Inclusion debates/Rachel Survived, White Canvas, The Gendar Conspiracy and Life After Death (10,000 Dawns continued)
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Thread:258247, the previous discussion on the validity of Rachel Survived, White Canvas and The Gendar Conspiracy, was closed recently. However, I believe there is crucial evidence that was not discussed in the two previous forum threads that supports the validity of these three stories, and a fourth. I will centre this post around the points raised in User:Shambala108's final judgement as that represents the actual decision reached.
Undoubtedly the largest change in the status quo since the conclusion of the last debate is the fact that a new story featuring Doctor Who characters has been released Arcbeatle, namely Life After Death by Michael Robertson. Unlike the other three, Life After Death was released as episode five of the spin-off Lady Aesculapius: Series 1. Coloth from the 1998 Short Trips story War Crimes appears and Auteur is mentioned, both of whom had previously crossed over in White Canvas. It seems to be a similar situation to the other three crossover stories. It can be read for free here. Despite the fact it is episode five of the series, the story itself is self-contained and makes sense on its own.
We seem to have gotten away from considering Rule 4. From the posts here, in the original post, and in the comments left by User:Amorkuz on User talk:Borisashton and User talk:NateBumber, there are a lot of confusing, contradictory, or ambiguous statements. Researching the material on the internet in general didn't help clarify anything. The clearest statement I found was on the author's website calling this "a whole new universe" and "a new science fiction universe".
Just to remind everyone of the points regarding rule 4 that were raised in the debate I will repost that section of the OP now:
Borisashton wrote: Rule 4: "If a story was intended to be set outside the DWU, then it’s probably not allowed. But a community discussion will likely be needed to make a final determination."
The second part of this rule is not relevant, as this is the community discussion in question, but I left the full rule in to ensure clarity regarding the "probably" clause.
Harkening back to the rule 2 argument, one struggles to imagine why Wylder would go to such an effort to get permissions for characters and concepts from the DWU only to set the stories outside of it, but let’s look at the evidence. These three stories have very clearly been established as crossovers between 10,000 Dawns and Faction Paradox and/or Doctor Who. Once again, it has been well-established (see Assimilation²) that we only cover the crossovers which is why this debate is only focused on these three stories.
In its 2017 release, Rachel Survived is described as “a 20th anniversary crossover”, and as being the product of “[getting] permission from a Faction Paradox author to write a story crossing over a character from his novel [Head of State] with the universe-hopping heroes of [Wylder’s] 10,000 Dawns book series”.
In its 2018 release, White Canvas is described as a “licensed crossover between the 10,000 Dawns, and characters from the universes of Doctor Who and Faction Paradox”. It features concepts and characters from the Virgin New Adventures, BBC Eighth Doctor Adventures, and Short Trips. Additionally, it is said that the novella “acts as something of a prequel to a few of the stories” in Obverse Books' The Book of the Peace, and at the time of its original release Obverse itself acknowledged the story as “some Faction Paradox crossover fiction”. The intention of its DWU setting doesn’t come much clearer than that.
In its March 2019 release, The Gendar Conspiracy is described as “a prequel to [Wylder’s] novella White Canvas” and “like Rachel Survived and White Canvas, [is] a licenced crossover, pulling characters and settings from the universes of Doctor Who and Faction Paradox”.
Finally, in the anthology release of August 2019, the release of the three stories and their relation to the DWU is described as follows: “In 2017, Arcbeatle Press put out the first of our beloved licensed crossovers between 10,000 Dawns and the Universes of Doctor Who titled Rachel Survived. Since then, we went on to put out two more stories…”.
In every iteration of their releases, these three stories have unambiguously been described as crossovers between 10,000 Dawns and the DWU. So in regard to rule 4, the three stories clearly pass.
It is my belief that rule 4 wasn’t discussed as much as rule 2 because the consensus was that most people agreed with the interpretation above.
As outlined above this repeated claim that these three stories are crossovers with Doctor Who is hardly ambiguous, contradictory, or confusing. Instead, it is clear in every iteration of the stories' release that the three stories are crossovers between 10,000 Dawns and Doctor Who and Faction Paradox.
In this tweet, posted in order to familiarise readers of Life After Death with the other characters that the titular Lady Aesculapius had met, states “You can read all three of the 10,000 Dawns stories set in the Doctor Who Universe (for free) here”. Any reading of that that isn’t these stories were intended to be set within the DWU is frankly a stretch.
The quotes of “a whole new universe” and “a new science fiction universe” are some great quotes but I don’t think they accurately represent Rachel Survived, White Canvas and The Gendar Conspiracy because Shambala is one hundred per cent correct in asserting that the series that these quotes refer to, namely 10,000 Dawns, is invalid. There has never been any question about that fact. Instead, just these three crossover stories are the focus of the debate.
