Board Thread:Inclusion debates/@comment-27280472-20161222145551/@comment-24894325-20170126211146

TheChampionOfTime wrote: Look, regardless of your personal vendetta against Magrs, it seems absolutely bonkers to say that he's doing this just for a marketing ploy. Was his use of Iris Wildthyme in Old Flames (short story) a clever trick to get the many fans of his incredibly obscure Phoenix Court series to buy Doctor Who? Was there a nefarious plot to get books off shelves by making the main characters of Exchange the companions of Iris Wildthyme in Enter Wildthyme? I think Magrs just happens to make quite a few characters that he really likes and wants to reuse. Baker's End features the exact same Vince Cosmos that encountered Iris Wildthyme. Whether that makes the story in the DWU or not in the DWU is not for me to say. But, before I leave completely, no, I don't really think that Magrs would do it for money. (He might or he might not. It's immaterial for which reason he includes DWU elements in his works. The validity should hinge on whether sufficiently many elements are included in a non-parodic way.) Could he do it as a bet with his buddy? Definitely. He strikes me as a writer who likes to mess with his readers, subvert their expectations, dazzle them with metafictional connections. Would he not want to get metaWiktional and mess up with editors of his own novels, subvert our expectations, dazzle us with connections that are there and not there at the same time? And then write a novel about that? I mean, come on, this thing is practically writing itself.

The world is breaking apart because the world encyclopaedia editors cannot agree on how to edit it. Evil Amorkuz keeps finding (seeming) inconsistencies in historical chronicles, unwittingly causing more and more rifts in reality, which only reinforce the inconsistencies. Brave Pluto2 feverishly searches for rare incunabula explaining Amorkuz's paradoxes away. She breaks into a secret vault containing the only copy of the Ultimate History of the World, Past, Present and Future, gets caught and is banished from the archives. But then TheChampionOfTime, a renowned scholar of the Ultimate History, begins countering Amorkuz's claims with simple common sense explanations. The world starts to heal. The heroes discover that the Ultimate History is nothing but the encyclopaedia they've been editing.

In fact, I half expect that he's already written something of the kind. Only smarter, more convoluted, and with a juicy mind-bending reveal about the Ultimate History.

Bottomline, I fully expect Magrs to mess with his readers for the fun of creating multidimensional multi-level narrative self-referential forks. And I never truly thought of this as a negative, just as something that I would not want to subvert this Wiki.

There, now I'm truly gone from this thread.