Talk:First Morbius

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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)
Mmh. I have mixed feelings about this, especially as it concerns a character like Morbius who was once a Lord President — because we have plentiful evidence of Time Lord presidents using precisely this numbering scheme not to refer to incarnations of a singular individual, but two distinct individuals holding the same office who shared the same first name — just like real-world human monarchs. If I see "Morbius I became Lord President", I don't know whether to think "the first incarnation of Morbius became President", or "this guy, in an unknown incarnation, was the first guy named Morbius to become President, but there were others". This ambiguity does not exist with First Morbius. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 21:52, 20 December 2021 (UTC)
Romana has also been Lord President yet I've never seen any confusion over the use of cardinal numbers with her. That being said, I do feel that cardinal numbers would cause confusion with other characters which just highlights how weird the use of them with Romana is. Bongo50 (aka Bongolium500) ☎ 22:10, 20 December 2021 (UTC)
Also, @Nate, I don't think it's fair to say that using "the First Morbius" is "garbage"/that it necessarily means that "we're using his name like a title: the Morbius". Let us do away with outer-space time-gods for a moment and consider human parlance: if I meet two people called Linda, and one is blond-haired while the other one is a redhead, then I might describe our conversation in such terms as "The blond Linda said X. She and the red-headed Linda shook hands." In fact, if I meet one then the other, I could in fact say "The second Linda was a lot more polite than the first Linda". None of this means that I am treating either Linda's name as being "the Linda". Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 22:27, 20 December 2021 (UTC)
I agree with Nate on this one. Things like "Second Tecteun" sound odd to me. Regardless of which convention we go with, note that within pages, typically the incarnation can be specified with the link and doesn't need to be mentioned again. e.g. "Morbius' first incarnation declared himself Imperator. Morbius then..." This only really needs further clarification if another incarnation of the same Time Lord is involved, and sounds not so clunky. Chubby Potato ☎ 04:24, 21 December 2021 (UTC)
I can see how Roman numberals might be confusing (considering Pandad IV and others) but "First Morbius" might be a bigger problem. One thing we could do is alter our naming schemes for Lord Presidents. Pandad IV of Gallifrey and so on, with redirects. Or something like Pandad IV, President of the High Council. (No need to alter Elizabeth I, since so far as we know, she can't regenerate.) Any thoughts?
× SOTO (☎/✍/↯) 05:31, 21 December 2021 (UTC)
It seems a bit clunky to me. And either way, what if we had incarnation numberings for Pandad IV, or some other numbered President? The fourth incarnation of Pandad IV, under the current scheme, would be the Fourth Pandad IV; in the proposed new scheme… what, Pandad IV IV? Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 05:38, 21 December 2021 (UTC)
It does rather fall apart if Pandad IV were to enter the fold with multiple incarnations, yeah. But as I see it, Morbius 2 is not necessarily an improvement. In writing, Roman numerals seem like an odd choice in the first place for Romana, but when spoken aloud, you see it's "Romana the First", rather than "the First Romana" which fans were going for.
(And Romana III herself is technically "Romana II of Gallifrey", since she had to regenerate in order to gain a second term. So it's not wasted energy to try to clarify our terms, when there are already some confusing corners.)
× SOTO (☎/✍/↯) 05:47, 21 December 2021 (UTC)
I suppose if we decide to standardise Time Lord incarnations according to T:ROMANA, we could always have "Pandad IV's first incarnation" as a last resort, for that exceptional situation where applying our standard naming scheme would not work.
× SOTO (☎/✍/↯) 05:50, 21 December 2021 (UTC)
