Icon-UK wrote:Alcoholism comes in many shades, it's not always about not being able to stop drinking, though that is perhaps the most severe situation, it's about alcohol becoming something you depend on too much,
Not something we've seen with Brian.
Icon-UK wrote: it can be drinking too much, or drinking at the wrong time,
If you take that at the strict definition, then virtually anyone who has ever had an alcoholic beverage would qualify.
If you mean doing either of those on a repeated or regular basis, then Brian doesn't fit those definitions either.
Icon-UK wrote:
or not being able to NOT take a drink,
Never seen to be a problem - he's always shown the ability to stop drinking cold.
Icon-UK wrote:
or relying on it to get you through times it might be better, if not easier, to deal with sober. Brian has done this a time or two, usually when dealing with loss.
Again, if you think doing this a couple of times qualifies as making someone an alcoholic, then the vast majority of people who aren't teetotal would qualify as alcoholics. If, as would be a more reasonable argument, someone has to do this repeatedly or regularly to qualify, then Brian doesn't fit the profile.
Icon-UK wrote:
And again, I'm not saying Brian is an alcoholic in the way you seem to imply, but he is aware that when he does start drinking at times he doesn't limit himself the way he should, so he tries to avoid it. Many people do.
Yes, many do. Someone doesn't need to be an alcoholic to realise that they should moderate their drinking because over indulging is bad for you - in fact, that's pretty much the definition of every non-alcoholic. It's not that Brian doesn't moderate himself when he starts drinking; the vast majority of the time he has and does. The trouble is that many readers, and not a few writers, fail to grasp subtleties; they see a character really drunk one time, and immediately that character must have a drinking problem, which is why a couple of fill-in writers perpetuated the misinterpretation of the scene that started this debate by adding scenes like the one you claim suggests a drinking problem. However, other, usually more long-term writers, including Brian's most recent scribe Paul Cornell, have made it clear the Brian doesn't have a problem, and Alan has confirmed above that the scene generally used as the main evidence and which was the genesis of this claim was not intended to suggest that.
Icon-UK wrote:Some alcoholics CAN have one drink, though it's true that some can't, it's by no means an absolute condition, and varies from situation to situation too. In the Hellfire Club scene you mention, Brian was in full control of his faculties, is in a fairly stable place emotionally, knows it's a one-drink situation, and he had a mission to perform which other people were relying on him to deal with (and is surrounded by people who would cheerfully kill him if it suited their ends). That's not the same as attempting to drown his sorrows at home, after the loss of his twin sister.
True that it isn't the same as watching your twin sister, the person you are closest to in the whole world, die on television (remember, her demise was televised), with you powerless to save her. Under those kind of circumstances the vast majority of people would be in the same kind of emotional state Brian is, even without alcohol. As for the Hellfire Club scene, yes, Brian is in full control of his faculties, but stable emotional place? He's only just recovered from his jaunt through the time stream, and he's under major stress, going back into costume knowing that if he fails the world is literally going to H***. He might not be grieving, but it is the kind of situation where it would be all to easy to fall into "taking another just to steady my nerves" where he inclined to drink. As for alcoholics taking just one drink, yes, I know some who might manage it, but I know none who would risk it; the inability to stop once they started is why they are alcoholics. So my point stands; if Brian thought of himself as an alcoholic, would he really risk that the one drink would cause him to fall off the wagon and thus risk the fate of the world? That he felt he was confident he could take just one suggests he doesn't view himself that way.