Talk:Planet of the Rain Gods (comic story)

Can this really be counted as canonical? Tardis1963 talk 08:39, December 27, 2011 (UTC)

It's not a valid source, no. Whether you want to count it as part of your personal canon is up to you, but this wiki doesn't think it can be used as a source for the writing of in-universe articles.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  23:52: Sun 27 Jan 2013

Invalid?

Is there a reason why this is still invalid? I don't see how it breaks the 4 rules.Never Forget The Day The 456 Arrived ☎ 23:59, October 26, 2020 (UTC)

Is there a thread concerning the validity of this story? Epsilon (Contact me) 00:08, October 27, 2020 (UTC)

Not that I'm aware of, no. Honestly, I think that people just confused this and the actual deleted scene. Never Forget The Day The 456 Arrived ☎ 00:21, October 27, 2020 (UTC)

I can't find the thread that decided this, but I'm fairly certain I came across a discussion of its invalidity once. The rationale, at any rate, is rather stouter than merely confusion with the comic story.

Essentially, the rationale is that this is akin to the animatic-webcast version of P.S.: a reconstruction of what might have been, rather than an attempt to tell a fully-fledged DWU story in its own right. It is, hence, held to break Rule 4. It's not "here are events in the DWU", it's "here is a simulacrum of what a TV prologue about the DWU might have been like if it had been filmed as originally planed". --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 00:34, October 27, 2020 (UTC)

But the thing is, P.S. was never finished. This comic adaptation is finished and was released in the annual. Never Forget The Day The 456 Arrived ☎ 01:05, October 27, 2020 (UTC)

That is what I also thought, as the comic was never meant to be anything more than the adaptation of the unproduced scene, but therein lies the issue. While the comic is fully completed, it's not in itself a full story. Epsilon (Contact me) 01:11, October 27, 2020 (UTC)

Oh, it can be deemed a full story. That's not the problem.

What User:Never Forget The Day The 456 Arrived overlooks is that a significant amount of "finish" went into P.S. (webcast) — as distinct to "P.S. (home video)", which was never finished. P.S.-the-webcast was edited together and given voice over not as part of a larger production effort that was cut off, but to produce the exact result we have today. The clincher is that this effort wasn't to present a complete story, but rather to give a reconstitution of another, unfinished, unreleased story: the live-action DVD extra. If Chris Chibnall had voiced his intent when making P.S.-the-webcast as "we're telling the story as an animatic", that would count as "finished".

(After all, there are precedents for slideshows with voiceovers being "finished" DWU products.)

Rule 4 is all in the intent, not in the qualities of the stories themselves. Printed as-is, Planet would pass T:VS in a heartbeat. What invalidates it is that it wasn't intended to depict "definitive" events in the DWU — it's depicting a TV scene that never was rather than conveying the same in-universe info the TV scene would have conveyed. It's a fine difference, but it's there, and it matters to us. --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 01:33, October 27, 2020 (UTC)