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Post by Aristide Twain on Sept 18, 2022 16:58:49 GMT
- The Houses call the workings of history "equations", while the Faction calls them entities - and FP is right to some extent, as Death, Time, Pain all exist as beings in the DWU.
And yet it's the Time Lords who, in the VNAs, worshipped the Menti Celesti… In Interference Miles stresses the difference between gods and loas. The Faction do not worship grand abstract concepts, it's more small-scale animist than that; they see oh, say, individual Laws of Time as having personalities, wants and needs; as persons who can be bargained with. (In point of fact, the voodoo term of “ loas” derives from the French “ lois”, which literally just means Law.) - The War universe has no parallels - just a changing timeline with a few bubble dimensions like E-Space. This is a pretty big difference from the way the Doctor Who Universe works, as per Inferno, but it might just be a matter of perspective.
I rather think it is, yes. In fact, the words “blatantly untrue” comes to mind. Do the Great Houses genuinely disbelieve parallel universes, burying their heads in the sand to avoid confronting something that would make them feel less consequential than they want to be in the grand scheme of things? Or do they know, but refuse to admit it? Interesting questions all. (It's true that there is a notable lack of involvement of truly parallel universes in the War except in especially momentous circumstances, though, so it can be inferred that travel between universes isn't as pedestrian as it seemed sometimes to be in the Classic Series of Doctor Who.) |
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Post by doctornolonger on Sept 18, 2022 18:08:25 GMT
Welcome constonks, I'm glad you've joined us, and thank you for setting the desired precedent that people can keep commenting and discussing even when the Book Club moves on to the next section! The War universe has no parallels - just a changing timeline with a few bubble dimensions like E-Space. This is a pretty big difference from the way the Doctor Who Universe works, as per Inferno, but it might just be a matter of perspective. This came up in the Dr Who Discord server recently and a genius fellow called Poseidome (I don't know if he's on here yet) highlighted the Time Lord textbook excerpts that Miles wrote for the charity anthology Perfect Timing 2.  Given that Miles seemed to confirm the "unknown force" explanation in "Toy Story", which was also printed in Perfect Timing 2, my takeaway is that the Houses doth protest too much regarding the existence of parallel universes. Contrast this paragraph from The Cosmology of the Spiral Politic, which is all about this topic and discusses it at great length:I guess we can take this as an early indicator that The Book is written from an in-universe perspective and may not be infallible! This is How You Lose the Time War This is the second time in as many days that I've seen this book recommended (the first was desertkris in the "Reading Branches" thread). I'll have to bump it up on my list! Whereas I think the Great Houses would have ended up allied with the Daleks as the War in Heaven went on and they became more degraded and desperate and began doing crazy stuff like resurrecting Rassilon. The House Military are halfway to being Daleks already. spoilers: |
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Post by constonks on Sept 18, 2022 18:34:01 GMT
Welcome constonks, I'm glad you've joined us, and thank you for setting the desired precedent that people can keep commenting and discussing even when the Book Club moves on to the next section! I knew my lateness would be good for something one of these days! Absolutely. That reads as a pure fingers-in-the-ears denial. Hadn't thought about it before but there's also the Axis (in a few Big Finish audios) to consider, which is basically the Time Lords shoving anything that might be considered a plausible alternate timeline to the back of the cupboard - even including at least two that branched off before the Anchoring, which should be impossible by the Houses' logic... |
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Post by garyshots on Sept 19, 2022 0:53:27 GMT
This came up in the Dr Who Discord server recently and a genius fellow called Poseidome (I don't know if he's on here yet) highlighted the Time Lord textbook excerpts that Miles wrote for the charity anthology Perfect Timing 2. This is a good find. Do we know the other six species biologically linked to the causal nexus? |
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Post by darkspine10 on Sept 19, 2022 11:53:45 GMT
I wonder if the Time Lord denial of parallel universes, and the blatant contradiction that throws up with the world the Doctor visits in Inferno, is in fact a point of interest about the whole thing. I'll ignore Pete's World for now, since that's visited in an explicitly post Time War setting (though the way its presented as a 'world of the dead' is a thematic thread worth pulling on elsewhere).
