued, until a story featured concrete evidence of Unbound being a literal parallel universe, he was not going to budge.

(His stance was that the Unbound Doctor's cameo in The 100 Days of the Doctor was a throwaway line, and thus didn't count)

So obviously things changed on this front in 2016, when AUDIO: The Library in the Body released. This story featured Bernice Summerfield falling into a parallel universe, and... What do you know! It was the universe of the Unbound Doctor, as we call him today.

This started a long series of debates where Czech finally admitted that there was in-text evidence of Unbound being "non-DWU" in the sense of being a parallel reality, and not "non-DWU" in the sense of being non-canon. Thus, on the 12th of June 2017, Czech himself removed any mention of Unbound from T:VS.

However... What he didn't do was remove the rule which specifically only ever existed to invalidate this one specific story. So, starting on that specific day, this existed in the fine text of T:VS:

That was it. Just a rule, sitting there, with no story it was actually effecting.

This changed on the 2nd of October 2020, when User:Scrooge MacDuck began cleaning up T:VS, as it had many outdated elements. While doing this, he decided to add an example to justify this rule:

This... is almost an example of a what if story... but not really. Basically, there's an ongoing argument that Death Comes to Time was written with the belief that the Eighth Doctor and the 1996 TV movie were probably "not canon" to the writer. But it wasn't really "What if the Seventh Doctor was a god and died battling some dude", it was "Oh I want to write the REAL Doctor Who ending, this won't age poorly at all."

So in other words, Death Comes to Time wasn't a what if. It tried to make the 1996 TV movie into a what if.

However, I do think functionally Death Comes to Time is a sort of "what if", it's just not accurate to what the rule meant when it was written down by CzechOut.

In early 2023, the wiki passed Rule 4 by Proxy, and since numerous stories have referenced the events of Death Comes to Time as either being the Eighth Doctor's past or being a parallel universe, this rule was once again left without a clear story. As Scream of the Shalka was still non-valid for a brief period of time after this, that story was then moved to the table.

We could debate if Scream of the Shalka is a "what if" all day. I think under our current rules it's not, but if you define the RTD/Moffat version of the DWU the "true version" then sure, functionally it's a what if. But again, I don't think it's the definition of What If Czech meant when the rule was drafted.

Pretty soon Scream was validated in it own debate, leading to:

Which is what we have today, in spite again of An Adventure in Space and Time not being a what if story. So in other words, for the past three years this abandoned rule has simply been a convenient place to stick any non-valid story which isn't set in the primary Doctor Who Universe, to the point of it now being used to list a story which was supposed to be set in the real world.

It is my full intention with this post that the "no what if stories" rule be removed from T:VS. It was never a justified rule, and we are running so low on what if stories still considered non-valid that we haven't actually had a real what if story listed on the page since 2017. And that story... was Doctor Who Unbound.

Why Doctor Who Unbound should be valid
... Yes, I know that it already is. HOWEVER

I believe that to properly represent why this rule isn't justified, I need to prove my side of the argument, which is that Doctor Who Unbound should have been valid as a series of parallel realities from day one. Even before the Unbound Doctor returned in the Bernice Summerfield audios, we should have been covering all of these stories as alternate realities.

So when I started writing this, the first thing I wanted to get a gauge on is how non-DW communities define "what if" fiction. What I found is quite interesting, and you can see for yourself at the Wikipedia page.

"An alternative universe (also known as AU, alternate universe, alternative timeline, alternate timeline, alternative reality, or alternate reality) is a setting for a work of fan fiction that departs from the canon of the fictional universe that the fan work is based on. For example, an AU fan fiction might imagine what would have taken place if the plot events of the source material had unfolded differently, or it might transpose the characters from the original work into a different setting to explore their lives and relationships in a different narrative context.

AU stories are also sometimes used in official, though typically non-canonical, story lines, written by the creators of the original canon material."

- Wikipedia

Note that "canon" here is clearly defined as "stories which take place in the original universe." I would assume the phrase "non canonical" is a blanket term used in presumption of the numerous franchises which do not feature interdimensional travel as a facet of their storytelling. For instance, Sliding Doors is not canon to the main universe of but is set in an alternate universe. Don't ask me why that was the first AU story I could think of.

The reason I've cited this article is to clarify something which is very obvious to me but has been contentious to some admins and editors of this wiki. That being "what if" and "AU" or "Alternate Universe" are typically synonyms when discussing story genres. A story presenting a fictional what if inside a particular universe automatically leads with the presumption that the story takes place in a splintered reality, not just that it "doesn't count" with no other context. (Not also that the politics of "universe" and "timeline" being different is very much exclusive to time travel franchises like Doctor Who)

So, if I say, "What if the Second Doctor won his trial?" and I then write a Big Finish Short Trips adventure about the Second Doctor being acquitted at his trial and starting a Punk Rock group with the Monk, it's fair to say that story is set in an alternate reality to the main DWU, even if the Doctor never turns to the reader and says "This is an alternate universe parallel to the events of The War Games." That's just a consequence of how AU fiction works.

