Forum:Story arcs

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A story arc is a common thread carried across a number of stories to form an over reaching arc or a continuing element in a story line. (See Story arc)

Looking through Category:Story arcs category there are though, a few I'm unsure of. Is Category:Rassilon's Final Solution arc an arc? The stories within fall into the 'continuing element' style of arc, but it's more to do with the Doctor's end (which is linked into Rassilon but Rassilon isn't the common theme throughout these stories).

Category:Return of the Master arc is another I'm unsure of, with the stories; The Keeper of Traken, Logopolis and Castrovalva it is the return of the Master, but it's not the only return of the Master arc, maybe consider renaming it in case of confusion with the Utopia/The Sound of Drums/Last of the Time Lords stories? Or maybe have this as a main category with two sub-categories of different returns? (I'm not really sure)

Also the Category:Missing Planets arc articles I've grouped together into this category (previously there were about half a dozen categories relating to this such as: Category:Medusa Cascade arc, Category:The Return of Rose arc, Category:Series 4 prophecies, Category:Shadow Proclamation arc and Category:Series 4 story arcs into which these were sub-categories of. --Tangerineduel 17:26, May 28, 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, I seem to remember tackling this issue back in the day. And the truth is there's never a completely satisfactory name for these things, because they're all drawn from our own impressions of the episodes. There's no doubt there is an arc, but what we name it depends on what we take away from the episodes. The reason people leap to "Return of the Master" is because the Master is the common element, I suppose. But it does cause a problem to use that, because, as you point out, that's an equally valid name for Utopia-The End of Time. Whatever name you came up with would have to, in my mind, cover the Doctor, the Master and Nyssa, because they're all three the continuing elements in all stories of the trilogy.

One of the reasons I suggested putting this information actually in the infobox — with those nav arrows that you disliked — was because you then didn't actually have to create a linkable name for the arc. You could call it what you wanted, give people the ability to navigate it, but not worry about having an actual article about it. People could edit the name as they saw fit until a really good name was established — without that creative process resulting in the creation of any page or category.

Doing it this way with categories is just messy. I think they should all be deleted, as they're really just one or two fans' opinions and not worthy of articles/categories. Not only that, but categories don't organize this information usefully. Categories have no real ability, unless you trick 'em out with funky numerical sort keys, of giving a sense of chronological order. And that's really what people want here, I think. 23:10, May 28, 2010 (UTC)

In principle, I like CzechOut's solution (I think that was him who missed a tilde above) of putting this in the infobox, but I'm not sure even that's necessary. Almost every arc is made up of consecutive stories, or mostly consecutive stories skipping over a few of them. In fact, the only counter-example I can think of is Cartmel's War Trilogy from the NAs (which we have a category for, but it's called "Warlock Trilogy"). Which means the arrows wouldn't really be helpful in any way, as they'd just reproduce the existing previous story/next story links every time, so all they could show is that a story was the start or end of an arc (by not having a left or right arrow).

Having an _article_ on each arc makes sense if there's enough to say there, with the stories listed in order, and some description of what the arc is about. If there are multiple names for the same thing (like what we call the "Return of the Master arc" being usually called the "Master trilogy"--even in the top of The Keeper of Traken), we can discuss them, and have redirects from the other names. And so on.

But a category listing 3 or 13 episodes/stories and a handful of related articles all sorted in alphabetical order (without even the usual DW:, etc. to distinguish the stories from other episodes) doesn't do anyone any good. --Falcotron 00:24, May 29, 2010 (UTC)

I strongly oppose articles, not only for the reasons I gave above, but also because the articles are already present. You don't need an article on the "Return of the Master", when you've already got an article on the Master. Everything you could say about that arc should be in the Master article.

I'd also disagree with your notion that "almost every arc is made of consecutive stories". That's not true at all. "The Master's Heartbeat", "Pete's World" and "Ood" storylines aren't consecutive in the BBC Wales production. But each appearance does build on the other narratively in a way that's a bit different than the relationship between, say, Revenge of the Cybermen and Earthshock.

Furthermore, many arcs go to other media. For instance, the "Peladon Stories" are Curse, Monster, Bride, a Big Finish production, and Legacy, a NA novel. And they all are narratively linked. The "Stockbridge arc" involves comics in both Five and Eight's reign, as well as the middle chapter of BF's "Stockbridge season". You could easily conceive a "Destruction of Mondas" trilogy of The Tenth Planet, Attack of the Cybermen and The Reaping (and by extension, The Gathering and The Harvest). There are really any number of adversaries — Metebelis Spiders, Krotons, Wirrn, Krynoid — who have direct sequels to their televised appearances in BF. Then there's Beep the Meep in the comics, and one BFA, whose appearances are not consecutive in terms of publication, but are so in terms of narrative intent. And of course the Abslom Daak, Shayde/Feyde and Kroton (Cyberman) stuff isn't in consecutive publications. Across all media, there are a lot of non-consecutive story arcs.

