Forum:Temporary forums/Incarnation naming standards

Where we stand
I don't think an OP is necessary for this thread, as it is a continuation of the discussion which started at Talk:First Morbius before the resurrection of the Forums in their present, ‘Temporary’ form. It's a discussion that should, in an ideal world, always have belonged to the Forums, so let's relocate it there now and do this properly. People who intend to participate in this discussion should ideally read through the backlog at that talk page, but I will proceed to summarise the main points of contention.

The question at hand is establishing standards for the naming of incarnations — principally of Time Lords, but the same logic would obviously apply to characters of other species whose different incarnations are covered in the same spirit, like Malika or Swarm — for characters who go by an ordinary proper name (e.g. Morbius) rather than a title where it's straightforward to treat them like The Doctor (e.g. The Monk).

The current practice, pioneered and championed by myself (among others), is to treat them like the Doctor anyway: e.g. "the First Malika regenerated into the Second Malika". This seems straightforward, unambiguous and intuitive to me. It also broadly matches the credits/production material for Swarm's incarnations, "the Old Swarm" and "the Younger Swarm".

User:NateBumber's proposal is to instead base ourselves on T:ROMANA, a decision initially taken in the specific case of Romana due to established fandom practice, and to use Roman numerals; e.g. Morbius I, Malika I. He argues that the grammatical correctness of a form like "the First Morbius" is debatable at best.

A major edge-case that has seen discussion is the possibility of confusion between Nate's proposal and actual dynastic numbering: Elizabeth X is not the tenth incarnation of Elizabeth I, and the problem gets thornier with Gallifreyan Presidents who actually use Roman numerals, like Pandad IV. I argued that it would be counterintuitive and confusing to have a list of Time Lord Presidents include both "Pandad IV" and "Morbius I" when the Roman numerals mean completely different things in this case. Nate's side objected that the confusion exists either way in the case of President Romana II, whose name is outside the bounds of this discussion; argued that the scenario of having to talk about "the first incarnation of Pandad IV" is thus far purely hypothetical, and will, in any case, certainly remain rare enough that we don't need to base the entire system on it; and proposed some hypothetical avenues to disambiguate, if the case should ever actually come up otherwise, such as using the honourific "of Gallifrey" for the Presidents.

The old discussion had become confused and deadlocked enough that we were down to the proverbial shows of hand, but I'm hoping this new start will be an opportunity to get some new perspectives in. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 17:53, 18 February 2023 (UTC)