YMMV / Eighth Doctor Adventures

WARNING! THERE MAY BE UNMARKED SPOILERS!

• Adorkable: Fitz is gawky, scruffy, clumsy, and surprisingly bookish. He often lives in his own little world, and despite all his attempts to seem mysterious and dangerous is really just a Nice Guy. Fitz's rather epic crush on the Doctor makes their interaction even cuter.
• Alas, Poor Scrappy: Sam was widely considered irritating during her run. But since Fitz is so broken up about it when she's killed off-screen, you can't help but feel a little sad...
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Halfway through Vampire Science the Doctor and a vampire break into a hairdresser's so she can give him a haircut (with wash and conditioner). This is never mentioned again.
• Bizarro Episode: The Blue Angel is by far the weirdest novel. You've got a Star Trek Parody Episode, a hallucinating human-Doctor Alternate Universe, and... some ladies of a certain age going shopping? The plotlines are more or less independent of each other^note Well... the human Doctor segments are in first person and contain a lot of the Doctor fussing and worrying about various personal and philosophical quandaries, and then in one chapter the usual Doctor's storyline goes into first person and he starts fussing about existential angst, but still, the stories seem to be sealed away into little Alternate Universes relative to each other... but actually they're implied to be connected. It's complicated. and it all gets rather metafictional. The Adventuress of Henrietta Street is stylistically unusual, but the plot is only slightly more surreal than any other.
• Designated Monkey: Fitz in the Lance Parkin stories, at least.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Fitz may well be more popular than the Doctor himself in this line.
• Fanon: It's practically accepted as fact amongst the fans that the Ninth Doctor's coat is Fitz's old leather jacket.
• Fanon Discontinuity:
  • Fans near-universally take the Big Finish audios to be the canonical (or at least as close to canonical as we're ever likely to get) account of the Eighth Doctor's life, with this merely being an Alternate Universe version of his adventures. This is in no small part because the events of those audios have been obliquely mentioned in the revived series at several points, whereas these books have never been acknowledged by the series.
  • The series' two Dalek books are almost universally reviled by fans for upending Dalek/Skaro canon. War of the Daleks in particular is essentially one long series of retcons of all the stories involving Davros, with the goal of explaining that everything bad that happened to the Daleks in those stories (their ultimately unsuccessful war with the Movellans, the civil war between Davros' and the Dalek Supreme's factions, and the destruction of Skaro) was just part of an extremely long Gambit Roulette scheme to get rid of Davros.^note (Though, showing that the author was at least aware of the controversy this would cause, one of Davros' lines allows for the interpretation that everything we saw in those stories did happen as depicted, and the Daleks are just pulling an epic case of I Meant to Do That) Legacy of the Daleks isn't considered as bad in this regard, but is still disliked for its Happy Ending Override of "The Dalek Invasion of Earth", as well as the unsatisfactory explanation of how the Roger Delgado incarnation of the Master met his end.
• Fan-Preferred Couple: The Doctor and Fitz. Not only do many fans notice and expand upon their relationship, many of the authors put in frankly ridiculous amounts of subtext into the books, especially post-Earth Arc.
• Faux Symbolism: Fitz is the begonia, right?
• Harsher in Hindsight: The Gallifrey Chronicles include a line about "Dec [being] fine, but there was no sign of Ant". In 2018, the duo went through a separation period when Ant went to rehab following a charge of drunk driving.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • In The Adventures Of Henrietta Street, Fitz' comments about the TARDIS being "something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue" are this after "The Big Bang".
  • By the end of the series, Gallifrey is destroyed and all the Time Lords have retreated into the Matrix. In a 2013 issue of Doctor Who Magazine, it was revealed that the secret backstory to Scream of the Shalka, by coincidence, also involved those same plot points.
• Ho Yay: Tons.
  • The Doctor was "more than friends" with Alan Turing and mentions having been in love with William Shakespeare.