What do the events at the Stahlman Gas project revolve around? Digging into the core of the Earth, which according to Interference is where a hole into the realm of the Yssgaroth is found. Green ooze bubbles up to the surface turning men into Mal'akh (the Primords). In our own universe, the timely intervention of Sir Keith is crucial to the Doctor realising free will is not an illusion, and saving the world from exploding.
However, in the parallel universe, the project is accelerated and Sir Keith is already dead. The Doctor cannot save this world. It is destroyed by fire. Despite how unclear the nature of the Yssgaroth is, this seems like it would be a very bad thing for the rest of the universe beyond Earth as well, exposing the hole to their realm to a wider scope.
Perhaps that's why the Time Lords are so adamant that these universes don't exist. Because in their framework, any universe where the Yssgaroth win out is fundamentally hostile to their existence.
The lack of a Doctor figure in the parallel world also throws up interesting concepts. Perhaps a world without the hope his role provides in our own is what dooms the fate of the parallel Earth. The Doctor even lampshades his own metafictional nature by comparing his lacklustre TARDIS setup to Batman.
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Post by shuncucker on Sept 20, 2022 19:38:09 GMT
The Book of the War says: You must lift heavy weights!
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Post by ryanfogarty on Sept 22, 2022 17:09:12 GMT
The Remote are interesting. Are they basically just humans with Twitter plugged into their brains? An empty-headed army waiting to be programmed by television? Such a thing doesn't bear thinking about. Could you imagine the chaos such a mob of easily led people could cause, with no motivation but to smear shit on the halls of power? |
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Post by ryanfogarty on Sept 22, 2022 18:14:52 GMT
Definitely. I don't want to offend any Satanists present, I'm sure there are some really creative and original Satanists. But there's also a sort of Spinal Tap end of it that seems like "It's Catholicism, but upside down, man. Upside down." And the Faction do have that slightly adolescent side to them. But also, time travel voodoo is cool. Shall we talk about cultural appropriation now, or never? I do find it rather inappropriate how the Vondun religion stole a Catholic saint and made her part of their Pantheon. I suspect the Pope is rather miffed about it. Faction Paradox seems to engage with voodoo on 3 seperate levels. 1) Hollywood voodoo, which borrows a lot of Santería's most noticable outward-facing visual signifiers and turns it into an evil Harry Potter magic system of blood-sacrifice-for-results. 2) Chaos magic, a pop-magical occoult movement from the late 1990s when FP first launched. It described a magical system that allowed even novice pracitioners to work with outside entities without necessarily believing in their existance, but still achieving quick and noticable results. The Web 2.0 era of magic where everything was wide open and everyone did their rituals bareback with no protections running, channeling angels, fictional entities, loa, aliens, Gods or the collective unconsciousness's embodiment of Keanu Reeves and charting a universe with no order to it except that which we chose to impose. Chaos magic still exists but the momement has been somewhat dampened by how many of its practitioners ended up institutionalized. Especially the invokers, OH MY GOD THE INVOKERS! There's a difference between channeling and invocation you yutzes! 3) The Loa. While the front-facing side of the Vodun religion shows the Loa as a series of ritual figures in elaborate costume the reality is more... abstract. A Vodun priest/priestess's training includes being more-or-less sealed inside a ritually constructed hut whose structure mirrors the pole-and-boat structure of the lingam (down to the terminology) so they are literally living in an upwelling of energy and resting with the dirt floor directly against their skin so sort of fizzle away all the... stuff... that gets in the way so they can serve as cheval (lit. horse) and be easily 'ridden' by spirits without breaking him/her. There is a certain sense within the Vodun teaching texts *I* have read that the Voodoo personas are really how these things present themselves in human terms on a human scale, and they're actually much 'bigger.' So while FP is appropriating the concept of the Loa and largely ignores the various Barons and such... it treats the underlying entities very much the same way the priest training does. But because that's not a publicly-facing side of the religion no one would ever know that. Interestingly FP wholly omits the notion that spirits are summoned through the water. Which is fairly appropriate, the Faction being from a desert world. |
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Anastasia
Cousin
Liberating the oppressed of the Houses and toppling regimes.