The Wikipedia article goes on to cite two specific examples, Marvel's What If and DC's Elseworlds. What If is certainly the most famous example out there, as comics have been ongoing since 1977.

Now, let's say we wake up tomorrow and decide we want to cover every single Marvel story to ever feature Death's Head. If we did this, one comic we would have to cover is What If...? Vol 1 54. This story features an alternate series of events pertaining Death's Head's battle with Minion. In the main continuity, Minion kills Death's Head, absorbing his personality and becoming Death's Head II. BUT, in What If... 54, Death's Head lives and is forced to stop Minion after he goes on a rampage, killing other heroes.

Now, a reference book later clarified that this was an alternate universe, specifically Earth-8454. However, if we were covering this story without that context, it would be not only fair but necessary that we view the events depicted as an alternate reality of some kind. That's just how What If works!

The important detail here is that when Big Finish Productions launched Unbound in 2003, it was very much depicted as the Doctor Who version of Marvel's What If. In fact, upon release each story had its own What if... blurb which began the publisher's summary. I checked not only the current Big Finish website to prove this, but I also used Wayback to check archives of the story pages in 2003. The exceptions are Deadline, (which some interpret as actually being set in the DWU) and Masters of War, which is a sequel to Sympathy for the Devil.

The "What if" blurbs, in order of release, are:


 * What if... the Doctor and Susan had never left Gallifrey? (Auld Mortality)


 * What if... the Doctor had not been UNIT's scientific advisor? (Sympathy for the Devil)


 * What if... ? "If I told you the truth, I'd have to kill you..." (Full Fathom Five)


 * What if... the Valeyard had won? (He Jests at Scars...)


 * What if...the Doctor had escaped the justice of the Time Lords? (Exile)


 * What if... the Doctor really had changed History, even just the tiniest bit? (A Storm of Angels)

Full Fathom Five delays telling you the full what if to maintain the twist, that being that the story's version of the Doctor believes that the ends justify the means.

Now, without any outside context, be it in-universe lore or authorial intent, each of these should be looked at as a parallel universe. I think the important factor is that calling these "non canon" is actually a lie, as each of these is hyper-fixated on canon. The two stories which depict alternate outcomes to the Doctor's trial in The War Games clearly very carefully take the events of these stories into account, and He Jets at Scars doesn't exactly ignore the script to Trial of a Time Lord in order to depict its content.

I think no writer for this series would take controversy with someone saying that they take place in their own universes, as again that's the definition of the AU genre.

There should be a clear difference between a story being written with the conviction of this doesn't count and a story being written with the intention of being set in a parallel version of the pre-existing events. Non-parody what if stories should be valid by default and without need of in-universe clarification.

What stories apply to my suggested rule change
Now, I've said several times throughout this post that there are stories which are currently non-valid because of this rule. Well, it's finally time to present them. Here are... The main three.


 * 1) The Last Dalek - What if the Dalek had won TV: Dalek?''
 * 2) K9: Deja Who - What if the Ninth and Tenth Doctors had their own K9 unit during series 1 and 2?
 * 3) Daleks v Cybermen - What if the Cybermen had won the Battle of Canary Wharf? (and the Doctor hadn't been present apparently)

The last one I'm the least confident about. But as someone who played the first two games A LOT as a kid, I knew even then that the stories where what ifs. A game where you play the Metaltron, and you kill the Ninth Doctor, becoming the new Dalek Emperor? Yes, I knew that was a what if. And I was eleven.

The same for K9: Deja Who, which is a play on the term "Deja Vu." The game is about a model of K9 being present in series 1 episodes and doing missions for the Doctor. I knew it wasn't the main Doctor Who reality, but some parallel one.

So here's my argument. The Last Dalek should be covered on an "Alternate realities" subsection of Metaltron. K9 (Deja Who) should be created and should cover the game as a parallel account of a reality where K9 traveled with the Ninth Doctor.

Daleks v Cybermen should be covered on the alternate realities section of Battle of Canary Wharf. You might say "as a multiverse battle the Battle of Canary Wharf can't have an alternate reality series of events," but guess what Paul Foster and COMIC: The Fractures say you're wrong.

On top of these three, I think there's one extra story we might consider throwing into this discussion:


 * 1) Voice from the Vortex!

So this is one of the hardest stories to get a gauge on. It was printed in DWM 364 and is a satire of the short stories and comics present in the early Doctor Who Annuals. The story addresses the Ninth Doctor as "Dr Who", presents him traveling with a companion named Rosie Taylor, (more Gillian Who to Rose's Susan Foreman than just a typo) and purposefully gets numerous details about the TV series wrong.

