Talk:Doctor Who Comes to MINECRAFT! (webcast)

Trailer

There is not, and never has been, a rule on this wiki saying that trailers must be explicitly identified as such. This is a ludicrous red herring. The issue is simple, the description of the video says:

We are very excited to announce that Doctor Who will be coming to Minecraft officially!

And goes on to list details. The definition of a trailer is to advertise something by broadcasting excerpts or details - as both the video and the description do. This is a trailer. (Note that I'd love for there to be a MC DW video, I find that hilarious, this has nothing to do with my personal preference. This just is a trailer. It's honestly a little surreal to me that there's a discussion.) Najawin ☎ 21:02, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Hang on now; as a matter of policy, you're wrong. There is such a policy, or at least such a precedent. The borders between "prologues", "prequels", "trailers" and so on have become so porous that the only standard for whether a given story is a trailer is whether it is called a trailer in its marketing; which this isn't. So it isn't.

Thing is, though, there are still such things as narrative commercials, even ones that are not trailers as the Wiki understands the term. And per current T:VS, they cannot be valid on principle. This does look a heck of a lot like one of those. It'd be one thing if it were a single, continuous narrative clip, but here we have disconnected snapshots of various Doctors and companions doing various thing, with no clear overarching story or premise. It looks a lot more like one of the LEGO Dimensions trailers made up of cleaned-up gameplay footage than it does like, say, Listen to the voice of your Master! or even Cyberon is Back!! (two notable examples of things not called trailers that one might be tempted to call trailers naively, but whose validity is tangibly justified by both being specifically referenced by the narrative of the things they were "promotional prequels" for).

There is also a more general Rule 4 discussion to be had — even if it were a regular narrative webcast with no question of promotion, is this really intended to take place in the Doctor Who universe? The lack of any multiverse-talk, or indeed any particular narrative justifications for all the Doctors being here and able to pull bows out of thin air and walk on the same, leads me to think this just isn't meant to be a narrative about the "real" Doctors, commercial or not.

So I lean towards this being not technically a trailer, but still {{invalid}} on more general Rule 4 grounds. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 21:08, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Addressing the point about bows being pulled out from thin air... not quite. In the context of Minecraft, every non-NPC (non playable character) has an Inventory - think of it as bigger on the inside pockets. They didn't pull bows out of thin air, they pulled them out of their Inventories. This is an instance where the Star Trek principle of acknowledging context of the non-Doctor Who side of a crossover is necessary.

Epsilon📯 📂

21:19, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Sure, but exactly at which point did they acquire Inventories? If we assume that we are looking at the Doctors being pulled into the Minecraft universe à la Assimilation², it does sort of chafe that the Twelfth Doctor materialises in the Minecraftverse at the beginning, we hardly take our eyes off him, and out of nowhere, he suddenly has an Inventory. Unless I'm missing something, this just isn't trying for self-consistent internal logic. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 21:22, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

My understanding is that Friend from the Future (TV story) was labeled a trailer? I could be misremembering that - forums are ded. My issue is really the editing and the description box rather than the Minecraft-ness. Like, it's focused on showing off the things in the pack rather than a coherent story, imo. If this was a 15-30 minute long video with voice acting or even a chat box that had a real narrative but it still didn't explain the Minecraft stuff, I'd probably push towards validity. But it's not doing that. It's just showing off the cool skins while running around with gameplay elements. Najawin ☎ 21:24, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

@Scrooge MacDuck Inventories aren't quite material like that, it's a core aspect of the game; you can't not have one. It's par for the course, it is a staple of the medium. We don't say "According to one account, the Twelfth Doctor was made of LEGO. (WC: Supergirl Meets E.T.)", we take into account that it not meant to be acknowledge literally, that it's part of the medium. You could instead look at this in a different way, wherein the context of this story, the characters have always had Inventories; we wouldn't invalidate something based on discontinuity and/or establishing something inexplicably.

