Talk:Who's After Your Cash (short story)

Questions

I understand Fatal Death itself being valid, as per Moffat’s comments about how they painstakingly made sure it fit in with the DWU proper as it existed then, despite its clearly comical nature, but this to me seems like just a little promotional piece, no different from, say, all those other little skits the franchise has done to promote charities and stories and the like.

Then again, all the promotional tweet along stuff on Doctor Who: Lockdown! is VALID, even in the case of one story blessing us with an in-universe page on ourselves, so maybe it’s case by case? If so, the criteria seems pretty arbitrary, at least to me. Should this be excluded as merely a promotional piece, or is it a VALID story in its own right?

Assuming promotion pieces like ARE considered to be stories in their own right on this wiki (thus passing rule 1), which does appear to be the case most of the time, in this specific case, does Rowan appear to be setting this in the DWU proper as Moffat was with Fatal Death is elf (this passing rule 4)? I’m not too sure if this is supposed to "fit" like Fatal Death does... hmmmm.... 🤔 NightmareofEden ☎ 17:30, October 3, 2020 (UTC)

You're mixing a lot of things together here. Children in Need 2011, One Born Every Minute, Dermot and the Doctor and Blue Peter special 2005 are not invalid because they are commercials, because they're not commercials. They're invalid because they break Rule 4 in other ways. Volume Two trailer is the only one of the stories you linked here that is invalid due to being a commercial.

But that is because it was labelled as such. Who's After Your Cash is not presented as a commercial per se — it's not saying "subscribe to the BBC" or anything, just metafictionally saying "guess what's coming soon". Tardisodes and Prequels are similarly designed to "drum up interest" in the episode to which they're connected, but that doesn't make them invalid commercials.

In addition, and more as a general PSA than a specific answer to you: a story that's invalid-because-it's-a-commercial does, most of the time, pass Rule 1. Jo Grant Returns and, inded, the First Doctor trailer, are both stories — they're just invalid stories under Rule 4. See Tardis:Valid sources#What doesn't count for more details.

Finally, you yourself cited the precedent of The Zygon Isolation for the seemingly-fourth-wall-breaking stuff. And I use "seemingly" for a good reason: the thing the Doctor is talking about here is never called Doctor Who (not that this would be a problem). When it's clear that the Doctor is treated as a real person in their own universe, and that there's no "fourth-wall-breaking" going on, a story depicting Doctor Who fiction as also existing within that universe does not automatically constitute a fourth wall break.

Of course, if compelling evidence that Rowan Atkinson did not mean for this story to be in continuity with The Curse of Fatal Death can be found, we can revisit this. (Or we will be able to do that, anyway, once we have a working Forum again.)

But in the meantime, this story definitely isn't a commercial, and no sufficient evidence of a Rule 4 break has yet been presented. --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 17:42, October 3, 2020 (UTC)