Board Thread:Inclusion debates/@comment-4028641-20170306172600/@comment-6032121-20190525192957

Only that I stand by what I wrote three posts ago. Valid stories reference previously-established, but Four-Little-Rules-breaking, facts all the time. It is weird that we don't bat an eyelid at a story referencing Time Rift (invalid due to Rule 2 break) yet apparently very much do at a story referencing Dimensions in Time (also mostly invalid due to a complicated Rule 2 break, IIRC, though some people also argue that it breaks Rule 4 according to one interpretation of some JNT statements). Just because an author's headcanon happens to not include with what we call valid, shouldn't mean the stories they make on this basis are to be treated as invalid, so long as the author wasn't trying to set them outside their understanding of the mainstream DWU.

This holds true even when the invalid story is invalid due to a Rule 4 break. The Gallifrey Chronicles, as many know, references Death Comes to Time’s Tannis; as has been recently restated, DCtT is firmly invalid. Yet no one's seriously proposing to make The Gallifrey Chronicles invalid on this basis, are they?

I feel, by the way, that we should point out there are a few currently invalid-by-association stories that would stay invalid because in their case, it's blindingly obvious that setting themselves after the invalid story is not a statement that the invalid story is “canon” in the author's view, but rather that they are setting themselves in that invalid story's own continuity.

It's pretty easy to tell the difference: the whole point of Storm in a Tikka is to try and make sense of the invalid works it's referencing in the context of the regular DWU, whereas Dr Who and the House on Oldark Moor does not claim to be anything more than a sequel to the Peter Cushing Dalek Movies, set in their universe.