Gregory

25 years of age, just a bloke trying to survive London Boy

[devilfromthestars]

My 2 pages for @gallifrey-fanzine ! (+Romana details)

I’m glad to finally showcase my contribution on web! 

[doctornolonger]

“What are you talking about?” Fitz protested. “You didn’t say he was one of your five statues earlier.” “What do you mean, five?” She sounded vaguely amused. “There’s only ever been four, one for each of the colleges who built the Panopticon.” “Stop mucking around,” Fitz insisted. “It had five walls and as many statues, we talked about it!” “Four, Fitz.” Romana’s tone suggested this was the end of an idiotic conversation, but Fitz wasn’t having it. “She said there were six colleges, six statues!” “This is getting tiring, Fitz. The statues are just the same as they’ve always been. The Doctor, the Other …” “No!” Fitz was almost laughing in his frustration. “Can’t you see it? It’s all changed! This place is square!” “Naturally.” She stepped off midair and on to a walkway of blue copper, her footsteps echoing lazily around the empty hall. “No!” He followed her on to the walkway and chased after her. The air was colder up so high, and Fitz’s arms were already puckered with gooseflesh. “You just can’t see it, can you? Your history’s being torn away and rewritten and you really can’t see it! Your precious Panopticon had five walls earlier. Now it’s got four. What if tomorrow you find it’s got three, and you start telling me that three is the basis of all Time Lord society, huh? You’re not going to worry about this until there are only two sides and it closes on you with an almighty bang, like a book slamming shut on you …” He clapped his hands together for effect and it sounded like a pistol crack. ‘The End!’”

— one of the only good parts of The Ancestor Cell, by Peter Anghelides and Steven Cole

[grainjew]

On the Gallifreyan Concept of Marriage

A year and a half ago, I posted a fic called Something Old. The piece can best be characterized as a canon-weld of Lungbarrow and The Adventuress of Henrietta Street, with some “The Wedding of River Song” and Cold Fusion for flavor. Even back then, I was jokingly calling it a fic that should have been a meta post, and honestly why I didn’t just write a meta post is a mystery for the ages.

But because of that choice, many of my points had to be implied rather than stated. And while I did my best (and I am glad I wrote it the way I did, I think the end result came out really pretty excellent), I’m given to understand that some of what I wanted to say was, perhaps, a little oblique.

Plus there are plenty of folks on this website who won’t follow a link to ao3 but will absolutely click a readmore. So this is for you also. What follows will be a non-narrative version of the points in that fic, plus some additional notes on references in the fic that were a little unclear and/or I just wanted to talk about.

.

So. Gallifreyan marriage.

In modern Gallifrey, at least as per Lungbarrow, marriage refers exclusively to the union between a Housekeeper and her living House. Even Leela, immigrant that she is, seems baffled when asked if she and Andred are married. Obviously they aren’t. Neither of them is a House. They’re together, and that’s already weird enough in the eyes of the Time Lords.

In the post-War universe of the Eighth Doctor Adventures, the Doctor, having severed his connection to Gallifrey, is dying. His solution, as detailed at length in The Adventuress of Henrietta Street, is to turn to occult ritual and bind himself by ritual marriage to the planet Earth, legitimizing his place in the universe on a metaphysical level and anchoring him to a time and place.

In the post-War universe of New Who, reality collapses because River Song, daughter of the Vortex, refuses to kill the Doctor, despite his death at her hands being a fixed point in time. So he marries her, and only after the ceremony reveals his scheme to cheat Time Itself.

In ancient Gallifrey, whoever the Doctor was before he was the Doctor isn’t Gallifreyan. Not really. The Other implies in his conversations with Rassilon that he’s somehow alien or unnatural; the Timeless Child was brought to Gallifrey by Tecteun; whatever. Patience, however, is Gallifreyan as they come. So he marries her.

I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this.

The Housekeeper has total dominion over her House- in that Pythian all-seeing way (a concept I spoke more about in the meta post I did write after posting that fic, about the Gallifreyan vestigial gender binary), she can spy anywhere within her domain through the House’s mirrors, and she commands the House’s wooden Drudge servants, and her ring is of the House’s wood, and her wedding vows are with the House:

I shall serve you might and main, mortar and mortice. I shall guard your bounds, your chattels and your progeny from Loom to Tomb.

Deeply silly pun, by the way, I’m kind of obsessed. It feels so wonderfully 7th dr era thank you Marc Platt.

