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Post by quicksilverkitling on Sept 27, 2022 0:17:12 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. These are wonderful reflections, thank you for sharing! As a pretty new Faction Paradox fan who came via the parent series proper, I think I'm still working to see the two as cousins(!) with a common origin, but which now stand alone and don't depend on each other to work properly and tell their own unique stories. One thing to add: I'm fairly sure that the Mouri are based off the Moirai of Greek mythology, more commonly rendered in English as the Fates. Their role in mythology is to spin, measure out and eventually cut the "threads" of human lives, and the one who cuts the thread gives her name to the Temple of Atropos itself. |
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Post by ryanfogarty on Sept 27, 2022 6:30:37 GMT
One thing to add: I'm fairly sure that the Mouri are based off the Moirai of Greek mythology, more commonly rendered in English as the Fates. Their role in mythology is to spin, measure out and eventually cut the "threads" of human lives, and the one who cuts the thread gives her name to the Temple of Atropos itself. Just another brick in the 'anchoring of the thread' wall. Flux, like a lot of NuWho, was built on the back of Faction Paradox. At this point if anyone in the BBC understoof how much their showrunners were nicking that they didn't own they would probably be terrified. The Kate Stewart fiasco was bad enough. |
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Athenodora
Little Sibling
Posts: 14 
Preferred Pronouns: She/They
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Post by Athenodora on Oct 27, 2022 13:15:35 GMT
I rather like the idea that GP was just … this weird little bloke who thought he was edgy by wandering about in bones (oooh scary) and using “voodoo” (OHH dangerous!). Who suicided in some stupid bloody manner and everyone else brought into his “edginess” after he died and created an elaborate mythology in order to accomodate the reality that the Grandfather was the sort of person who looks up to Rick Sanchez and wears combat cosplay saying “don’t tread on me”. In fact, “Alien Bodies” explicitly equates “paradox” with the human conception of “Satan”, something so utterly terribly at odds with accepted society that it’s the epitome of evil…. So here we still go, some ponsy twit wanting to look “extreme”. A similar thought that just popped up in my head while I was reading this - what if the grand mythological "erased himself from History" was a later misunderstanding/misrepresentation of the truth, which is that GP just disappeared by way of doing one of the most obvious things a criminal just escaping from prison would consider doing: cross the border and lie low somewhere outside of his captors' jurisdiction. Which, in this case, translating to hiding beyond the Frontier in Time (and thus technically be "outside of History", from the Great Houses' point of view).
Would this be a possible in-universe conspiracy theory, perhaps?
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Post by garyshots on Oct 27, 2022 18:27:37 GMT
A similar thought that just popped up in my head while I was reading this - what if the grand mythological "erased himself from History" was a later misunderstanding/misrepresentation of the truth, which is that GP just disappeared by way of doing one of the most obvious things a criminal just escaping from prison would consider doing: cross the border and lie low somewhere outside of his captors' jurisdiction. Which, in this case, translating to hiding beyond the Frontier in Time (and thus technically be "outside of History", from the Great Houses' point of view). I like it. I like it a lot. He could be hiding in the Book under a different alias.
Grandfather Halfling comes to mind, but that may be a bit obvious, and I don't recall much indication that GP was half-human. |
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Post by Ettolrahc Dvora on Jan 4, 2023 18:59:49 GMT
On the subject of the Faction Paradox "Family', I find it rather intriguing that they tBotW never uses gender-neutral language, even when it's inconvenient. It's always "Little Brother or Little Sister", it "Mother/Father" (or "Godmother or Godfather"), never Little Siblings, or "Parent", and yet despite this, this fandom (rightfully) uses the gender-neutral terms.
Building on the Family Ranks, I think it would be cool to have an Uncle/Aunt (or, may I posit, a Grandcousin) rank which is for Faction Parents who have left the main body of the Faction and lead an alternative group (I'm not sure if there are any of these at the moment, but there definitely should be, at least soon. Especially due to the lack of an Eleven Day Empire in the current era of the War)
As for the Faction in general, when first encountering FP I thought - or rather, presumed - that it's usage of the word "voodo" was done inaccurately (and hence, offensively). But extracts from here and Interference seem to imply there's no intended inherent evilness to their voodoo. However, I have not studied the real-life religion of voodoo, so if someone could correct or affirm me, that would be nice.
