Convenience Retcons

 After reading 1635: A Parcel Full of Rogues, I sincerely considered making a Saturday Note about Cromwell and how much he sucks, but I think a large chunk of that will go into the Book Diary entry for that book. This Note was kind of inspired by a book though.

Tonight I’m planning to go see the play Something Rotten! So I hope that goes well. It’s been a while since I saw a play, I think.

Also! I have a public service announcement coming to ImpishIdea. So watch out for that.

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The Convenience Retcon

A lot of times when we talk about ‘retcons’, or ‘retroactive continuity,’ we generally mean worldbuilding details or character backstories. It’s when something is changed that contradicts what we already knew. Like, if your immortal character is established to have been born in the Scottish highlands and have no clear explanation for his powers, but then a new story declares that it’s actually because of he was born 500 years ago on the planet Zeist and is in exile for being an alien rebel, well, yeah, you clearly changed the backstory, that’s a retcon. And a very bad one at that.

We’re not here to talk about that kind of retcon though. Basically on Friday while thinking of this Note, I considered what I call “the convenience retcon.” Basically, it’s when you change the established rules of how the fictional world works for the sake of convenience. See, [old man voice] back in my day, Internet writing guides for fantasy worlds always drilled into people’s heads that they needed to have the rules for their magic systems precisely explained or drawn out, so that both you and the reader knew the rules.

Now I don’t think that’s a hard and fast rule–if the magic doesn’t have set rules, it can work. I don’t know how the magic works in Hellboy, and that’s never really bothered me that much. It’s magic. Who cares. It’s not supposed to make sense in that setting. ButI think that you shouldn’t contradict the rules you set up, or change things for the sake of convenience even though it doesn’t fit with what’s already established.

The reason I started thinking about this is because I reread Eragon and there’s a certain kind of spell called scrying, in which you can view something or someone far away. It’s specifically stated in this book that scrying can only let you see someone, not hear or talk to him or her. And if that person is somewhere you haven’t been before, you can’t see his or her environment. Communicating over this way is explicitly impossible, we’re told by characters who are experts at magic.

In the third book of the series, Brisingr, Eragon casually casts a spell to essentially do a magic Skype call, with the narration telling us that this was a spell he learned off-page that lets you talk to people over great distances. He and his boss have set up a system for him to do this.

And I get it, okay? That you needed characters to communicate with each other across long distances, so you had to do something. I suppose it’s better than what we have in Wheel of Time, in which plenty of characters are running across the map and have no idea what the others are doing, and missing out on important information because of it for books on end. But that doesn’t change that the author is now changing something that was before a hardbound rule. Yes, we can handwave it as a spell being rediscovered by an ancient master or something, but it’s pretty egregiously breaking the rules. Could he not think of some other way to communicate information over long distances?

Another example: in Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica, when a group of characters starts out their time travel journey, they’re told that time travel has to be balanced. A trip to the past has to have a balance of a trip to the future of relatively equal value. So when our heroes want to go to the deep past, they first have to shoot into the deep future. Except when they finally get to the deep past after fighting through a dystopian future, they find they need to go back even further. When asked if they need to do a balancing trip first, Rose answers that she thinks that specific rule of time travel is bunk and so they can just keep going back. Which they do. With no negative consequences.

Hurm.

[I thought about adding the time travel rules from the CW The Flash here, but they don’t have any consistency with the rules there so I didn’t see the point.]

I’m also thinking of Heroes of Olympus examples, which aren’t breaking hardbound rules, as such, but they are changing things to make it convenient. Jason starts the series with a magic coin that he flips and it turns into an Imperial Gold weapon: one side makes a sword, the other a spear. He flips it again to change it back. It breaks at the end of The Lost Hero and he gets a new sword. It’s later decided that actually, all Imperial Gold weapons work like that, and you can just will them to change on the fly, as both Jason and Reyna shift their weapons between spear and sword in combat.

Likewise, we get a few other weird bits. Percy’s sword, Riptide, is magically disguised as a pen until he uncaps it. This is specifically something special, and we rarely see other items like it–and they’re all explicitly magic. Percy’s watch turns into a shield. Thalia’s wristband turns into a shield. Her spray can turns into a spear. Bianca finds a hairpin that turns into a bow. Except there’s a scene in one of the later Heroes of Olympus books in which the narration is like, ‘By the way, when he puts it over his shoulder, Frank’s bow turns into a backpack! Anyway moving on.’

This is also silly, because the setting has the Mist, which obscures what normal people see. The other items change for easy carrying, whereas Frank’s transforms to blend in–when it should already blend it because magic sight BS.

All of these are examples where the retcon happens because it makes it easier for the characters. Not necessarily easier for the Plot–though they sometimes are. But they make things easier or more comfortable for the hero by breaking the rules of what we already know, very often with casual disregard to what’s already been put down. There are times when it’s okay to break the rules you’ve already set up, but when it’s done for the sake of making things easier for the heroes, to sweep away any struggles they might have had, it’s frustrating. If you come up with a limitation, it’s YOUR job as the author to figure out a way around it. That’s the ‘creative’ part of ‘creative writing.’ If you make a rule in the story, don’t throw it away to make the protagonist more comfortable. You don’t always have to put characters through the ringer, but you shouldn’t cut corners to make things too easy either.

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