But silly or not, the vows and the ring and the wedding are what makes her Housekeeper. Without that old ritual, that relic of the pre-Rassilon era and its magic and its feminine psychic hiveminds, the connection—the symbiotic link so necessary to all sorts of Gallifreyan technology—goes unestablished. A location, on Gallifrey, is a living thing, and to establish a connection with it requires a wedding, and to belong to a location, to truly belong there, one has to establish a connection with it. The Housekeeper is the only member of a Family ever truly truly comfortable in their own House, I’m sure. Species full of control freaks.

And a Housekeeper, I’m sure, must find the utilitarian bond between a Time Lord and their TARDIS to be a Rassilonian bastardization of the ancient ritual relationship she partakes in.

(Here is a tangent. I only read The Taking of Planet 5 recently, but if I’d had it in my brain while writing this fic, I probably would have found a way to talk in this fic about how that novel depicts the standard symbiotic bond between Time Lord and TARDIS versus its depiction of the Doctor and his TARDIS’s cobbled-together, equitable situation- those two DID elope, after all.)

Another essential piece of this puzzle to me is how easily one can read Lungbarrow as a trans narrative. People have been saying this for forever. That plus every Doctor but especially the Eighth’s nonbinary coding combine with the Housekeeper role (and therefore, the act of marriage entirely) appearing to be traditionally exclusive to women to paint a very interesting picture to me of the Doctor’s relationship with Gallifreyan gender.

Because, of course, here are three significant weddings across the Doctor’s timeline: Patience, Scarlette, and River.

And in each one, by Gallifreyan standards, he is the bride.

We’ll get to the other two by way of Scarlette. The Adventuress of Henrietta Street is set in the EDAs’ version of a post-War and post-Gallifrey universe, with an amnesiac Doctor and a Web of Time slowly unraveling back into its magical, pre-Rassilon state of chaos. There are no more Time Lords. In some sense there never have been, except the few survivors. The Doctor’s explicit stated goal in The Adventuress of Henrietta Street is the following, which I pull directly from the novel (chapter 8, subsection “Dear John”) both here and in the fic itself because there’s just so much going on it’s better to have the paragraph itself:

Long before the Doctor had known the truth about the apes, he’d instinctively understood the ‘elemental’ truth, that the Earth required a form of protector: an elemental anchor, so to speak, that would hold time still around the planet. By the symbolic marriage ceremony, the alchemical wedding of the Doctor (representing the elemental) and Juliette (representing the Earth), the Doctor hoped to bring a new security to the troubled world. And also, perhaps, to give himself roots in a universe where he no longer truly belonged. In a sense, what he needed was a kind of ‘green card’ that would give him the right to interfere in the Earth’s affairs, a ceremony which would by its very nature have a stabilising effect on the planet. Or at least, that was the theory.

(Clarification on names: the original intention in the novel is for him to marry Juliette; he ends up marrying Scarlette instead. This matters a lot to the characters but doesn’t matter to the thesis here, the two of them are doing the same job.)

Because he’s working with Earth occultism, because a wedding in 1700s England is a ceremony between a man and a woman, the location is given a human representative and the Doctor is referred to as a groom. But the parallel draws itself. Earth the House, the Doctor the Housekeeper. He binds himself to Earth through the person of Scarlette to have a place to belong, and to give it and himself an anchor. In the absence of Gallifrey, as chaos creeps back into the universe, despite his complete amnesia, he creates the only kind of stability he knows: the Gallifreyan symbiotic relationship between psychic bride and living, beloved place.

Becoming a Housekeeper grants you dominion over your House. The House is given claim over the Housekeeper, as well, reciprocally, but, essentially, in marrying a House, a Housekeeper is gains the ability to, in certain ways, command, observe, and understand her domain.

So, in “The Wedding of River Song,” the Doctor marries River, daughter of the TARDIS, daughter of the Vortex, and gains symbiotic dominion over Time.

His scheme in that episode to cheat the fixed point in time of his death is ridiculous. Technically, yes, it can be argued it was foreshadowed. We met the Teselecta previously, at least. It’s not completely out of nowhere. But in practice it’s completely unforeseen. It feels improvised in that clever, last-minute sort of way the Doctor is good at. See problem in the moment, manipulate and hack at something nearby until it’s solution-shaped, pretend like you knew what you were doing all along.

But for it to be successful, which it is, he has to have gone back and set it up in advance. And he could have! We don’t know! But the sequence as shown to us goes as follows:

Time begins collapsing because River resists her part in the fixed point in time. The Doctor marries River, who was born from the Vortex, who represents Time, in this chaotic, mixed-up, magical bubble where Time is weak. Only then does Doctor reveal his plan to River. Thus, the fixed point in time is cheated, and everyone lives happily ever after, or whatever.