The quotes come from here, which is a summary of the non-DWU 10,000 Dawns as a whole. “A new science fiction universe” is in response to the statement “10,000 Dawns is:”. Additionally, a more complete version of the other quote is “10,000 Dawns isn't just this story though, this is the start of a whole new universe” which is clearly stating that the single piece of 10,000 Dawns literature that had been released at the time is its own thing rather than deciding to set it in the universe of H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, for example. It is also worth noting that at this point 10,000 Dawns had absolutely no official affiliation with Doctor Who whatsoever. Would we invalidate 2012's Assimilation² because an interview from 1987 said that Star Trek: The Next Generation was in a distinct universe from Doctor Who? Of course not, because precedent suggests we cover the crossover and nothing else which is what is proposed. A very poignant fact that I surprisingly could not find mentioned in either of the two threads was that the titular 10,000 Dawns is a multiverse of ten thousand universes that exist independent of N-Space and characters from the Dawns sometimes leaves their realities to visit the Doctor’s universe. This means the comments about Dawns being a new universe hold up even within the crossovers.
In the judgement, there were also some concerns regarding rules 2 and 3:
We do have to consider how decisions regarding new situations will affect the wiki in the future. The confusing nature of the posting, selling, and licensing of these stories would allow too much of a loophole in the future for other stories.
[...]
The nature of how these stories were published and distributed would just allow for too much abuse further down the line.
I just don’t see it. It’s not that hard to understand. T:OFF REL dictates that the official release date is the date set by the publisher, in this case Arcbeatle Press. This means that the releases that should be covered by the wiki are located here, here, here and here. The first three stories were then collected in an anthology here. I hope this clears up any confusion about the posting of these stories.
At the time of these releases, the stories were free and not available physically. A post on Arcbeatle's blog in July 2018 confirmed that at least Rachel Survived was available physically at a cost via Patreon. The Patreon terms of use prohibit creations or benefits that use others’ intellectual properties so we can be sure on that front that these stories were properly licensed. This is not strictly relevant as the proposal to cover the original releases that are available online for free does not extend to the physical editions which were published later. A small note on the pages (if anything) would suffice in regard to this wiki covering the physical editions. To clarify, T:VALID does not preclude stories published online or stories published for free. I hope this clears up any confusion of the selling of these stories.
What precisely the loophole and abuse the coverage of this story could cause has now been helpfully elaborated upon:
My main concern came from comments (or quotes) by the author regarding other people using his licensed characters. This was mostly mentioned in the original post, so we don't have a record for it, but that was my concern, that the freedom with this licensing would lead to later abuse.
Once again, I’ll repost a section from the OP of the previous debate to outline why these concerns are had unnecessarily.
Borisashton wrote: One of the concerns raised in the original thread weren’t directly related to any of these rules about validity, but rather concerned Wylder’s tweet saying that he would be willing to let “any other folks writing officially licensed Whoniverse works (that is, not fanworks)” borrow the 10,000 Dawns characters for their own writing. This led to a tangent in which it was claimed that the validity of these three crossover stories would lead to “anyone” being able to publish works in the DWU that the wiki would have to cover. This is not true, as the tweet clearly only opens the request to those who are writing stories already set in the DWU; furthermore, even if it was open to anyone it specifically concerns Wylder’s 10,000 Dawns characters, and as per the analogy to Assimilation², non-DWU related 10,000 Dawns stories are of no concern to our wiki.
This tangent also led to a discussion about how people like Gareth Roberts, who have been accused of posting trans-misogynistic posts online, could take advantage of Wylder’s offer to force the wiki to cover transphobic slurs. Most posters in the last thread seemed to agree that this had nothing to do with the matter at hand, as policy dictates we “do not consider the quality of the narrative” when deciding validity; we already have an (albeit obscured) page for the n-word without purging everything relating to The Celestial Toymaker from the wiki.
Just to add to that last point, there is precedent of FANDOM intervening if these hypothetical slurs made it onto the wiki. The pages for N*gger and F*ck buddy were both censored as per FANDOM’s request that they better comply with the terms of use. The conversation at Talk:Penis#Image also saw FANDOM intervene and disallow the image in question from Zygon: When Being You Just Isn’t Enough as it was in violation of the terms of use. I’m sure if FANDOM didn’t intervene, a community discussion would be in favour of purging any hypothetical slurs from this hypothetical book if this unlikely scenario were to ever occur.
Finally, I’d just like to address this statement:
As has been pointed out before, the large majority of readers/users on this site only care about Doctor Who. We do allow a very large percentage of other stories onto the wiki, but unfortunately sometimes we have to draw the line for those that are two or more times removed from the DWU.
As has been pointed out by User:NateBumber at User talk:Shambala108#10,000 Dawns thread closure clarification, I struggle to see how these three stories are two or more times removed from the DWU. White Canvas features Miranda Dawkins, the Doctor’s own daughter. I think if we exclude White Canvas on the basis of it being too far away from the DWU we need to reconsider a great deal of spin-off media, probably ranging in the hundreds of pages that will need to be deleted from the wiki.
I hope we can now rediscuss this matter on a more informed basis.
(Again, just a reminder that as per Thread:256955 anyone professionally involved with Arcbeatle Press should refrain from joining this thread.)