All answers include the ones above them except for the last three

Talking with a friend who stopped watching Doctor Who after Matt Smith about Thoschei over the years and was like “Yeah funny that the only time The Master and The Doctor kissed on TV is when they were a straight couple lmao mysogyny” and my friend said “yeah, funny how they only made her vulnerable and needy of the Doctor when she was a woman, too” and my jaw was. On the floor

Learning To Love The Timeless Child

I’ve gone through a flux (har har) of emotions upon my thoughts on The Timeless Child reveal. From feeling ambivalent to mild disliking and to thinking it was just “ok”. I’m finally ready to put my foot down and not only say I love it but it’s actually one of the best inclusions in DW cannon.

But before you rase you're pitchforks I’m not writing this in an attempt to invalidate the opinion of people who don’t like it but to offer understanding of those that do.

While also identifying some of the common complaints/criticisms that've been levelled at it. "It breaks cannon, it makes the Doctor a Messiah figure, its pointless, it disrespects Hartnell ect".

First off The Doctor still is “some guy” Tecteun finds her alone and abandoned, as the Master puts it a “refugee” the only thing this change’s is that she was the first person able to regeneration which in-itself is just a cosmetic plot device it’s not what defines Gallifreyans as a race, whilst there have been instances where it's used to comment on the Doctors mortality (The End of Time, Twice Upon a Time) rarely is it displayed as anything more. As for the Doctor being “it makes the Doctor a Messiah figure” the Timelords evolved naturally and expanded their outreached as mentioned in the TTC, with Tectuan they became the self-appointed elite and renamed themselves Timelords, there would still be “Timelords” regardless of the Doctors involvement it's a title not a literal race. The Doctor is only ever presented as a “messiah” figure through the lens of the Master's insecurity "All I am is somehow because of you". And what works about the Master is he is essentially meant to symbolise an outrage merchant/NMD type, wanting the Doctor to be scared and outraged over the revelation, He even goes to the lengths of creating an army of Cybermasters purely in his image, when they regenerate, they don’t change they just stay the same. Echoing the fear of change and evolution.

TTC narratively justifies itself within its own story it doesn’t need to exist outside its own confines as it already serves a narrative purpose in this episode. Primarily as a commentary on colonialism with the Doctor appearing as a black girl who was taken and exploited for gain of another race and having her history buried and forgotten, the Timelords forging this story of supposed ‘greatness’.

Thematically TTC works as well as it does by not only opening up the lore to new possibilities but simultaneously exposing the white patriarchy. Showing the Doctors previous lives as children, that diversity has always existed after decades of telling people that this how it’s always been so it so should just to stay the same; instead of questioning why an alien who can change their appearance into literally anyone would always take the form of a white guy. Being that identity has been the following theme throughout this era, I think there’s a lot of value in this conceit, which comes through in Ruth and Thirteens short interaction. Learning to reconcile with parts of yourself that you never realised were there. I suspect those sequences might mean a lot too adopted or just alienated kids in general watching the show, showing that this program is for them as it is for anyone else.

Posing the question of what if there were many different Doctors from any ethnicity groups but we haven’t seen them before because the Timelords have appropriated the ability to regenerate for themselves in addition to this doubling as commentary all the previous Doctors being white men.

The TTC makes it very clear that the point is the open up possibilities and new venues for the show to explore, that your past doesn’t define you. With the Doctor partially acting as an audience surrogate, constantly asking questions of what it all means.

It’s about the intrigue and the joy of the mystery itself which is what the TTC is trying too ahead too.

You can even look at it on a metatextual level, with a show that spans a history of almost 60 years, amassing numerous spin offs and expanded media. Making an almost celebratory deconstruction on the arbitrary nature of cannon and if you’re going to tell a story the largely focuses on this then you have to acknowledge that cannon isn’t necessarily fundamental, as much as it’s just a storytelling device, especially in the case of DW with its numerous contradictions. Incidentally, this also applies to the revelation itself. If you really don’t like it then feel free to disregard it. But be prepared to accept the fact that some people might critique that standpoint, and that’s OK.

