Forum:Iris Wildthyme: should she stay or should she go?

Index → Panopticon → Iris Wildthyme: should she stay or should she go?

Spoilers are strongly policed here.
If this thread's title doesn't specify it's spoilery, don't bring any up.

There's very little debate that the character of Iris Wildthyme, as used in her Doctor Who-labelled crossovers, is a part of the DWU, and therefore something to be covered by this wiki.

Where it gets murkier are the books and audios where she's on her own. I think these should be put well outside our borders, because they are explicitly not in the DWU as stated by the publisher.

Here are some selections from the IW submission guidelines Obverse Books have on their webite, which can be found at http://obversebooks.co.uk/guide/.

• Iris’ origins are shrouded in mystery, which is the way Iris likes it. The most recent theory suggests that she comes from the Clockworks, the home of a race of powerful but indolent technologically advanced aliens, situated in a separate universe to our own known as the Obverse. Some have hinted that it is the manner in which the people of the Clockworks merely record and not intervene which caused Iris to leave in her bus, looking for adventure and excitement. There have also been suggestions that there is something rotten in the Obverse, something which scares Iris for some reason…

So, her people are the "Clockworks" and explicitly not the Time Lords. Yes, we all know what "Clockworks" is code for, but no, code language isn't good enough — as has been established at forum:How do we best include Faction Paradox on the wiki? We also have a named other universe from which she apparently comes. And it ain't the DWU.

• The Doctor, Time Lords, Cybermen and all that Jazz

Nowhere to be seen. Not even in jest. Nothing whose copyright belongs elsewhere, either BBC or Big Finish or Telos or whatever.

You can hint if it’s sufficiently subtle and deniable, but that’s about it. And it’d have to be pretty damn subtle and deniable, so calling them Cyberons or introducing a mysterious time travelling boyfriend called The Dentist isn’t going to work.

Heh, I like the dig at Bill Baggs here, but it's also fairly conclusive evidence that Obverse aren't playin' the same game as BBV or even Bernice Summerfield. They're not trying to remain in the DWU using only characters to which they have a license. This isn't P.R.O.B.E. where they've got permission for Liz Shaw — but not Benton — so they just fail to include Benton. Iris Wildthyme stories, at least by Obverse, just aren't in the DWU at all. They're taking a character out of the DWU and building a wholly new, and largely parodic, universe around that character. Which, again, is very different than what happens with Bernice Summerfield stuff.

It's more akin to what happened to Lucille Ball when she went from I Love Lucy to The Lucy Show. Yes, The Lucy Show basically still features Lucy Ricardo amd Ethel Mertz — only now they're both divorced and neither talks about her ex that much.

So I think all of it should go — save, again, for those things that happen in stories clearly branded with the Doctor Who logo. What do we do with it? Create another mini-wiki, I guess. It'd be pretty easy, given the pace of development at w:c:factionparadox over the last week.

Objections?
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  <span style="">19:19: Fri 25 May 2012 

I used to wonder why Mary Tyler Moore had divorced Dick van Dyke -- clearly the marriage had crumbled when the boy had died and she needed to get as far away as possible. Why did she change her name though?

Here, though, Ms. Wildthyme has not bothered to change her name, not even to the extent that Lucy Ricardo did. It's still Ms. Wildthyme, even in those Big Finish productions where Katy Manning is voicing her and Jo Grant. Given the slovenly BBC attitude towards continuity, I think we have little reason to turn our noses up at Ms. Wildthyme and the issues of picking and choosing which set of adventures is canonical and which isn't. So, yeah, I object. Boblipton ^{talk to me} 20:56, May 25, 2012 (UTC)

I'm with Bob. The argument with Faction Paradox was that these weren't stories about Time Lords with TARDISes from Gallifrey, they're stories about members of the Great Houses with timeships from the Homeworld. The change in names was a sign of the change in universes.

That's not what Obverse is doing with Iris. they're just telling stories about what Iris is doing when she's not around the Doctor (or anything else owned by the BBC or anybody else). And Iris is still visiting the DCU on a semi-regular basis. To me, this seems very much like the Bernice Summerfield situation.

