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Re: Why retcons don't bother me anymore
Posted By: Narcogen <narcogen@rampancy.net>	Date: 5/18/11 11:40 p.m.
: I guess the defining difference between them is mention of the characters in : the novel in the captured dropship walking from the troop bay to the : cockpit makes the Halo 1 version the right one and relegates the Reach : design to wrong. That's taking other methods of determining right and : wrong. Hmm. Normally I just discount the ancillary material where it conflicts with Bungie material, but here you've potentially got ancillary material being used to corroborate one primary source (Halo 1) over another (Halo Reach) which seems to me pretty logical. I could look at it another way, though. The design of that ship always was odd. Even if you could pass from the troop nacelles to the cockpit, it never would have been easy or convenient, and quite possibly it would have been pointless. It's not shown happening in the games (even in Keyes it appears the characters enter through the troop bay) so the only explicit reference to any such ability is in the novel itself (although H1's model is somewhat consistent with it, and Reach's model is not). Assuming it was considered at all, I might conjecture that Bungie looked at the design, figured that such communication between the troop bay and the cockpit was not actually part of the Covenant ship's design, and did not define that as a design constraint on the new model. The only material that conflicts is ancillary, so I'd discard it. Again, I'm not sure what I've achieved, except being able to point at the screen while playing Halo and say "that model is the right one" while playing one game, and "that model is the wrong one". It strikes me that the real value to be had is in the determination itself, not the result-- although again, the form you produce your results in is certainly entertaining in and of itself, even if I interpret as just another part of the fiction (and ancillary at that, however well-considered) and not authoritative.

Death by intelligence

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