The inclusion of the Morbius Doctors is a prime example, hell even the Curse of Fatal Death Doctors, all of it is possible now. To have the revelation change the Doctor in any significant way would be hugely undermining the point of what the episode is trying to say. Instead of conforming to the Masters way of thinking she doesn’t let this change frighten her she embraces it. Much like the very nature of the show.

Anyway, hope u enjoyed my rant :-]

ok that is NOT what the master (especially this master) is about!!!! but agreed on the other stuff.

timeless child(ren) is still an origin story of both of them… who do we think the timeless friend is otherwise?!

also dhawan’s master is closer than any other to the doctor. as much as they are emotionally distanced, they are so so so SIMILAR. and he’s also similar to past doctors. it’s the dr that can’t see it. well maybe neither of them can. because the master is still so desperate to be the doctor, at least partly in order to not be himself anymore.

aaaaaanyway, great points abt the timeless child !! it totally opens up tv-canon possibilities and brings in many EU concepts thru the side door so to speak.

There’s a little boy who is clearly exactly like the Master as a child in their appearance, who kills the true!baby!Doctor in a very baby!Master-ish way by making them fall off something by semi-accident.

He-ugh.

Guh.

Oh, no. Oh yes, but oh no.

Oh, I bet that’s Rassilon/Whatever-she-was-going-by’s son.

So when they test the Timeless Child after the accident, they eventually gain the regeneration power, putting it in themself.

But what if they put that same variant in their son too.

Oh God. That bit from The End Of Time, the episode that literally just got name checked and is the logical end for how Thirteen’s run mirrors Ten’s:

Of course he knows it’s them because he’s the one that made the Master functionally immortal in the first place!

Rassilon puts the drums in the Master’s head and drives him mad because why the hell wouldn’t he - they’ve made it clear that they don’t care about experimenting on their own children, makes it easier if anything.

Sacha said it was almost like a sibling relationship, not because he’s stupid, but because he’s stupid! (ilu baby it’s just secrets aren’t your strong suit)

It’ll make them just close enough for the morons to scream about incest, but far enough away that most of us will be like ‘if that was where you drew the line for the wrongness of this relationship you must seriously be lacking in braincells.’

They’re both the same, except the Master was made, not the same base species unless we’re time looping which we probably are and the Doctor’s not a species but Beethoven’s Fifth - a paradox, and just is.

And I bet that’s why the Master’s so mad, because he hid that from the Doctor - he already knows that he’s even more made from the Doctor than everyone else. He redacted it, he doesn’t want her to know, doesn’t know what to do with it, and put those images in her mind because he’s him, they’re connected like that in their minds, and he always gives her an out.

That’s why The Master needs reassuring of who he is in Spyfall, he’s going through exactly what the Doctor is. He’s missing life too.

It’s not that they’ve both got pseudo daddy issues with Rassilon - they’ve got straight up daddy issues with Rassilon.

They even have the same meta, the Master was also turned back into a child at least once - he’s how we know we can do that in the first place! The Master is Rassilon’s son, has the full ultra-regenerative ability which may well go deeper than mere body, and really is eternally linked with the Doctor, because deep down they always feel like no-one’s paying attention to them and people only care about the Doctor.

The Doctor who was Rassilon’s ‘foster kid’-slash-‘lab rat’.

Oh mate, you thought you needed a stiff drink after this episode?

After they’re reset the Master’s from a high-born family. With estates. That’s where he’s put. Rassilon doesn’t even keep him. Kept the Doctor (or rather someone kept him on his behalf I’m sure), who knows something’s up and runs away from their life at the centre of the citadel as soon as they’re old enough to reach a door handle.

Which means the Master was rejected. Rassilon was always so weirdly cruel to him. I wonder when Rassilon/Whoever found out the truth about what happened on that cliff? After the regeneration injection and then emotionally abandoned him, or before and just thought two test subjects could be useful because Rassilon was always awful like that.

He used both of them, and then put them back to the beginning. In childhood the Doctor and the Master as we know them are the same age. It’s not coincidence, they were just reset at the same time.

