Frosty

Understandable. I tend to treat “of its time” as “when it was generally uncontroversial and the use of benefit of the doubt could reasonably be applied in terms of people just being ignorant.”

True, but not in isolation. It can’t be said to have been caused by ignorance, as “product of its time” defenses tend to imply. Just genuine and plain racism.

Of course, bit of nuance, yellowface did not magically disappear in Hollywood overnight after 1961, but by that point, the conversation surrounding yellowface was already growing very quickly. It was older than Doctor Who itself.

I think people just see racism in media from a date before 2010 and assume a priori that it’s all a “product of its time” without any actual familiarity WITH that time.

when people call The Talons of Weng-Chiang a “product of its time,” they always forget that yellowface had been disfavored in Hollywood for over a decade and a half. 1961 is basically the cutoff point for yellowface being accepted in the US, and it isn’t like the UK was unaware.

long winded joke about kids in a santa movie thinking they were sent back in time to hang out with a jolly bearded gift giver but instead going to the council of nycea and listening to hours of debate with St Nicholas of Myra

Time again for my favorite christmas post ever, one that still makes me laugh every time i read it

when push comes to shove, this is Doctor Who, basically

That one Romanov apologist audio really grinds my gears, let me tell you

Doctor Who is basically accidentally-communist panto /pos which tries really hard to pretend it ISNT communist because it is owned by the BBC. british institutions cant even give Robespierre credit for helping create the world that lets them exist, much less someone like Lenin

I should note that earlier works wouldn’t really count as fanfic, as fanfic is a specific historical phenomenon that arose in direct contradiction, and thus unity, with copyright law. However, both the works of Ovid and Shakespeare AND fanfic fall under the umbrella of derivative.

If ever were I to become a famous author, I’d jot down every work I was influenced by, either consciously or, as is common when thinking on one’s own work and one’s favorite fiction, subconsciously. And I’d share the list. Of course I would. And I’d tell others to do the same.

This is why I find creators like Toby Fox compelling. Inspirations firmly on sleeve, and unafraid to admit that whole plot points of Deltarune will parallel Mother 3. This sort of thing has long been the rule. The past few centuries? Exceptions.

Frankly, there are big stretches of history where it would have been stranger to write non-derivative works. Or at least works that don’t explicitly try to parallel and reference earlier ones, as even the original works of, say, Shakespeare make heavy reference to just about everything ever.

At any rate, this creates this idea of originality to the point of ex nihilo creation being the only truly valid way to create. Of course, any actual writer will understand that this is silly, but lesser versions of this extreme permeate our society ubiquitously.

It can all ultimately be boiled down to a materio-economic matter which is superstructurally enforced. Of course, fanfic writers, like most writers, are often petty bourgeois themselves by their nature as artists. Not exclusively, but often. So it isn’t all black and white. Still, notable.

There is no argument under the sun against derivative works that cannot eventually be boiled down to “copyright is good” and/or “I personally dislike this and will project that by pathologizing you,” the latter of which is usually a consequence of the former mindset anyway.

it’s really only with the rise of the copyright and both the big and petty bourgeois that derivative works of fiction (fanfic) began to be endowed with negative connotations of unoriginality or, god forbid, cringiness. You’d never call Ovid unoriginal.

Doctor Who and Homestuck are similar in that when you really get into them, deeper than the surface, they irrevocably change the way you engage with fiction.

I certainly don’t think the Enemy is some grand revolutionary vanguard. But I do think this says a LOT about the Time Lords in this scenario

I largely think you shouldn’t take anything at all from this book at face value tbh (in a good way)

This is a very Time Lord view to have. Makes sense if you’re the one who shaped the world in the first place to call it the best, I think.

“the best of all possible worlds” as a phrase is rather telling, I think. It’s a notion from Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz which claims that the current world is the best possible outcome. Almost an End of History, if you will.

The idea that the Enemy proper, rather than just the rank and file, is “a different experience of what it means to be” is perhaps most telling. If the Enemy is not just a wartime force but a revolutionary one, all revolutionary philosophies see themselves that way, some even being right.

Particularly, the notion that the Enemy is some kind of dissatisfied upstart that can’t accept things as they are. That’s how people strawman revolutionaries. The simple answer to this kinda hodgepodge analysis of them is that the narrator is unreliable. Which they are, of course, being of Gallifrey

Pre-narrative Briefing A: These buffers are presented for your safety between quasi-active-text experiences.] The Enemy is not a certain world, nor is it a certain species. At one time a person may be of the Enemy's camp and at another neutral, or even allied with the Great Houses. To be of the Enemy is to have become infected with their rhetoric, to have adopted their methods, to strive towards their ends rather than our own. Ask always - who profits - is it us, or THEM? Is it those who create or those who consume? The Enemy are always in a minority, but their very inconsistency serves them for a shield. They wear the flesh of the commonality, they bow (seemingly) to their superiors, but they invest their every act with an irony which is symptomatic of their progressive disconnection from the world-machine. They are cogs which grit their teeth, and deny that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. They are immune to the certainty of history, and their most sinister belief is the assertion that *anything* might not only have been different, but that it might *still* be different tomorrow. By Enemy here, of course I speak only of the 'Rep' level; behind them, we know, stands (if standing is the correct anatomical metaphor) a different kind of entity, a different experience of what it means to be. It is by no means a false step (although it may be a step which is partially a circumambulation) to describe the Enemy by the German phrase: Weltschmerz. The one thing which the Enemy cannot abide is a Utopia. They are incapable of contentment, and this is their great weakness. - Irma Ebbinghaus

This section at the start of The Book of the Enemy gets me a lot. Things are described in pseudo-materialist terms. Asking who is profiting from what. And yet a simple marxist analysis eludes us if we take it at face value, as the Enemy is described in terms both bourgeois and proletarian

I have this idea of a short story series based on tokusatsu. Kinda the pithy summary is “what if Deltarune was Power Rangers and Metal Heroes via pseudo-string theory”

This is why the identity of the Enemy can literally change. Because the primary contradiction in a scenario can change.

I think of the Enemy (War in Heaven) as basically the culmination of the dialectical process as applied to the Time Lords. All the contradictions in Time Lord society, ideology, dogma, and action. The internal contradictions causing Time Lord society to collapse around their ears.

Believe.

Purely on a philosophical level, it’s now basically a useless term. All it means is “not a modern right winger,” and even then, it barely even means that given the rightward trend of mainstream liberal parties in the first world.