Good evening. Thank you for visiting this, our humble page. Allow me to explain who we are. Faction Paradox is a separate splinter from the continuum you may know as the Doctor Who Expanded Universe. We were created by Lawrence Miles, who depicted the little gallivantings of the Faction across this rather odd Universe of ours, which, we've been told, holds uncountable parallels to the mainstream Whoniverse. As of now, our splinter universe has twelve audio dramas, six by BBV and six by Magic Bullet, two issues of a short-lived comic series published by Image, and seven novels, six published by Mad Norwegian Press and one by Random Static. Obverse Books has acquired the license to print an anthology of new Faction stories, which saw the light in April 2011. Our Faction has its roots in the Whoniverse, where we were born as particularly perverse, if you'll pardon the expression, "enemies" of the Eighth Doctor, but eventually we grew in number and power until we acquired our own universe to play with by our rules.Our Faction delights in creating temporal paradoxes, all the while seeking to tighten our hold over theuniverse and drown it into anarchic chaos by pitting the main players in the current Time War against each other while remaining... shall we describe our position as ambiguously neutral? As befits our rather contrived agenda, we are not above taking advantage and using every underhanded trick in our arsenal to worsen the war until we end up being the sole remaining power.This War is fought between those pompous asses, the Great Houses and the nameless Enemy, who, mind you, the Houses are too afraid to even name. The Great Houses, for the uninformed, are essentially an aristocratic race who spent their time sleeping in their laurels until a certain stray former renegade returned home, bringing news of a great danger. The Enemy, on the other hand isn't a specific army, or even a person... it's something far, war worse. And the battlefield is all of history. And the battle prizes are the two most valuable territories: cause and effect.As you can imagine, the Faction stands to gain much.The Faction was once one of the Homeworld's ruling Houses, until our illustrious leader Grandfather Paradox became disenchanted with their diseased pretensions to immortality and separated from them, and turned his House into a timetravelling, time-active, ritualistic cult based in part in the beliefs of voodoo, time travel with the marked interest in paradoxes and death fetishism that is now our trademark, both rejecting the immortality the Houses sought and ridiculing the Laws of Time they had laid down.Ever wondered what would it be like if God played dice with the universe? We provide the answer.
Examples
Action Survivor: From the audios, Cousins Justine and Eliza after the destruction of the Eleven-Day Empire.
All Asians are Alike: Played with. An Asian-accented automaton says King George III thinks they all look alike.
Anti-Hero: The Faction being the sort of organization it is, if you happen across a Faction protagonist that's at all likeable according to current Earth standards, odds are good that you're somewhere in this trope.
Another Dimension: The Yssgaroths' home Universe. The Homeworld's been sending military expeditions. We're taking bets on how long they last.
It's also postulated that the Yssgaroth are in fact the result of the two universes interacting, or maybe even just a mental reaction to the interaction of matter and hostile anti-matter. As no-one's ever been near one and come back in one piece, no-one really knows.
Apathetic Citizens: The Broken Remote. They were a branch of our Remote colonists until they were brainwashed by the Homeworld into accepting a steady diet of reality TV, docudramas and the like. As a result, any potential worth in them was complete and utterly spoiled.
Beethoven Was an Alien Spy: At various times, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, King George III, and Johann Sebastian Bach have gotten caught up in a Gambit Pileup involving the Time Lords Homeworld and our own schemes. Sherlock Holmes... well, for starters, was a real but otherwise perfectly normal human, but Jimmy Moriarty was a scientist from the 21st century using stolen Faction technology given to him by the Celestis. Vlad Tepes (aka the man known as Dracula) fought Mal'akh and almost got snared into a deal with the Celestis. We don't talk about Rasputin. Oh, and Queen Charlotte is secretly a timeship — Shhh...
Big Bad: For the audios: House Lolita, who single-handedly consumes the Eleven-Day Empire, hunts Cousins Justine and Eliza throughout time and space, and, by the end, is considered to be an even greater threat to the universe than Sutekh. Yes, that Sutekh.
Blood Knight: Cousin Justine, who keeps getting distracted from rebuilding the Faction, by whatever fight comes her way.
Captain Ersatz: Almost every single one of the major players in the War. The Great Houses are most definitely not the race you call the Time Lords, the Evil Renegade / Grandfather Halfling is definitely not the man you call the Doctor, the War King is certainly not the madman you know as The Master and our timeships are certainly not TARDISes.
