Essay: "Retconning"

Are you a nerd? Here is a very simple test: when Padme Amidala (Natalie Portman's character in the new Star Wars movie) died (rather unconvincingly) in childbirth, were you angry because in Return of the Jedi Princess Leia had clearly stated that she remembered meeting her mother?



This, my friend, is a "retcon", short for "retroactive continuity." It means to deliberately change previously established facts in a work of serial fiction, and it is the bane of nerds everywhere, who are enraged when the details of a fantasy world are changed after they have spent countless hours learning the minutiae of its history and geography.

The new Star Wars movies, of course, contained an enormous amount of retconning. Some of these involved ignoring comics or novels (such as Timothy Zahn's triology), which I think for the most part is understandable. But the changes to the original trilogy were harder to swallow. George Lucas went so far as to redo the old movies with new special effects, famously changing one scene so that Greedo shot first before Han blasted him.

There's a lot of retconning out there. A retcon which recently angered me (and prompted this post) was in the video game Starcraft 2. Starcraft is a real-time strategy game made by Blizzard, the same company that does World of Warcraft. They are an extremely well-regarded company who has never made a bad game. On the other hand, they are sometimes criticized for not being particularly innovative (having perfected games in genres that other companies originally conceived) and for the long delays before releasing their games. The first Starcraft game was released in 1998 with an expansion pack in 1999 and ended with a cliffhanger.

Patient Stacraft fans (such as myself) had to wait until this month for the new game to come out. That's twelve years. Imagine my dismay when I found that Blizzard had retconned the story. The manual from the first game had described the genesis of the Zerg, the alien bad guys from the first game. While I won't get into the nerdy details here, suffice to say that their origin had been changed, in a rather boring and irritating way.

This is all a long way of coming round to my question: why is it that retconning bothers us so much? Why should we care about these sorts of details in a fictional universe involving magic and spaceships?

First of all, it seems to me outrageously ad hominem for people to play the "what a nerdy question" card. You can argue that retconning is a lot less important than, oh, I don't know, AIDS in Africa, but by that standard, almost everything's unimportant. I think nerds have as much right to get upset about continuity errors in video games as jocks have to argue over whether Floyd Mayweather is ducking Manny Pacquiao or the other way around, or as the ladies have to get all catty about Lindsay Lohan. None of this stuff matters from a cosmic perspective.

Second, I don't see what the subject matter of the universe has to do with it. Sloppy retconning has any more place in science fiction than spelling errors in Canadian literary fiction. It's not a matter of suspension of disbelief - it's more a matter of pure laziness.

And more than that, it's somehow an affront to your fans. If people take the time to learn the rules of your fictional universe, and it's history, it is insulting to break them afterwards. The basic continuity errors in Starcraft and Star Wars could have been easily caught by anyone looking for them. The basic insult of retconning your material, more so than general sloppiness, is that you imply to your fans that you aren't taking the material as seriously as they are.

Does this mean that creators are prisoners of what they did before? Say George Lucas or the folks at Blizzard have a new idea. Can they really not change it? Are they bound by continuity, like a straight jacket?

I don't think so. As for many, many, many things in my life, the answer lies in comic books, where they have been dealing with continuity issues for quite some time now. Comics, after all, technically all take place in one continuous story. That means that every writer is shackled by what the writers have done before. And in some cases, in order to produce short-term boosts to sales, writers do incredibly stupid things, like killing off major characters. This means that subsequent writers then have to come and retcon those stupid things just to fix the book.

There are numerous retcons in comics, some good, some bad. For instance, as you may know, recently Spiderman revealed his secret identity and his Aunt May was shot by an assassin. A few months later I guess the peyote wore off and the Spiderman brain-trust realized what a horrible idea that was. And so these events were retconned - by Spiderman making a deal with the devil. Lame.

On the other hand, we've seen perhaps the best retcon ever recently in Green Lantern. Hal Jordan, the original Green Lantern, had not only been killed off, but transformed into a super-villain named “Parallax” who killed all the rest of the Green Lantern corps. But when the book was taken over by Geoff Johns (the best writer in modern comics) he managed to not only fix the problem without doing too much violence to the previous material, but also to completely regenerate the Green Lantern books. Johns imagined Parallax as an alien parasite that had possessed Green Lantern, which eventually left Hal Jordan and founded its own evil Lantern Corps. Perfect? Not really. But a creative and consistent way to deal with a continuity problem rather than just ignoring it.

I think this proves you can do anything within the strictures of continuity if you are willing to work at. It just takes time, patience and a respect for the source material. Anything less just proves you don't take this stuff seriously. But it's not serious, you might say. Well, that’s fair enough - but it seems like a strange and dangerous position for the creators of this kind of thing to take.