Talk:The Pantheon

Krampus was never mentioned by Harriet Arbinger so he should only be cited under an In Other Media section and not in the main body of the article. --104.244.231.6^{talk to me} 23:19, 18 June 2024 (UTC)

T:NPOV. Najawin ☎ 23:22, 18 June 2024 (UTC)

(Edit conflict) This wiki considers all valid sources to hold equal weight, including both comics and TV. If a comic says Krampus is part of the Pantheon, at the very least that's a fact provided by "one account". Cookieboy 2005 ☎ 23:22, 18 June 2024 (UTC)

Gods of Ragnarok?

I thought it was pretty obvious the "threefold deity" was meant to be the Gods of Ragnarok from The Greatest Show in the Galaxy. I guess it's too vague to put in the article but maybe in the behind the scenes? 91.110.84.0^{talk to me} 22:50, 20 June 2024 (UTC)

Yes, fair enough on a BTS notes! Found a couple of comments from noteworthy people, but more sources would be good. But yes, I do think in in-universe terms the text is too vague. If RTD said "yes, it's the Gods of Ragnarok and you're absolutely unambiguously meant to get that from the line", then maybe. --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 23:51, 20 June 2024 (UTC)

Scope creep?

I feel like the scope of this page could be better defined. The concept of the Pantheon isn't very well-defined in the show currently, so much of this page reads as speculation. We can't take a 'common sense' approach to the lore because frankly what we've seen on TV this year is murky and contradictory and can't be squared with past lore (for instance, looking at just The Legend of Ruby Sunday itself, I don't think we should so confidently declare that Sutekh's parenthood of the other Gods is symbolic, until a source indicates it as such). If a reader wants a history of the Mara, they can go read the Mara page, what's relevant here are the sources which discuss both the Mara and the Pantheon, both Sutekh and the Pantheon, and so on. My opinion is that this page should only focus on pages which directly discuss/name/are written with the idea of the Pantheon.

For example, the statement "Sutekh, originally a member of the Osirian Court, (TV: Pyramids of Mars ^[+]Loading...["Pyramids of Mars (TV story)"], AUDIO: The Judgment of Sutekh ^[+]Loading...["The Judgment of Sutekh (audio story)"]) came to hold himself to be the King of the other gods making up this group. (TV: The Legend of Ruby Sunday ^[+]Loading...["The Legend of Ruby Sunday (TV story)"])" could be rewritten using the Tales of the TARDIS story as a source which mentions both the Osirian Court and Sutekh's god-hood. If the core point of statement combining multiple sources is to highlight an ambiguous hole between the things left unsaid in either source, that's veering on theory. TheChampionOfTime ☎ 22:37, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

Doesn't Legend or Empire explicitly say that Sutekh evolved into godhood during his time in the vortex, which puts a hard constraint on his parenthood not being literal? (I'd 100% agree with you if it wasn't for this fact.) Najawin ☎ 23:14, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

I agree with you, but by the same logic it's hard to see how he becomes "The Oldest One", leader of the Pantheon, just by staying on top of the TARDIS - especially when Maestro says "how could he be there?" at an incident involving the Doctor's TARDIS. Empire of Death has a line indicating there's a Susan Twist for the events of The Time Meddler ^[+]Loading...["The Time Meddler (TV story)"], so there seems to a looseness to the script with regards to timelines. There's a lot that's unclear. TheChampionOfTime ☎ 00:08, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

I think the primary reason to read "father and mother and other of them all" as symbolic is that Maestro is included in the list of that "them all", but Sutekh clearly can't be their father because we know who their father is already: the Toymaker. (And before anyone suggests it, divine incest — to which the mythological Set is no stranger, let's be fair — still wouldn't fit the facts: Maestro mentions the Toymaker as "my father" in the singular. They don't have two daddies.)