And it's worth remembering that the Clockworks backstory first appeared in a BBC-licensed Doctor Who novel, The Blue Angel. I'm not seeing the problem here. —Josiah Rowe ^{talk to me} 00:42, May 26, 2012 (UTC)

@Bob: Carol Brady didn't bother to changeher name for The Brady Bunch movies of the 1990s, but no one in their right mind would argue that Shelley Long is playing the same character as Florence Henderson. Christopher Reeve and Tom Welling both played a guy named Clark Kent whose real identity was Kal-El from the planet Krypton. That doesn't mean that Smallville is in the same continuity as Superman II. Guys named Greene and Olomos have both played a Colonial leader named "Adama", but that doesn't mean that the two BSGs are necessarily in the same continuity.

Fiction is rife with examples of related characters with the same name. It's hardly fair to dismiss this thread's proposal simply on the basis that Paul Magrs didn't change his lead character's name. If he called her something other than "Iris Wildthyme", he would be losing a significant marketing asset.

@Josiah: Could you develop your last point a bit further, please? The word "Clockworks" does not appear in The Blue Angel. The word "clockwork" does, but only three times, always in its ordinary English meaning. The word "clock" appears only six times, always in ordinary ways.

Also, this isn't at all like the Bernice situation, as far as I can see, because Bernice has had solo encounters with other elements of the DWU — Daleks, Sontarans, Braxiatel, whatever. AFIAK, there's no attempt to suggest that Benny is in some alternate universe to the Doctor.

Not so, Iris. The publisher specifies that Iris' people, called the Clockworks, come from another universe called "the Obverse". Yet, she's definitely a Time Lord from Gallifrey in the DWU stories. I'm not seeing how that's compatible with being a Clockwork from the Obverse in the IWU stories.

Just as with other inclusion debates, I'm gonna need more info if I'm going to be able to integrate this into our "what this wiki covers" policy document. I need to know what the actual difference is between this and FP. As it stands, it really looks like Obverse are changing names to protect their asses, just like FP. I'm not sure I'd be able to convincingly distinguish between the two cases.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  <span style="">15:10: Sat 26 May 2012 

CzechOut could you give more information on exactly what you want to exclude from 'what this wiki covers policy' (we need a shorter name for it).

Are you proposing to exclude just the Obverse Books published stories? What of the Big Finish Productions books and audio? And Snowbooks' Enter Wildthyme? --Tangerineduel / talk 15:30, May 26, 2012 (UTC)

Why is it that we are asked for our feelings and then get into a long debate over logic and reason? I fail to see why we accept the fact that the Doctor was loomed and has a mother, father, brother and grandchildren, yet we strain at this particular gnat. Iris Wildthyme is part of the Doctor Who universe, so what she does and says away from the Doctor and the BBC-licensed parts of it are likewise part of it including her unlikely lies. You want my reasons, I demand that opposing material be composed in higgledy-piggledies or at least good solid clerihews. Boblipton ^{talk to me} 20:47, May 26, 2012 (UTC)

Now that I've gotten that glob of bile out of my throat, I'd like to discuss a bit of a trend that disturbs me. You may think this is thread hijacking. I think it is not, but a discussion of the impetus behind this and other threads.

Any organization can and must reflect the opinions of the people running it at the moment, tempered by the difficulty of changing things -- inertia, if you will -- and a bit of consideration for those who will come after. I think in this discussion and in others like the thread about The Infinity Doctors, Czechout has been trimming problematic works from consideration in this wiki. I have several issues with this. First, I am conservative in language and organization, feeling that there's no need to shoot the waltzing bears and replace them with dancing chickens simply because the former don't dance well; second there are real problems with continuity -- canon, if you will -- at the heart of the Whoniverse and worrying about what happens with people like Ms. Wildthyme when the Doctor is not around is small potatoes when we consider questions like the Doctor's age and what Time Lord family life really entails.

The third point is a philosophical one of how we organize this wiki. The original impetus was to make it inclusive: anything that might reasonably relate to the universe of Doctor Who was welcome. Czechout has been working to rationalize that attitude on a case-by-case basis. Each case can be justified on its own terms -- and by citing similar decision made in the past, the way the jettisoning of Faction paradox has come up in this thread. It's true that a lot of the Obverse stuff doesn't fit well, but then, neither does a lot of the stuff at the core of consideration -- just considering the tv shows, how many times did Sarah Jane Smith see the Doctor between her tenure in the TARDIS and School Reunion?

