Forums → Archive index → Panopticon archives → Should we class Big Finish's Doctor Who Unbound series as non-canon?
I don't think these stories should be classed as non-canon by the wikia as they simply are "what-if?" stories that take place in parallel universes and do not attempt to take place within the main universe as non-canon stories do. Even The 100 Days of the Doctor depics the Sixth Doctor travelling to another universe to meet one of the unbound Doctors. Therefore I believe that we should class the unbound stories as canon but existing in other universes to the main Whoniverse.
Communities thoughts? --Revan\Talk 15:34, April 11, 2011 (UTC)
- See, this brings up the question of what Canon is... If I remember correctly there is one of the QOTWs that is of someone from Doctor Who stating that there is no canon, and that it's just something that fans have created. I mean, surely that means we can't decide what is and isn't canon, since someone actually from the production has stated it? Technically then, everything is canon, but certain things aren't in our universe or timeline. --The Thirteenth Doctor 15:43, April 11, 2011 (UTC)
- Yes...but, as our template:notdwu states "you can believe this subject is part of the Doctor Who universe. But we don't", we're not trying to say that this is canon and this isn't, just that we've had to put in some boundaries in order to get our sources in the right place. Here's the post from Paul Cornell's blog site Canonicity in Doctor Who (posted Feb 2007), it's debatable whether Paul Cornell was part of the production team, his story was part of that year's run of stories, but the production team of DW was RTD, Julie Gardner, Phil Collinson and Susie Liggart (executive producers and producer at the time).
- With the 100 Days example can we definitively state that it exists in another universe? Just as with the Inferno Universe, Merlin's World etc because there's story based proof that they exist.
- But is there evidence that the other Unbound universes exist? Are there stories / POVs shown in stories that demonstrate that these Unbound universes exist as alt-universes? Or are you saying just because one story suggests one of the universes exists that they all exist by association? --Tangerineduel / talk 15:00, April 12, 2011 (UTC)
- I'd echo and amplify the things that Tangerineduel has said. Our problem is that we were started in 2005, long before Cornell, Davies and Moffat made their public pronouncements about canon. (It's not just Cornell, btw, but also the two modern showrunners. So it is at least a showrunner position "there is no canon".) Back before 2007-ish, it was perfectly ordinary and acceptable for fans to speak of what was canonical and what wasn't. In fact, that was the very word used in all those debates about whether the BBC Wales series "counted". Cornell, et al, were fairly specifically offering their opinions on the matter as a direct response to fan grumblings. In fact, it can certainly be seen that the reason all these authors are speaking in one voice about there being no canon is because it protects their work. (Cornell was particularly, if not explicitly, trying to justify the existence of both the novel and televised versions of Human Nature, at the time.) If stories get chucked overboard, as Shearman has said Dalek (TV story) has been by later Dalek stories like Doomsday and Journey's End, it doesn't affect the "status" of his story, because the constant of the DW universe is that "time can be rewritten". So the event still happened to the Ninth Doctor and Rose, but at least certain aspects of it (the notion that people didn't know what a Dalek was, for instance) didn't happen to much of the rest of the DWU because of subsequent events involving the Tenth Doctor. More egregious is the way that The Waters of Mars completely redefines the latter half of the 21st century in a way that simply can't be reconciled against the way the Troughton era depicted it with The Moonbase and The Seeds of Death. Earth can't have been going through both a drive for faster-than-light travel and a ban on spaceflight at the same time. But again, somewhere along the way, in a story we haven't seen, it can be assumed that time was rewritten.
- Our problem is that we have never adjusted our use of the word "canon" from those early days in 2005 and 2006 when it wasn't the dirty word it is today. We've kept chugging along calling this thing canon and that thing non-canon, when such usage is largely frowned upon by "modern" fandom.
- It is better and less confusing for us to now move away from using "canon" to describe things. That's why {{notdwu}} no longer includes the word "canon", and stresses the fact that it's a decision of our wiki that the topic isn't part of the DWU.
- This is why our current "canon policy" feels a bit creaky these days. Our "canon policy" is going to be modified to de-emphasize the word "canon", and to distinguish between the "main" DWU and alternate universes. I think we've also used "non-canon" and {{notdwu}} in a confusing way to mark articles that aren't at all within any aspect of the DWU. For instance, The Stranger series was long marked as "non-canon", when really it shouldn't be on the site at all. {{notdwu}} should only be used on those articles about topics that are properly licensed by the BBC/copyright holders, but which are not a part of the main DWU. In other words, "nc" means non-continuity, not non-canon.
- Stuff that is truly non-canon — that is, in the dictionary definition of canon, outside the body of works legally accepted by the BBC or copyright holders — shouldn't even be on the site at all.
- Put more simply, our current use of the word, "canon", is actually used in two ways. We need o phase out our use of the word "canon" entirely, in favor of two different expressions. Tangerineduel has usefully coined the phrase "what this wiki covers" as an expression to help draw the line between articles that can be on the wiki and those that can't. Thus, The Stranger isn't "non-canon", it's simply something we don't cover. And Doctor Who Unbound is something we cover (because it's derived from a full BBC license), but it deserves {{notdwu}} because it's clearly, purposefully outside the narrative continuity of any other Doctor Who stories.
czechout ☎ ✍ 13:10:24 Wed 13 Apr 2011
- Put more simply, our current use of the word, "canon", is actually used in two ways. We need o phase out our use of the word "canon" entirely, in favor of two different expressions. Tangerineduel has usefully coined the phrase "what this wiki covers" as an expression to help draw the line between articles that can be on the wiki and those that can't. Thus, The Stranger isn't "non-canon", it's simply something we don't cover. And Doctor Who Unbound is something we cover (because it's derived from a full BBC license), but it deserves {{notdwu}} because it's clearly, purposefully outside the narrative continuity of any other Doctor Who stories.