Talk:Smashed Bits (short story)

Validity

I have to object in the strongest terms to the creation of this page as invalid. The justifications given on the page are simply not enough to justify its invalidity. Let us go through the two justifications used on the page individually, and see if they hold up to scrutiny.

Justification 1 given, and this is the one given at the top of the page, is that

Like Who on Earth is... Beep the Meep ^[+]Loading...["Who on Earth is... Beep the Meep (short story)"] before it, Smashed Bits was framed as a tongue-in-cheek mock-interview with Janis Goblin.

This justification does not seem to make any sense to me. Firstly, Who on Earth is... Beep the Meep is a fourth-wall breaking piece that depicts Doctor Who as real, and Beep the Meep as knowing all about what Doctor Who is, to the point where the interviewer asks if he could be making an appearance in the TV show, and Beep retorts that he doesn't think that the TV show is canonical. This is clearly nothing like this situation, which has nothing even remotely approaching a fourth wall break. The whole thing is styled as an in-universe interview with a magazine that is explicitly not DWM, it is a magazine that one might expect to find circulating among goblins.

In fact, we have an almost one to one analogue of this situation, Forum:Validity: Hacker T. Dog. In this forum, a similar situation was had. Robot Week ^[+]Loading...["Robot Week (TV story)"] (back then strangely called The Robot Reveal) was invalid due to the fact that it was similar to the fourth wall-breaking Mind My Minions ^[+]Loading...["Mind My Minions (webcast)"]. Note that despite the fact that the closing post to that same forum ruled it to be invalid, it was for a completely different reason, and ruled the original justification to be invalid, as it were, for want of a better term. Yes, that segment of Robot Week was, and is, similar to Mind My Minions, but that similarity is not in and of itself a justification for invalidity, as the original justification for that first story's invalidity does not extend to the similar story.

Now, justification 2 is a little more complicated and subtle, and doesn't on the surface appear to be a justification at all, being as it is buried in the continuity section, but here it is:

Smashed Bits, like A Message from Janis Goblin ^[+]Loading...["A Message from Janis Goblin (short story)"] published not too long prior, references the characters from The Church on Ruby Road ^[+]Loading...["The Church on Ruby Road (TV story)"], but in such a way that depicts them in a meta-fictional setting where the Goblins are famous and Davina McCall is amicable with them, at odds with their attempted murder of Davina in the episode.

Now, this appears to justify the invalidity of Smashed Bits by invoking both narrative discontinuity and fourth wall break simultaneously. The fourth wall break is really a stretch, this is not remotely a meta-fictional setting, merely an in-universe magazine article. And "the goblins are famous" makes no sense at all. I've no idea how you could get that from the story. It is Janis Goblin who is famous among the goblins. Their amicability with Davina McCall is discontinuous, yes, but here's the thing. This is directly at odds with T:VS. Consider this paragraph:

The DWU has messy continuity. A story can't be declared invalid just because it contradicts other works of fiction.

Come on, now. T:VS explicitly forbids declaring a story invalid due to narrative discontinuity. And here this story is, and it has been invalidated due to just that (albeit in tandem with other reasons, which, as I've hopefully already explained, don't hold up particularly well).

In short, the invalidation of this story was a grave miscarriage of justice, which can hopefully be rectified through this talk page. Aquanafrahudy 📢 🖊️ 11:04, 10 February 2024 (UTC)