: HP and I started a website you guys might have heard of called Halo Reach in
: Not Canon. The idea was that we were both dissatisfied that Reach decided
: to retcon previous works for no good reason. I still think the writing in
: Reach is still poor, but now I'm not so much bothered with retcons.
: When I was growing up, I loved Ren & Stimpy. One thing that always
: bothered me though was that they never lived in the same house. In one
: episode they'd live in a trailer, another a house in the suburbs, and in
: another they'd live in a birdhouse. It didn't make sense to me since there
: was no continuity there, and I remember asking my dad why they always keep
: moving. My dad kind of found it amusing that this bothered me, and
: explained that they kept moving because it was funny and when I was
: older I'd understand. I'm older and I do understand now.
: Obviously in a show like Ren & Stimpy where there's no continuity and
: each episode is simply its own self contained story, you can do things
: like have them move from house to house, or press the history eraser
: button and erase all existence, or implode into nothingness, or even have
: them die.
: Even in stories that are meant to have continuity between their installments
: can have retcons and still work. Probably one of the best examples of this
: is Star Wars. In reading The Secret History of Star Wars , the one thing
: that was made very clear was that Lucas did NOT have the entire arc laid
: out in advance. He was making it up as he went along.
: In Star Wars (now Ep. 4 A new Hope), Darth Vader was not Luke's father.
: Examining the script revisions reveals Anakin and Vader as always being
: separate characters. At one point Luke fights along side his father. As
: the drafts progress, Luke's father is pushed more and more out of the
: story, until eventually he dies before the story begins. He's still a
: separate character though. At the time of Star Wars' release, when Obi Wan
: said Darth Vader betrayed and murdered Luke's father, he meant it
: literally.
: In the third draft of Empire though Lucas decided to make Vader into Luke's
: father. This was quite the retcon! This new revelation obviously overwrote
: what happened in Star Wars, but at the same time completely changed Obi
: Wan's character. Instead of the noble Jedi knight that he was in Star
: Wars, by Return of the Jedi we learn he is a tragic figure, whose
: arrogance in thinking he could train Anakin as well as Yoda essentially
: led to the Empire's rule of the galaxy.
: Later on Lucas would do the same thing by making Luke and Leia related. This
: didn't happen until he wrote Return of the Jedi. The line in Empire
: "No there is another" was not meant at the time to refer to
: Leia. Lucas admitted it was supposed to cast doubt on whether Luke would
: succeed. If Luke was the only hope, then he couldn't very well fail could
: he? The line as originally written was "Well then we'll find
: another".
: The prequels themselves had their fair share of retcons, too many of which to
: discuss here (but which are discussed quite well in Secret History ).
: So you look at Star Wars, and one of the greatest moments in film, and you
: realize it was a retcon.
: I think one can enjoy the films (and possibly the prequels if you're daft)
: regardless of the contradictions that arise (even just within the original
: trilogy they are numerous). In the end you get drawn in by the story, the
: characters, and the emotion, not the little details.
: So when Reach retconed Fall of Reach, I don't really see it as that
: disastrous. It's not like they are dropping a retcon to the lines of
: 'MASTER CHIEF NEVER WENT TO HALO". They're small details. Who cares.
: When focusing on the Fall of Reach story, I'll focus on it. When focusing
: on Reach's 'story' I'll focus on it. They're both right because they are
: meant to be experienced independently. They overlap enough that they bind
: together in the Halo universe, but I kind of just see them now as two
: different houses in Ren & Stimpy. They don't have to match up exactly.
: The fact of the matter is, there would be no Reach if Bungie didn't retcon
: Fall of Reach. Fall of Reach leaves nothing for noble team to do that's
: important. That would be a boring game. You'd really have nothing
: meaningful to fight for. So, retcon, and now we have something players can
: care about (but don't because it was executed badly).
: I'm a Star Trek fan (haha start the jokes), and if you were concerned about
: perfect continuity then pretty much nothing would make sense. Just take
: each episode as a self contained adventure, and if parts tie in to other
: episodes then accept the ones that don't conflict, and the ones that do
: conflict just either ignore, or accept the established version, or if
: there's no established version accept the version that you prefer.
: The retcons I think were an easy way to vent my frustration about how much
: the story sucked. IT wasn't the retcons that made the story suck though,
: and I'd like to come clean and say I have no beef with them now. I don't
: care if Bungie's next IP has retcons; I care that they just do the story
: well.
: Of course if it's an MMO it won't matter to me because I won't be playing it.
: Haha!
A Star Wars recon is Obi-Wan telling Luke to seek Yoda "The Jedi Master who instructed me" and then we find out it was really Qui-Gon, not Yoda.
Or Obi-Wan spending a lot of time around R2 only to have a senior moment indicating "I don't remember ever owning a droid". Even R4 in Ep 2 and 3 was "his" assigned droid, whether that means ownership is semantics. He didn't seem to recognize R2-D2 but should have.
Your discussion above about Obi-Wan and Anakin makes me recall Robot Chicken's "Certain Point of View" song. :)
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