The big controversy is that when writers in the 1960s did these mistakes on accident, the stories are valid. But when an author does the mistakes on purpose, it's non-valid. I think it would be justifies to basically treat this story as an honorary what if story.

So my opinion is that Voice from the Vortex! is this really weird... conceptual what if story. Like, not a what if story from the point of view of an event, but a what if story from a creative standpoint. So:


 * What if Ninth Doctor tie-in media was written like First Doctor tie-in media?

The logic being that we would allow people to present in-universe articles about this story in the valid space, but we would make it clear that this was some tangential version of the Doctor. It's my opinion that this is where the information would fit best, as it doesn't really work at Ninth Doctor nor Ninth Doctor/Non-valid sources. The Doctor presented here is purposefully like a new incarnation, and thus it's fitting to treat him this way.

What stories do not apply to my suggested rule change
One thing I would like to clarify here is that not every what if story which has coverage on Tardis should be a valid source.

I believe that creating a what if story immediately makes that story a sort of fictional parallel universe to whatever the source is. So when you do a "what if" about a DWU concept, you're making a DWU parallel universe. BUT, if you make a what if story based in the real world, you aren't necessarily establishing that as a DWU story.

So.


 * 1) What If? - This feature depicts a universe where Doctor Who wasn't canceled and Richard Griffiths became the Eighth Doctor. This is not a what if story depicting an alternate DWU, it's a what if story depicting an alternate real world.
 * 2) Father Time: "Set Visit" - "What if PROSE: Father Time was a TV story in a full Paul McGann season?" Exactly the same circumstance. What if story staked in our world.

Now, in the future perhaps evidence will persist showing that these two universes are parallel to the DWU, being set in worlds the Doctor could visit. But when it comes to this one debate, I don't think they qualify for what I'm talking about.

And, perhaps, if we really want some version of that old rule on T:VS, we could change it from "No what ifs" to "No real world what ifs."

Additionally, I only think this rule change would effect direct what if stories, not parodies or any story set in an alternate DW universe. I also am not trying to validate An Adventure in Space and Time, which is not actually a what if story.

I should also state that there might be very fringe cases where "What if" stories can still fail Rule 4, but I think I'd only want to accept this if we had some kind of specific quote of authorial intent. Like, if someone said "This story isn't an alternate DWU, it just doesn't count. It's just words on a page," then yeah we should call that invalid. I also think we should define what a "What if" story actually is at our own discretion.

Other matters
In spite of my ongoing casual use of "alternate universe" as a term for the genre, I think it's best if we stick to phrases like "In one reality..." unless we have specific quotes about authorial intent or in-universe placement. With Doctor Who, it's naturally going to be contentious if something is a universe or a timeline especially as those are in-universe concepts defined by other stories. So "reality" is the best term for simply explaining this literary term in an in-universe sense.

Now because we've had the "No what ifs" rule for years but haven't been following it for a long time, I think it's fair to say that we likely have a good number of "what if" AU stories which we currently just cover as valid without comment. And it might be worth discussing what our official boundaries will end up being.

The big example to me is Doctor Who and the Time War. Now, this wasn't written as a what if but I do believe it was published as one by the time it came out. Russell T Davies even allegedly said in an Instagram post that it is "a glimpse of parallel events". I can not confirm if he really said this because RTD blocked me on Instagram after I asked him to make the Shalka Doctor canon.

There's also AUDIO: Return of the Cybermen, but I think this one's less clear because the intention was that it was more like a novelisation than an alternate universe. Because of this, I wouldn't call it a what if. HOWEVER, if this had come out before 2010 it would not have been a valid source in the early Forums, that's just a fact.

But I do think we have been avoiding calling AU stories AU because our rules still, without justification, say that they are not valid sources. So if we're not going to get rid of this random rule, let's just get rid of it.

Closing statements
So to recap everything we've learned:

Unbound being valid as an alternate universe was a popular rule from opening day but was widely ignored or forgotten about by specific bureaucrats. Unbound is essentially the DW version of Marvel's What If, and most audios were staked in showing alternate outcomes to specific events in the series, the most common being the trials of The War Games and Trial of a Time Lord. I forgot to include Doctor of War in this analysis because it's bad. What if stories which depict alternate outcomes do not need to justify if they are alternate realities, that is simply the most basic definition of the Alternate Universe genre. Furthermore, as our current reading of the "Doctor Who Universe" also includes alternate timelines and universes parallel to the Doctor's, there is no longer any controversy with covering alternate universes as valid. The "no what ifs" rule should be deleted since we haven't payed any attention to it since 2017, and the "alternate reality" flash games trilogy should be made valid, as they are functionally the only stories still invalidated for this flimsy rule.

Alright, I think that covers everything! OS25🤙☎️ 20:09, 20 April 2023 (UTC)