Talk:Clara Oswin Oswald

Reordering of Clara page
I believe a reordering of the article is needed now after the reveals in "The Name of the Doctor". Since we have found out that the Clara currently with the Doctor is the original Clara who from all the other Clara's come from, as sort of copies throughout time, the article should begin with her birth and onwards. The other Claras should be either placed after or in a section known as alternate Claras. Does anyone agree with me on this? --BorgKnight ☎  04:02, May 19, 2013 (UTC)
 * Yes. Also, this now needs to be renamed. Her name is, according to her "just Clara Oswald". Oswin is a username she comes up with that then becomes the first name of one of her echoes. But it's an alias and an alternate name, not her proper name. Anoted ☎  04:16, May 19, 2013 (UTC)
 * Oswin is her middle name, it was never stated to not be the case, when you tell someone your name it is very common to leave the middle name out, meanwhile some people (like Dalek asylum Clara) use their middle name in place of their proper first name. - The Light6 ☎  04:47, May 19, 2013 (UTC)
 * She specifically stated that Oswin was not her middle name.
 * DOCTOR: Clara. Clara Oswald.
 * CLARA: Hello.
 * DOCTOR: Clara Oswin Oswald.
 * CLARA: Just Clara Oswald. What was that middle one?
 * Later in the Bells of Saint John she creates the name oswin.
 * CLARA: Sure. Setting up stuff. Need a user name.
 * DOCTOR: Learning fast.
 * CLARA: Clara Oswald for the win. Oswin!
 * Which is probably where the echo Oswin Oswald got the name from. But no, Oswin is not and never was the proper Clara Oswald's middle name. Anoted ☎  05:05, May 19, 2013 (UTC)


 * Well it seems I was mistaken, can't remember everything. But yeah in that case, along with the proposed split the page of the "real" Clara should be renamed. - The Light6 ☎  05:46, May 19, 2013 (UTC)

spliting page back up?
Now that we know who Clara is, can we split this page back up? The same way that we do Rory Williams and Rory Williams (Auton)? Anoted ☎  04:21, May 19, 2013 (UTC)


 * The difference though is that we have been shown so many alternate Claras, should we do a page for each or reference them in the same article. I would say it would be better to keep it all in one article. Maybe only split off the Victorian Clara and the Oswin Clara as there is a fair amount of information about them --BorgKnight ☎  04:30, May 19, 2013 (UTC)


 * Since it has to do with multiple Doctors and facets of Clara, I think ordering it in viewer chronological order makes the most sense. First Oswinn, then Victorian Clara, then Prime Clara, then all the different versions of Clara, with the article returning to Prima Clara after the Doctor finds her again.
 * That sounds really confusing. I don't think the copies should take precedent over the original, just because they were seen first. The copies couldn't have been created without the original. I like the idea of having a separate page for the copies (one page for all the copies?), like we have separate pages for the Martha Jones Clone and the Eleventh Doctor Ganger. Mewiet ☎  04:58, May 19, 2013 (UTC)


 * I don't agree. Prime Clara is the main Clara, the Clara that will continue to currently have adventures with the Doctor so her article will build up. We may learn more about the others but not much information. In other articles, such as River Song, the order is kept in the timeline of the character not as in the viewer chronological order. Prime Clara is the beginning so should be treated as such. The others should be either separated into a section under title alternate Claras or place into their own pages. --BorgKnight ☎  04:57, May 19, 2013 (UTC)


 * (Blah edit conflict)
 * If we there were to be a split it should be something along the lines of "Clara Oswin Oswald" and "Clara Oswin Oswald (duplicates)" or some other disambiguity. That way the duplicate page can start with their creation when the "real" Clara jumped into the Doctor's timestream at Trenzlore and then detail the various incarnations of her caused by that, sure most of the page would end up dedicated to Dalek Clara and Victorian Clara but I don't think that is too large of an issue. Also, given that at least one duplicate lived on Gallifrey, should this page (or if the split occurs, only the duplicate page) have Clara listed as a time lord? - The Light6 ☎  04:47, May 19, 2013 (UTC)


 * First, I think this page should be renamed Clara Oswald, as "Oswin" is definitely not her middle name, it's only the first name and middle name of two separate copies. Secondly, the other "lives" are said to be just that: individual copies, not the original, who each start out as infants and lead their own individual lives. Mewiet ☎  04:52, May 19, 2013 (UTC)


