Talk:Lungbarrow

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[edit] Refactoring

I've done a substantial refactoring to Czechout (talk • contribs)'s edits, removing and rewriting what I feel were overly bold assertions about the mood and reasons behind certain opinions in fandom that could not really be verified - I've tried to retain the spirit of those edits but toned them down a bit.

The other bit that I removed was the one that said that Lungbarrow bears a similiarity to the Byrne reworking of the Superman mythos in The Man of Steel. Aside from the fact that Byrne made Krypton a sterile planet where Kryptonians reproduce by machinery instead of sex, I don't see much else similar - Gallifrey is not as bloodless or as cold, and even the major characteristic of the Byrne mini-series, that it was a complete retcon or even reboot, is not present in Lungbarrow. Very little is actually retconned, bar the one or two occasions that the Doctor mentions his father in the television series - nothing else in Lungbarrow explicitly contradicts what we've seen before; it merely reinterprets. Byrne's reworking, however, was a complete wipe. --khaosworks (talk • contribs) 01:22, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

Wow, you completely restructured the article as I was in the middle of making a substantial edit, making me uncertain how now to proceed with the work I've been doing, which would have gone on, among other things, to have made the similarities with "Man of Steel" more apparent. Hmmmm, I guess the lesson here is not to edit incrementally . . .CzechOut 01:45, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

I'm sorry, but that's the nature of edit conflicts. There's also the {{inusefor}} tag if you want to flag it. On the other hand, you can perhaps summarise what similarities you wanted to point out and we can still discuss it. --khaosworks (talk • contribs) 02:57, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

I get what you did, and I mostly do think you improved the readability of the text. I'm definitely not offended by what happened or anything. It was just shocking cause nothing I had spent time writing really fit anymore to the new format. What can I tell ya? i'm a newbie. I'm definitely not finished here yet, though, so please feel free to continue to edit as you see fit.

On the specific point of MOS, though, I think they are similar. MOS posits a Kryptonian society that was once a paradise of enlightenment, emotion, and engagement. Then came a crisis, later amplified by the "last hurrah" of the Byrne era, The Last God of Krypton (1999), which made Kryptonian society retreat into an emotionless, sexless society. This isn't so awfully different from the way Lungbarrow describes its "Schism" and "Curse". Just like MOS, Lungbarrow posits a single couple breaking through the tradition to forge a new kind of family. Leela and Andred are in many ways the Jor-El and Lara of the piece. Just as with Lungbarrow, MOS took an idea that had been loosely bandied about before, namely the notion of Kryptonian "houses", and really strengthened them. Byrne's revamp was the first time that Richard Donner's 1978 filmed notion of the "Superman S" being a family crest, was really cemented into the comic lore. Both works put detailed notions of "Houses" more firmly into the lexicon of their respective planets, even though neither uses the basic concept for the first time.

I'd also totally disagree that Lungbarrow isn't a retcon. Thinking in terms of the time this novel was released, it specifically reacts against the then-most-recent piece of televised DW, the TVM--at, curiously, the same time that it acts as a prequel to McGann's outing. McGann remembers his father--not, as had been indicated sporadically throughout the 1963-89 run, the more general "family". You pointed that out, above, of course, but I guess i place more emphasis on it, due to the fact that the "father" line is absolutely in-canon (both with McGann and with another Doctor, as I recall), and isn't said in any flippant way that can be dismissed (as the "half human on my mother's side" line might be).

And, finally, like Byrne, Platt has effectively been edited out of the current myth.

So, while it may not have been a reboot of the entire myth of DW, like Byrne's was for Superman, it doesn't mean that the end results weren't similar enough to at least note.CzechOut 05:18, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

The difficulty I have with most of the above is that all of this seems to come right out from you, which may tread on original research. If someone else had written it elsewhere, I'd feel more comfortable with the idea, or if the similarities were so obvious, which they really aren't. In the absence of that, I'd rather not even mention it at all.

On the subject of retconning, I do not agree that the novel "specifically reacts" against the TVM: granted, it was written close to it, and it in fact does try ot link up to it at the end when Romana gives the Doctor the assignment to fetch the Master's remains, but it is also true that the major elements of Lungbarrow had been established as far back as Andrew Cartmel's Masterplan - Looms and all. The two instances of the Doctor even mentioning a father are Davison ("just the one") and McGann, but as later novels have indicated, even Lungbarrow does not really contradict any of these statements, since we are not sure if the Doctor is talking of his own memories, or of the Other, or even both! Remember "Didn't we have trouble with the protoype..." from Remembrance?