I've argued for cardinal numbers before so it goes without saying that I support it. That said, Scrooge makes a good point regarding all the different Pandaks and such. If, say, Pandak XXIII is depicted with multiple numbered incarnations, naming them could become tricky. I disagree, however, with the statement that the use of an article before "First Morbius" isn't a problem. I think it is a problem and Scrooge's example, in fact, highlights this. In the example, you are not referring to the "First Linda" (compound noun) you are referring to the first (adjective) Linda (noun). I struggle to think of any examples where you'd say "the [compound noun]" but would not say "the [noun]". "First Morbius" is a compound noun too. As such, any mention of a "the first Morbius" should strictly speaking be using a lowercase 'f' for Morbius, as the word 'first' is being used as an adjective, at which point I feel it loses some of its descriptive capacity (first in what? First through the door? First to be born?) Danochy ☎ 05:52, 21 December 2021 (UTC)
I disagree that in fandom conversation, people are likely to say "Romana the First" over "the first Romana". Though really what people most often say in these questions are things like "the Mary Tamm Romana". As for whether to capitalise "First" or not… Well, I would take "The first Morbius" as a compromise, really — it causes far fewer issues down the road than "Morbius I".
But let us not forget that usage of capitalised "the First Doctor" and such in narrative sources is pretty rare, too.
I would advise that everyone read through Forum:Is using "First Doctor", "Second Doctor" etc in-universe?, specifically the last stretch of the conversation, where it was shown (once it had been established that yes, obviously the Doctor numbers were in-universe to some degree) that there was actually some debate on whether the proper form is "The first Doctor" or "the First Doctor". People were making the very same point you make about Morbius: by most sources the character's proper name is "the Doctor"; they don't go around thinking of themselves as "the Eleventh Doctor", just "the Doctor", though he might say that he is "the eleventh Doctor" as a brute-force count. And indeed some sources, both valid narratives and licensed reference works, use "the first Doctor" onwards, sans capital "F".
But still we went with First Doctor, not first Doctor, and I think time has proven us emninently correct in that particular judgment call.
In a real-world sense there's no reason "the First Morbius" can't be thought of as a proper compound name to the same degree as well-established fandom parlance like "the Mary Tamm Romana". And to go back to my Lindas, sure, in the real-world I wouldn't address the second Linda I'd met as "Hello, Second Linda" — but if I were writing an autobiographical account of the encounter, with a wry tone, then I very well might end up capitalising "Second" and continuing to refer to her as the Second Linda throughout the book. Likewise, it is not that the Lord President Morbius would have gone around saying he was "the First Morbius", but if we cast ourselves as in-universe biographers, then having established in the lede the way in which he is "first", and the need to disinguish him from other incarnations, it seems stylistically perfectly natural that we should begin to refer to him as "the First Doctor" thereafter, when disambiguation from the other incarnations is required. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 06:18, 21 December 2021 (UTC)
I'm not opposed to "first Morbius", but it would be a bit confusing to have titled Time Lords use capital letters and proper-named ones use lowercase letters, especially since the page title will always be capitalised. And we certainly shouldn't make the Doctor's incarnations lowercase at this point. It's something that would work in an article, but not a page's title. I like User:SOTO's above idea to use Roman numerals and then honourifics to disambiguate if necessary, which T:HONOUR allows. Though if different incarnations of the same individual are really given different numbers for the presidency (Romana II is "Romana I of Gallifrey" and Romana III is "Romana II of Gallifrey" even though they're both the same Romana), that means "Pandad V" could either refer to Pandad IV's next incarnation who took the position again, or some other Pandad who became Lord President after him. Quite the headache. Chubby Potato ☎ 07:01, 21 December 2021 (UTC)
I'd just like to point out that nowhere did I suggest that we use lowercase letters for ordinal numbers on Morbius, let alone renaming any Doctor articles. I was merely pointing out the difference between the adjective (first Morbius) and compound noun (First Doctor) forms... But Scrooge does make a good point I had not previously considered in the way "First Morbius" could be somewhat-naturally moulded into a compound noun. Danochy ☎ 07:53, 21 December 2021 (UTC)

