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Re: Why retcons don't bother me anymore
Posted By: Narcogen <narcogen@rampancy.net>	Date: 5/18/11 12:12 a.m.
: No, I'm aware of the show but I don't think I've seen more than one or two : episodes. If you mean the changing actors of the doctor, I know there were : many...like the James Bond effect. : For instance, the Autumn in Halo 1 had the potential of having 48 decks. The : Reach revised Autumn would not...it's that kind of change I can't : reconcile. : Even in Star Trek: First Contact, the Enterprise-E was said to have 24 decks : in one line of dialogue and 26 in another, in the same movie. Then it : suddenly becomes 29 in the Nemesis movie.....I have huge issues with that : lack of continuity. The correct answer is 24 BTW. See, my reaction to that is that there isn't a correct answer. How can there possibly be? There's no objective reality or other single authoritative source to appeal to. If one assumes that inconsistencies are mistakes, you could perhaps arrive at a consensus figure, but of what use would it be? Granted, Star Trek has no wholly abandoned its continuity (a subject for another day) but let's assume they hadn't. What if the next film had a scene that took place on Deck 25? What if characters spoke about Deck 25 multiple times? What if signs on doors and walls said "Deck 25"? What if an on-screen schematic displayed a diagram of Deck 25? Does the "correct" answer now become 25, instead of 24? Or do we stick with 24 and just try to imagine than all the "25s" are mistakes? Doesn't that make the audience feel that all the characters are idiots for not knowing how many decks their ship has? It just seems untenable to me. If a fictional universe were to be treated as real, and be forced to maintain a strict continuity, then the audience is logically forced into one of two unattractive positions. One is that any apparent contradictions in the implementations of that fictional universe occur because they are imperfect, and thus unreliable-- which is a problem since these are the only connections the audience has to that universe, and thereby throws everything we know about it into doubt. The second is that there is no one single authoritative fictional universe, but many-- and if so, on what basis does one point to the one (or even many) that have 24 decks instead of ones that have 25 or 26 or 29? Is it "most references wins"? Last reference wins? Do you average them out to the nearest whole number of decks? Even once you've done that, what has been established? Of what significance is the number of decks? Even if there was a supposedly reliable method of establishing as fact the number of decks, it seems to me the only possible value it has is to stand up in the movie theater and shake a fist at the screen and scream "you're wrong" when a movie inevitably shows an Enterprise with 26 decks or 29 decks. It's hard enough maintaining consistent timelines, characterizations, emotional authenticity, and all of the other things that help people suspend their disbelief and immerse themselves in a work. I'm not sure that the effort spent striving for engineering consistency from work to work in a fictional universe is worthwhile except where it impacts plot or character. It certainly doesn't seem that Bungie puts any more effort into it now than they did in the Marathon days, for instance.

Death by intelligence

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