There may be merit in discussing whether or not this is supposed to be set in the DWU or the Minecraft world, as nebulous as that is, but my point is that the Doctors having bows isn't something that should necessitate discussion like this. It should not be used as rationale for invalidity.

Epsilon📯 📂

21:40, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Friend from the Future is actually a somewhat unique, tricky case — the key thing was that footage from it ended up in The Pilot, but edited somewhat differently. The Forum thread's conclusion was that it made the original version akin to the sort of "trailers" that are simply edited clips from an upcoming, fuller story — and the shots unique to the FftF version of events, "deleted scenes". None of this has a lot of bearing on the breed of arguable-trailers that are made up of unique footage, and indeed, in this case, don't even advertise a specific story.

But yes, I think "it's focused on showing off the things in the pack rather than a coherent story" hits the nail on the head. This is sort of narrative, but that feels like accident, almost — it's just not coherent, let alone coherently DWU. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 21:52, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Sure, FftF is weird, and I'm not even sure I agree with the ruling. My point is just that that's why I was saying "you don't have to explicitly be called a trailer to be a trailer". Najawin ☎ 21:59, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Oh, yes, but my point was that this only goes for trailers that can be chalked up to the "Next Time"-style "footage from a later, fuller thing" kind of trailer; trailers made up of original footage are a wildly different kettle of fish, with their own jurisprudence. (And even then, Friend from the Future was only deemed an invalid trailer as an ad hoc decision at the end of a very lengthy thread!)

Still, as I said, this is all fairly academic since I agree Doctor Who Comes to MINECRAFT! should be invalid. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 22:03, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

I Wouldn't say it being narrative was an "accident", they clearly knew what they were doing to some extent by having each clip go fairly well into the next. First, the Twelfth Doctor and Clara arrive atop a grass hill in the TARDIS, and then they split up - Clara goes to a jungle while the Doctor gives chase to the "Delgado" Master who he sees in a fortress. Upon entering, he falls into the End portal, seemingly as a form of trap by the Master, perhaps with the idea that his previous incarnations wouldn't be there to help him defeat the Ender Dragon. Regardless, the Doctor teams up with his past incarnations and they defeat the dragon using their bows. The Doctor bids farewell to his past incarnations and exits via the portal, popping into existence in front of Amy Pond and Rory Williams (which is not only something that makes full sense in the context of Minecraft, but also in the context of Doctor Who with some classic episodes presenting teleportation in much the same way), who enter a house. While walking towards the house, the Doctor seemingly hears something behind him and looks, only to see a member of the Silence. After looking away, he forgets about them, but is met with another Silent. After turning back, he pulls out his gold sword to do battle with the Silent. Meanwhile, in the house, Amy and Rory face a Weeping Angel, which moves towards them as the lights flicker. When they attempt to exit, they're faced with another angel (they seemingly escape by, for example, breaking out of the house, which again makes sense not only in Minecraft, but to an extent in Doctor Who or the real world, as someone could, indeed, probably escape a house that way if they have an axe). In a later scene, the Twelfth Doctor sneaks in front of 3 Ice Warriors and approaches a field filled with Nether portals, out of which a Red Dalek, a Blue Dalek, and Davros exit and begin giving chase to him. The Doctor runs, and meets up with Clara, Amy, and Rory, all of whom have bows. The Doctor and his companions then run towards the TARDIS, which begins materialising in the field. They escape Davros and the Daleks.

And as for the way the story's told, that could be taken as a stylistic choice - an attempt is made to form some kind of coherent Doctor Who story, and if it's meant to just be examples of "what you could do in your own world", well, that could easily apply to Supergirl Meets E.T. but for brickfilms (albeit with edits adding animated faces). Overall, I don't believe this story actually does anything to fall afoul of our rules for validity, and authorial intent is very difficult to gauge in anything outside the main show and spin-offs, but I could be missing something in the rules. Cookieboy 2005 ☎ 09:51, 6 September 2022 (UTC)