#YOU TRANSMISOGYNISTIC PIECE OF THUMB SHAPED FUCK

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The Rival Presidency of Drornid...

Skagra relinquished his place at the controls. “You are familiar with the planet Drornid?” he said stiffly.

Romana nodded. “It was the scene of an incident in Gallifreyan history.”

“An incident,” said Skagra. He tilted his head to one side. “I admire your understatement. It is an excellent quality.”

“Thank you,’ said Romana. “Many thousands of years ago there was a schism in the College of Cardinals on Gallifrey. Cardinal Thorac fled to Drornid, declared himself President of the Time Lords, and established a rival court there.”

“Where he became known as the Heresiarch of Drornid,” Skagra continued. “Eventually Thorac returned to Gallifrey.”

Romana nodded, thinking back to her history lessons. “The High Council forced him to return by simply ignoring him.”

Skagra’s eyes narrowed. “And do you know what happened on Drornid, Time Lady, both during and after the reign of the Heresiarch?”

Romana searched her memory. “There was no mention of that on my history syllabus at the Academy.”

“Skagra grunted, and his hands flew over the controls. The holo-screen shifted to show another image. “Then it is time for me to expand your learning. This was Drornid during the reign of the Heresiarch.”

The holo-screen showed the wide vista of a city that nestled in a large valley. Towering over the buildings was an enormous statue of a hook-nosed man in the robes of a Time Lord President. “The Heresiarch controlled the planet from the statue. He set up a pacification beam from his court within, quelling any unrest or resistance from the native populace.”

The image shifted again as Skagra manipulated more controls. Now Romana saw the crowded streets of the city from ground level, with the statue looming down from on high. The citizens of Drornid shambled happily along the streets, dumb smiles on their faces. 

“Drornid at this time was an advanced civilisation, late level nine, early level ten,” continued Skagra. “But the day came, after several hundred years, when Thorac, as you say, left to return to Gallifrey.”

The screen now showed an aerial view of the city. Tiny figures teemed through the streets. “The pacification ray was switched suddenly off,” said Skagra. “The people of Drornid suffered a severe psychic feedback. The centuries of quiet subservience were over, and all the accumulated aggression and unrest spilled back into their minds. They tore their own planet apart.”

- Shada, Gareth Roberts 

Dronid’s first disastrous contact with the Great Houses was long before the War Era, in the period following the Imperator Presidency when various intervention groups on the Homeworld were beginning to demand greater involvement in the affairs of the outside universe. In these “difficult” times several of the more active groups attempted to make aggressive, highly-politicised statements to the ruling Houses. One of the more successful efforts was undertaken by the Grandfather of House Paradox: while one of the least successful was a minor rebellion in the ranks of the ruling Houses themselves. A small clique from the elite bloodlines announced, with great pomp and ceremony, that the Homeworld was no longer fit to do its job and that a new Homeworld should be created inside the Spiral Politic itself… right under the noses of the lesser species. The members of this cabal simply turned their backs on the Presidency, and removed themselves to a world where they felt the locals would treat them as the beings of wisdom and status they so obviously were. The site they choose was Dronid, then a world in its early industrial era, divided into autonomous city-states but with a rapidly-expanding system of trade and technology.

Yet the “renegade Presidency” is now only a footnote in history, nowhere near as well-remembered as greater rebellions like the Imperator Presidency. Why? The main reason is just that this new attempt at defying the ruling Houses was stupid, infantile and badly-planned. The renegades believed themselves to be following in the footsteps of the Imperator, doing something cutting-edge and revolutionary, but while the Imperator had been ambitious, bloody-minded and utterly ruthless, the new rebels were polite academicians and deluded bureaucrats who in truth knew next to nothing about concepts like ”warfare”, “conquest” or even “violence”. They simply didn’t believe that the ruling Houses would hurt them, and besides, they’d seen how confused and helpless the Houses had been after the Imperator’s rebellion. Surely, they told themselves, we’ll be safe from our cousins back Home?

They were, of course, hopelessly wrong on both counts. Following the Imperator crisis the ruling Houses had become distinctly paranoid, terrified that a second Imperator might make their problems even worse. These new rebels might have been hopeless time-wasters, but the Houses didn’t feel it was worth taking any risks. They elected to deal with the breakaway ”Presidency” in the most damning way imaginable: by ignoring it.

This is far worse than it sounds. As has been documented elsewhere, the Houses created and maintained the entire framework of history. To this day they see the Homeworld as the great ”eye” which observes that framework, keeping all its causal connections and time-structures in check. If this “eye” should fail to see some part of the Spiral Politic, then the effect on that world would be catastrophic. Ungoverned by the certainty of history, the world would be torn apart by the random probability-forms of the unformatted universe. There may have been House members on Dronid to try to keep time stable, but the renegades now had no link to the Homeworld, nobody to acknowledge that they even existed.

The result was a cataclysm, a front of protospace and anti-history which not only tore the renegades’ powerbase to shreds but ate its way through the culture of the world’s local population. The city-states of Dronid became terrified, insular communities, the inhabitants hiding behind their siege walls as neighbouring states were ripped apart by the colliding time-states. Once the attack of ignorance was over, and the Houses saw fit to re-connect the world to the rest of the Spiral Politic, the face of Dronid had been changed beyond recognition. An early-industrial society had been turned into a world of fallen nations and paranoid anxiety, while most of the original renegades were nowhere to be found. (Having a certain resistance to alter-time effects, it’s generally thought that they must have escaped the world before being consumed by the storm. Though the leaders of the clique were returned to the Homeworld, the others have never been heard of since, but if any of them survive then they’re hardly likely to pose any kind of threat in future.)

- The Book of the War, edited by Lawrence Miles, Appendix I: The Rival Homeworld 

[...]

Mr Gabriel reached for the Blue Dog. “So, you want to get yourself off Drornid while you’ve still got all your legs?”

Mr Qixotl felt like hissing. He hated people who did that. Technically, this planet was supposed to be called “Drornid”; that was the name the locals had always used, anyway. But there’d been a typo in the first edition of Bartholomew’s Planetary Gazeteer, so the rest of the universe called it “Dronid”, including the off-worlders who came to make a living/killing here. And, as the off-worlders were at the heart of the planet’s economy, most of the natives went along with them. Some people always had to be picky, though.

- Alien Bodies, Lawrence Miles

(Obviously the contradiction between the Shada novelization account and The Book of the War/War in Heaven account is that most of Gareth Roberts’ expansions are his own invention... to my knowledge, Douglas Adams hadn’t actually developed the history of Dro(r)nid that deeply, other than the idea that a renegade Time Lord had set up shop and then got ignored by Gallifrey. This contradictory gap is a really fascinating spark of theorizing/headcanoning; how can the Rival Homeworld be a millennia-old event taught in Academy history, while only being a result of the Morbius’ Crisis, which, according to The Book of the War, a mere few years before the Doctor left Gallifrey? War propoganda? Rewriting of Gallifrey history to hide the unpleasantness? You decide!) 

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I used quite a bit of the Shada novelization in an upcoming queued post about Dro(r)nid, and I genuinely love the book very much, but I enjoy these tags from that post: 

#FUCK GARETH ROBERTS#YOU TRANSMISOGYNISTIC PIECE OF THUMB SHAPED FUCK#YOUR BEST BOOK IS A FUCKING NOVELIZATION OF DOUGLAS ADAMS' SCRIPT HOW DOES THAT FEEL???#GOD.