Posts: 154
Preferred Pronouns: She/They
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Post by Anastasia on Sept 22, 2022 19:57:43 GMT
The Remote are interesting. Are they basically just humans with Twitter plugged into their brains? An empty-headed army waiting to be programmed by television? Such a thing doesn't bear thinking about. Could you imagine the chaos such a mob of easily led people could cause, with no motivation but to smear shit on the halls of power? I myself always saw the Remote as the closest thing the FP universe has to good guys (they are not the good guys but the closest to one) and I would argue that The ones with Twitter plugged into their minds are more like the broken remote. However I imagine this just subjective. |
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Post by ryanfogarty on Sept 22, 2022 20:00:42 GMT
Of all the major factions, [the Celestis] is in interesting [...] for being the only faction to be 'killed off' in a final manner. Umberto Ecco wrote an amazing essay 40 years ago called Faith in Fakes about the concept of 'authentic replicas,' 'authorized copies' and the general obsession with simulcra and reflections of original works and how while exhibiting those works we never look at the originals. Lord Smoking Mirror is dead, but presumably Tezcatlipoca (or whatever inspired him) could still be out there. Or did Smoking Mirror create those myths himself, in which case any fictional representation of Tezcatlipoca is in fact a microcosmic replica of Smoking Mirror inside the Prime Universe, just shorn of knowledge of its origins? The Celestis are conceptual entities but those CONCEPTS still exist. I argue that it's more accurate to call the Calestis Ontological entities... 'this is the being' of Smokign Mirror, which happens to exist as concept rather than matter. Concept alone is not enough to living-creature make. If Smoking Mirror were a Loa (and the Celestis explicitly were NOT, they're something else entirely) and someone had built am android in the form of the mythological Tezcatlipoca it would come as no surprise if it started to exhibit behaviors of the 'real' one, due to the Loa's influence -- the symbol of the thing becomes the thing, etc. But would that same thing have happened for one of the god-entities in Mictilan prior to its destruction? It's unclear how much backflow existed in their situation. Basically... they made themslved into Gods. Gods can have mortal avatars in the material worlds. Some of the high-wattage members of Celestis could have survived, at least as lesser versions...? Maybe. (I don't want them to because I find the Celestis trdious but their removal was also overly-neat.) None of which addressed whether the name Mictilan and the God-identities witin were ones they appropriated which previously existed or whether they invented them and their records in history are a result of Celestis's crazy period. If this were the Faction they would definately have stolen someone else's name but did Celestis just decide to create Hell for FUNSIES without following the design pattern of a preexisting myth? |
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Post by ryanfogarty on Sept 22, 2022 20:24:59 GMT
Yssgaroth-vulnerable weak points are encased in planets. I think this explains Inferno; there is green goo beneath the skin of the Earth, and it makes people into something monstrous. Is the one in Earth a weak point Well canoncly if the Daleks kept mining in Bedfordshire they would eventually have struck Dracula. That's just right there in The Book of the Enemy. There is a giant wormhole called the Hellmouth out in space near Orlock's Spiral that allegedly leads to vampire space. The Daleks tried ot breach it and were attacked by some VERY LARGE (but not quite Greater) vampires without ever making it through. But as I read things the Hellmouth doesn't lead to Yssgaroth space... it sounds more like during the fracas around the Anchoring of the Thread the Great Vampire(s) dropped an entire galaxy into an... oxbow or something. So the lost galaxy of Nosfera II is a literal holdout of the battle between Cause and Effect where the Yssgaroth version of reality reigns, chock full of mythical Vampire Weapon-Worlds that were meant to be employed during the first war against the Time Lords but never were. *sips tea* On 'our' side of the wormhole is the galaxy of Orlock's Spiral which is permenantly enshrouded by the Great Astral Fogstorm. So, you know... probably also a vampire galaxy... just not a Great Old Vampire galaxy. Much less troubling. (I have a theory about the origin of the name Yssgaroth and it's somewhat metafictional....) |
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Post by constonks on Sept 23, 2022 15:18:51 GMT
Well canoncly if the Daleks kept mining in Bedfordshire they would eventually have struck Dracula. That's just right there in The Book of the Enemy. There's an Unbound we need to see - Hartnell arrives a few years late to find the Mal'eks running Earth! I just figured it was an anagram of the founder of the Time Lords' dark alter ego: Goth Rassy |
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Post by Epsilon (Toby Price) on Sept 24, 2022 15:34:56 GMT
