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Re: Cautious skepticism.
Posted By: Quirel <I_am_quirel@hotmail.com>	Date: 5/14/11 3:24 p.m.
: There is a trade off operating here. I don't really see one. : The benefit of easy retcons is that the authors can tell the best, stand : alone, story that they can. They have few constraints on their creativity. Really? I'd say that pre-existing constraints will, to a degree, actually encourage creativity. Look at Asimov: by creating his three laws, and essentially cutting himself off from the generic robot uprising story, he created a mythos that shapes science fiction to this day. Zeroth Law Rebellion was a concept he codified, and has been used in science fiction since. I mean, look at the Data Pads in Reach. If that's not ZLR, I don't know what is. : The cost is that it kills fan involvement in the universe, speculation : becomes pointless because there is no guarantee that what you have seen so : far will hold up in the future. : In the past the Halo story appeared to be reliable: you could count on things : you saw having a payoff later, they would still be true later, would still : have happened. : This engendered big fan loyalty and active speculation. You loose this by : compromising story reliability. Exactly. : I'm not saying that you can't have unreliable characters because you can take : their unreliability into account when you speculate, but sweeping changes, : the attitude that anything can change on the authors' whims, kills : involvement stone dead. I don't count nixing what an earlier character said to be retconning, though it depends on what they say. Are they in position to know the truth/tell the truth? Are they conveying the information in dialog, or third-person narrative?

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