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| Re: Why retcons do bother me. | |
| Posted By: Narcogen <narcogen@rampancy.net> | Date: 5/26/11 7:46 a.m. |
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: Then back in 2001 they shouldn't have published an officially licensed novel, : but rather should have made a PDF available with a few key data points on : it. Well... Bungie didn't do that. Microsoft did. Let me look back at all the licensed spinoff novels that Bungie did for Myth and Marathon... oh, wait, there weren't any because Bungie makes games and not novels. Having to do promotional tie-ins was part and parcel of the buyout. As Staten wrote, the novels are canon "for better or worse"-- until they get retconned. Which they did; a possibility he acknowledged at least as early as four years ago and possibly earlier. I think it's a bit more than can reasonably be expected of a corporation of Microsoft's makeup that they exercise that kind of exemplary restraint. I don't think they've got a Watterson working for them who is looking out for the integrity of characters and the world they live in above any and all possibility of supplemental income. I'm not really sure how many buyers there would have been for a PDF appendix in 2001. I'm sure they also thought they might attack the SF trade paperback audience as a potential market for Halo; after all, it was a launch title for the Xbox, which was a new console, so raising awareness was also a goal. : They provided the info to the fans and we gobbled it up with enthusiasm. Well, some did. Some ignored it, and some bought it, read it, and didn't necessarily accept it wholesale as the "truth". : Forgive us for not wanting that enthusiasm and loyalty tarnished. That's sort of the way lots of people think about Greedo shooting first; I guess it's just really easy for me to see how that tarnishes one's impression of the work-- by making a major, character-altering change-- that I just don't see in what's gone on between Reach and TFOR. We already went over the differences in how the invasion feels, but for me I guess it's hard to see how the invasion taking one day or two weeks, or certain events happening on August 12 or August 30 changes what happened in the same way that Greedo shooting first turns Han Solo from a cynical rebel willing to commit murder to avoid paying a debt to a mama's boy who shoots a guy in self-defense from under a table and only lives because the other guy can't hit the broad side of a barn with a laser from two feet away. I'd say there are already plenty of precedents (like the SW EU) that show that enthusiasm and interest, as currencies, are not necessarily convertible into canon value as a commodity. It's probably not something reasonable to expect without someone maintaining much stricter controls over materials. Had they been in place, I think the most likely result would not have been a version of the game Reach that complies with TFOR, but no release of TFOR at all, and perhaps novels that integrated much less tightly with the games. As for loyalty... did you perceive it as a test of your loyalty to Halo as a franchise that you should buy the novelizations and accept them as canon truth on par with the games? Insofar as that word can be applied to being a fan of a videogame-- and I'm not entirely sure that I do-- I'd also count myself as a "loyal" fan, and I own the books and have read them. Did not accepting them as bible truth mean I failed the test of loyalty, or wasted my money? As an aside, blaming the information for being so tasty is sort of like blaming heroin for being addictive :)
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