While Czechout's proposed changes are not wrong in the context of some views of how to organize this wiki, it is exclusive rather than inclusive and in the end it will be a very small and comparatively useless wiki. You can't remove the obviously wrong stuff and nothing else. In the end it winds up like a mustache in a Marx Brother movie --- one more little snoop and it's gone. Well, people can change it back later if they disagree -- except there's that inertia working against that.

What's the answer? The radical one of getting rid of the non-canon tag altogether? Maybe, but I doubt that will fly. I do, however, think we have reached, if not passed the point of diminishing returns and we should give this entire type of thread a rest. Even though I expect Czechout will complain that this is thread-hijacking. Boblipton ^{talk to me} 22:54, May 26, 2012 (UTC)

Again, I agree with Bob. This seems to me to be part of a "death by a thousand cuts" of all the interesting side-steps and discontinuities of the larger world of Doctor Who-related fiction. As such, it seems fundamentally misguided, and makes me want to suggest that CzechOut re-read Unnatural History, which I think says all that needs be said about such discontinuities.

To answer the question about The Blue Angel, I'd have to re-read it to be sure, but my recollection was that the sections of the novel which dealt with the Obverse suggested an alternative origin for Iris (hence the name of the publisher). I'm not at all sure that Iris has called herself a Time Lord or claimed that she was from Gallifrey in any work published since then; and even if she did, we know that she lies and misremembers things. Anyway, the version of Iris currently appearing on the covers of Obverse Books looks like Katy Manning, who's still playing her on audio for Big Finish.

When I was making the comparison with Bernice Summerfield, I was specifically thinking of her earliest adventures in the non-Doctor Who NAs. As I recall (and I could be wrong,as I haven't read any of those books since shortly after they were published) they didn't use any Doctor Who monsters, but did use characters like Jason and Braxiatel who had been created for the Doctor Who NAs. Specifically, Braxiatel was never referred to as a Time Lord in those NAs, was he?

Iris has always been an elusive, willful old bat, who refuses to be tied down by anything as mundane as continuity. Why should we presume to determine which of her adventures were real and which we're fictional in the Doctor's universe? I may have quoted this in another one of these inclusion debates, but it seems to me to come down to the line from Alan Moore's "last" Superman story: "This is an imaginary story. Aren't they all?" —Josiah Rowe ^{talk to me} 01:53, May 27, 2012 (UTC)

I like to think of a wiki as a well trimmed tree, about a specific topic, not like Wikipedia that is a never-ending grape vine, encompassing everything. If we include non-BBC/BF produced Iris, where does it end? If a character is introduced in a Obverse IW book, and then gets their own spin-off with another company, that does not mention DW or IW at all - do we include that series? What if we do, then a character in that series gets their own series with another publisher, that does not mention the series that they originated it?

As far as I can see, just because she looks the same as Katy Manning in both Obverse and BBC/BF productions, does not mean that Iris is the same person in both. If the only connection between Obverse IW and BBC/BF IW is the character name and image, I don't think that quite qualifies for inclusion.

I'm all for "interesting side-steps and discontinuities", but a separate wiki is more appropriate for such ventures. Keep the TARDIS Index File for Doctor Who, not stuff based on, but separate from, Doctor Who. Tardis1963 talk 10:23, May 27, 2012 (UTC)

If we do wind up covering companions of companions of companions, what's the problem, Tardis1963? Are you concerned that we don't have enough floorspace or will run out of brooms? I'm old enough that I have issues with some of the normal practicalities of the Internet and do silly things like that. If we wind up having articles on stuff that stray pretty far from William Hartnell's Doctor, it's the nature of the beast. People will still head over to the core current articles to learn and edit. Articles further afield will consist largely of a few lines and a link to sites with on-point discussion, like the Star Trek references.

A more overtly realistic concern would be that the quality of the core articles would suffer as effort is shifted to peripheral issues. If it is, it is the natural evolution of the way some one's interests shift and people are just as likely to move from Iris to the Doctor as the other way -- more likely, I should think, because the Doctor offers more diversity. In either case, it's an infinite buffet -- take what you want and don't worry -- the food does not spoil.Boblipton ^{talk to me} 11:04, May 27, 2012 (UTC)