Huh, giving ex-House members Parent status by default is... weird, considering the Faction's entire ethos is "piss of the Houses". The entry does give the defense that the House members have a "biological advantage" due to their time-control. Which is fair, but I think they only deserve the immediate rank of Cousin, or optimally their biodata should be extracted and given to a Godparent to redistribute, or something similar.
Hmm, the "Godparents don't leave the Eleven Day Empire", interesting. After the fall of the Empire, are there any examples of Godparents in splinter-factions? Except for Godfather Auter, of course.
"the name of the founder is rary taken in vain". I presume people took this to mean the Faction don't say "Oh, Grandfather!", however the obvious similarity to the Hebrew First Commandment cannot be discarded. And that commandment didn't originally refer to saying "oh my god" (as modern Christians interpret it), but rather meant "don't say the name of God", which is why Jewish people don't pronounce YWHW and say Adonai (lord) instead, and say G•d not God. This leads me to think that like the Hebrew God, the Grandfather may have had an original, unknown, name - which may hold similar mythic importance to the doctor's.
Oh my god, the Remote!! I love you!! Genuinely, I find the Remote to be the most interesting of Wartime cultures, because of their anarchism-yet-still-acting-as-one thing. Part of me thinks it's kinda suspicious that the entry and Interference never seem to point out that whilst the Remote are currently anarchists (to an extent, I'd argue it's much more complicated than that), that could be altered completely by anyone with acces to the "main transmitter", as Guest almost fully displayed in Interference.
Re: Lesser Species, says that any member of the lesser species who travels through time (in a stable fashion) are altered on the biodata level. This implies (and sorry for the DW reference here, it's only small) that each of the Doctor's companion's are no longer human in the same way other humans are.
"This volume, for obvious reasons, is largely concerned with the effects of the War on human development" - that's not obvious! What's the (in-universe) reason? GAH this statement is so frustrating to read, because clearly info has been lost in transit. Presumably, the Author (Auter? Jk) of the Book intendes it to be read by posthumans?
It's very interesting that within the DWU FPU, humans are capable of cross-breeding with other species, whilst in the real-world, the inability to cross-breed is literally what defines two beings as being from separate species. I don't think there's anything to note here, except that the FPU is rather discontinuous with real-life, which we all knew and isn't a bad thing at all.
Lalalala the Yssgaroth entry is all propoganda. Seriously, "worlds of pure torture existed. But they were conveniently removed, so there's no evidence of their existence, lol. Source for them existing? Trust me bro". Also, I've always had a soft-spot for the Yssgaroth since I listened to Zagreus (or maybe it's sequel, I can't remember. The one where it says Rassilon drew the Vampires into war and they were fine beforehand).
