Talk:Clara Oswald splinters

Splinter

Where does the term "splinter" come from? They were only described as echoes and copies in The Name of the Doctor. Jack "BtR" Saxon ☎ 16:20, 4 February 2024 (UTC)

I seem to recall there was a Forum thread about this which found a valid source for "splinters" — possibly in the Twelfth Doctor comic with Winnie Clarence? But I may be wrong. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 16:24, 4 February 2024 (UTC)

God, this was a headache and a half to track down. Couldn't find a forum post, at least, not one in the Panopticon. There might be one in one of the other boards, but the Panopticon just had people using "echoes" up until 2015 and then slowly switching to "splinters" after. This page was no help, because it was created in 2021 after revisiting one of those forum threads we couldn't access. And Talk:Clara Oswald only mentions the term insofar as someone complains about its usage because it's nonstandard. So I had to dig deep through the history of that page to see when we first started using the term. (There were some odd anomalies, like it saying River used it, which just isn't true.) Right around when Blood and Ice came out we have this in one of the edits:

The Twelfth Doctor rhetorically asked Clara if she should have told Winnie that she was a "splinter of [Clara] created for a single purpose"

Prior to that it was used once in the BTS section and once in some random list. Technically improper, but understandable. So, yeah, I think Blood and Ice seems to be the clear origin here, even if some users apparently had minor clairvoyance. Najawin ☎ 20:53, 4 February 2024 (UTC)

Blood and Ice uses the term once in the actual story when Clara declares "The splinters don't all die". However, in the The Eye of Torment graphic novel it is used religiously by Jacqueline Rayner in the interview section at the end. Here are a few of her comments:

* "The story was potentially Clara's last comic strip (although this turned out not to be the case, as she didn't leave at the end of Last Christmas after all) and was to feature her meeting one of her splinters."

* "It's not necessarily the case that all the splinters would perish."

* "What I did get to see was Martin's take on a host of Clara splinters - coming up with ideas for them was my favourite task in the process." BerniceSummerfan ☎ 21:19, 4 February 2024 (UTC)

Individual pages

I'm not holding my breath for a "yes", but what are the chances of these minor Clara splinters getting their own pages? I feel the titles are pretty easy to figure out: all the Claras seen in TNotD would be numbered (Gallifreyen Clara who talked to the First Doctor being "Clara Oswald splinter 1 (The Name of the Doctor)", and so on), as would the ones in Blood and Ice.

I think it's doable, but what do you guys think?