User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates/@comment-4028641-20170306172600/@comment-86.164.12.223-20190528121912

Scrooge MacDuck wrote: The best not-continuity-based-per-se argument that I can see for the "invalid by association" idea is reasoning along the lines of "When writing of Fixing a Hole, Samantha Baker had to know that A Fix with Sontarans was an invalid story, therefore knowingly making a sequel to it is inherently a statement that their story breaks Rule 4". But I think that's a very uncharitable way to look at an author's mindset. More realistically, a sequel to an invalid story is to be taken as a tacit statement of "perhaps Dimensions in Time/Search Our Space/whatever wasn't created with the intent of being set in the DWU, or wasn't licensed to say anything definitive about the DWU, or sumthin'; but I choose to believe that events identical to it did happen in the DWU".

Agreed. I feel that arguing that making a sequel to an ‘invalid’ story in and of itself demonstrated an intent on the author’s part that Orr stories be set outside the DWU, is simply as case of projecting our wiki’s rules onto Doctor Who writers. Not everyone in the world follows our wiki’s ‘four little rules’. The writers of those stories mostly likely wouldn’t care less about ‘valid’ or ‘invlaid’ stories even if this wiki did exist when they wrote their stories. Quite sinply, as had been said, they consider Dimensions, Fox with Sontarans, etc. to ‘count’ as Doctor Who, and don’t think any deeper than that. There is no intention to set their stories in an, alternate ‘invlaid’ universe, and. I’m sorry to say, you’d probably get a reaction along the lines of ‘what on Earth are you gibbing in about?’ if you tried to explain to them the rules of ‘validity’ and why their stories are ‘really invalid’, and how they actually intended them to be such.