The episode is called The Timeless Children cus eventually we’re gonna look back and see that it’s true, there’s two of them.

Baby!Master was Rassilon/Tectactoe’s first successful loomling and the way they were going to save their dwindling species, before they discovered that you could burst into flames and then get better.

Then Rassilon devoted their time mostly to that and looms ended up just being your garden variety eugenics scheme.

The Master is furious because he knows that he was supposed to be the start of the Time Lords, it was his inheritance stolen, he should have been the Master of them all, but then the Doctor ruined it by making it so people could heal themselves. (Those names are etched deep in their souls, huh).

So CyberMasterTimeLords. Of course. An instinctual urge in the End Of Time to turn not just every human, but every Time Lord into himself. “I’ve transplanted myself into every single human being. But who wants a mongrel little species like them, because now I can transplant myself into every single Time Lord.” Rassilon doesn’t even deign to say anything. Just sneers and undoes it all.

It was two Immortal Gods in Can You Hear Me, not one god and one normal person playing catch-up.

Maybe going a bit off-piste here into more vague speculation, but we were wondering what could have made them stop experimenting on the Timeless Child/Doctor… Well with Can You Hear Me’s meta, maybe it was the Valeyard, and he happened at the end of their first ‘lifeset’. Instead of refusing as they do now, in that ‘lifetime’ the Doctor took the Master up on their offer of becoming destructive playmates - one probably for Earth, one for Gallifrey - and eventually they were stopped, one first then the other, the ‘maximum carnage’ restored as if nothing had happened, and that’s when they had them fully reset to children. And it’s also why the Master keeps making this offer to the Doctor and defaulting to destruction even though it never works, because deep down in their subconscious they remember that one time it did.

@iatheia suggesting that the Doctor might have given it to the Master willingly.

Now that’s an even neater idea for the narrative, because it fits with Tectactoe knowing the Master killed the Timeless Child, and emotionally abandoning him from that point completely.

Out of love when being comforted? Cute. But perhaps from trying to fix a catastrophe they caused this time, after a fight, and trying to bring him back to life/stop him dying? A Doctor holding a Master trying to force them to regenerate - now that sounds very them.

i think pretty much all of this still works even after what we “learn” in Flux and tPotD. (which, canon-“facts”-wise isn’t a whole lot. Chinball said his aim was to open-up canon to more possibilities, and i think he wildly succeeded at that. he didn’t say a lot of them were from the EU, but for most ppl it wouldn’t matter that they were.)

i also had the immediate instinct that the Timeless Friend was the Master (assuming it’s deliberate cos the TC looks a bit like Ruth!Doctor would have as a kid, and the TF looks a bit like Spymaster would have as a kid … if they’d ever been kids. which they hadn’t?)

but i didn’t take it any further than M being experimented on and made immortal by Tecteun. kinda felt like Tecteun was The Other instead of Rassilon, because how could the Doctor be The Other without ever knowing it? but still …. she acted awfully like Rassilon. her being The Other would maybe explain Division’s outside-everything-ness, though. but overall, idrc about Tecteun.

the doctor and master meta here still works.

fandoms purists have never watched doctor who and it SHOWS

These people haven't been hardened by a media property where half of the writers hate the other half's ideas and they duke it out with the shows cannon, there's a third half of the writers that ignore the rest and just do whatever they want anyway. And they've been doing this for 50+ years. The main characters home planet has been destroyed at least four times possibly more, there are entire spinoffs based on breaking cannon, the current show runner was basically killed in effigy on the show in the 7th doctors run (30+ years before he took the role lmao), the main characters backstory has been changed so much so often that one writer made an entire book to explain why it doesn't matter. IN 1999. We're simply on another level

Doctor Who is the long running comic book serial of shows and that is my hill

This is helped by the several actual long running comic book serials it has spawned (it's technically a part of the marvel universe because of this, or at least it was when those comics came out)

Doctor Dolittle taught me tie-ins aren’t canon in 1969.

