i tried to look into some older doctor who lore outside of the show and got into faction paradox and house lungbarrow and the doctor's brother irving braxiatel and kithriarchs and nine gallifreys and cat people and the war in heaven and compassion the living tardis and

it's all, to me, really really bad

so as I understand it, towards the end of the original series the show was really ramping up how much we saw of Gallifrey and Gallifreyans

when the show was canceled, writers took the natural course: write a lot about Gallifrey

this of course led to what looks like Game of Thrones but starring people that can time travel and regenerate

people complain about Moffat stories being unnecessarily complex but uh

okay so the War in Heaven is when the Matrix of Gallifrey predicts a devastating attack from an enemy that it can't determine, so Gallifreyans start ramping up for a war with an enemy that they don't know but they know that they will know at some point

and that point will start the War, so they try to prevent the War by trying to predict who the Enemy will be and avoiding them and it ends up spilling across time so things happen out of order a bit and then Dracula is the Enemy for a bit and then the writer of the series is and

and then all the Time Lords die except four of them who are called elementals and the power of the War goes back in time and makes the Doctor a predestined renegade Time Lord and also not all the Time Lords are dead

meanwhile the new show went a different direction and said "the Time Lords did a big war with the Daleks and they're dead now" and we never had to worry about what the Doctor's family lineage was or Dark Universes or whatever

tbf it's then like "Gallifrey wasn't destroyed just sent to a pocket universe where the Doctor found them and saved Gallifrey and then the Master destroyed it again" which is a lot simpler

and of course the new twist which I think is a lot simpler than Looms and Weaving and whatever

I think a lot of this stuff is technically still active in the books which means Doctor Who has a secret, way more annoying, way more complex lore that literally never affects the show at all

it's like two entirely separate entities, almost like two completely different paths of events that could've happened, like two courses of time that are entirely separate to each other, like two do you get what I'm going for here

personally I'd do a Star Wars and say all of that is a separate timeline so that I can read the wiki without having to sift through mountains of needlessly complex filler for nerds who were sad their show got canceled

this thread was as long and unnecessary as the entire Faction Paradox series! Goodnight!