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Post by Ettolrahc Dvora on Jan 4, 2023 19:08:25 GMT
Similar ideas have been played with in many subtle ways elsewhere in FP. For example, in a twist on the same semiotics, I think there is an implication you can easily read into Dead Romance that perhaps the Time Lords have been fleeing down the ladder of bottle universes for a long time; that the Gallifrey we know was formerly some other planet that they terraformed into a Homeworld-duplicate. There is far too much emphasis on how unrecognisable Christine's Earth becomes overnight, and the depiction of the remainder of humanity scrabbling in the dark and in the cracks of the new masters, returning to prehistoric levels of civlisation, is perhaps the most interesting gonzo theory of the Outsiders and/or Shabogans yet devised. I do like this, however viewing Christine's Universe as a pre-Timelord universe doesn't quite work in an FP setting, as FP has the Pre-Anchoring Era be as far away from real life as possible, whereas Christine's Earth is described as like ours. However, the may have been Miles's authorial intent, as when Dead Romance was originally published he hadn't built up the FP Mythos as much |
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Post by Ettolrahc Dvora on Jan 4, 2023 19:17:29 GMT
Grandfather Paradox was from one of the older and slightly more erratic Great Houses bloodlines. Are we supposed to know which one? Or are we just meant to assume that he's a cousin of Dr. Who? Or is he a specific cousin? The Grandfather's first-ever mention was as “the voodoo priest of the House of Lungbarrow” in Christmas on a Rational Planet! And this is restated in Crimes Against History, which features Lungbarrow explicitly. Quite how the Grandfather fits into the Plattian family tree is an interesting question; he is of the War King's, and thus Theta Sigma's, generation, but I definitely don't think he's any one of the Cousins we know about from Lungbarrow itself. Me, I have a guess, though I don't know whether either man ever intended it. Much is made in Lungbarrow of the forty-five Cousins quota that Lungbarrow must adhere to. What if, just maybe, Dr Who only exists because the Grandfather erased himself from history — because his erasure left a vacant 45th spot into which the Other's biodata-ghost was able to slip unnoticed? That is a good idea, and also gives a kinda-explanation as to how the Grandfather and the Doctor are related in the Ancestor Cell |
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Post by Ettolrahc Dvora on Jan 4, 2023 19:40:50 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: When I first read tBotW, I shard it's disbelief in parallel universes, as I saw it as gospel. But now reading that image in "Oblique Time" it becomes painfully, painfully, obvious that the Great Houses are going "lala-la-lala I can't hear you" to the incredibly obvious existence of parallel universes, to the extend Oblique Time says "they banned all research and there's been no evidence" |
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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 Jan 4, 2023 22:01:38 GMT
Building on the Family Ranks, I think it would be cool to have an Uncle/Aunt (or, may I posit, a Grandcousin) rank which is for Faction Parents who have left the main body of the Faction and lead an alternative group (I'm not sure if there are any of these at the moment, but there definitely should be, at least soon. Especially due to the lack of an Eleven Day Empire in the current era of the War) Oh my god, the Remote!! I love you!! Genuinely, I find the Remote to be the most interesting of Wartime cultures, because of their anarchism-yet-still-acting-as-one thing. Part of me thinks it's kinda suspicious that the entry and Interference never seem to point out that whilst the Remote are currently anarchists (to an extent, I'd argue it's much more complicated than that), that could be altered completely by anyone with acces to the "main transmitter", as Guest almost fully displayed in Interference.
"This volume, for obvious reasons, is largely concerned with the effects of the War on human development" - that's not obvious! What's the (in-universe) reason? GAH this statement is so frustrating to read, because clearly info has been lost in transit. Presumably, the Author (Auter? Jk) of the Book intendes it to be read by posthumans? Their Aunts and Uncles but they only appear/ are mentioned in three sources, Ancestor Cell, the Galifrey Chronicles and the Story so Far in which they are described as the Faction Assassins and kind of sub branch formed by Mathara’s splinter cell. I can not name any Godparents after the devouring of the Empire by Lolita except for those in the City of the Saved (Avatar, Pinochle and Jezebel) other than the aforementioned Auter (well he may be lying about that as it seems their can only be four Godparent at a time, one who is always absent and may not exist) and all bar Sabbath where killed when the Empire fell (or trapped beyond the war anyway) and so only Godfather Sabbath but we only know this thanks to Mujan (I will not spoil how) however plans for him to appear in the Protocols fell through when the series for prematurely cancelled. Most Surviving Sects are led by Parents, such as the Shadow Spier, Matharas Order and Francesca’s survivors, or Cousins such as Faction a Hollywood, however at least one is led by a Grandfather assumptive. I to myself love the Remote and view them as the closely thing the Spiral Politic has to good guys (emphasis of Closest). and I believe the Obvious Reasons are not obvious deliberately and is more like how in myths sometimes a character will rock up who we are all expected to know but has never been mentioned before or latter as over time the information about this person has faded I believe this is a case of the opposite the information is yet to occur or outside our frame of reference. |
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Post by Ettolrahc Dvora on Jan 4, 2023 22:45:28 GMT
Building on the Family Ranks, I think it would be cool to have an Uncle/Aunt (or, may I posit, a Grandcousin) rank which is for Faction Parents who have left the main body of the Faction and lead an alternative group (I'm not sure if there are any of these at the moment, but there definitely should be, at least soon. Especially due to the lack of an Eleven Day Empire in the current era of the War) Oh my god, the Remote!! I love you!! Genuinely, I find the Remote to be the most interesting of Wartime cultures, because of their anarchism-yet-still-acting-as-one thing. Part of me thinks it's kinda suspicious that the entry and Interference never seem to point out that whilst the Remote are currently anarchists (to an extent, I'd argue it's much more complicated than that), that could be altered completely by anyone with acces to the "main transmitter", as Guest almost fully displayed in Interference.
