Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-4028641-20121212231649/@comment-188432-20121214015135

OttselSpy25 wrote: Just because we don't cover them doesn't mean that they're any different from any other DWU story. Please re-read and think deeply on this assertion. It's because you think that sentence makes sense that you're having a problem. Definitionally, if we've decided that a story has nothing to do with the DWU, then it's obviously different from a story set in the DWU — because ... it's not set in the DWU.

Ouch. My head hurts from the simplicity of the tautology.

Lemme try a different tack. In The Empty Planet, Clyde and Rani talk about an assignment they have in school about Great Expectations, the real life novel by Charles Dickens.

Does that mean we can have a real world article about Great Expectations? Does that mean we need a real world article about Charles Dickens? No. Not just no, but of course and obviously no.

The only reason that we do have a real world article on The Curse of Fatal Death but don't have one on Great Expectations is really because the former is BBC licensed and it has the words "Doctor Who" on the tin.

And, despite what you say, an article about such a work is different to, say, the article on The Unquiet Dead. The main point of the article on P.S., Seven Keys to Doomsday or any of these highly marginal bits and bobs, is simply to display the flag. In effect, the focus of the article is primarily about contextualising the story and explaining why it's not a "normal" story. Secondarily, sure, cast and crew information and plot is important.

What articles about such stories must never do, however, is to try to find continuity connections in the DWU — any more than we should write a real world article about Great Expectations and unreasonably assert that, I dunno, Mercy Hartigan is 's long lost sister or something. To the extent that there is a relationship between Hartigan and Havisham, it is strictly behind-the-scenes and thus could not populate a "continuity" section.