Talk:First Morbius
Time Lord incarnation naming
If a Time Lord's name is a title beginning with "the", it's perfectly natural to disambiguate their incarnations with an ordinal number (when numbering is known). For instance, "An astronaut shot the Doctor" is very naturally transformed into
- An astronaut shot the Eleventh Doctor.
It's with good sense that we have incarnation pages named First Doctor, First Rani, First Monk, Ninth Corsair, and so on.
But the situation is different when the Time Lord's name doesn't start with "the": for instance, personal names. Consider how we would transition the sentence "Morbius declared himself Imperator." With the current page name, we might say
- First Morbius declared himself Imperator.
But this is ambiguous, since "first" could be an adjective or an adverb, and it might sound like we're starting a list of things Morbius did! To remove the ambiguity, we find ourselves writing
- The First Morbius declared himself Imperator.
This is garbage, since now we're using his name like a title: "the Morbius".
This is the exact reason why we (and the fandom at large) use cardinal numerals to differentiate Romana I from Romana II instead of saying "First Romana" and "Second Romana". Transferring this precedent to Morbius's incarnations gives us an easy, readable, and grammatically sensical alternative to the current confusing title:
- Morbius I declared himself Imperator.
I propose that this incarnation naming standard be applied to not just First Morbius and Second Morbius but also First Tecteun, First Drax, and so on. – n8 (☎) 20:20, 20 December 2021 (UTC)
- I like this proposal, but what do you suggest we do when we know that a named multi-body character (as not all characters with multiple regenerations are Time Lords) has a name consisting of multiple nouns?
- E.g. Iris Wildthyme I: seems clunky.
Not that the character would not be actually named this as I'm sure we could do Lilith or "Edith Sitwell" Iris.20:46, 20 December 2021 (UTC)
- I like this proposal. It feel very natural and makes a lot of logical sense. As for Iris Wildthyme, I think that, due to the ambiguity of incarnation numbering with her (much like the Master), names should be used wherever possible instead of numbers anyway. Bongo50 (aka Bongolium500) ☎ 20:52, 20 December 2021 (UTC)