"This volume, for obvious reasons, is largely concerned with the effects of the War on human development" - that's not obvious! What's the (in-universe) reason? GAH this statement is so frustrating to read, because clearly info has been lost in transit. Presumably, the Author (Auter? Jk) of the Book intendes it to be read by posthumans? Their Aunts and Uncles but they only appear/ are mentioned in three sources, Ancestor Cell, the Galifrey Chronicles and the Story so Far in which they are described as the Faction Assassins and kind of sub branch formed by Mathara’s splinter cell. I can not name any Godparents after the devouring of the Empire by Lolita except for those in the City of the Saved (Avatar, Pinochle and Jezebel) other than the aforementioned Auter (well he may be lying about that as it seems their can only be four Godparent at a time, one who is always absent and may not exist) and all bar Sabbath where killed when the Empire fell (or trapped beyond the war anyway) and so only Godfather Sabbath but we only know this thanks to Mujan (I will not spoil how) however plans for him to appear in the Protocols fell through when the series for prematurely cancelled. Most Surviving Sects are led by Parents, such as the Shadow Spier, Matharas Order and Francesca’s survivors, or Cousins such as Faction a Hollywood, however at least one is led by a Grandfather assumptive. I to myself love the Remote and view them as the closely thing the Spiral Politic has to good guys (emphasis of Closest). and I believe the Obvious Reasons are not obvious deliberately and is more like how in myths sometimes a character will rock up who we are all expected to know but has never been mentioned before or latter as over time the information about this person has faded I believe this is a case of the opposite the information is yet to occur or outside our frame of reference. Oh so Uncles exist but it's Ancestor Cell lore, ew Who's the Grandfather assumptive? The Ancestor Cell guy?
Mutual love of Remote <33
Yah I thought so |
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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 Jan 5, 2023 9:09:33 GMT
Their Aunts and Uncles but they only appear/ are mentioned in three sources, Ancestor Cell, the Galifrey Chronicles and the Story so Far in which they are described as the Faction Assassins and kind of sub branch formed by Mathara’s splinter cell. I can not name any Godparents after the devouring of the Empire by Lolita except for those in the City of the Saved (Avatar, Pinochle and Jezebel) other than the aforementioned Auter (well he may be lying about that as it seems their can only be four Godparent at a time, one who is always absent and may not exist) and all bar Sabbath where killed when the Empire fell (or trapped beyond the war anyway) and so only Godfather Sabbath but we only know this thanks to Mujan (I will not spoil how) however plans for him to appear in the Protocols fell through when the series for prematurely cancelled. Most Surviving Sects are led by Parents, such as the Shadow Spier, Matharas Order and Francesca’s survivors, or Cousins such as Faction a Hollywood, however at least one is led by a Grandfather assumptive. I to myself love the Remote and view them as the closely thing the Spiral Politic has to good guys (emphasis of Closest). and I believe the Obvious Reasons are not obvious deliberately and is more like how in myths sometimes a character will rock up who we are all expected to know but has never been mentioned before or latter as over time the information about this person has faded I believe this is a case of the opposite the information is yet to occur or outside our frame of reference. Oh so Uncles exist but it's Ancestor Cell lore, ew Who's the Grandfather assumptive? The Ancestor Cell guy?
Mutual love of Remote <33
Yah I thought so The Ancestor Cell guy is the false Grandfather, the Grandfather Assumptive (a little term of my own the term used in story so far is the new grandfather but the fact that their may be more than one is why I changed it to a Grandfather Assumptive) is Justine and possibly Shuncucker. |
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