I agree with User:Danochy's comments on compound nouns, and I don't think they've been satisfactorily dismissed.

Regnal numbering is a genuinely good point which I hadn't considered at the time of the original proposal. On further reflection, however, I don't think it poses any issue:

  • This ambiguity existed at the time of the stories. The "Romana I" / "Romana II" terminology is common parlance dating all the way back to the 20th anniversary Radio Times Special in 1983, predating the introduction of Presidential numberings in The Legacy of Gallifrey et al. Who are we to treat Benncuiq III and Benncuiq IV as separate Time Lords when their creators seem to have viewed them as incarnations of a single Time Lord? Rather than introducing new confusion by using Roman numerals for both incarnation names and regnal numbering, we'd be correctly reflecting the ambiguity already present in the texts.
  • The current Queen Elizabeth wasn't born "Elizabeth II" or "Elizabeth Jr"; she was born with the personal name "Elizabeth Alexandra Mary". The regnal number "II" is part of the title she received when she became Queen. So, in the (very unlikely) hypothetical that we are one day given enough information to differentiate between Pandad IV's incarnations, while I like User:SOTO's suggestion of Pandad IV's first incarnation, my proposal of differentiating between titles and personal names would allow for First Pandad IV.

In any case, the issue of how to differentiate between incarnations of numbered Presidents remains purely hypothetical, and it's about as much an argument against the proposal as the possibility of a short story called (novel) would be against our dab term scheme. – n8 (☎) 13:38, 21 December 2021 (UTC)

A fairly strong argument in favour of "First Morbius", or at least proving tha "First Morbius" wouldn't be incorrect in the way some have argued: it's what Doctor Who itself is using, and I mean current Who at that. Consider "Old Swarm", an incarnation name for a character using a non-"The" name, given to us by the actual TV episode's credits. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 15:52, 4 January 2022 (UTC)
I don't think that's an airtight case, since we've never seen "Old Swarm" used in the context of a sentence. It may have just as easily been "old Swarm". And given that we have no indication of how many incarnations Swarm has been through, it's perfectly natural not to use numbers with his name; that would remain true even under this policy suggestion. Either way, Swarm isn't a Time Lord, so he's outside the scope of the specific proposal here and should be considered individually. – n8 (☎) 15:16, 23 February 2022 (UTC)
Actually, I'm pretty sure it's used in sentences in the officially-release Series 13 scripts, though I don't have them on hand at the moment. Of course, scripts aren't, of themselves, valid sources, but they can certainly be informative in those cases. I admit this isn't as good a precedent as if the scripts used "the First Swarm" and "the Second Swarm", but it is, at least, of interest for cases like War Ollistra, and it parallels some of the names used for Time Lord with Renegade names (e.g. Fugitive Doctor, Spy Master, Old Master).
Regardless, I dispute that this discussion should concern itselfexclusively with characters who are technically Time Lords. I think any characters who regenerate in a Time Lord-like fashion should be considered — be they Time Lords, Ravagers, or indeed Minyans: Malika, the main protagonist of Cutaway Comics' Omega, appears in three distinct successive incarnations across the course of Omega, with the first one seen being her first. Whatever we decide here should, by all rights, also govern whether we go with Malika I, Malika II and Malika III, or First Malika, Second Malika and Third Malika. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 15:23, 23 February 2022 (UTC)
"Old Swarm" and "Younger Swarm" were used in BTS info on prosthetics but they were put in quotes because they are arbitrary names like you'd see in the credits more than anything else. But barring official credits, I still think numerals are the way to go. I recently stumbled across the page Thirteenth Livia Caralis and that just seems incredibly clunky to me. I thought Thirteenth was actually part of a name.
Let it be said I don’t think numerals are always the right way to go. This page would be called "Livia Caralis XIII" I suppose, which is odd because it's the only numbered incarnation. So I think in some cases where most incarnations of someone aren't clear, story dabs might work better, or particular names in special cases like Iris Wildthyme mentioned above. The first sentence of the page could still say The xth incarnation of… to make the incarnation number clear. There's an ongoing discussion about the names of the Doctors from The Curse of Fatal Death, who are clearly sequential from the Ninth on but also have "official" names. My point being (and maybe this sounds odd from the current perspective) just because we know the number of an incarnation does not necessarily mean it should go in the title, but it can be emphasized on the page. It may depend on if the number is important in how the character is known and in relation to other incarnations— after all, that is kind of the reasoning for the "War" incarnation names. Chubby Potato ☎ 15:50, 23 February 2022 (UTC)
That's definitely a novel spin — personally I'm of the opinion that dabs are best avoided if there is a non-speculative alternative. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 15:53, 23 February 2022 (UTC)
For the record, I definitely agree with Scrooge that numberings are better if available, but I would also like to add that "War" incarnations are only dabbed that way because (and when) we don't know their numbering, not just because the incarnation's relation to the Time War is important (okay, we know War Doctor comes after 8, but him being the "Ninth Doctor" will never fly solely due to real world reasons).
Say, the next time Ollistra appears they reveal that War Ollistra is her tenth incarnation. There's no doubt that that page will then become [[Tenth Ollistra]]. In fact, that was what happened with War Livia Caralis. As soon as I realised she was on her final (and thus, thirteenth) incarnation, I switched from "War" to "Thirteenth". OncomingStorm12th ☎ 16:10, 23 February 2022 (UTC)
Or, to drag us back on topic, perhaps [[Ollistra X]]. – n8 (☎) 07:32, 18 April 2022 (UTC)
Being reminded of this thread, I've changed my mind on what I said earlier. I think numbers should be used where applicable. (Basically, I agree the way User:NateBumber originally proposed.)
But, I also think using "War" with personal names (e.g. War Ollistra) should be avoided. As I've said, I personally think something like "the First Tecteun" sounds silly, but at least it's technically correct as in the Linda example. But "the War Ollistra" sounds even sillier, and, in my opinion, makes things more confusing. I'd propose the War naming should only be used if a) the Time Lord uses a titular name, b) the incarnation has no other clear number (obviously excepting the War Doctor), and c) the incarnation engaged in the Last Great Time War (or perhaps some other notable war, but this could lead to confusion seeing as the War Doctor and the War Master both refer to that one). Chubby Potato ☎ 07:53, 18 April 2022 (UTC)

