Retconn: When does it work?

[mrhappy1489]

So I'm just wondering, has there been a time when you've watched something, then seen its adaption which changes an aspect an been like, damn, that works much better. My example will be the Death Note anime and its Live-Action Adaption.

Spoiler

In the anime, at episode 25, the main character and arguably villain Light Yagami successfully pulls of his extremely complicated plan and successfully pushes the blame off himself as Kira (the big bad of the series) and onto someone else and killing the only man that could have possibly stopped him, L. Perfectly done and executed and even though it was immensely depressing definitely a high point of the series. The best ending that could come from the show. And then it keeps going.

After L's death, two other characters, Near and Mello, are introduced as the successors to L. They finish the investigation, catch Light and then light dies. It has it's moments but is nowhere near the quality of the first 25 episodes. Near and Mello just cannot live up to the legacy of L and it shows so much. The reason for this, is that Light and L complemented each other so well in the show. If it weren't for the fact that Light was some mass murdering sociopath they would have been the best of friends and incidentally were for a significant portion of the tv show. Basically, the only example I can come up with, is if Gimli was killed off halfway through LOTR and replaced by two other characters who rarely interact with Legolas and Legolas himself spends all his time looking confused and out of place, attempting to keep up the witty banter by himself and looking stupid in the process.

In comes the Death Note movie. Some elaboration on L's death is needed to fully appreciate this. Light is responsible for killing L, Rem a Shinigami is the one who does the deed. The reason for this is that she is in love with Misa Amane, the second Kira, and refuses to let her die. The rule, is that a shinigami can only shorten life, not lengthen it. Whenever a Shinigami lengthens life by stopping the person who is going to kill the person, they are instantly killed and their remaining life is added to the person they saved. Now to take it back to L's death. In the Death Note that L, Light and the Kira Task Team discover, there is a rule at the back, put in by Light that says the person who writes in the Note book must continually write names in the book, otherwise they will die in 13 days. This rule, effectively ruled Light and Misa out as suspects in the Kira case because they were locked up under continual surveillance well past 13 days. L always suspected Light to be Kira and even after uncovering the Death Note was still highly suspicious of Light. So to test whether the rule was correct or not, L decided he was going to write a name in the Death Note and if he didn't die in 13 days, was going to arrest Light and Misa. Light convinces Rem that by doing this, L will be responsible for killing Misa eventually and that Rem has to kill L to save Misa. So that's how he dies in the anime. In the film however, L always suspected himself to die very shortly after catching Kira so he went ahead and wrote his own name down. A rule states that if two names have been written in the Death Note, the second name is invalid. By writing his own name down (to die in 23 days), Rems attempt doesn't kill him and he catches L out as Kira.

For me, this is one of the two endings I would have been happy with and personally I consider it my Cannon ending. It just feels so much better than the actual end of the Anime because the relationship between L and Light comes to a conclusive end, with one side emerging the victor, which is what I wanted after seeing Light win in the anime.

So escapist when have you noticed a Retconn working better than the original?

 

[madwarper]

I thought the way BTAS retconned Mr. Freeze's origin story was universally lauded. The episode won an Emmy for its writing.

Captcha: hello sweetie ... Captcha, you're trying to seduce me.

 

[Dragonbums]

Retconning only works when the original thing you did is so bad, that fans of the series are willing to have it officially re written so they know it doesn't exist anymore canon wise.

Mass Effect 3 retconned so hard it hurts. However, that was because they forgot half of the lore and physics they wrote and established in the last two titles.

Sonic Generations could've retconned Sonic 06 by deciding not to add any stages from that broken game into it. For some reason however they didn't.
At least Nintendo's CD-I garbage was funny. Sonic 06 didn't even have that going for them.

 

[lacktheknack]

Myst's incessant retconning is really hit-and-miss. The "we may not actually be fiction" representative "Dr. Watson" claims the enormous differences between Myst and Myst IV happened because "we wished to give a simplified version of reality in the first game, as to not overwhelm the player".

What this means is that in Myst, Myst II AND the various Myst books, a "trap book" is a book that has been verbally damaged (yes, that's a thing) so that the linker gets trapped midway through the link. This means they're permanently stuck in the void between worlds until released (either the book is repaired, or they get knocked out of the void by someone else entering). In Myst IV, however, it's suddenly revealed that the trap books in the first game were actually just "no-way-back" books - books that linked to worlds with no linking book coming back - and the books that got burned were just linking books connected to the "master book".

This was a good retcon, as it allowed for more exploration of Sirrus and Achenar, fixed a rather alarming case of good-guy infanticide and generally allowed for a more cohesive story. They didn't say that "trap books" don't exist, which is good, because that would mean that game two was impossible.

A bad retcon, however, was the introduction of instancing in Uru. The idea was based off an idea from the Book of Atrus, where causing impossible events to occur in the linking book simply switches the book's link to a new location that closely matches the results of your events. In the case of the Book of Atrus, it came from Atrus undoing the damage Gehn caused to a book linking to an island of tribals, which he did by literally refilling the ocean by essentially writing "Actually, this didn't happen", but upon doing so, the tribals suddenly lost all their skills they gained from Gehn, artifacts disappeared, and the island became more "organic" and less suitable to civilization. This happened because the book couldn't account for the sudden refilling of the ocean, so it switched to an identical world with the ocean filled that Gehn had never visited.

