User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-45692830-20200511054726/@comment-6032121-20200514015236

I've had similar thoughts in the past about The Thief of Sherwood — but the fact is that there is an "outer story" as well as an "inner story". The whole business about X writing an imaginary novelisation of the imaginary TV story and so on — that is licensed Doctor Who fiction in its own right, and surely should be chronicled somewhere, even if it's not acknowledged to be part of N-Space. It's quite a conundrum.

I daresay it might even deserve its own thread! Can it be that the "outer story" is straight-up, while the "inner story" self-evidently remains valid? How would we go about covering that on the actual "The Thief of Sherwood (short story)" page?

The thing is, we already know that some bits of Doctor Who (N-Space) perfectly match events in the Doctor's real adventures, somehow. This is front-and-center in the ending of The Zygon Isolation, of course. And Afterword, in Decalog 3: Consequences, gives us a perfectly good explanation of how that might be the case, namely that the Doctor themselves periodically does something complex and timey-wimey to retcon all of their past interference in a planet's history into popular fiction on that planet, so that further meddlings slip under the radar.

Some of what was being written about The Thief of Sherwood’s outer story didn't seem to quite take that approach, but it seems perfectly viable (if slightly counterintuitive) to cover both the outer and inner story as being valid within the DWU — that is to say, it is valid fact that the First Doctor met Robin Hood and dressed up as the apothecary and so on; and it is valid fact that there existed a TV story on the in-universe BBC which chronicled those events.

To treat it, in essence, as we might do the novel All-Consuming Fire, which is largely the text of a slightly-fictionalised account of the Doctor's adventures with Sherlock Holmes, presented as a "lost" Arthur Conan Doyle story — where we cover the events described therein as a valid story, and we also acknowledge the frame story of the Doctor and Benny reading Doyle's book once they get a copy of it.

Granted, we don't have he luxury, in The Thief of Sherwood, of seeing the Doctor perusing the fictional Doctor Who Magazine issue or whatever. But once we've got other valid stories acknowledging that such things existed, if not in N-Space, then at the very least in a valid parallel universe like the meta-fiction universe… it's not too much of a leap, is it? And far easier than to have half a story be invalid somehow.