That being said, yes, Lungbarrow does retcon, but it's more on the side of the traditional definition of retroactive continuity (which, when Roy Thomas first came up with the term, simply meant "filling in the blanks in previous continuity") more than the more current, popular definition ("this never happened; this is the current version"). Nothing in it really contradicts anything that came before - or since (yes, even the 2005 series; I don't see where Platt has been edited out of current continuity) - when taken in totality. --khaosworks (talk • contribs) 10:17, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for your reply :) I dunno, to me all this is bleedingly obvious, but maybe it is all in my little mind. I honestly didn't think it would be any more controversial to suggest the similarities between MOS and Lungbarrow than it was to mention its commonality with Gormenghast. The difference, I suppose, is that so far I've been able to find a review which actually mentions the Peake connection, but not so much with Superman. I suppose all that really proves is that such a comparison was more likely because readers of both of the works were likely to come from the same subset, i.e. British fans of literary fantastic fiction, but that it's comparatively less likely to find people who have read late 80s Superman and late 90s British spin-off science fiction — and want to talk about it.

As for Platt being edited out of continuity, it was done almost exactly the same as the way Byrne was. Subsequent writers (RTD in Platt's case; Jeph Loeb in Byrne's) came along and wrote a soft reboot that said, essentially, "Okay, that all might have happened before, but as from right now a new revelation (be it Jor-El's willful deception of Kal-El or the wholesale destruction of Gallifrey) renders what you've known before effectively moot." It was, as you aptly mentioned, a "Roy Thomas" kinda retcon in both cases.

In any case, you're right to point out the need for proof. You go right on takin' me to task for this sorta thing, The articles will only be stronger for the discussion.CzechOut 18:47, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

I still don't see where RTD has edited Platt out of continuity. --khaosworks (talk • contribs) 22:31, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

Well, if you destroy Gallifrey, then it really doesn't matter what Platt said about Gallifrey anymore. Plus RTD said somewhere, I think on one of the Confidentials that the motivation was largely because Gallifrey had become too complicated. Platt is right in the thick of that complication, and Lungbarrow is something RTD would, as a NA author himself, likely have known about. He might have even contributed a piece or two to the overall jigsaw puzzle of the "Masterplan", but I don't know. He's also stated that there's continuity between the two television series (used here in the American sense) to the extent that he keeps what he likes from the past. I therefore don't see how the 2005 series can be seen as too much else than a fairly intentional excision of Lungbarrow from current continuity. Same thing holds true for Loeb's edits: if you say that the Byrne Krypton was an intentional lie, then it really doesn't matter anymore what Byrne said Krypton was like.CzechOut 00:54, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

That's not the same as editing it out, though. I'm not sure that RTD said that Gallifrey was "too complicated," and even if he did, there's no indication as I can recall from any of the interviews that I've read or seen, that it was a reaction to Lungbarrow. One might argue, quite convincingly, that The Deadly Assassin was the first nail in Gallifrey's coffin and that The Trial of a Time Lord finally put paid to the idea of the Time Lords as anywhere mysterious, omnipotent or even sensible. Another way to look at it is that it isn't Gallifrey's history as revealed by Lungbarrow that's too complicated; it's the Time Lords and Gallifrey themselves as a concept, quite apart from anything else, that's too complicated. Removing the Time Lords isn't a reaction against Platt, but generally a reaction against the idea that the Time Lords just ain't all that any more, and it's far more interesting to have the main character without a leash or lifeline. The same reasons, in fact, that Gallifrey was blown up in The Ancestor Cell.

The fact that RTD is as much a continuity geek as the rest of us is evident in the little touches he sprinkles through the series: he namedrops Lucifer, from Deceit in Bad Wolf, he even mentions kronkbugers from the comic strip in The Long Game, to give a couple of examples. His article for the Doctor Who Annual 2006 explaining the Time War is chock full of references to the novels, audios and the comic strips. This is not the sign of a man who doesn't like the continuity thrown up in the other media. --khaosworks (talk • contribs) 01:49, 30 March 2006 (UTC)