 * (edit conflict)
 * No, you can live on Gallifrey and not be a time-lord. No, this article should not be ordered by viewer chronological order, this is an in-universe biography.
 * We don't know that these other lives start out as entities. They're echoes. An individual echo could last as long as clara's been alive or only a few minutes. She certainly seemed more aware that she was an echo in some situations.
 * But I do agree that victorian clara and asylum oswin need their own articles. So we need a:
 * Clara Oswald - the girl
 * Clara Oswald (echoes) - the entity
 * Clara Oswin Oswald - victorian clara
 * Oswin Oswald - asylum clara
 * Thoughts? Anoted ☎  05:03, May 19, 2013 (UTC)
 * Hm, I do see your point about the lasting of the copies. I was thinking of Victorian Clara and how we saw her as an infant, child, and adult. (Then there was the version wearing the Oswin clothes with Ten in The Library. I'm not sure if there's a conflict or not there, since I don't think we had any kind of timeframe for Alaska.) Mewiet ☎  05:14, May 19, 2013 (UTC)
 * Well we know that the Victorian echo lasted about as long at Clara's life till now. But we haven't seen this with other echoes. Maybe they all have the same span, maybe not. Clara seemed sometimes cognizant of the fact that she was actively looking for the Doctor and that she was falling through time. Maybe she was only aware in specific moments, or in between lives, or maybe some echoes were shorter and she was aware during those. We really don't know. But we do know that Victorian Clara had a proper life from childhood to adulthood, and we know that Asylum Oswin at least thought she had a proper life. The last one is a bit weird though. Vastra talks about him dying at the Asylum in a past without Clara but Clara and her music was the reason that the Doctor was brought to the Asylum. Not sure if that's supposed to be timey-wimey or just the writers throwing time out the window. Of course, I like to think that timey-wimey is the scream that time emits during it's fall out a window. Anoted ☎  05:22, May 19, 2013 (UTC)


 * Given in The Name of the Doctor, Clara talked about living thousands of lives I think it is a reasonable assumption that the intention of the line was that each of the echoes lived entire lives from their birth to their death. I mean given how the Doctor investigated the past of the "real" Clara I would assume he would do the same with the other ones and would have noticed if they didn't have a full history.
 * Also, given the point about Oswin not being the middle name of the real Clara, only the Victorian one (see above discussion), I think that moves changes the ground for Dalek Clara and Victorian Clara having separate pages with a 3rd page that discusses all of Clara's echos mentions how her duplicates tended to have a variation of the real Clara's name with Oswin being integrated into it. - The Light6 ☎  05:53, May 19, 2013 (UTC)

[resetting indent] We only saw him do that with the real Clara, and so we only know that that is true of the real Clara. These lives could all be full complete lives or some could be partials. It was strongly implied that the Doctor was unable to find other Claras. He'd been looking for a while with no luck when he found real Clara. Anoted ☎  05:57, May 19, 2013 (UTC)


