User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates/@comment-45314928-20200606025128

So, 'How The Monk Got His Habit' was first revealed nearly a month ago and since then there has been various discussions regarding its validity namely here; Talk: How The Monk Got His Habit (short story).

For some backstory, during the Doctor Who: Lockdown! tweet-along of The Zygon Invasion / The Zygon Inversion writer Peter Harness revealed that he had pitched three Doctor Who stories that never saw the light of day; The Last One To Go To Sleep, Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters and How The Monk Got His Habit. Later, long after the tweet-along had ended - Harness was persuaded by eager fans to go into detail about the unproduced stories. This was when Harness revealed that he had also been working on a similarly unproduced novelisation of 'How The Monk Got His Habit' - here is his direct quote;

"Since some of you seemed to appreciate the discarded Meddling Monk idea, here's the similar discarded first page of a novelisation of it."

- Peter Harness, Twitter

Some users have suggested that a novelisation of this story was never actually intended, and this was similar to Russell T Davies' Revenge of the Nestene being framed as the fictitious 'Chapter 21' of the 2018 Rose novelisation. However, there's absolutely no proof of that - and until there is, we have to go with what was stated by Harness himself. It was a "discarded" first page of an unproduced novelisation.

Revenge of the Nestene was made extremely clear that it was completely new work - with Emily Cook having helped produced it herself during lockdown, and a timely reference to Boris Johnston within the source material. Then there was the fact that the story had other work done to it; including being designed to look like it was part of the Target series, and having a video posted onto official channels narrated by Jacob Dudman. This is completely different to a guest tweeter posting their own discarded story, in a spur of the moment thing, after realising that "some [of you] seemed to appreciate the discarded Meddling Monk idea".

That is not even to mention that Emily Cook herself has come out to stress that this "story" was not part of her lockdown event. Some have tried to suggest that she was talking about the unproduced television story - but that is a big stretch, why would she ever be under the impression that fans were considering an unproduced television story from 2015 as part of her lockdown event in 2020? She was clearly referring to Harness' mentioning of the Monk story as a whole, and "discarded" goes hand-in-hand with "unproduced". There is even a category on this Wikia for Category:Unproduced novels so there is no reason whatsoever to suspect that the word "unproduced" means that she was talking television-only.

All in all, this story pretty clearly fails two of the "four little rules". Not only is there serious evidence, and actual confirmation, against it's official release - but there is absolutely no proof whatsoever that the story was licensed. And, as User:Shambala108 stated on Talk:The Castellan has returned and has brought a message from Gallifrey! (webcast), "We have to be strict about licensing just like we have to be strict about plagiarism."

I wanted to start this topic ahead of the inevitable re-opening of the Lockdown-releases discussion later today, after the final release, as 'How The Monk Got His Habit' will cause far more headaches than need be.