It's a tricky thing, this. Because in some cases, describing a story arc is very like a list of appearances — Peladon being a prime example of that. Likewise, all the Saxon Master stuff is very much one big story arc, from Utopia to The End of Time. The Sabalom Glitz, Lytton and Sil appearances are very much continuous, too. But you certainly couldn't put all Dalek stories into a single story arc. Nor could you put Cyberman, Sontaran, Silurian or Auton stuff all in one arc. You'd go mad trying to work it out. Or you'd at least hit a point where you gave up. And there are some cases where a "return" of an alien doesn't equal a sequel. For instance, is Paper Cuts really a sequel to Frontier in Space? And while you can't say Evil of the Daleks is a sequel to The Power of the Daleks – even though they're "consecutive" Dalek TV stories, you can say that Power and Children of the Revolution are an indivisible narrative whole.

So while story arcs are tricky, and we wouldn't want them turning into an ape of a list of appearances, there are enough clear-cut examples of narrative flow that they deserve attention. I'd suggest that the absence of an ability to do it universally or uncontroversially doesn't mean we shouldn't try where it's bleedingly obvious. CzechOut ☎ | ✍ 09:01, May 29, 2010 (UTC)

I agree that in most cases, the article that serves the purpose already exists. In the few cases it doesn't exist, we could add it. In some cases, the article is (or would be) explicitly about the arc; far more often, it's just part of a larger article. No problem there.

Beyond that: Most of the examples you gave don't exist, or at least they're not in Category:Story arcs. There's no "Peladon Stories" arc, no "Stockbridge arc", etc. Of the ones that do exist, nearly all of them are contiguous, or contiguous minus a couple episodes, just as I said. Maybe other categories _could_ be created for which that isn't true, but they _haven't_ been.

Also, I don't think every set of stories that deal with the same thing are an "arc" in the sense of the ones that are currently listed. If you read the Story arc article, many of your examples don't really fit. Of course that might mean that the story arc article is wrong--and, if so, fixing that is actually more important than dealing with the categories/templates/etc., because articles are what people actually read.

As for using navigation templates--well, in some cases, that clearly is the right thing. For example, Template:Auton stories makes sense, but the idea of a Category:Auton arc doesn't. We could expand this if there are a few other cases that make sense. But if there are a ton of them, that would probably be a mistake that would cause more problems than it would solve.

Anyway, my main point is this: Even if we do want to add additional arcs, like one for Sabalom Glitz, adding them as just a category like the existing things won't do anyone any good. --Falcotron 21:15, May 29, 2010 (UTC)

Um, of course there's a Peladon arc. Every story set on Peladon is linked by the royal family of Peladon, and each one takes us further down the chain from the original King Peladon encountered by Jo and the Third Doctor. If viewed from the perspective of the royal house, it's very clearly a complete narrative of a patriarchal, class-based society that blossomed into a liberal, mixed class society over the course of five generations, thanks to their desire to join the Federation and their encounters with the Doctor, Jo, Sarah, Peri and Erimem. "Story arc" is a very broad term, whatever our article currently says. And it's especially tricky in a time travel show, because things that might not be particularly chronological to our hero, the Doctor, are entirely ordered for other characters. We have to have the flexibility to look at things from all angles, given Tardis:Point of view. When we do, we will discover that there are all sorts of arcs out there. To pretend that The Bride of Peladon is not directly linked to Curse and Monster is fairly short-sighted. Likewise, The Eternal Summer is directly narratively linked to Stars Fell on Stockbridge. I mean, the character of Maxwell Edison is pivotal, really, to the DWM run. You can trace a direct line from Max's introduction to Izzy's introduction, and without Izzy, welll, you hardly have a DWM Eightth Doctor run at all.

Again, I voice my opposition to articles written about story arcs. Finding a name for them that everyone will like is impossible. Thus, you can't really create a name that's usefully searchable. If you can't search for the article, what's the point of having it, really? It's totally not necessary to "create" a topic and then write about it. All this stuff about, for example, Max can be in his article, and in Izzy's. The Peladon arc, per se, can be in the History section of the article on the planet Peladon. The best way to handle story arcs is, I still believe, simply having navigational arrows that point from one story to the next story in that arc. Easy navigation between story pages, plus comprehensively written character/race pages, are all we need to ensure that the information is convenient, searchable and well-organized. CzechOut ☎ | ✍ 19:28, June 3, 2010 (UTC)

What I was saying is that there is no currently-existing category "Peladon stories arc", or any other representation, on this wiki, of such an arc. And the same is true for your other examples. Not that such a thing couldn't be sensibly created or wouldn't be useful, but just that it hasn't been created. Look at the category and see what's there.

