“Metaestheticism”

Metaestheticism is a coinage of mine, which you will see scattered about YARVELLING. 

A portmanteau of sorts between “metafiction” and “aestheticism”, it refers to “metafiction for metafiction's sake” — to my deeply-held conviction that it is a good thing for elements of narrative diegesis to mirror the circumstances of its own creation in interesting ways, whether or not this is done to provide some kind of commentary. 

Thanks to its time-travel premise, Doctor Who is the perfect medium for the fulfilment of metaestheticist ideals, and has often embraced it. Using time-travel to make real-life retcons out to have been in-universe retcons as well is the most striking, and most common, example of metaesthetic rewriting of Doctor Who's fictional universe.