Subject: An important point
Author:
Posted on: 2013-04-13 05:50:00 UTC
OFUs do not require recognition from the PPC to be official. The PPC has a history of working with various OFUs but they are, in fact, two different things.
-Phobos
OFU for Doctor Who? Just wondering, I doubt I could (or would) write it myself.
There are OFUs for Doctor Who, yes, but they're all on hiatuses (OFUs are so tricky to write; I should know).
And logistically it's extremely hard to write an OFU for that fandom because there's eleven Doctors, six Masters, countless companions and monsters, and extreme amounts of timey-wimey stuff that tend to contradict each other. If anything, I'd suggest doing what I've done with Sherlock Holmes, and have a Classic Who campus and a New Who campus so we can focus specifically on various areas. The OFU for Doctor Who that I read had separate campuses for Torchwood and Sarah Jane Adventures as well.
OFUs are tricky. I mean, there's at least three abandoned Trek OFUs (one of which became affiliated with the PPC, and is the origin of mini-tribbles), and I tend to update very slowly because it is difficult and I'm a procrastinator.
Wow, Doctor Who is really hard to manage. I mean with Star Trek you just have to divide up the series. Some of the Trek OFUs only focused on one series, one of them tried to do all five but basically ended up focusing on one. OFAS has two campuses, one with three and one with two, so that each series can get attention without there having to be five campuses. But with Doctor Who you have multiple versions of some of the same characters. And I have this feelng that the universe would implode if the all the Doctors met each other. Just a feeling though. I don't know much about Doctor Who.
He always was paranoid about people meeting their time-copies. It's not really a rule, though; there have been several Doctors in one place on at least four occasions, and the Doctor was in the same time and area as his past self in the same regeneration on at least two more.
When dealing with multiple versions of the same character, or multiple characters that go by the same name, it would start getting even more complicated than Doctor Who inherently is. For example, there are three separate characters that call themselves the Dalek Emperor, one of which is the same character as Davros, the Fourth Doctor's main villain and creator of the Daleks, after one point in his life, but not he's not permanently the Emperor after that point.
How would someone even deal with that? Would there be two versions of Davros, the Emperor and the wheelchair-scientist? Would the two be constantly fighting over who the "real" Davros is? Would we have a second Dalek Civil War between the Vault Daleks and the Imperial Daleks for the validity of the Davros name?
I tried to make a situation that sounded complex and unwieldly, but that could actually be a pretty cool recurring scenario if it was written right. Hmm...
I imagine there'd be one big Dalek showdown where all the various kinds of Daleks would try to kill the other kinds they deem lesser forms of Dalek.
That scenario Outhra mentioned would be pretty interesting in a Who OFU. Hehe...I just thought of a funny name for a Who OFU...the Doctor WhOFU. Doctor Who Official Fanfiction University.
As for OFUs in general, yeah, they're tricky. OFUA:TLA is apparently on hiatus because my beta hasn't contacted me in months...
And I could always beta for you, if you still want someone beta-reading. I need more experience doing it. In fact, you could send out a general "Hey, does anyone want to beta for me until my old choice comes back" call on the Board or IRC if you want someone who's specialized in a specific fandom. I know Avatar: The Last Airbender, but I don't know if I have enough experience to beta an OFU by myself.
I should probably look for a new beta, yeah. I've found that without someone to conspire with, it's hard to keep my focus with writing an OFU.
One may have been attempted, but if it was, it didn't get far enough to have a mention on the PPC Wikia site, which means it was never very Official at all.
I played with the idea of writing one myself, but I discarded the idea because it would be way too time-intensive and would force me to write six different Masters. No thank you,
OFUs do not require recognition from the PPC to be official. The PPC has a history of working with various OFUs but they are, in fact, two different things.
-Phobos