Cassandra Truth: The man who would be the War King reported the existence of the Enemy to the ruling council of the Homeworld. Unwilling to accept his warnings, the Council journeyed to the point in time and space where the Renegade had told them the capital of the Enemy was in the Presidential timeship, intending to found a Homeworld colony there to silence the rumors. Following a rather tense moment, only the head of the President materialized back, with a note jammed into the mounth - "We are not amused."
Clarke's Third Law: The main issue between the Homeworld and the Faction is that they cannot agree on exactly what in the name of the Grandfather Faction Paradox uses: tech or magic. We believe that the barriers protecting the Faction's home dimension are loa, voodoo spirits, while the Homeworld thinks they are merely manifestations of the laws of the Universe at work. Quite honestly, many doubt there's a truth to it all. Including us.
As mentioned below, Little Brother Edward is a clone of Johnny Depp, originally designed to be a boytoy for a rich old lady. Between that, the various Depp characters that keep clashing in his head, and the general Mind Screwiness of Faction training, his state of mind is, shall we say, a little fragmented?
The various iterations of Compassion that end up in the City of the Saved. And that's not even including the one who BECAME the City.
The Remote get to have their own special reverse version of the ol' Cloning Blues. Because their method of reproduction invariably results in a slightly more stereotypical version of themselves walking around afterwards, any Remote member that meets his future iterations invariably ends up wondering if he's really that damn unpleasant.
Dark Action Girl: Any female Faction operative. Notable individuals include Cousins Octavia, Shuncucker, Justine, and Eliza. Also, Lolita (if she can be considered a 'she').
Deadpan Snarker: Plenty to go around, the worst offenders being Lady Lolita and Godfathers Avatar and Morlock. The War King occasionally delves into this, to the point that it's extremely hard to imagine him without an eyebrow raised.
Lawrence Miles' narrative voice tends to end up like this, too.
Depending on the Writer: We of the Faction have been characterized as monsters, Affably Evil, or even downright Anti Heroic protagonists, depending on which book you're reading. The Ancestor Cell, for instance, was our infamous appearance, changing us hugely from what Master Miles intended us to be in the first place, making us mutilate Gallifrey's history For the Evulz rather than gaining control of the Universe. On the other hand, it seems like a fun idea altogether.
The Great Houses too, of all people. The (logically extremely rare) pariahs of their society who secretly want to nurture the lesser races and rebel against the cold logical approach tend to show up with alarming regularity in the non-Miles books.
Downer Ending: This Town Will Never Let Us Go ends with the total cultural stasis of humanity until the Earth's destruction.
Discard and Draw: When Cousin Shuncucker bores of her current shadow weapon, she drops it and grows a new one.
The loa spirits that protect the Eleven-Day Empire. Much like a certain gentleman, Azathoth, for the curious, they have been implied to be physical embodiments of the laws of the Universe.
And of course, our less fortunate neighbors: the Yssgaroth.
Given various characters' reactions to her true face, Lolita, who might just also be the Enemy, given that she is described as 'a new kind of history'.
The Eleven-Day Empire. Depending on your views, the City of the Saved.
Antipathy invaded the City of the Saved, assimilating parts of it into him; these infected sectors changed from peaceful sections of City populated by happy invulnerable / immortals, to nightmare industrial wastelands full of terrified, highly killable people.
The Yssgaroth Universe. Timeline's begun devouring itself there...
Little Brother Edward from Of The City of the Saved is essentially a clone of Johnny Depp whose personality keeps wobbling between different characters the original has played. Also a Woobie.
Tiffany Korta from This Town Will Never Let Us Go is an amalgam of Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, and assorted other pop tarts.
Evil Counterpart: The Faction and the Homeworld, or, as some may colloquially know them, the Time Lords.
Flanderization: The Remote are, by design, sterile. This requires special equipment named Remembrance Tanks, in which a certain amount of biomass (a recently deceased person) is inserted, and the people who were closest in life to them linked to a device which scans them for memories and impressions of that person, cloning the remains and downloading the accrued data into them as their new personality. This, of course, means no Remote colonist will be exactly the same after dying, often losing huge chunks of their more private selves.
Freudian Excuse: The one known as Antipathy has... issues... with that Compassion woman.
Future Me Scares Me: Grandfather Paradox is everyone's evil future self, if you'll pardon the uncouthness.
Possibly. Like the Enemy, the what of the Grandfather is never as important to the series as the how and the why.