Unfortunately, They changed the way that "instancing" works for Uru, and while this looked like a good way at first to explain why there are multiple copies of each world in Uru, it falls apart under scrutiny. Why can the Nexus hold billions of books? If it's because of multiple instances, how does it know which one is yours? Does it write the books itself? Why is there a "standard" instance of the main cavern? Why is it that instance? How does starting the Great Zero affect ALL instances of Ae'Gura? Why do we act like Bevins are various islands in the cavern when they're clearly instances? How did D'ni society function when there were near-infinite instances for traitors to hide in?

Etc.

Furthermore, in Uru, you can use your personal Relto book, and it will follow you through the link. This is like someone eating their own head.

TLDR: It depends on the retcon.

 

[badgersprite]

It's not actually a retcon if the change is in an adaptation. Retcon refers to retroactive continuity, meaning you've changed something later on in the same continuity and therefore you've retroactively changed what came beforehand. Adaptations are free to change whatever they want because they aren't bound by any kind of continuity, though that's a problem in and of itself.

Sometimes retcons can sort of work, but ones that do are usually only things like when a character was acting really bizarrely in a particular storyline and a later writer chooses to retroactively explain it so that they were under mind control or something like that which in hindsight makes that character's actions much more understandable and preserves their characterisation. Of course, those kinds of retcons tend to be really overdone in comic books which has kind of ruined their effectiveness.

Basically, the only real functional purpose of deliberately employing a retcon is to fix past mistakes, or maybe to include backstory or information that wasn't in your mind initially when the story began but later became part of the story or character and still fits with everything that happened and generally makes more sense, like say giving a character more fleshed out motivations.

 

[FalloutJack]

Time travel!

I'm surprised nobody mentioned Doctor Who, a sci-fi show so long that all the holes and plot confusions from one story to the next are more or less handwaved by "Hey, it's time travel, baby. Whole histories can change.", and it works. Only the most obsessed of Doctor Who fans actually give a damn that something that couldn't happen in the TARDIS eventually did at some point later when they might've forgot.

Additional: Longstanding comedy shows like Red Dwarf don't matter, because of the Rule of Funny.

 

[Pink Gregory]

Additional: Longstanding comedy shows like Red Dwarf don't matter, because of the Rule of Funny.

Such to the point that the writers point out the plot-holes and inconsistencies in the DVD liner notes.

I like that attitude

 

[Thaluikhain]

Additional: Longstanding comedy shows like Red Dwarf don't matter, because of the Rule of Funny.

Assuming the newer stuff is funny, though.

Now, Red Dwarf rectonned all sorts of things, but I really didn't like the new Kochanski. The old Kochanski was much more working class, and fit better. Suddenly having her as an upper class generic movie star type that had been in a relationship with Dave...nah.

 

[DoPo]

It's not actually a retcon if the change is in an adaptation. Retcon refers to retroactive continuity, meaning you've changed something later on in the same continuity and therefore you've retroactively changed what came beforehand. Adaptations are free to change whatever they want because they aren't bound by any kind of continuity, though that's a problem in and of itself.

*sigh* Yes, I noticed that. I'm not sure if OP's example can be further from a retcon.

As for when does it work...really hard to say. It's mostly judged on a case by case basis, I don't think there are rules that govern it. I suppose it's better if the retcon does as little ripples as possible and/or tries to fix more minor stuff. Can't think of many of these, though, because they try not to stand out as much. I can only remember the retcon from the Legacy of Kain series - in Blood Omen, the Circle of Nine gets attacked by Vorador and that happens 5000 years before the actual game begins. Later it was retconned to 500 years. But the time pretty much doesn't matter - the time period is not explored nor does it come into play. I don't even know why the retcon was, maybe to be more believable, I suppose - 5 centureies vs 5 millenia.

 

[mrhappy1489]

It's not actually a retcon if the change is in an adaptation. Retcon refers to retroactive continuity, meaning you've changed something later on in the same continuity and therefore you've retroactively changed what came beforehand. Adaptations are free to change whatever they want because they aren't bound by any kind of continuity, though that's a problem in and of itself.

*sigh* Yes, I noticed that. I'm not sure if OP's example can be further from a retcon.

As for when does it work...really hard to say. It's mostly judged on a case by case basis, I don't think there are rules that govern it. I suppose it's better if the retcon does as little ripples as possible and/or tries to fix more minor stuff. Can't think of many of these, though, because they try not to stand out as much. I can only remember the retcon from the Legacy of Kain series - in Blood Omen, the Circle of Nine gets attacked by Vorador and that happens 5000 years before the actual game begins. Later it was retconned to 500 years. But the time pretty much doesn't matter - the time period is not explored nor does it come into play. I don't even know why the retcon was, maybe to be more believable, I suppose - 5 centureies vs 5 millenia.

Yeah I realise that Retconn was completely the wrong choice of word for this situation, I just couldn't think of anything at the time. Honestly the point I was trying to make was that I prefer the movie ending to the anime one. That could just be a preference of adaptation, but I guess it could be called a retconn if you assume that some people see that as its cannon ending now, which would come under retconn. I don't think many people would, but I'd be stoked if that was considered the cannon ending now. Captcha: I have fallen, please Captcha, I have fallen much further than this.