Meanwhile, I'm agreeing with you about almost everything:

• In general, articles would be unnecessary and counterproductive (although I wouldn't categorically rule out that they could ever be useful).
• Categories are a useless way to represent arcs.
• There are many arcs that are not here that should be, including your examples, and they would be more usefully represented as navigation links than as either articles or categories.

I'm disagreeing about only one thing: You suggested turning the current arc categories into nav links. But the current categories amount to things like "all of season 16", or "all of series 1", or "NAs 1-4", so the nav links would only duplicate what's already there. Although I didn't look through them all with utmost care, the Cartmel War trilogy seems to be the only one this isn't true of. So, the right thing to replace these categories with is... nothing at all. Just delete them. --Falcotron 20:07, June 3, 2010 (UTC)

I know our differences aren't great, but I do disagree most strongly on that one little point of contention. In fact, cross-media, story arcs happen with great frequency out of publication order. In comics, for instance, it is entirely uncommon for there to be consecutive stories. The Kroton (Cyberman) story arc, the Max Edison/Stockbridge thing, the Shayde thing, the Frobisher contracts monomorphia thing, the Ivan Asimoff thing, the Feyde thing, and the Destrii thing all have at least one (but often much more than one) intervening, un-related strip. Then you add in the complication that Max, Shayde, Frobisher, and Izzy now have audio existences, and that his audio story can be placed within the context of his comic strip appearances. And then you have comic strip characters like Stacy Townsend and Ssard who started in the Radio Times but then concluded their story in the novels. And then you have all manner of direct television sequels in audio — for example, Worldwide Web being a sequel to Planet of the Spiders. The Companion Chronices also complicate matters by either offering nonconsecutive releases which nonetheless form a complete story (The Catalyst, Empathy Games, The Time Vampire), or which form a part of another line (The Mahogany Murderers begatting Jago and Litefoot, Night's Black Agents coming between City of Spires and the rest of the Jamie/Sixth Doctor adventures). I think there's every reason for navigation because our simple little "Timeline" structure on story pages simply can't handle it neatly, and, as we're both agreeing, categories and separate article pages are far too clumsy. CzechOut ☎ | ✍ 01:10, June 4, 2010 (UTC)

I'm not disagreeing that such arcs exist. My point is that those are not what our current categories list. Look at what's there when you go to the category today--Black Guardian trilogy, Cat's Cradle arc, Key to Time arc, Timewyrm arc, etc. Those are all useless. Therefore, we shouldn't talk about replacing the existing categories. Better to just scrap the existing categories, and start from scratch on how we should represent something useless, like the Stockbridge arc. I think that way, there would be less resistance to your nav link idea (which, at least in my mind, is the best solution anyone's proposed, so I'd like to see it happen). --Falcotron 05:38, June 4, 2010 (UTC)

Articles might be a way to go, but they'd need to be something more than a list. They could be an extension of the story arcs article to really explore how story arcs have manifested themselves throughout Doctor Who. If we're going to have articles they'd need to be about something, which might actually be useful I can think of at least two sources to write real world articles about the NA arcs, TV series arcs would also be relatively easy to find sources to backup.

CzechOut, I disagreed with the implementation of the story arcs and how they were realised (I still really dislike arrows) but also there was no discussion of what the story arcs were, why we needed them, how they were dreamt up etc. The fluid way they could be renamed etc was a little too fluid, comprehensively written pages works in theory.

Sequels, reappearances across media and other things don't necessarily make a story arc. Stacy and Ssard appeared in Placebo Effect nothing from their adventures impacted that story, they reappeared but there wasn't much of an arc nature about their reappearance. I'm not sure about sequels or reappearances being markers for arcs or patters.

The categories serve a purpose, not an entirely useful one, but there are obviously some editors who want to be able to place / find things in categories. However looking to the future I don't think the story arcs category will service us too well, so I'd be willing to consider hitting the delete button on it all. --Tangerineduel 17:21, June 9, 2010 (UTC)

Archivist's note

Despite the vigorousness of the debate, I'm not sure it ever actually came to a conclusion. These story arc categories still abound.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 17:24: Sun 06 Nov 2011