Retcons

More Dragon Age this weekend!

I’ve finished re-reading Interesting Times, and will post my review for it soon enough. After that, we’ll do some BPRD and Thursday Next. In the world news, the International Eucharistic Congress is going on in Quito (or it might be finished?). 

Also, fun fact, I wrote my notes for this on the same page I did notes for the review of Iron Giant.

Retcons

I recently read Prisoner of Heaven, the third book in Cemetery of Forgotten Books, and I had some mixed feelings because so much of this novel is retcons. For the uninitiated! “Retcon” is short for “Retroactive Continuity”, and it’s when a newer work in a piece of media retroactively changes continuity in one way or another. Basically, it’s when you watch a movie which says one thing about the characters, and then the next one in the series will say something different.

So, like, the sequel to An American Tale is subtitled “Fievel Goes West” and involves Fievel going on a Western adventure. But one of the sequels to that, which I believe was straight-to-video, has the characters still in New York, and one of the others tells Fievel something like, “Hey, do you remember that weird dream you had where you went and became a cowboy?”, retroactively saying that Fievel Goes West never happened and was all just a dream. And people weren’t thrilled with that development because a movie they liked is now considered non-canon for a crappy straight-to-video sequel.

Not all retcons are bad, however, and many long-running series will do them accidentally because of minor character details that the writers will forget and ultimately don’t do anything with the narrative. One of the earlier Dresden Files books has Michael Carpenter seemingly rely on his wife to do all the patching up after battle with the forces of evil; a later book has him casually mention that he was a combat medic and bandage his friend. It’s an issue, but a really minor one. Most retcons are like this: character details that someone forgot and then got rewritten.

[I like to joke that Thanos was retconned into a competent villain in Infinity War given how horrible his track record of getting Infinity Stones was. Seriously, he had one and he lost it, and all of his minions up until that movie betrayed him.]

Sometimes stories need retcons if they’re going to continue. The movie Highlander is pretty sealed tight, and no way to continue forward; so any sequel or follow-up has to retcon the ending. The TV series did it by saying that there are a bajillion other Immortals out there still, and Connor didn’t win the Prize. The second movie did it by claiming that they’re actually aliens from the planet Zeist. Every other installment retcons the second movie out of canon, and rightfully so.

You’ll notice that often, supplementary material will get retconned. If a tie-in book or comic has an important event, you can probably bet that future movies, games, or episodes will ignore it when telling their own story, because hardly anyone will have read those.

The problem with Prisoner of Heaven was like the one with An American Tail; the narrator of the previous book in the series is revealed to be insane and hallucinating, and pretty much all of it is implied to have been made up and now non-canon. It also reworks one key character’s entire backstory and motivations into something that doesn’t make sense, and implying that the main character of the first book has a different father than we’d been led to believe. It’s a mess.

There are good and bad retcons. A Good Retcon is one that is used to add interesting depth or complexity to a character or a story. In Star Wars, it’s generally agreed by everyone except Lucas cultists that Darth Vader wasn’t originally intended to be Luke’s father, and there’s no reason to think that just from A New Hope alone. It’s a retcon to reveal that he is–but it works because it makes things messy in an intriguing way. Suddenly, the figure Luke idolized as his role model is the villain, and his mentors have been deliberately keeping that from him. There’s also Nate’s brother in Uncharted; the man quite clearly comes out of nowhere in the fourth game, and the half-hearted explanation that Nate didn’t want to talk about him because he thought he was dead doesn’t quite work, considering that we’ve seen Nate’s childhood in the previous game, and there’s nothing to possibly hint at there being a brother. But Samuel Drake makes a really good story, so even though it’s obviously a retcon, it works.

A Bad Retcon does the opposite: it is usually a hasty way to explain some inconsistency, or to make an arbitrary change. Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League has a black Deadshot, in order to match with the depiction of Will Smith as the character in the 2016 movie. Except previous games in this continuity, Arkham Origins and Arkham City, depict Deadshot as a white man. Instead of being like, “Okay, he’s black now, deal with it!” (which would have been preferred), the new game explains that the old Deadshot was actually a doppelganger from Earth-2, and that somehow no one who has tracked this criminal down (including Batman) has noticed the discrepancy. It’s dumb as rocks and everyone knows it.

[Presumably a future update would have made the situation clearer, but no one bought the game so it probably won’t happen!]

A Horrible Retcon is when it’s downright nonsensical. Again, Highlander–the sequel tells us that actually, the Immortals are interplanetary freedom fighters from Zeist from 500 years ago. For Reasons. It makes no sense, and everyone hates it.

Retcons, when intentionally applied, should be used sparingly. If you throw in minor ones every now and then? No biggie. But big ones? Only use those when you feel you have to, and carefully consider them. Telling your audience that they can’t rely on the events they’ve already seen or read can make them mistrust the storyteller, especially if they make the characters or story too different from what they’ve come to know and love. And if you’re using it to explain some inconsistency, make sure it’s a good explanation, and not something stupid like, “Ah, yes, it was an invader from another world that no one noticed for years.”

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