The Doctor may have loved River. He may not have. He may have loved Scarlette. He may not have. Neither time did it matter. A Gallifreyan marriage has nothing to do with love at all, only dominion, symbiosis, and belonging. All of Time, through her. It’s his wedding. He can cheat if he wants to.

(There’s something here also about 7 and Time’s relationship in the VNAs that I could have done more with I think. Time’s Champion is one thing, marrying a representative of the Vortex is another; there’s a dotted line there that I think might be interesting to connect. Maybe I’ll write that fic someday.)

And finally, we have Patience. She and the Doctor, we know from Cold Fusion, were married at some point before either of them was called the Doctor or Patience, in one of those pre-First Doctor lives from “The Brain of Morbius.” The thing is, is that quite a lot of sources seem to suggest that whatever that pre-Doctor Doctor was, he wasn’t Gallifreyan.

In Lungbarrow, Rassilon seems to think of the Other as some kind of outsider demon he’s made a pact with. “The Timeless Children” posits the pre-Doctor Doctor as an abandoned child from another universe entirely. These can co-exist, these are both fun options, but which is which and what is what doesn’t matter much to the thesis here. The point is, that it’s very likely that the entity who became the Doctor wasn’t originally from Gallifrey at all.

But there’s a ceremony to fix that, if you’re willing to be the bride. If you can find a representative for your intended House. If you can find it in yourself to serve and guard and see.

Scarlette, to make himself at home on Earth. River, for dominion over Time. And Patience, to live unquestioned on Gallifrey.

.

Additional Something Old notes and references:

Innocet’s worry about the disappearing Cousins is a reference to Faction Paradox reportedly recruiting heavily from House Lungbarrow. She’s right to be worried but there’s not much she can do about this one lol.

Her new House being small, and specifically the size of a barn, is of course a nod to the barn from 12’s era, with the implication that it simply never had time to finish growing (or was somehow stunted) once the War started up. I’m not the first to have drawn this connection and I definitely picked it up from someone else, but I think it’s a satisfying little canon-weld.

Fitz’s section has a little bit of implied 8/Fitz (or at least Fitz pining) because well I’m a sucker. The note about Fitz being “too something else to count [as a representative of Earth]” is. Well. We all know what happens in Interference.

As I mentioned earlier, I wrote a whole post about the Gallifreyan vestigial gender binary after posting this fic- the scene with Juliette and the scene with the Doctor and Innocet as children are drawing on the concepts in it particularly heavily. Those were also the scenes where I leaned particularly hard into 8’s nonbinary coding and the very easy trans read of Lungbarrow. I find both of these reads essential.

The section about Innocet being betrothed to a mausoleum was the very last section I wrote, and it’s one of my favorites.

the River Song section. Compassion’s little sister, as a concept, is drawn from this post by @the-voice-of-light-city, which is absolutely CRITICAL to my understanding of River as a character and as a piece of worldbuilding. I have not been able to think of her in any other terms since reading this post years ago, and I should have credited it on the fic itself. If you read anything from this meta go read that post.

One of the things I wanted to touch on in this fic but didn’t really fit anywhere was how, at the end of Grimm Reality (which of course is the book right before Adventuress) the Doctor catches the bouquet at the end-of-story wedding. So I at least included the reference to “the fairy tale world” in Anji’s section. I really like Grimm Reality, despite its flaws, and I find it to be a really interesting lead-in to Adventuress- there’s a few paragraphs of an incomplete fic in my notes about that transition, actually. Maybe someday I’ll finish it. In the meantime here’s the concept notes:

it does actually follow really neatly for henrietta street to be directly after this one - of course the doctor, fresh off a world run by fairy tale logic, and fresh off bargaining with raw quantum wishing power, would slot in so neatly to that world of symbolism and occult ritual. of course a doctor fresh off that would just walk into scarlette's london, without his tardis, with no apparent provenance or reason for being there except that it was the right time for all this. fairy tale logic and ritual logic are cousins. one leads to the other. and, of course- he caught the bouquet

Also in Anji’s section is 8 making an unknowing reference to the Carnival Queen. Someday I’ll read Christmas on a Rational Planet. Eventually. It’s on my list. Here the reference is a nod to magic creeping back into the post-Gallifrey universe, of course.

House Blyledge is Patience’s House! I only knew this because I looked it up on the wiki because I was truly desperate to find some way to refer to her that wasn’t Patience, which isn’t, of course, her name at all. That makes the reference here more oblique and missable than was really intended or ideal, but I decided it was a necessary evil. It’s not like she would have been called Patience when she was marrying the pre-Doctor.

What exactly is 7 referring to when he implies he’s already married? Well, could be anything. There’s a reason the ending quote is about the TARDIS though.