Restated proposal

Like many talk page conversations, this one flew off topic and then died. Since many important points were nonetheless raised in the above, here's a summary of my refined proposal:

  • Extend Tardis:Romana-style cardinal numbering to all numbered incarnations of Time Lords known by personal names. This entails moving First Morbius to Morbius I, First Tecteun to Tecteun I, First Drax to Drax I, etc.
  • No change to current practice of Tardis:Doctors-style ordinal numbering for numbered incarnations of Time Lords known by titles.
    1. This includes names starting with "the", like the First Monk, the Second Rani, and the Third Corsair.
    2. This also covers regnal names which already use Roman numerals: right now, none of these Time Lords have differentiated numbered incarnations, but if one day they did, according to current practice we'd name them like "First Pandad IV". This might seem confusing, but it's confusing regardless of this proposal, since either way Presidents Romana II and Romana III muck things up.
  • No change to current practice in Time Lord incarnation naming when numbering is uncertain, like the use of "War" in War Ollistra.

Regardless of any grammatical concerns, I believe this proposal reflects the long-standing fandom practice reflected in Tardis:Romana much better than the status quo. See also the behind-the-scenes of Benncuiq III for a case that this proposal would clarify.

Of course this doesn't come down to anything as simple as a vote, but if it did, here's the tally as I see it:

Is this accurate? (As an aside, should replacement Forums ever arise, we might want to think about adopting the Wikipedia format of each person replying with "Agree" or "Disagree", with subsequent back-and-forth indented underneath each individual response. Would maybe keep things on track a little better!) – n8 (☎) 16:17, 2 June 2022 (UTC)

Sounds like an improvement to me. One small modification I would make, in the case of regenerating presidents, is to use the format "Pandad IV (first incarnation)", which seems immediately much clearer than "First Pandad IV". (I'm sure someone will suggest Pandad IV's first incarnation just to avoid the dab, but that makes him sound more like a material possession than a self, and would encourage awkward sentence structures when linking to him from other pages. In general I think this wiki's aversion to dabbed titles is wrongheaded, and seems to place more importance on the minor editing inconvenience of pipelinking than it does on the clarity of the reading experience.) Gowlbag ☎ 18:02, 2 June 2022 (UTC)
Thanks for your support. Added you to the list!
I also share your appreciation of dabbed titles. That said, I tried to make this clear in the restatement, but this proposal wouldn't change current practice for cases like "First Pandad IV". It's possible that this current practice is wrong, but that should be a separate discussion if and when we need to have it, lest we be derailed again. I've gently edited for clarity. – n8 (☎) 19:58, 2 June 2022 (UTC)
So I read this now, and having done so I must say I lean slightly against, but this isn't a particularly strong objection. I just mainly find the proposed solution to the Pandad IV issue unworkable. First Pandad IV I strongly object to, as it's assuming that Gallifreyan presidential names work the same as regnal names. This is stated nowhere in the text, and I note that it's not unheard of for individuals to have numbers in their own personal names. (I mean, I've never heard of a "the fourth" off hand, but I have heard of "the third".) If the Pandad issue can be addressed I have no objection, but, in all honesty, no strong preference towards the rest of the issue. Najawin ☎ 07:36, 16 September 2022 (UTC)
Good feedback. In hindsight I could have avoided speculation by simply stating "We make an exception for personal names which already include numbers, since it would be very confusing," which is just as well. But yeah, SOTO told me basically the same thing: my judo move with "they're titles, they won't be affected" is what's holding this idea back from being enacted.

So, sigh, to confront the problem head-on. There are actually two separate concerns in play, each with several proposed solutions to match:

Does anyone have any clear preferences or other suggestions? – n8 (☎) 13:16, 16 September 2022 (UTC)

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