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Re: Why retcons don't bother me anymore | |
Posted By: Narcogen <narcogen@rampancy.net> | Date: 5/19/11 6:52 a.m. |
In Response To: Re: Why retcons don't bother me anymore (Stephen L. (SoundEffect)) [snip] : If you look at the two bays in the Reach version, there is no such corridor
: I'm still conjecturing Bungie either explicitly decided not to add that to
: And I do count novel descriptions where they are 'official' sources. Even the
: The distinction between you and I regarding our viewpoints on this is I count
Sort of. I consider "Halo" to mean primarily, but not exclusively, the games developed by Bungie; so that's Halo 1-3, ODST, and Reach. So for me, everything in those is canon, except where it conflicts where something else at the same level. Then there's a bunch of other stuff: games by other studios (Halo Wars) licensed novelizations, graphic novels, anime episodes. I have varying levels of interest in these (I have the original novelizations, but not the graphic novel; I have the anime and Halo Wars but I basically ignore Halo Wars). These I all consider secondary, with the possible exception of Contact Harvest given that it's not just licensed by Bungie or MS, but written by Staten who has a primary role in developing story on the games. Where secondary material-- regardless of detail, voluminousness, or repetition-- runs afoul of primary material, for me, it loses out. So what I see there is that the Halo 1 dropship has a nondescript black space where a corridor *could* be, and the Reach dropship does not. An authorized, but secondary source, basically offers up the explanation that this is a corridor. That's consistent with Halo 1, but not with Reach. So I've got a tri-level conflict: Reach and Halo 1 don't agree, and they're both primary, and the novel and Halo 1 agree, but not the novel and Halo 1. (Is the corridor mentioned in TFOR, in the Dietz novel, or in Contact Harvest?) It's a question of handling precedence in tiebreakers. I suppose what I'm mentally doing is removing the low-hanging fruit, first. So the novel's mention of a corridor there drops out first because it conflicts with Reach, which is in the series' primary form (a game) and made by its primary source (Bungie). For me, having one primary source confirm the secondary source doesn't validate it, one disagreement invalidates it. So the novel gets thrown out at that point (at least, the portion of it that addresses the question of whether or not there's a corridor there. My reasoning is this: There's nothing in the game that explicitly shows a corridor there. Whether that's because Bungie decided there wasn't one, or because they didn't think about it, or because they couldn't show that because of a technical limitation, doesn't really matter for me. It apparently wasn't important enough for Bungie to show explicitly that there was a corridor there; it's just a blank texture. It wasn't a crucial enough part of the universe to expend the effort. The novel comes along and fills in a bunch of details, and somebody somewhere gets to vet this stuff. I honestly don't know how much detail is gone into at this stage, and whether or not it considers the integrity of in-game models as described in the novels. It's possible that nobody ever bothered. It's possible that somebody read that passage, maybe looked at a 3D model or some in-game footage, and decided a corridor there was OK. Then Reach comes along. It's a primary source, made by Bungie, and in the form of a game. In the continuity, it precedes Halo 1, and in Bungie's discography, it is the most recent work. When I combine all those factors, it seems to me to be the least disruptive thing to ignore the reference from the model, assume that the black space in the H1 model is not a corridor. I suppose I could go further, and imagine that the Spirit revisions we see on Reach are not the same that we see a few days or weeks later at Installation 04, for reasons I think it would be difficult to explain, but I guess I feel that this is a question that I don't personally need answered. If Bungie had shown a Covenant character use that 'corridor', or if Keyes or the marines had been shown using it when boarding the vehicle... I suppose we have to assume he uses it, if he gets into the cockpit to fly the vehicle, and the troop bay is shown opening, so we almost have to assume there's some access... I think at that point I'd be willing to write it off on the basis that the original design was cool and iconic, but impractical. I think that's sufficient motivation for Bungie to retire the Spirit and introduce the Phantom, which is a lot more consistent with the rest of the Covenant designs, and also more practical and traditional. Reach brings back the old design for continuity and nostalgia; and acknowledging that it was an impractical design didn't bother to correct any of its flaws. So the corridor area that seems small and impractical just gets eliminated because it minimizes the iconic nature of the design (which is essentially the two large troop nacelles held together by a gun). Of course, they also add in Phantoms, which we don't see in Halo 1, which further seems to emphasize that the justification is nostalgia and not continuity. So putting in Spirits does stop people from asking why there aren't Spirits, but it raises the question (again) of why there aren't Phantoms at Installation 04-- or, at the very least, doesn't answer it. If the game had Spirits but not Phantoms, you could conceivably convince yourself that Phantoms arrived in the volume around Reach / Earth / Installation 04 / Delta Halo only within the Halo 2 timeframe, which explains their absence earlier, and they supersede the odder Spirit models, which explains why you don't see them after. I'm guessing Phantoms were also put in because Bungie artists like them (and their atmospheric spotlights) and they're cool, which sort of overrode the need to develop a comprehensive, accurate and consistent history of Covenant military transport. That's the best I got. Can't say it shows a particular attention to consistency on Bungie's part, I just have a tough time calling one "wrong" or "right" when backing off a bit, and ignoring some supplemental material makes the problem go away. Without taking for granted that there's a hallway there, both the Reach and Halo 1 models of the Spirit are both "good enough" approximations of the "real" Spirit design in the Haloverse; one appears to have a larger blank space near where the troop nacelles join, but neither has a communicating corridor. That's all I can come up with.
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