  • In The Year of Intelligent Tigers, the Doctor has a sometimes-tempestuous, sometimes-adorable relationship with composer Karl Sadeghi. Karl spends most of the book being very obliquely in love with him, waxing poetic about the Doctor constantly^note  Karl watched the Doctor doze. He had flopped back on to the soft grass, his golden-brown hair spreading around his face. The bright sunshine highlighted the exotic whiteness of his skin. ^note  The numen had left the Doctor: he was no longer a god of thunder, but only a beautiful man lying in the grass.
  • Fitz and the Doctor act Like an Old Married Couple, and Fitz admits to the fact he loves the Doctor and might like to have sex with him. Given the Doctor occasionally flirts with Fitz^note Fitz gaped. ‘A sailor? I don’t believe it. Go on, give us a jig!’ The Doctor laughed. ‘Not likely – but I’ll show you my tattoo if you’re lucky.’, there's some interest there. He also did some very morally dubious things to get his version of Fitz back when he'd been lost. See the DW HoYay page for much more.
• Jerkass Woobie: Some pretty awful things happen to Compassion. For example, she turns into a TARDIS, and just to make it worse, the Time Lords try to capture her for "breeding purposes". Whenever Fitz or the Doctor tries to show her any sympathy, she doesn't take it well.
• Just Here for Godzilla: In the fandom, The Taint is almost universally panned as a sub-par book that's only saving grace is introducing the reader to Fitz Kreiner. It's often advised to new fans to just skim until you see his name, then read those bits.
• Narm: Escape Velocity provides a certain sense of bathos in a character's death scene:
  What a view! he thought, and then died as the flames from the engines reached the bus which then exploded.
• Older Than They Think:
  • A rift in space and time opens in a major city, inciting a ton of general weirdness into said city happened in Unnatural History.
  • This book also has paradox machines.
  • The Doctor being forced to destroy Gallifrey happened in Ancestor Cell.
  • The first Doctor/male Companion kiss was in Dominion.
  • The Doctor, newly regenerated, picked up a blonde, teenage, contemporary London girl who falls for him named Sam.
  • The Doctor grows a beard and gets married in The Adventuress of Henrietta Street.
  • A skinny, kindhearted non-action guy gets copied and spends thousands of years waiting for the person he loves. His name is Fitz.
  • A TARDIS in a human body? Her name is Compassion.
  • The future death of the Doctor being weaponized happened in Alien Bodies.
• The Scrappy: Samantha Jones, whose Holier Than Thou and overly politically correct and 'right-on' character was so disliked that her replacement, Compassion, may have been deliberately written as the exact opposite - i.e. rude, snobby, opinionated, and selfish - either to avoid this, or to make people say "now that I think about it, Sam wasn't that bad."
• Slow-Paced Beginning: It's generally recommended to skip the first book entirely, mainly because it's pure Continuity Porn with an Excuse Plot.
• Stoic Woobie: The Doctor's life is basically terrible, in case previous entries in his trope list haven't already made this clear. He's rarely seen crying about it. Very rarely. Possibly only in Halflife, in which it was quite obviously helped along by the fact he was still somewhat under the influence of swapping minds with Fitz, who's significantly more emotive, and it was appropriately manly Tears of Remorse, at any rate.
• Strangled by the Red String: Anji Kapoor.
• Villain Decay: Sabbath. He's still a compelling, likable character despite all the more-powerful villains mocking him for being gullible, the Doctor just generally mocking him and trying to be friends with him, the bit where he takes his Morality Pet to the zoo, the fact all his Mooks are apes who wear uniforms^note He must spend half his time stuffing them into their uniforms and trying to stop them from climbing things and crapping everywhere, his apparent inability to pick a pseudonym that doesn't have to do with holidays or days of the week, etc. It's just that he reaches a point of being no more menacing than any other character.
• The Woobie:
  • The Doctor.
  • Fitz Kreiner. He was peer pressured into smoking to prove he's not some kind of rule-abiding Nazi (he's now addicted to nicotine), and worried about "getting his head kicked in" when he was three. There's a poem about it. It's almost like every EDA he's in is required to add another reason (or five) to why Fitz should be a horrible, cynical, broken person. The fact he's not is absolutely astonishing.

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