User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-26285319-20170104192003/@comment-4028641-20170305233647

I think there is a clear-cut difference between an author saying "Haha! I have the rights to a character/villain that was used in Doctor Who! I can make a Doctor Who Universe story with only half the rights I need!" and an author saying "You know what, that character I used once in a DWU story was pretty cool. I wanna use him/her/them again somewhere."

It's the difference between Adventures in a Pocket Universe and the Sleeze Brothers spin-off comics. Something like the AiaPU or the K9 tv series try really hard to be set in the DWU, and to connect to as many things as possible. The Sleeze comics, meanwhile, just happen to be based on characters who happened to appear in a DWU comic before anything else. No one would call them DWU characters, and yet they did start here. But most people tend to view their first story as a "crossover" that was their first published work in an unfortunate set of circumstances.

Now I had previously been all-for Sleeze being valid, but since we're questioning the rough edges of our policy like this, I'm now turning ship. I think it's the perfect example of a set of stories which would be easy to cover, but we have no reason to. There is no attempt to be set in the DWU. If we were going to cover them, we would need proof that they were set in the DWU before we needed proof that they weren't.

My only quandary is how we define which stories need to be "proven" instead of "un-proven." I would need more specific reasoning than "the stupid ones need to be proven."