Forum:Temporary forums/10,000 Dawns crossovers (Final Round)

Opening post
Since we now have Fandom's permission, right here in black and white, the time has come to tie off one of our remaining loose ends from the Lost Forums...

As foretold by an ancient closing post, we are here to examine...

The 10,000 Dawns crossovers
Alright, today, we review the validity of the following prose stories, which were crossovers between the Doctor Who universe and the 10,000 Dawns franchise. There was some confusion on this point in the past, so let's restate clearly, now those in the back, that the topic of discussion is validity for the following already-covered crossover stories, not greater coverage of the 10,000 Dawns series itself.

Most of these feature DWU elements which debuted in Doctor Who proper, including Coloth from the Short Trips story War Crimes and no less than Miranda Dawkins, the Eighth Doctor's daughter, as seen in the BBC Eighth Doctor Adventures. A few are slightly more tangential, bringing in DWU concepts that debuted in the Faction Paradox series, such as Auteur and Littlejohn... but, for those of us who have been around for the change of tide, and need reminding, it's well-established by now that Faction Paradox's coverage on this wiki is as "prime" DWU material.

In any case, Rachel Survived, White Canvas, The Gendar Conspiracy and Birthdays are Made for Memories form a narratively interlinked run of stories — so if one of them is agreed to take place in the DWU, I don't think we could reasonably exclude the others, particularly as they all share a writer. So all for one and one for all. We're taking these together.

Background
In the original series of threads, there was much made of the notion that, as these stories were published on the Internet freely, we had no evidence that they were truly licensed. However, even setting aside the imbalanced weight of evidence for a case like this, with the release of The Outer Universe Collection on 29 August 2019, this point was well and truly put to rest, so let's please not retread that whole area of debate unless new, reliable evidence surfaces. Baseless aspersions will not be tolerated. We should never, as a community, have assumed wrongdoing.

The foreword of The Outer Universe Collection also described the three stories within as "10,000 Dawns / Universe of Doctor Who crossover stories", well and truly putting an end to any quibbling around Rule 4 along those lines.

As a brief history lesson, these were the subject of multiple successive inclusion debates in the final years of Special:Forum, with the final attempt being deleted from the site by Fandom Staff after a user stooped to doxxing one of the editors arguing for validity. This had been meant to be one last chance for dissenting voices to come forward with good-faith arguments against, after all previous attempts had similarly devolved into improper forum use. Now, at this point, as established by my previous closing statement, the burden of proof was on those who would see these stories invalidated, else they would get full inclusion by default once the three weeks had elapsed.

I've posted the full closing post as an addendum, but here is the most relevant section, so folks know where things already stood:

Part 4: Where are we now?
As of the time of this thread's closure, I do not see that sufficient evidence has been provided to show that these stories are any different to comparable releases from Candy Jar Books or BBV Productions, which are founded on licensing agreements with individual authors (or their estates). These have a long (and storied) history of being covered. And naturally, we have precedents for short stories released exclusively for the web (see: WEB short stories), including those released in blog format (see: Christmas Special), for stories released for free that make use of known licenses (see: Free Comic Book Day and The Paul Spragg Memorial Short Trip Opportunity) and finally for crossovers (see: Stories that crossover with non-DWU series).

Tardis:Valid sources tells us that we need sufficient evidence that one of the four little rules has in fact been broken, if community discussion is to declare these invalid. But all here seems to be in order.

In point of fact:

The first collection containing these stories has a copyright note on, well, the copyright page, which lists exactly whose rights have been acquired, and the introduction to this same release explicitly states these are "commercially licensed" stories.

We even get this more extensive account:

And as for Rule 4 concerns, this was the tentative conclusion where we left things, in my closing post:

[ Following an analysis of precedent. ] Here, however, we are in no shortage of such evidence for rule 2 — with credits attached to the stories, and statements from the publisher, and statements from some of the authors that they have in fact been involved — and, honestly, I'm not sure that rule 4 has ever been clearer.

Multiple quotes have been drawn up from the publisher indicating, quite clearly, that the intent is for these stories to cross over with the Doctor Who universe. The most salient piece of information, which formed the basis of [the thread in question] — a quote from Wylder which plainly reads, "You can read all three of the 10,000 Dawns stories set in the Doctor Who Universe (for free) here" — was, of course, absent from the last discussion. Another reads, "Getting to play around in the edges of the Whoniverse has been an honor". No matter how you slice it, the intent (which forms the basis of rule 4) has been directly stated.

No practice round
Since the last thread was deleted, User:Borisashton kindly started us off once more on this "fourth and unambiguously final" debate, but alas, it was frozen by over concerns that the doxxing would repeat itself. But now we're long since past all that, and even the victim of the original doxxing incident has privately come forward to inform the admin team that they wished to see the thread re-opened. So here we are again. Unless arguments rooted in T:VS are brought forward within a period of three weeks starting today, the stories listed above will be considered valid sources going forward. Just to cover our bases, this cannot be countermanded, by anyone, in any fashion. Even if this thread somehow becomes interrupted like the final thread in the Lost Forums, before it reaches a proper conclusion, the result of this should still be validation. There is currently no rationale for the stories' invalidity, other than the procedural kink that we never had the chance to fulfil the requirements on that final closure. So until or unless some actual factual reasoning presented here, which can be cited in the leads, is located... This is it. No more.

As you can see on the announcement, Fandom actually told us admins that we could choose to skip the thread altogether if we wanted, just to be on the safe side. We are extending trust to the community by holding this three-week thread properly, at last. Please repay that trust and be on your best behaviour, everyone. 20:52, 24 April 2023 (UTC)