Gambit Pileup: You'd better believe it, sweetheart. A multitude of sufficiently advanced scheming cutthroat organizations, plus timey wimey tech and zero scruples about using it? This trope, if you're lucky.
Genius Loci: The City of the Saved, a galaxy-wide citadel containing every single human to ever exist and billions of fictional characters to boot, actually is the incarnation of Compassion that became a TARDIS during the Eighth Doctor Adventures.
The Great Houses in general, but it's the Celestis that really buy into their own hype.
The Osirians. It helps that countless civilisations worship them as gods.
Godwin's Law of Time Travel: Warlords of Utopia is about every single Earth where Hitler won versus every Earth where the Romans won. And it's awesome.
The newer-style timeships like those of Lolita's ilk are a more straightforward, if relatively reasonable, example of this trope. It's also implied that the Great Houses, especially the ones who are less than sympathetic to humanity's problems, are moving in this direction, being described more as "forces of history" than actual people.
Impossibly Cool Clothes: If you can't destroy timelines in style, perhaps you ought not to do it at all.
Invocation: How at least Cousin Justine controls her Sombra Que Corta.
Bloodline to bloodline, in constant transition. Our pattern, our flesh, and our one restoration. Conception, completion, the will of the city. Grandfather watch me, Spirits maintain me.
Jumping Off the Slippery Slope: Compare the Faction Paradox of the earlier Eighth Doctor and stand-alone novels to the Gallifrey's history-rapists in The Ancestor Cell. They barely seem like the same organisation. Our creator, Lawrence Miles, openly chewed out The Ancestor Cell for derailing his plans on the War in Heaven. Instead of accepting another author destroy his image of Faction Paradox, he wound up creating his own standalone universe. And thus we were born...
We have freaking Sutekh, the lord and master of this trope. With the original actor, no less. Accept no imitations!
Not to mention the delightful Godfather Morlock and Shuncucker from the audio play.
Let's You and Him Fight: The Homeworld and the Enemy's war is rather boring. We prefer to sit in the backbenches and carefully scavenge what we want.
Living Shadow: The Cousins of the Faction turn their shadows, or "sombras que cortan" into living beings by grafting weapons on them, making them capable of slicing through rooms of Mooks while the Cousin himself remains calmly sitting. The single two exceptions to this are Ax Crazy Cousin Shuncucker, who gained the ability to drop her shadow's weapon and grow a new one, and Cousin Justine, who acquired Grandfather Paradox's shadow, which is an infinite Hammerspace containing an endless arsenal. Give that kinda weaponry to a couple of Reality Warpers. Watch hilarity ensue.
On the other hand, we do not show it, and often appear to possess no shadow at all, as seen when a certain Doctor once was infected by the Faction's biodata virus, causing his shadow to fade.
A Load of Bull: Justine meets a Minotaur on the prison planet. However, he points out that only the mythical beast from Crete is the Minotaur. All similar creatures are just men with bull's heads.
Godfather Morlock. His inventions include the Tracking Knife (used to read the future from a corpse's entrails) and the Biodata Virus.
Anubis. Also an example of why you don't want a bored Mad Scientist.
Magic from Technology: Even we don't know whether our tech is true magic, or whether it's just very advanced. Word of advice? Don't think about it. Really. Don't.
Magitek: The Homeworld loathes the Faction for the creation of technology that ignores physical laws and works alongside voodoo principles. Screw 'em.
Doctor Who was bad enough. Now imagine a group of time travelers who worship paradoxes.
This Town Will Never Let Us Go is one colossal Mind Screw in novel form.
The Judgment of Sutekh is a battle in time. Different characters experience the events in completely different orders, so that it is nigh impossible to work out their correct sequence until the very end.
Anyone who dubs themselves "Antipathy" as a Take That to their mother (Compassion) is clearly not a good person. Add to that the fact that he's an Ax Crazy, Omnicidal Maniactimeship... yeah.
Seriously, do you really believe any of you mortals are capable of comprehending, much less taking a serious part in something called a War in Heaven?
Attaining the rank of Godfather - or Godmother - in the Faction requires you to earn three Ph.Ds - bastardry, scathing remarks, and reality bending.
Nightmare Fetishist: Many of our members qualify. Incidentally, if you aren't one... may I ask what are you doing here?
Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: Warlords of Utopia starts with the blurb "Rome Never Fell. Hitler Won. Now They Are At War." Said war involves 21st century Roman Legions going toe-to-toe, and, eventually, bitchslapping Nazi soldiers.
No Periods, Period: Eliza says she's been biologically modified to stop these.
Older Than They Look: Godfather Morlock looks sixty-ish. He's actually much older.
Omnicidal Maniac: Sutekh, who, after spending millenia guarding the Osirian Court, has become so paranoid that he will never feel safe until he destroys everything in existence. A feat of which he is more than capable.
One-Winged Angel: The more the Great Houses regenerate, the less humanoid and more "War-ready" their bodies become. The hardened veterans are basically massive blocks of weapons, armor, and defense mechanisms, like Khiste in Dead Romance.
Properly Paranoid: There's a reason the Great Houses won't name their Enemy... see, the Enemy isn't a person, or a group, or a race. It's a whole new hostile history that threatens to destroy their version of History and replace it from the foundations. To name the Enemy would be diminishing the scope of its powers and reach. Something only a complete and utter moron would do.
Psycho Prototype: Imagine the power a sentient timeship has. Add some horrific issues and a lot of very detailed and uncomfortable backstory, name it Antipathy and realize what kind of situation it is.
Recursive Reality: The Universe-in-a-bottle from Dead Romance. Said novel is the source of the top quote. Mind screwing at its finest.
We are all in the bottle and one day the bottle will break. Then all worlds will be one world. The inside will meet the outside...
Red Sky, Take Warning: The Eleven-Day Empire is a shadow copy of London under a blood-red sky, as if something was endlessly burning just past the horizon. Enjoy your stay...
Redshirt Army: The Cwejen. We were trying to remold the Remote into our version of this, but, umm, something went amiss in the road. Hopefully, we can still make it work...
Ret Gone: Continuity Needles do this to whoever they are stuck into, allowing Time to fill in the cracks. However, it's not recommended to use them on important historical figures. We're still cleaning up from when one managed to hit a certain Isaac Newton.
Sapient Ship: Timeships, lovely ships capable of time travel. Except when they are sapient. Or they happen to rebel. Or if they happen to be psychotic.
We laugh at people who try to have a go at them with "mere" matter-based technology. The Book of the War lumps everything like this — from the mightiest starships to the most exotically vicious nanoprobe infection — under the heading of "Burlesque Devices". After all, why bother replicating a fortification when you can just tweak the substrata of the universe to ensure that a base was always there to begin with? Or why fight an enemy when you can just dick with his biodata so that he has always lost this fight? Aren'tTime-Active warsfun?
Temporal Paradox: Our goal is to burn the entire structure of time. Wanna join in?
Timey Wimey Ball: We want it to shatter, and the causality chain to snap.
Twin Threesome Fantasy: Again, Warlords of Utopia. The twins, or rather, the two different versions of the same woman are the ones to suggest it.
Unperson: A classic sport for initiates of the Faction. We like to amp it further by killing our own ancestors before they're born, making our very existences more of a paradox than it is already.
Up the Real Rabbit Hole: It is the final goal of Christine Summerfield at the end of Dead Romance.
That Man Is Dead: Entering the Faction means kissing all of your past goodbye. You simply will have never existed to start with. In fact, the special membership ceremony in which you see your totem animal, an entity representing your life up to that point, and to join the Faction, you kill it and feed it to snakes, ritualistically casting all of your life away and embracing the name and title the Faction grants you.
The Faction's Biodata Virus. Shall we say monstruous doesn't even begin to describe it?
For starters, a person's biodata is the sum of their temporal and physical self. An analyzable summary everything you are throughout any point in your history. The Faction Virus corrupts that biodata and brainwashes you. Not so that you'll be working for the Faction. That'd be too easy. It makes it so you always have been and always will. It takes your new loyalties and makes them into immutable, unchangeable fact. There is no cure because, in his new reality, the corrupted individual has always been a Faction operative, with no way to change him back without changing the patient's biodata, which the Virus doesn't make easy to say the least. Oh, and the Doctor is infected.
Words From Nine Divinities, which ends with the assassination of the War King (The Master) by Lolita and a full-scale invasion of the Homeworld by the Mal'akh forces of Cousin Justine.
Before that, in Shadow Play, Lolita devoured the Eleven Day Empire.
Interference, Books 1 and 2, where we really go to town on the Doctor's timeline by getting his Third self killed before his appointment on Metebelis 3.
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