 * Well the Claras were split over the Doctor's past, he would have had to likely cross his own timeline to find the other Claras, hence why he failed to find the other ones. But like I said, Clara herself said about living thousands of lives, if they only existed for short period of time that is hardly living thousands of lives. - The Light6 ☎  06:10, May 19, 2013 (UTC)
 * No, we won't be splitting this back up. The story proves that it's one character.  The Name of the Doctor is an absolute vindication of our policy to combine the article.  It will not be split up again.   16:41: Sun 19 May 2013
 * Can you explain why? We have Rory Williams and Rory Williams (Auton) so I'm not seeing the difference. And on this talk page there seems to be a lot of support for multiple pages. I thought the discussion at the forum was that we'd merge these pages and wait to see what happened with Clara and what we wanted to do then. Well, we now know what has happened with Clara and we've opened a discussion about splitting this back up. I'm having a hard time understanding what is governing this decision and why we are not even allowed to discuss this. If this is the wrong place for this discussion, if this discussion needs to be happening at the Panoptican I'd understand that. But not allowing the discussion seems both harsh and like the antithesis of a wiki. Anoted ☎  17:32, May 19, 2013 (UTC)
 * It's sort of the opposite to Rory and Auton Rory - they were two separate beings who believed they were one and the same, while the multiple Clara's were the same being who believed they were separate (and that's speculation, as some of the Clara's knew the Doctor beforehand - maybe Dalek Clara and Victorian Clara knew the Doctor too, but did not reveal themselves?). To suggest re-splitting the page is like suggesting we should have a different page for each of Scaroth's forms splintered throughout time. 86.174.188.161talk to me 17:44, May 19, 2013 (UTC)
 * I can see maybe having just two clara articles, Clara Oswald and Clara Oswald (echo), but Clara as an echo is fundamentally different from Clara the person. And at least for the Victornia Clara and the Asylum Oswin we have enough for a proper article. They have different histories, different actions, heck, we even have different personality sections for them. Why should they all be on the proper Clara article? It's this thinking that has led to this article being misnamed and written in a non-chronological way.
 * Now, if we discuss that we want to treat all mulitple variations of people as one, then that's one thing. But I'm having difficult seeing why we treat some people who live multiple lives as separate entities and some people who live multiple lives as one and only one. Anoted ☎  17:53, May 19, 2013 (UTC)
 * Auton Rory wasn't really a separate being from Rory, though. He had Rory's actual consciousness because Amy's mind, drawn on to create him, was affected by emissions from the Time Crack she was exposed to for so long, making it possible for her memories to influence reality (such as bringing back the Doctor). That's why Rory remembered being an Auton after the universe was reset, because it was his own mind and soul in the Auton body, not just a copy that thought it was him, and then he returned to his human body. Personally, I never really thought Auton Rory should have a separate article; it doesn't make sense. Rory was essentially turned into an Auton, like Amy being briefly turned into a doll creature in "Night Terrors", and other temporary forms don't have separate articles. -- Noneofyourbusiness ☎  07:10, May 20, 2013 (UTC)
 * It never made much sense to me either. There's a much stronger case for splitting Clara then there is Rory. Clara lived a good portion of her life completely unaware of her echoes and without any of their memories and it at least appeared as though some of her echoes were unaware of their echoness. If we're going to keep this as one article, then we need to make major changes. Not only does this need to follow Clara's life chronoligcally (not viewer or Doctor order), but we need to have only one personality section. And, we'd need to merge the Rory articles because we need to have some sort of standard and stick with it. By any measure with which Rory as auton requires a separate article, so do the Clara echoes. The most logical thing to do would be to treat these articles in the same way that we treat the master. We could have Rory Williams (auton) redirect to the section of Rory Williams that discusses his time as an auton. We could have Oswin Oswald and Clara Oswin Oswald redirect to their respective sections in the main Clara Oswin page. But people would have to be willing to treat her as one person. None of this three personality sections stuff. But if we don't want to treat her as one person with one personality then we really do need separate articles. Anoted ☎  14:12, May 20, 2013 (UTC)

You can use Rory as an example, but this is not the place for proposing the combining of his articles or proposing a standard policy for such situation. This page is only for discussing the editing of Clara. Shambala108 ☎  14:26, May 20, 2013 (UTC)

I'm badly misquoting this from memory, but:

RIVER SONG: You'll die, do you understand? The other Claras won't be you, they'll just be copies.

CLARA: It's like my mum always said. The soufflé isn't the soufflé; the recipe is the soufflé.

Essentially, it was River's position that the alternate Claras would only be echoes of the original Clara, not the true Clara (which implies that River thought of herself as only an echo of the original River, something the Doctor agreed with - this also fits with the Doctor telling Jenny that "I know who she looks like. But it isn't her. It can't be" a few episodes earlier). Clara took the opposite position; that her recipe or template - her Platonic ideal, so to speak - was the real Clara, and any particular incarnation was as much a valid interpretation of that recipe as the original Clara. And that the Library copy of River was therefore as much the true River Song as her previous, fleshy incarnation.

This also relates to the way we handle the Remote clone of Fitz Kreiner, and perhaps the alternate version of Sam Jones.

So which position does this wiki take? Do we agree with River and the Doctor that the alternate Claras (and, by implication, the archived version of River) were separate individuals, echoes of the original Clara but not the same person. Or do we agree with Clara herself (and her mum) that "the recipe is the soufflé." In the episode, we see Clara drifting through her various lives like a leaf, a single continuous being sometimes remembering her past lives and sometimes not (like Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion), which seems to indicate that she and her mum were right, at least in her case if not in River's.

