User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates/@comment-1432718-20191023230311/@comment-6032121-20191024104021

Having read the book: what Revan is saying that these stories are written by children and it shows. Not in the writing, which is perfectly decent, but in the strangeness of some of the plots, and especially the matter-of-fact, fast-paced way in which these fantastical elements are introduced. The Robot Invasion, for example, begins with the fact that all the teachers at Lucy and Hobo's school have been replaced by robot duplicates, without taking any time to establish this, and doesn't stop to wonder where these robots came from or precisely what their motivations are.

That being said, the lack of context for adventures is nothing we haven't seen with Give-a-Show Projector stories, and the somewhat childish concepts and resolutions is familiar to anyone who's read the First Doctor TV Comics. We'd have no trouble covering all this on the Wiki if we wanted to, is my point.

Revan mentions stories ending on cliffhangers. So what? Are we going to make Sleep No More invalid next? And that's not the case of all of the stories. Here are the only ones with an ending that seems to go against established continuity:

• Gone: Hobo has apparently drowned.
• Assessment Day: Lucy and Hobo are on the run from a corrupt government, with the world devastated by an alien invasion.
• Just Shrink: The one Revan mentioned which ends with Lucy having gotten shrunk to doll-size as its ironic Twillight Zone-size ending.

But Peardrop, The Robot Invasion and The Mystery of the Cyber Teachers are perfectly alright and don't go against any kind of continuity.

Not, of course, that this should matter. We judge validity on whether the authors intend for their stories to slot into DWU continuity, not on whether we think they work as part of a unified DW timeline. Revan does say “all the stories contained within aren't written to fit with continuity”, but this is frankly baseless speculation about the intent of the various writers.

It may be that Gene Turner's Gone is more a what-if, focusing as it does on the death of Hobo Kostinen. Perhaps the same can be said of Assessment Day ("what if Lucy and Hobo were runaways after the end of the world?"). But I see no reason whatsoever to think the rest of the stories were not intended to take place in the DWU.

The stories being all by different authors, and narratively unconnected to one another, I think such Rule 4 concerns should be handled regarding the individual stories (which definitely should get individual pages, even the couple we might or might not eventually deem invalid).

There is no evidence whatsoever in the book itself that it's a charity release, at any rate.