User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates/@comment-31010985-20191101112654/@comment-31010985-20191212014849

Helpfully, User:Shambala108 has now elaborated on her "Validity is not determined by appearances" comment at User talk:Schreibenheimer. It seems this stance was affected by User:CzechOut's closing comments of Thread:191574 instead of anything actually written in policy, such as Tardis:Valid sources.

The thread in question was a debate regarding the inclusion of BBV Productions' Infidel's Comet that attempted to rectify an apparent oversight from Forum:BBV and canon policy. Let's take a look at some of the comments in that closing argument. CzechOut wrote: The thing is, Infidel's Comet doesn't feature any DWU elements. It has a cameo in which the Sontaran doesn't even quite identify himself fully. And that's a world of difference.

The analogue here is No Future for You, a Buffy comic strip that has a panel depicting the Tenth Doctor and Rose. Or, if you prefer, the episode of Young Justice that depicts a/the TARDIS. I'm afraid to say, this example is almost incomparable with White Canvas with how different it is.

Auteur, painted warriors, Gideon, Hole, Littlejohn, Cá Bảy Màu, Axastyakis, Mullion, Coloth and Miranda Dawkins, the Doctor's daughter are all characters from the DWU that fully feature. They are all explicitly identified and appear throughout the story, hardly in the capacity of cameos. Miranda, in her previously established role as supreme ruler of the universe, even helps negotiate the Christmas Needle Agreement which concludes the story.

Unlike, the Buffy and Young Justice examples, this was fully licensed and we already have two people that gave permission for their characters to be used to testify for that!

CzechOut wrote: Even the BBV website as it existed upon the original release of this thing makes no attempt whatsoever to tie it into DW at all. This is a stark contrast to this situation. We have a tweet from the publisher stating this story was "set in the Doctor Who universe".

Finally, I'd like to quote a pertinent part of the closing message of the original Forum:BBV and canon policy: CzechOut wrote: The thing is, we've made a lot of progress in this thread. This thread has firmly established the need for some sort of legal usage of characters in a story before we'll touch it. We didn't actually have that concept before. This kind of undermines the point that validity is not affected by appearances as the above is pretty much what you can find today as rule 2 of our "four little rules", outlined at Tardis:Valid sources.

I'm quite confident we had mostly agreed that these stories passed rule 4 already, but I still wanted to make this post reiterating that fact in light of the new sources.