If they're all part of the same article, the 21st century Clara Oswald definitely needs to be described first; she's the original, after all. The alternate Claras should be described only after they split during the climax of The Name of the Doctor, since that's how the causal relationship works. -- Rowan Earthwood ☎  23:26, May 20, 2013 (UTC)

Gallifrey
Since Clara appears on Gallifrey, then one of her incarnations is a Time Lord, and being so, she should have known about her own history then (as Time Lords can perceive things), so that incarnation should know everything, including the future Last Great Time War, and be as capable as say Romana, in all things Time Lord, including beating the Great Intelligence -- 65.94.76.126talk to me 08:43, May 20, 2013 (UTC)
 * Time Lords don't know everything, and I doubt any of them knew the Time War was coming. Also, that incarnation would be as dead as all the other Time Lords. What was your point? -- Noneofyourbusiness ☎  13:52, May 20, 2013 (UTC)

Not every Galifreyan is a Time Lord. -- Lost Companion
 * It's also not clear that she should be considered Gallifreyan. She was clearly on Gallifrey, but we don't know that she lived there. And she wasn't from Gallifrey. We don't really know how the echoes work. It's clear that some echoes lived out lives from childhood to adulthood and seemed normal. It certainly appears that Victorian Clara and Dalek Asylum Oswin thought that they were normal. But in Name of the Doctor, Clara seems as though she's actively searching for the Doctor. Maybe every echo lived out a life from birth to death. Maybe every echo had no memory of her real life, and thought that they were normal people. But it's possible, and certainly hinted at that at least some of the time Clara was aware of the fact that she was an echo and that she had to save the Doctor. Maybe she was only aware in-between existences, maybe she was always aware. The point is, we don't know. We don't know that that Clara on Gallifrey existed for any longer than the amount of time she spoke to the Doctor. To call her Gallifreyan we have to assume that she lived a full life on Gallifrey and belived that she was in fact Gallifreyan. That's a pretty big leap. Until we know more (and we may never), let's just stick to the facts that we have. Anoted ☎  15:24, May 20, 2013 (UTC)
 * It seems pretty clear that each Clara lived a full life, living and dying all over time and space, as River said. It's possible that she was more aware in some incarnations, but if she was present in the background during various adventures, she can easily have overheard that he's called the Doctor and that would be why she was saying "Doctor!" in those scenes. There's no evidence that the Clara on Gallifrey was consciously motivated by anything other than what she said, to help the Doctor escape and have fun, in keeping with her personality, any more than Oswin consciously knew she was going to save the Doctor at the Dalek Asylum. And if she was on Gallifrey she was almost certainly Gallifreyan, because humans weren't allowed in the old days, as the Tenth Doctor said to Sarah Jane. However, that's a bit less clear. -- Noneofyourbusiness ☎  16:43, May 20, 2013 (UTC)
 * It's not clear at all. River said that Clara would be living and dying all over time and space but she didn't say how long Clara would be living for. Unlike Oswin and the Victorian Clara, the Clara echo who spoke to the First Doctor clearly had some sort of knowledge or awareness from her life with the Doctor. Otherwise why tell him to take an older TARDIS? Even if she lived a full life, birth to death on Gallifrey, she's not from Gallifrey. At best, she thought that she was Gallifreyan, but we don't know that. If we split Clara and her echoes into separate pages I'd probably be ok with this, but without a split, the categories are just going to be berserk. From multiple centuries, multiple places. It's a bit of a mess overall. Anoted ☎  17:05, May 20, 2013 (UTC)
 * Like I said, she'd do it because it was in keeping with her personality to give him that advice even without any conscious knowledge of what would come of it, just like Oswin and Victorian Clara were there to save him but didn't know that. And if she was born to Gallifreyan parents, she would be biologically Gallifreyan (or it would be detected the first time her mother had a checkup). But you're correct about our not knowing for 100% if she was of Gallifreyan heritage or not in that incarnation. All we can say is that there was an incarnation of Clara who was on Gallifrey. -- Noneofyourbusiness ☎  22:07, May 20, 2013 (UTC)


 * In the novels and audios, yes, but the new series has consistently referred to Time Lords as a species. However, since we accept all potential canon on this wiki, if we did decide that this Clara was Gallifreyan, it would be best just to refer to her as Gallifreyan rather than a Time Lady. -- Noneofyourbusiness ☎  16:47, May 20, 2013 (UTC)

Someone needs to create a list of appearances of clara oswald.