Talk:Ansillon

Merge

The reason I created this separate from K'anpo Rimpoche, at least initially, was that we should probably discuss how we want to proceed here first. The clues should be enough to point to him being the same character, but given the link is not explicitly made to K'anpo, how authoritative should this story be for reframing his narrative?

The thing is, if this is definitely K'anpo, this story tells us that he originally went by Ansillon, then came back to this name later in life. Sounds like Ansillon would be the more appropriate name for the Time Lord in general. On the other hand, this isn't used in any other story he's appeared in. (And this is a name the character also rejects, it would seem, when he breaks away from Gallifrey as K'anpo Rimpoche.)

Middle ground might be committing to the Hermit for the main page, with the understanding that he started out as Ansillon, went by a variety of names on Gallifrey (which aren't explicitly stated to be separate incarnations), then stuck with K'anpo Rimpoche while he rejected Time Lord society, before making peace with his background and practicing a kind of radical acceptance as Ansillon, back where he began.

Any thoughts?
× SOTO (☎/✍/↯) 02:29, 19 April 2022 (UTC)

It doesn't help that, while we currently treat K'anpo as the identity of the Doctor's hermit-mentor mentioned in The Time Monster, there are plenty of other identities proposed in valid sources, including Azmael, the Stranger, and the hermit (The Taking of Planet 5). In this light, Blood of the Time Lords has presented us with a golden opportunity to fix our coverage of this character. Here's what I suggest:

1. Move the "hermit on the mountain" material from K'anpo Rimpoche to The Hermit, which can serve as an in-universe disambiguation page like Time Lord messenger (Genesis of the Daleks) or The Doctor's mother.
2. Use K'anpo Rimpoche to cover the material from Planet of the Spiders. It can be treated like an incarnation page even though it covers two incarnations, removing the need for K'anpo Rimpoche 1 (Planet of the Spiders) and K'anpo Rimpoche 2 (Planet of the Spiders). (And shouldn't it be called K'anpo, since "Rimpoche" is an honourific?)
3. Use Ansillon as the page for the Time Lord of whom K'anpo was an incarnation.

This would let us fully incorporate Blood of the Time Lords into our coverage without deprioritizing K'anpo or the Hermit as "just a phase" or unworthy of coverage on their own merits. Just my personal proposal, but I think it would slice the Gordian knot and make our Hermit-related pages dramatically clearer. – n8 (☎) 04:06, 19 April 2022 (UTC)

I don't believe the Stranger is intended to be an identity for the hermit? The Patience story has him existing in the vicinity of a mountain on Gallifrey, but that's rather a thin argument to connect him to the Hermit. Per The Time Monster itself, the Doctor used to live in a "house halfway up that mountain", so in the wider context of who the Stranger is mysteriously meant to be…

(And about the The Taking of Planet 5 hermit, two questions: first, what's the in-universe evidence that he's the same as the Time Monsters hermit, aside from both being Gallifreyan hermits? And second, are we sure he isn't supposed to also be K'anpo? Which would make him and "Ansillon" different backstories for K'anpo, not just for the Time Monster hermit, which implies yet again slightly different coverage… It's like Russian dolls!)

Anyway, I like the spirit of this solution, but I'd want to fine-tune it. For one thing, not every account that gives him an identity treats "the Hermit" as an actual name he went by, as opposed to him simply being a small-H hermit, so while I do see the aesthetic appeal of The Hermit, I think the page should really be at Hermit (The Time Monster), which will also be more immediately legible.

And I'm not sure about putting the Kevin Lindsay K'anpo (who is of course a distinct entity from the Watcher-like projection Cho Je!) on the same page as the K'anpo we see the most of in Planet of the Spiders. The current titles are messy, but consider: if accounts seem to gravitate towards the idea that Ansillon/the Hermit/etc. only used the "K'anpo" name for a subfraction of his lives, rather than K'anpo having been his original name on Gallifrey — well — it strikes me that it's more speculative than not to say that any incarnations prior to George Cormack used the name K'anpo. Which frees us up to call Cormack First K'anpo (or K'anpo I, whatever) and Lindsay Second K'anpo/K'anpo II. Which seems perfectly sensible to me.

Oh, and I also think that although the Hermit (The Time Monsters) page should contain all the "hermit on the mountain" material, it should also be duplicated at Ansillon, much as Ferain's page duplicates the information from Genesis that is also present, "unattributed", at Time Lord messenger (Genesis of the Daleks).

But lest this look like negation by a hundred papercuts, I agree with the fundamental idea of making Ansillon an "overall Time Lord" sort of page, treating the K'anpo page(s) as incarnations, and of making a separate "accounts-overview" page for the Hermit's identities; it's about time we acknowledged the Azmael connection. So my proposal:

1. Hermit (The Time Monster) will house a copy of all information about "the hermit on the mountain", as well as a list of the proposed identities in valid sources: Ansillon/K'anpo, Azmael, and potentially the Hermit (The Taking of Planet 5).

1. Ansillon will be the overall Time Lord page for one of those identities, with K'anpo I, K'anpo II and Ansillon (Blood of the Time Lords) as incarnation pages. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 12:38, 19 April 2022 (UTC)