Man I've fallen far behind. I haven't even completed week one...  |
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Post by doctornolonger on Sept 26, 2022 14:14:17 GMT
Man I've fallen far behind. I haven't even completed week one... Not to worry! We're all moving at our own paces. Ideally people will still be starting this reading order and posting in these threads a year from now  |
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Post by ryanfogarty on Sept 26, 2022 18:40:09 GMT
I think my first question is: do you all think of this as the actual Doctor Who universe? Or something completely separate, inspired by, but not overlapping? The question of what Faction Paradox is depends on what the meaning of the word is... is. What was FP's relationship to Who when it launched? What was it's relationship to Who when Who came back? And what is their relationship in the Eternal Present? My onion (YMMV): When it launched: Doctor Who was essentially a 'dead' brand. Its relaunch had failed, the rights to the relaunch had been in limbo and the upcoming jazziness was about bringing it back as animated 'webisodes' that would be viewed by maybe 50.000 people max on the BBC website. There had been interest in 3rd party productions of Doctor Who characters but the BBC stubbornly refused to allow use of the Doctor himself, even while there was a sense that the 'window' on Doctor Who ever relaunching in a meaningful way was closing. The brand was too valuable to put into amateur productions, but not valuable enough ti justify proper BBC productions. (All while the cost of sci-fi on television was rising.) Doctor Who books were fundamentally a televisual medium translated to text. Faction Paradox stories were text-native. Their lurid visual elements were all easily shortlanded via text. It was designed for messing with metafiction and playing with Doctor Who as its sandbox the way other modernist works play with culture or the public domain. FP was meant to survive (if not thrive) in a medium with thinner margins if Doctor Who never came back. (Whether or not that was its INTENTION, that was the role it played.) Given how the EDAs had just turned their own universe inside-out at the time of FP's launch you COULD call it a 'fork' of the universe, or just a river which had split and not yet rejoined. All of the 'evil renegade' stuff around the Doctor is fully accounted for by the timeline shenanigans. After Doctor Who came back: The Time War was real. Gallifrey fell. All those lovecraftian abominations...? Real. The 2005 reboot was built ON THE FOUNDATION of Faction Paradox. (Technically the EDAs, but FP shaped those.) And then for legal reasons it filed off the serial numbers so it wouldn't have to pay anyone, decided on the not-terribly-interesting-but-inevitable 'Daleks were the final boss' scenario and confined the grimdark sprawl to the war and not Earth. All of the nasty stuff they said abotu the Great Houses is a perfect fit for the timeline where Rassilon came back to lead however. NuWho is the triumph of Faction Paradox. Its weird tangents and occational crapsack world tendencies all work perfectly with the Faction's universe. ...but it's really unclear how it falls relative to the FP narrative. Did they used to exist and then wiped themselves out of existence during the war? FP has been dancing around that. DURING NuWho's Time War the War Doctor, while not exactly an 'evil renegade', was comitting war atrocities, so he could believably fit that part of the FP narrative. Prior to his introduction it would have to refer to the eighth Doctor going rogue during the Time War and working against everyone... which doesn't really fit anything particularly well. Doctor Who in the eternal present: Well for one thing the Faction has shown up in a recent Doctor Who Christmas anthology, so the two are clearly playing nicer. The 'Ruth' Division Doctor(s) clearly DID fulfill the roles attribuited to the 'evil renegade', and her recent comic book had her being assigned to hunt down a radical sepratist Gallifreyan cult. (A DIFFERENT one, but still!) Doctor Who: Flux was basically an entire miniseries dedicated to the UN-Anchoring Of The Thread. (When are we getting a book about that?) There was even a pun... the mori == memento mori, but it's also an improper pluralization of moorings -- anchors. Basically I think that after about two decades of hand-wringing Faction Paradox and have finally reached a point where they kinda-sorta exist together, but I -don't- particularly think that the currenlt Obverse book output is 'caught up' to the current state of the TV universe. And I don't tink they're interested in being caught up simply for the sake of being synched. Given how many times the univrrse has been rebooted (5?) just since the series came back any discontinuities can be explained away and FP is free to play in its own little version of causality WITHOUT actually conflicting with anything..,.. or actually being seperate. And if Obverse ever wants to bring them expliclty into synch they can just release Flux part 7. Or Reflux. Or whatever they want to call it. |
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