.

Also, if anyone was curious, this is what my initial notes for the fic looked like. There’s a few things in here that I really wish had made it into the final version, but some sacrifices must be made for a coherent whole. And I’m currently working on a fic about Gallifreyan living technology that will catch at least some of what fell through the cracks:

- housekeeper ritually marries the house - doctor ritually married scarlette, representative of the earth -- earth is a home to him -- he needs a causal origin without gallifrey - subconscious legitimization of himself and his place ; need to regather power and knowledge?

gaining power and sight? the drudges vs the women of the house of scarlette? - house lungbarrow / house scarlette generally the long dark of house lungbarrow / the long dark of eights missing memories/earth arc

innocet and the doctor?

and what of river song? - is she herself an acausal act of legitimization - of authority over the post-war again , but the vortex rather than earth? he marries her to stop reality collapsing - legitimizing his cheating the fixed point of his death? - did the tardis intend for this - timeship river ; compassion’s sister? - the other helped engineer time travel as an option for gallifrey

and the tardis? he is linked to her, he sees through her, he commands her. a tardis doesnt have a housekeeper she has a pilot - but she is his home . he never married her but she is his wife. probably cut all this and keep the tardis to interfering with river - there was never a wedding - gallifreyan grown technology . living planets

focus on eight and innocet

[whathappenedonearth]

Why did no one tell me Black Orchid was the GOAT

Cease Transmission

[natequarter]

Forget your faith in me. I took you with me because I was vain. Because I wanted to be adored. Look at you. I'm not a hero. I really am just a madman in a box. And it's time we saw each other as we really are.

[whathappenedonearth]

LEGENDARY Collection update!

After a little shop, I chose these: a VNA and two early 8th adventures, all in great condition

Can’t wait to get into them!

[rassilon-imprimatur]

The riddle went something like this. You take an infant goose, just hatched from its egg, and slip it through the neck of a bottle. The goose grows inside the glass, until it’s too big to slip back out again. The question is, how do you free the goose without breaking the bottle?

Interference: Book One and Book Two, by Lawrence Miles 

[whathappenedonearth]

I refuse to believe the reference to Sam in Minuet in Hell is Samson Griffin, that is Sam Jones and no one can convince me otherwise.

Gideon Crane tests the Doctor by listing a range of his former companions — "Charley, Sam, Ace, Evelyn, Nyssa, Romana, Sarah Jane, Jamie, Polly, Ian, Barbara and Susan... dear, dear Susan."

In this list of gods amongst companions, why would he include what amounts to a plot device. Sam Jones however has narrative impact and is a major part of the EDAs.

End of message thank you for listening.

(partially influenced by me loving her character in interference)

[intuitive-revelations]

Thinking more about the Eighth Doctor / War in Heaven / Time War timeline, and I remain convinced that the Doctor is in Gallifrey's future timeline for the near entirity of the EDAs.

What's more, I think it's possible to pinpoint the exact moment the protocols of linearity broke and the Doctor got thrown out of sync with Gallifrey's relative time. This may also be the exact moment where the Great Grey Eminence makes his deal to rewrite Romana's presidency.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it all comes down to the TV Movie.

In the beginning of the movie, we have the Doctor explicitly travelling from Skaro to Gallifrey, 5725.2 RE. What's more, it's the "Local Dateline" so we know that's the actual date there, and not just the Doctor's own relative time.

This is following on from Lungbarrow, where President Romana enlists the Doctor with retrieving the Master's remains as part of the "Act of Master Restitution".

Now, we don't see a different RE date in the movie, but do we get a glimpse of Gallifrey at the end, and something is...well...off...

Incidentally, have you ever paid attention to the dialogue here? First of all there's the contentious line about Gallifrey being "250,000,000 ly away" on the other side of the galaxy, contradicting the usual placement of Gallifrey 29,000 ly away at the centre of the galaxy. But there's something else the Doctor says first:

DOCTOR: So, let's see where we are. There. The future. LEE: Wow. DOCTOR: Look over there, on the other side of your galaxy. That's home. GRACE: Gallifrey. DOCTOR: Two hundred and fifty million light years away. That's a good ten minutes in this old thing. GRACE: So, where are we? DOCTOR: December twenty ninth. Do you want to get off here?

Note, the Doctor simultaneously says the TARDIS is in 'the future' and still on December 29th. Seemingly, the "future" the Doctor is referring to is Gallifrey's, and his own. In other words, the planet we see isn't 5725.2 RE Gallifrey, but 6916? RE (estimated based on Romana III being 150 years into her presidency in The Ancestor Cell) Gallifrey.

