(no subject)

[gement]

In the wake of Torchwood fan reactions to events in Children of Earth, and just on general principle, I am delighted to support this thesis: Doctor Who has no canon.

It's a lovely essay, with no spoilers and lots of quotes from Doctor Who bigshot writers, and I just kept nodding like a bobble-head the whole time. It's a valuable piece of reading if you're a fan of some other geek franchise or like thinking about what makes stories Real, even if you're not Whovian.

This note in the comments actually made my eyes well up:

"The Doctor remembers every Doctor Who story ever told. Every episode, target book, comic strip and every game of companions and TARDISes that you played as a kid. The universe he lives in has no record of it, because of paradoxes and divergent dimensions and the Time War have reset things... but the Doctor remembers and sometimes when he is sad it's because you've stopped being 8 years old and he can't run around the school playground with you anymore."

Yes. Just like that. I'm still playing. Are you?

Comments

[rm.livejournal.com]

I've been following these essays, mainly because I know Paul in passing from con panels we've been on together, but THANK YOU, because in pulling that quote out, you've just helped me figure out how to answer an extremely difficult email I received, that utterly merits my answering, but which I have felt unqualified to deal with based on life experience and somewhat unwilling to deal with based on current emotional place. Perfect!

Thank YOU!

[gement.livejournal.com]

As one of two major sources* of my Torchwood fanon, thank you.

I've meant to write on this subject for a couple years, since Making Light did a few brilliant posts on the nature of canon and authority and the history of adaptive storytelling (these days called fanfic), but I could never quite pull it into shape. I'm delighted to highlight someone more articulate than myself on the subject.

* I was going to write "three," but the other two are Sam_Storyteller and, heaven help me, ask_aboutcoffee who turned to be Sam.

[ocicat.livejournal.com]

THIS:

"In a ideal world, every series' canon would have died of embarassment after the first panel of Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?"

[ocicat.livejournal.com]

(and for the record, this panel said: "This is an imaginary story. Aren't they all?"

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

I just finished watching CoE.
I still want to play, but I feel like now I'm allowed to stay up late.
*Goes to read essay*

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

Long live the difficult twiddly bits!

[nbarnes.livejournal.com]

"The Doctor remembers every Doctor Who story ever told."

Even the hideously Mary Sue stories in my head from when I was nine and staying up until 2 am on Sunday night to watch PBS' broadcast of random episodes in no particular order?

[maribou]

Oh, especially those! (And them like it.)

[gement.livejournal.com]

Ooh, ooh, me too! (Except I got to watch them in strict order, which meant 1.5 hours of Doctor Who every Saturday night if I wanted to keep up. The trials, the trials.)

[gfish.livejournal.com]

I'll admit it -- the loose approach to continuity on Doctor Who bugs me. (Not enough to keep me from loving it more than just about any other setting, of course, but it's there.) At some level, what's the point of learning a universe if the writers can change it out from under you at any point, with no warning, explanation or excuse?

[gement.livejournal.com]

Individual contradictions have bugged me, but almost all of those have been factual. Names and dates, history book stuff. Generally, though, they don't seem to be doing it deliberately. Mostly they try to stay consistent, enough that we have injokes and back references and the chance to feel clever. It's just hard to remember everything, and in a 40-year-long setting with so many chances for paradox, it doesn't seem worth sweating it down to granular detail.

The Great Conniption over the Doctor being written as half-human was, for me, a problem because it threatened characterization, which is much more core to my enjoyment of the show than whether the Man Who Owned The Internet should have heard of a Dalek what with the planet having been kidnapped by them. The latter can be put down to Timey-Wimey and the authors either forgetting or feeling too constrained by something written without enough forethought. The former messed with who we were playing with.

[annissamazing]

Question: Did the term "timey-wimey" originate in "Blink" or was it around before them. It's a great term. If it's only been around recently, what term did we use before?

I'm a new fan and I'm really excited to watch all the old eps. Got the first discs coming from Netflix soon.

[gement.livejournal.com]

It started in Blink, but it's just so useful! We've needed a word for years.

Let's see. If I didn't have the vocab word, I might have said "can be put down to paradox" or "can be put down to the timeline shifting because of blah blah blah" but there's no prior succint word for the wibbly-wobbliness of Time. :)

I'm so delighted you're hooked.

[annissamazing]

Me too. :)

I was sad that the quote you posted didn't apply to me. The character, the concept, of the Doctor is so beautiful. I've introduced Dominic to it and every time he asks to watch it I feel warm inside. Except this last time when I turned on Season 4 and he asked, "Where's Rose?" Then I felt a little sad.

[gement.livejournal.com]

While the Doctor is my first and dearest personal hero, I spent my fair share of time playing Star Trek, too, and Ninja Turtles and Darkwing Duck. The multiverse has many folds.

[annissamazing]

Well, in that case...

Let's get dangerous!

[gement.livejournal.com]

"I shoot your tales of derring-do in the face! ... Wait, that's not it either."

[annissamazing]

I literally laughed out loud.

[garillama.livejournal.com]

Well, in that case, the last episode and a half of COE is not in my canon. Too damn sad. I'll just imagine the REAL ending where the Doctor showed up just in the nick of time to Set Things Right and Deal Out Just Rewards, Both Good And Bad.

And for the record, I spend 95% of my time at work telling stories to myself. It's hard not too when the guy up in Accounts with the intriguing ear cuff reminds me so much of Ianto, which reminds me of Jack's office fetish, which somehow ends up with me crawling through the ducts trying to steal some artifact from a Doctor Who Is Actually An Alien Or Something, and also trying to keep it from Torchwood because I am in actuality an agent of the Talamasca (ala Anne Rice). It tends to get horribly silly and self-centered, which is just the thing to get me through a day of cleaning toilets and taking out trashes :P

There are of course the more mundane "What conversation will I have with my coworker if this hypothetical situation comes up?" stories, too. Stories is stories, though, and my brain is full of them...

[garillama.livejournal.com]

(note: Doctor Who Is Actually An Alien Or Something isn't of course the Doctor, more along the vein of something green and slimy what is wearing a physician suit.)