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Forum:Temporary forums/Inclusion debates speedround: Difference between revisions
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Forum:Temporary forums/Inclusion debates speedround (view source)
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''[[One Born Every Minute (TV story)|One Born Every Minute]]'' has remained controversial, and my thoughts on it haven't changed much since I posted on that talk page. The crossover is not in itself the problem; the problem is that it seems to be a fourth-wall-breaking spoof. The ''Call The Midwife'' characters are characterised as meta parodies of themselves; not real women from the 1950s but ''living characters'', the tropes of whose native stories follow them around. It is in short a ''Roger Rabbit''-style situation for them. I don't mean to say that any fourth-wall break is inherently disqualifying (we'll come back to it), but as much as we mustn't throw out stories because they don't fit a narrow conception of what a DWU story ''is like'', we must also remember not to square-peg-round-hole stories into "making sense". The premise of this minisode is ''not'' "the Doctor has transported people from the 1950s to 2010s", it's very tangibly "the Doctor has transported people from one TV show into another". | ''[[One Born Every Minute (TV story)|One Born Every Minute]]'' has remained controversial, and my thoughts on it haven't changed much since I posted on that talk page. The crossover is not in itself the problem; the problem is that it seems to be a fourth-wall-breaking spoof. The ''Call The Midwife'' characters are characterised as meta parodies of themselves; not real women from the 1950s but ''living characters'', the tropes of whose native stories follow them around. It is in short a ''Roger Rabbit''-style situation for them. I don't mean to say that any fourth-wall break is inherently disqualifying (we'll come back to it), but as much as we mustn't throw out stories because they don't fit a narrow conception of what a DWU story ''is like'', we must also remember not to square-peg-round-hole stories into "making sense". The premise of this minisode is ''not'' "the Doctor has transported people from the 1950s to 2010s", it's very tangibly "the Doctor has transported people from one TV show into another". | ||
Would this be disqualifying in itself? I still don't know. There are, to say the least, [[The Mind Robber (TV story)|precedents]] for Dr. Who interacting with living fictional characters. But what further sways me towards reaffirmed invalidity is that, from what little we see of him, the Eleventh Doctor is ''also'' characterised as a self-caricature, not as the real Time Lord in a world of fakes. For pity's sake, he's trying to stop the birth of a terrible abomination… "[[Jedward]]". On the whole the semiotics of the short really do treat him as a "meta" character like the others. In ''Roger Rabbit'' terms, imagine a Disney promo where Snow White has wandered into ''Star Wars'', causing it to transform into a musical to the confusion of the native characters; and at the end the Genie from ''Aladdin'' appears, apologises for zapping | Would this be disqualifying in itself? I still don't know. There are, to say the least, [[The Mind Robber (TV story)|precedents]] for Dr. Who interacting with living fictional characters. But what further sways me towards reaffirmed invalidity is that, from what little we see of him, the Eleventh Doctor is ''also'' characterised as a self-caricature, not as the real Time Lord in a world of fakes. For pity's sake, he's trying to stop the birth of a terrible abomination… "[[Jedward]]". On the whole the semiotics of the short really do treat him as a "meta" character like the others. In ''Roger Rabbit'' terms, imagine a Disney promo where Snow White has wandered into ''Star Wars'', causing it to transform into a musical to the confusion of the native characters; and at the end the Genie from ''Aladdin'' appears, apologises for zapping Snow White onto the Death Star, and notes that while he's here he ought to take care of the most evil entity in all of outer space… [Insert Hatable Celebrity Of Your Choice Here]. Would anybody, anybody at all, reasonably conclude that this is intended as a canonical part of the ''Aladdin'' universe, and the Genie is "real" even if the singing princess and the Jedi aren't? It's not that the Genie physically ''couldn't'' do that… but it would seem rather like missing the point. | ||
And granted, there are magic-realist storytellers within ''Who'' who do treat the Doctor as by default a living fictional character. It's not ''inconceivable'' that someone would write ''One Born Every Minute'' the way they did, and intend it to be something that the Doctor can look back on in ''[[The Time of the Doctor (TV story)|The Time of the Doctor]]'' when he promises to remember everything he did with this face. If [[Paul Magrs]] had written it…!… But he didn't, and absent a statement or a body of work to draw from about probable mindset, this just doesn't seem like it's intended to be in the real DWU. | And granted, there are magic-realist storytellers within ''Who'' who do treat the Doctor as by default a living fictional character. It's not ''inconceivable'' that someone would write ''One Born Every Minute'' the way they did, and intend it to be something that the Doctor can look back on in ''[[The Time of the Doctor (TV story)|The Time of the Doctor]]'' when he promises to remember everything he did with this face. If [[Paul Magrs]] had written it…!… But he didn't, and absent a statement or a body of work to draw from about probable mindset, this just doesn't seem like it's intended to be in the real DWU. | ||
Not because it's a crossover, though. | Not because it's a crossover, though. | ||
==== ''Looking for Pudsey'' ==== | ==== ''Looking for Pudsey'' ==== | ||