It should also be noted that the TV movie seems to be the one time in the series where Gallifrey's present and Earth's present are actually synced up, at least roughly. Technically previous Gallifrey stories all take place in Earth's past, whereas later stories take place in Earth's future.

This can actually be inferred from the TV Movie itself, based on the TARDIS console, even before the Master starts meddling. It's seen aiming for December 30th, despite present-day Gallifrey being the target. Though granted, it could be that the RE time control - bottom right in the left image - is disconnected from the other date controls.

Considering the time between Greyjan's presidency and the TV Movie for the Doctor/Gallifrey and the Earth, roughly 250 years for both, also supports this, further cementing that the 'future' line can't make sense if it's meant to be a present-day Gallifrey.

My personal take is that the Nine Gallifreys project has already been initiated by this point in the future. It's ambiguous whether we're looking at the original planet, moved and disguised, or one of the cloneworlds, although given it's the Doctor who shows us, I assume the prior. Either way, if the project is active then it's another sign we're in the future, as according to the Book of the War, it's not initiated until 400 years after Greyjan's death, in contrast to the 250 years previously mentioned. (I do have some issues with Book of the War's timeline, but this isn't necessarily one of them.)

We also see history has changed in The Eight Doctors, which takes place directly after the movie's events where we do actually get to see the present-day Gallifrey monitoring the Doctor as he continues unstuck from his own time, albeit in his past rather than future. In contrast to Lungbarrow, Flavia is now president once more and seemingly has been since the Doctor's trial, with Romana's presidency now having seemingly never occured. This concurs with Big Finish's stories, where Romana doesn't become president until 6776 RE. On Flavia's Gallifrey, there is no mention of the Doctor's mission to recover the Master's remains.

I don't think it's a coincidence that the timeline begins to change at the same time the Doctor gets thrown out of sync with Gallifrey.

OK, so the Doctor's linearity with Gallifrey seemingly breaks during the events of the TV movie, but when exactly?

The answer's pretty simple, actually. For the TARDIS to have jumped in relative time, it must have skipped a time track, hence also the changes in history. Usually when a time track is skipped we see some turbulence in the TARDIS and usually some damage causing sparks, maybe some monitor glitches. See the beginning of The Empty Child as an example.

And what do we see at the beginning of the movie?

Now obviously some of the damage is likely from the Deathworm!Master's sabotage, but things are clearly getting weird even before he starts meddling, none of which is ever explained beyond cinematic flavour, even by the books which went out of their way to explain the Master's survival.

We even see the record literally skipping, exactly the same analogy used for jumping time tracks.

And so the Doctor gets thrown out of his own place in time for the next century or so...

[whathappenedonearth]

My doctor who book collection!

(I just got the interference books yesterday, and am so excited to start them)

[reecypontiff]

The original Big Finish Eighth Doctor TARDIS Team!

Conrad Westmaas (C'rizz), Paul McGann, and India Fisher (Charley Pollard) at Spearhead Live 2024 in the UK.

TARDIS built by David Nagel. Photo by Marcus Bryan.

[dailyhotdgifs]

The blood of the dragon runs thick.

[goblinwolf]

[lilbeanz-wibblywobbly]

The Hybrid would stand over the ruins of Gallifrey and unravel the Web of Time, breaking a billion hearts to heal its own...

Together and united, the two halves are home. Chaos will reign should one half find themselves alone.

[birdmans]

The Cruel Prince — Holly Black

[victoryshowers]

the next time someone says to me that gwen and jack are “siblings” or have a “familial bond” again im going to do something so terrible and so drastic that i’ll end up on the news all over the world.

they are not siblings. they’re eyefucking each other through out the entire show even while they’re both in relationships. like they wanna fuck so bad that it’s making everyone miserable. jack and gwen are constantly yearning for the other. they’re so intertwined, they’re bonded, they’re soulmates! not siblings!!!!! i don’t care if you like gwen and jack romantically or not, but to regard the two of them as siblings does so much disservice to them, their relationship, and their complications. it’s also just straight up incorrect.

[horselover107]

Gwen Cooper...There's Something On Your Back...

(warning for character death below)

AU Where post-coe a time beetle makes its way to Cardiff, and creates a somehow-worse-than-canon timeline where Gwen never joins Torchwood. Suzie's murder spree continues, Ianto is killed by Lisa (who then begins an invasion), Jack never comes back feeling there's nothing for him, everyone still ends up dead, the government takes 10 percent, and the power plant blows (because Gray comes looking for Jack, who's not there, and tries to get his attention).

For Torchwood Villians Fest (the villian of course being our friend the time beetle...and also sort of Suzie, Lisa, the government, and Gray as bonuses)