I agree that the page shouldn't contain full histories of the Mara and Sutekh, but I don't think it's black-and-white. That's the thing about retcons. Russell seemingly intends us to believe that the Toymaker, the Mara and so on were Pantheon members all along — and thus that Kinda and The Celestial Toymaker constitute retroactive Pantheon stories. The official YouTube channel's "The Pantheon of Gods" clipshow accordingly compiles clips from the relevant Classic Who stories. Therefore doesn't discussion of them belong on a discussion of the Pantheon just as much as pre-Time Warrior allusions to "the Doctor's home planet" belong at Gallifrey, and so on?

But with that said, I do think it muddles things to cover this stuff in such detail here. It's not useful to the reader. We should say "the Doctor met the Mara a bunch of times" once, and let them go to the Mara's history if they want a fuller account. Still, this page's scope should be a little broader than just sources which mention the Pantheon by name; we do need to document the retroactive-welding going on here to some extent. It's a key part of what Davies was up to, and highlighting connections between different, but connected stories is the bread and butter of Wikification. It's what makes us different from the common breed of reference guide that simply regurgitates the contents of individual episodes without drawing those lines from A to B.

Honestly, I also don't see anything wrong with the sentence User:TheChampionOfTime highlights re: Sutekh. "Combining multiple sources to highlight an ambiguous hole between the things left unsaid in either source" is, to my mind, a perfectly legitimate way of writing a Wiki page about this sort of plot point, mired in both deliberate ambiguities and contradictory retcons. We aren't doing the job properly if the reader comes away thinking this stuff is all dandy and coherent, because, well, it isn't. Essentially the quoted sentence is saying:

"Sutekh, a character with a lot of preestablished DWU backstory (Old Sources, Old Sources) was depicted more recently as being mixed up with this stuff in a kind of mystifying way. (New Source)"

And I just think that's a more truthful and useful summary of the facts, for a lead section, than exclusively citing Bad Wolf-era sources and sanding away the sharp edges. "The Pantheon, and Sutekh's involvement in it, is one big retcon trying together various disparate bits-and-bobs of continuity, and leaving a lot of questions unsanswered" is precisely what I meant to convey in that lead; I think it's what the lead should convey.

Finally, I'll leave my interpretation which is certainly not definitive enough for Wikification, but seems to me relatively straightforward and side-steps the logical quibbles raised by the both of you. I think the idea is that Sutekh, having evolved into godhood while riding the TARDIS, founded the Pantheon from there (either recruiting or, if we must, siring, other god-things along the way — but my money's on recruiting, which tallies with Mr Smith describing the Pantheon as a "coalition"). If he could create Susans while staying put, why could he not spawn deities and scatter them through Time and Space, or, even more simply, communicate with preexisting deities and bully them into swearing fealty to him?

(Much as I dislike stable causal loops in my Doctor Who, the fact that it was Hartnell who met the Toymaker doesn't seem much of a factor. If he wasn't a Pantheon member yet, then he was simply recruited later; but even if we stick with the premise that we are to read the Toymaker as having already been a Pantheon member in his debut, it wouldn't be the only time the Doctor encountered the child of someone he hadn't met yet.)

This would handily resolve "the Oldest One": he's not necessarily the oldest of them by chronological age, but he's by definition the Oldest Member Of The Pantheon, since he founded it.

(Oh, and Maestro's "he can't have been there!" is not so surprising if one bears in mind that Maestro hasn't actually watched The Church on Ruby Road. By which I mean, they don't know that the Doctor's TARDIS was there on Ruby Road on the night of Ruby's birth.) --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 01:49, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

I've also just seen that the "Nature" section has been restructured. While I like highlighting the difference between the pre- and post-RTD2 depictions of the Pantheon (indeed, in precisely the same spirit as that which I discuss re: Sutekh), I do feel it suffers from not having a section clearly giving an easily-legible list of all individuals who have been asserted to be members of the Pantheon in one source or another. Any thoughts on how to include such a section without repeating info from other sections too egregiously?… Perhaps we don't need the Harriet-list to be presented in full in the RTD2 one? Perhaps a table would be good, with a column for sources and a column for additional context notes… --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 01:58, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

(I've gone ahead and implemented a stab at the table, but more thoughts welcome!) --Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 19:28, 27 September 2024 (UTC)