Nice! Love the TARDIS. Perfectly subtle!
Nice!
But how does the perception filter actually work (very nicely thank you
)? Is it that people don't see it or they don't notice it? Or is that the same thing? Or did the fictional painter see it but not think it was out of the ordinary as a result of the perception filter? Am I just mad and rambling and forgetting that it's a tv show and not actually real?
Thanks
The and
Demonland!
Demonland, I've had a character for many years in a paper-and-dice super-hero role-playing game who has an ability I call "innocuity". My game master and I take this to mean that people of average intelligence simply take no particular notice of my character when he uses it and he can thus stroll about without attracting any special attention. He's not invisible -- people will not walk into him, they will simply step around him as though he was just an unremarkable person who has every reason to be there. Guards generally don't react, paparazzi see nobody worth photographing, etc., but machines dutifully react without being affected, and if pressed after-the-fact, a witness might recall there was a guy there ... a guy in a super-hero costume ... a guy with big, glowing, energy wings ... hey!
So this "perception filter" doesn't feel like an especially unusual idea to me. The scene where the TARDIS lands in "Vampires in Venice" demonstrates the perception filter amazingly well. A big, blue police box materializes right in the path of a 16th century Venetian girl, and she simply steps around it.
She even looks at it, but takes no further notice. She and everyone else present knows it's there, but don't think of it as any more significant than any of the other clutter in that market. You could ask directions, and someone in that scene might tell you what you're looking for is just on the other side of the ugly blue cabinet.
Thus when Paul Revere or Henry Pelham first sketched out that famous, but not exactly breathtaking depiction of the Boston Massacre, they may have stood in that court, after the incident, and carefully depicted the standing architecture -- including the blue box that doesn't look like anything they've ever seen before but obviously isn't anything unusual -- before adding the British and Bostonians engaged in their bickering. It's not invisible, nor is it especially noteworthy, so the only reason they wouldn't include it would be that they simply
missed it. To Revere's credit, he included the unremarkable blue box.
Oh! Interesting side story here, my inspiration for this came from an episode of the series
Fringe, which depicts various weird things happening in vicinity of Boston as two parallel realities collide. In the episode "August", there's a scene where a character reveals that mysterious "observers" have been noted all over the place. Including that famous engraving. Here's a snapshot:
Naturally, when I saw that, I had to Google the real image and check it out. Sure, I knew the Observer wouldn't be there, but I looked anyway, and then started to think about how silly it would be to expect Revere to have captured a random stranger's likeness in such an image. Except for the setting, Revere and Pelham practically invented the whole scene, exaggerating events to fan outrage over the British soldiers' actions. Historically, the soldiers were encircled by a crowd throwing snowballs and rocks and the British captain never gave a command to fire ... he was actually in front of his troops when they began to shoot! So if they got all those details wrong, it's unlikely they would have noticed a curiously bald fellow standing on the sidelines and watching events unfold.
But a police box? That's
architecture. They'd see it and include it in their depiction. Nah, they'd take no more notice of the Doctor than they would the Observer, but they'd probably get the setting right -- especially if the Doctor stuck around long enough for the TARDIS to have been included. So after I commended
The for the subtlety of his Hiroshima Doctor, I realized the same thing would apply to a
Doctor Who version of the Boston Massacre engraving, and put the picture together.
Wow. I sure do like to go on about myself, don't I?
EDIT TO ADD:
ITL, that is
awesome! What's the source?
