User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates/@comment-6032121-20181230112657/@comment-6032121-20181230153826

Ah, I'd somehow missed the Pting (I knew I had to have missed something). Okay, I'm coming around to your point of view that the story (inasmuch as it is one) doesn't try to make sense, and that kind of disqualifies it on the same grounds as, say, Dimensions in Time.

All your paragraph about how no other sources establish that the Thirteenth Doctor visited post-Hell Bent Gallifrey do kind of run afoul of "all stories are equal", though. If we'd found that Festive Thirteenth Doctor Yule Log was meant by its creators to be a story, set in the DWU, then whether it says things about the Doctor or the sonic never previously shown in televised or literary Who shouldn't matter an inch. A webcast has as much right to say the Sonic can teleport as any other kind of licensed DW story. And (but again keep in mind that this was only my pet theory; I am in no way arguing for it to be put on pages, even if the webcast were valid) nothing forbids an animated Christmas webcast from showing 13's first visit to post-Hell Bent Gallifrey if it so pleases and Chibnall doesn't object.

(Again within that speculation, which would be better spun off to the Howling if you want to discuss my theory further: the fact that the Doctor was last known to own a house on Gallifrey long ago doesn't mean much. He fled and abandoned it; we have nothing, AFAIK, to suggest it was destroyed or repossessed since then. Presumably he — or, now, she — could just come to reclaim it at any time. For example, the War Doctor may well have stayed there during his time on Gallifrey in the Time War.)

Your argument that its nature as a Yule Log precludes it being a Christmas story is kind of flawed, I think. As I stressed in the opening post, FTDYL already deviates from the traditional Yule Log format, since it clearly establishes the passage of time as day turns to night, and features a bunch of discrete non-looped events (a Kerblam Man materializes, the Doctor comes in through the TARDIS then leaves); it has the trappings of a Yule Log, but it's also got a narrative component. A kind of aimless, not-enough-to-pass-Rule-1 sort of narrative component, yes; but a narrative component still. If the animation wasn't looped and the Pting & co. didn't materialize without rhyme nor reason, it's easy to imagine a version of FTDYL which would have nothing against its validity, yet would still also be a Yule Log.

Oh, and as far as making a single Yule Log article for both (and any future ones): I dunno about this… such an article would get crowded, I think, quite quickly, and become nigh-unreadable within five years if they keep it up every year. The interest of the article, whether it be a valid source or not, is to catalogue the references and cameos and so on; would we be able to do so as efficiently with a single catch-all page?