Frequently Asked Forum Questions
Search the HBO News Archives Any All Exact		Search the Halo Updates DBs Halo Halo2		Bungie Webcam HBO XBL Gamertags *Ar's Simple HTML Guide Shishka's Guide for Newcomers The Lowdown on Download Accelerators Red Loser's Anti-Spamming Guide Egg FAQ | More Egg Stuff c0ld's Movie Starter Guide Shishka's HaloPC Pre-Release FAQ 3.1 AutoMagic 117 StripzMaker
Search Older Posts on This Forum: Posts on Current Forum | Archived Posts

Re: Why retcons don't bother me anymore
Posted By: Narcogen <narcogen@rampancy.net>	Date: 5/12/11 2:08 a.m.
: 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. Perhaps the idea here would be to say that when you started the site, you felt the retcon was done for "no good reason", but below you reach the conclusion that there is a good reason-- that the game would have no reason to exist otherwise. I'd be in the camp that says that primary source material (the games) don't need to provide a justification when retconning material that starts out as being of lesser canonical value, like the novels. Any place a spinoff addresses its primary source somewhere, you're taking a risk. I still think the writing in : Reach is still poor, but now I'm not so much bothered with retcons. Time for a new domain name! :) I suggest HaloReachIsNotAsWellWrittenAsTheOtherGames.net. [snip] : 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! Without a doubt it's true that the story changed as it went on, and introduced inconsistencies and other things that don't make sense, I don't think you can call a revision to an unpublished portion of a script revision that didn't make it into the film a "retcon" properly. The failures in the writing from Jedi onwards are well-chronicled elsewhere so I'll refrain from commenting here further on the Star Wars example-- except to say that canonically I think that The Fall of Reach falls exactly where Splinter of the Mind's Eye does. That novel took what we were shown in the first Star Wars film and extrapolated on it, producing events and themes that, in light of the revelations in Empire and Jedi, made no sense, or were improper. I don't think you can properly accuse Lucas of having retconned Splinter (although you certainly can accuse him of having retconned himself!) : 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. Fair enough. [snip] : 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. Reach's story I think is easily the weakest of all the games; I don't think I'd be going that far out on a limb to say that it was the game that least needed to be made-- at least from a story perspective.

Death by intelligence

Message Index