Doctor Who has been teaching me there’s no such thing as canon since 1981.

people who insist on everything being canonically accurate are so boring lol

"this never happened in canon!!!!" yeah well it did happen in the better version that exists in my head so <3

the doctor rolls a d10000 every morning and whatever number comes up is the age they’re going to claim to be that day

they have a more complicated routine with a d8, a d20, three d4s, and a d57 for their gender

Is It Canon? A Helpful Guide

If You Answered “Yes” To One Or More Of These Questions, Congratulations!! It Is Canon

fandoms purists have never watched doctor who and it SHOWS

These people haven't been hardened by a media property where half of the writers hate the other half's ideas and they duke it out with the shows cannon, there's a third half of the writers that ignore the rest and just do whatever they want anyway. And they've been doing this for 50+ years. The main characters home planet has been destroyed at least four times possibly more, there are entire spinoffs based on breaking cannon, the current show runner was basically killed in effigy on the show in the 7th doctors run (30+ years before he took the role lmao), the main characters backstory has been changed so much so often that one writer made an entire book to explain why it doesn't matter. IN 1999. We're simply on another level

'wah wah this was out of character i don't like the ship' lmao go listen to zagreus. what is canon but a massive fucking joke?

Somewhat deluded Doctor Who fans - “Doctor Who has canon... it has rules!”

Doctor Who creators - 

oh, Doctor Who absolutely has canon. it has a superabundance of canon! Doctor Who is thirteen quarreling canons in a trenchcoat wired together with string and duct tape, and honestly, I'd expect nothing less of it.

It’s canon if I liked it and if I didn’t like it then it’s non-canon.

I love the Doctor Who fandom because some people blog about the latest series and make guesses at what’ll happen next while others are working through an infinite extended universe and talking about characters I’ve never heard of in my life and others are solely focused on one single character or pairing from like 30 years before they were born and it’s all so amazing.

gender of the day is doctor who canon

impossible to comprehend and constantly in flux

The five deadly sins of transformative fandom:

In response to certain recurring themes in the notes, I feel I should clarify that none of these issues depend in any way on one’s stance regarding the canon-versus-fanon debate. They’re still problems even if you place non-commercial fan work on absolutely equal footing with commercially published fiction and don’t acknowledge the existence of canon per se.

Leaving the notion of “canon” aside, the creation of fan-work is properly understood as a process of adaptation. What’s going on when you create that coffee shop AU is not fundamentally different from what happens when a book is made into a movie, or when a comic becomes a cartoon series. The key understanding is that adaptations don’t reach back in time to subsume or invalidate the source material they’re based on, nor are those who engage with that source material under any obligation to consider, or even acknowledge, any subsequent adaptations.

To draw a parallel, suppose you had a particular criticism of how the character of Dracula is depicted in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the 1897 novel. If I were to come to you and say “no, this criticism isn’t valid because it makes assertions about the character which are not true of Gary Oldman’s performance in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the 1992 film”, I suspect we can all agree that in this scenario, I’d be full of shit, right?

Well, it doesn’t become less full of shit when the adaptation being cited is non-commercial or fan created.

“adaptations don’t reach back in time to subsume or invalidate the source material they’re based on, nor are those who engage with that source material under any obligation to consider, or even acknowledge, any subsequent adaptations.”

reading fanfiction is like. you are misinterpreting this character incorrectly. i am also misinterpreting them but i'm doing it the correct and sexy way. you dont know him like i know him

I may have a new favourite quote about Doctor Who and canon.

(Source)

fandoms purists have never watched doctor who and it SHOWS

These people haven't been hardened by a media property where half of the writers hate the other half's ideas and they duke it out with the shows cannon, there's a third half of the writers that ignore the rest and just do whatever they want anyway. And they've been doing this for 50+ years. The main characters home planet has been destroyed at least four times possibly more, there are entire spinoffs based on breaking cannon, the current show runner was basically killed in effigy on the show in the 7th doctors run (30+ years before he took the role lmao), the main characters backstory has been changed so much so often that one writer made an entire book to explain why it doesn't matter. IN 1999. We're simply on another level

'wah wah this was out of character i don't like the ship' lmao go listen to zagreus. what is canon but a massive fucking joke?