Retroactive Continuity
Retroactive ContinuityThat is not dead which can eternal lie / and with strange eons even death may die. -- HpLovecraft
RetroactiveContinuity is believed to have originated on the ComicBook scene. It refers to any piece of fiction where events which were originally presented as real are later revealed not to be - often because the writers had gotten themselves into a tight spot and needed out. Few indeed are those who would defend this as a legitimate technique which makes for interesting reading.
This is different from a planned false history - one where the reader is presented the viewpoint of one (group) of characters who do not have all the information. RetroactiveContinuity is when the story past that was presented as 3rd-person true is changed, like the American TV show Dallas, which invalidated an entire season as "... just a dream, a horrible, horrible dream ..." because one actor who had been killed off wanted to return to the show. A RetroactiveContinuity that ultimately led to the demise of the show.
Topics on this page (I wonder if they deserve own pages):
Other examples:
RetroactiveContinuity is probably just a symptom of the emergence of serial literature. Someone writes a successful book or movie, the public will clamor for, and often get, a sequel. Someone writes a good TV pilot, the show gets picked up, and every week something new is added to the history of that little universe. Eventually, the history becomes too much to keep track of, and inconsistencies will crop up. How many first names did Colonel Blake's wife have? And if you take a look at a series like StarTrek, where the show goes on even after the creator has passed away, you can't write a new episode about anything without contradicting something somewhere. So now, the show really has nowhere to go but backwards.
I have done some - minor - world building for RolePlaying, where it is especially important to have a wide range of options at hand, to avoid that the players feel themself forced to follow one (linear) story or plot. Constructing a lot of mostly independent parts and sub-plots beforehand actually simplifies the later game, because in spite of the added complexity, the many pieces seem to fall together in just the right way at the right time and then build a coherent lively picture.
-- GunnarZarncke (See AddingComplexityCanHelp)
So this would be a plea for BigDesignUpFront? Seems logical, since you can't refactor an episode once it's broadcast.
I don't think, that it is BigDesignUpFront, at least not for RolePlaying. After all, the actual story is woven during the RolePlaying (I seldom tell long stories beforehand and then dump the adventurers into the nothing). I think this world-building it more like getting a grip on the DomainKnowledge. Where the domain is the not-yet existing world/plot (for XP, the best page I found is ElicitingRequirements).
Take, for example, the TV series Frasier. It was a spinoff of Cheers, so obviously they both take place in the same universe. In the Cheers universe, Frasier's father was a professor or something, and dead, but he's a main character on Frasier. This was kinda-sorta explained when Sam Malone made a guest appearance on Frasier; Sam simply said "he told me you were dead." While I suppose they were trying to avoid RetroactiveContinuity in this situation, the truth is, the writers of Cheers weren't really thinking "Frasier's father is a cop so he's embarrassed and tells everyone he's dead." So they've made Frasier retroactively lie about his family, which is better only in that it's a novel solution to a problem usually solved by ignoring the problem entirely.
There is an interesting bit like this in DeepSpaceNine?. They travel in time to the era or the Trouble With Tribbles episode of the original series. Someone asks Worf why the Klingons look different than they do now he simply says We don't like to talk about it. What a cop out. It would have been better to never have made this episode and ignored the issue all together.
Even funnier since they introduced "Klingon-human-augment" virus victims in Enterprise for some more retroactive continuing.
That was a mess.
''It may be useful to distinguish between a deliberate retcon - knowingly rewriting or re-interpreting what went before - and a continuity goof. The former is more like refactoring the plot, while the latter is more like introducing a bug.
To have a retcon, you need some form of serial publication - otherwise you could simply make the changes to the earlier material and (in principle) eliminate all evidence of the change, so, to an extent, retcons emerge from serial fiction - more particularly from serial fiction with established continuity: series where the same characters are in the same starting situation each time, and where events in one installment have no consequences in later installments don't qualify for retcons any more than anthologies do. Serial publication with ongoing continuity makes continuity errors inevitable, but it also creates a strong incentive to retcon - as time passes, incidental details accumulate, and more and more potential plot resolutions are blocked by the existing continuity, so that the resolution to the story at hand requires either that you come up with an even cleverer resolution, or that you knowingly contradict something that's already out there.''
On the other hand, the StarTrek universe has time travel. So it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to explain many minor discrepancies as minor deviations in the time lines due to time travel paradoxes.
Of course, last time I went to Home Depot, they still didn't have any transparent aluminum. Jeez, it's been almost 20 years since Scotty provided us with the formula. What happened - did that chemist get hit by a bus on the way out of the theatre? :)
But I have it. Look harder. -- JoshuaHudson
Some shows, such as TheSimpsons?, deliberately introduce inconsistencies into their virtual worlds to discourage overzealous fans from worrying/obsessing about such details. (One example on the Simpsons is the state in which "Springfield" is located. The writers avoid mentioning any state by name; but have intentionally provided sufficient clues to eliminate all states containing a Springfield. Interestingly enough, the reason Springfield was chosen was it's allegedly the city name that is found in more US states than any other...) I thought it was the school where MattGroening grew up.
Interesting. My wife does something related in the stories she tells to herself (and has sometimes written down) since childhood. In her youthful fantasy, she imagined a medieval world with many uncivilized tribes, swords as usual weapons and horses for transportation. But she used this world to resolve and model her problems in school and family. Thus she didn't get around to have a civilized core (here: Hamburg in Germany) with cars, supermarkets and the like. But out of this center, without sharp border mostly medieval times took over (aside from some other few spots, e.g. American WildWest?).
This led to some strange, but somehow comic resolutions: What happens to the BadGuys?? You can't simply kill them. But my wife didn't like unresolved mysteries. Thus she invented police stations (located in most villages), where these usually looked for bandits could be delivered and taken care of. Because of this mix of modern and medieval features, she has made all required RetCon into a feature, not a bug.
Star Wars has a novel (though heavy-handed) way of dealing with the numerous RetCon problems inherent when you do parts 4-6 before doing parts 1-3. Simply modify parts 4-6 to eliminate the RetCon. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth when the recent DVD edition of the first trilogy (4-6) was released, and the actors who played the Emperor in Empire, Anakin in Jedi, and provided the voice of Boba Fett in both, were replaced with the actors who played them in 1-3. (There is only a brief glimpse of the Emperor in Empire, but it wasn't Ian McDiarmid, though now it is. McDiarmid did play the Emperor in Jedi, and does throughout 1-3). Other (re-) releases of 4-6 have been similarly modified and/or enhanced.
Swapping actors is not typically a RetCon, as long as the scenes are the same (a common feature of American SoapOperas? is the temporary replacement of an actor with another, prefaced by a voiceover at the start "The part of X will be played by <actors name>"
While not strictly a RetCon (the events in question are not retracted), the last episode of StarTrekEnterprise revealed that... the entire show was (possibly) a Holodeck simulation undertaken by Riker and Troi, pondering on whether or not to rat out a Starfleet admiral who was up to no good. Not to say that Enterprise didn't happen... but whether the events as portrayed on the show "really" happened (or were merely a recreation inside a fictional universe) is now questioned. (The TNG events in question are intended to have taken place sometime during the TNG show; before any of the TNG films occurred. Riker and Troi weren't married; it was the Enterprise D, and Data was still very much alive.)
Needless to say, many fans of Enterprise, as well as many of the cast and crew, were rather pissed off about this.
Many more fans of the other series, who thought StarTrekEnterprise was garbage, were doubtless sighing in relief.
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