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)

I would like to second Aquanafrahudy's motion. They have articulated clear reasoning as to why this story should be made valid. The Plum Pudding ☎ 21:35, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

Although the characterisation of the action of creating this page as invalid as "a great miscarriage of justice" is certainly hyperbolic, I maintain I have been justified in how I approached this story.

My reasoning isn't really that "it contradicts TCoRR so it should be invalid", but that it exists in a heightened, meta-fictional interpretation of the world seen in TCoRR. While it doesn't say "we're the Goblins from the Doctor Who episode The Church on Ruby Road", it subtly runs with the idea that the Goblins are famous ― because they're been exposed to the pop culture zeitgeist through us having seen them in TCoRR. It's not that it is appeared in TCoRR in-universe, but it operates on the knowledge that we, collectively as the viewers, are now familiar with them.

It's not as deeply meta-fictional as It's Showtime, where the characters play themselves on television ― if anything A Message from Janis Goblin is much more guilty of that, given it explicitly has Janis perform The Goblin Song for Children in Need, which is the relative version of "an actor performing themselves" for a singer character ― but the story undeniably plays on the fact that the Goblins are now famous. This story makes that abundantly clear, given they now have a bona fide magazine where they have collaborations with Davina McCall. (And is this McCall the fictional one from TCoRR or the real world one? It's hard to tell.)

These stories seem to almost exist in a setting between the TCoRR world and our own, where they're not fictional characters, or individuals playing themselves on television, but they are also not quite the versions seen on television. Imagine the rungs of a ladder. TCoRR is the first rung, this story and AMFJG is the second, a hypothetical It's Showtime-type story is rung three, and rung four is just our world.

And this is without addressing how the story parodies TCoRR in subtle ways: "win a trip with Davina McCall" is very clearly a double entendre, as it reads as trip as-in-a-holiday and trip as-in-someone-making-you-fall-over. It exaggerates what we saw in the original episode unashamedly.

Is all this enough for invalidity? Maybe. Maybe not. But it is certainly not open and close, black and white. And if we do decide to validate these stories, I must insist that they be treated as separate accounts from TCoRR.

EPSILON^🔎 |📯|📂|📦|📝

15:48, 8 May 2024 (UTC)