Daily Entertainment: Out of Left Field Edition

[damncompass]

Good morning, Milliways.

My next couple weeks are full of chaos, session, and stress. That being said, is there anyone who might be able to take the next two weeks' worth of Thursdays and Fridays for me? Next week, I'm going to be insane, and the next week, I might take time off. The dates in question would be May 1&2 and May 8&9. Thanks!

In the DE department, however, in dubious honour of the effing curve ball canon just threw me... (And I have a sneaking suspicion that I'll never fully know what is going on with Joshua in particular):

Retconning! Is there something in your canon that was said, then retconned? Is there something that feels like a retcon that isn't?

Comments

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

The original version of Fallout 3 ends with one of two people dead: either Sentinel Sarah Lyons, or the Lone Wanderer. If you don't make Sarah turn on the purifier and you don't turn it on either, the purifier explodes and both of you die. Regardless, that's it, that's the original end- no warning, you go straight from the climactic battle and the confrontation with Colonel Autumn to 'you die, she dies, or everybody dies', and when the screen goes black it comes up on Ron Perlman's final voiceover before the credits.

This was retconned with the third piece of downloadable content, Broken Steel, from 'you die, she dies, or everybody dies' to 'you go into it thinking you or she are going to die, but both of you get overwhelmed by radiation and spend two weeks in a coma and eventually wake up in the Citadel and the game goes on'. It didn't really offer an explanation as to why or how, but at that point I didn't care. My character wasn't dead.

[runningred]

Jason is from the DC universe. It's been reconned so many times now he doesn't fully know his own origin story any more. Hell, the whole universe has been rebooting at least three times in the modern era. Not to mention that every offshoot comic, animated movie and tv series changes his story ever so slightly. No wonder he's such a mess.

[ceitfianna]

Maybe its why he and Charles get along, I think the X-Men have some of the most confusing continuity in the Marvelverse.

[runningred]

Considering how often their reboots coincide, they must be parallel universes.

[sdelmonte]

Two things that indirectly connect to Howard Stark in the MCU:

1. It was something of a running gag in Iron Man 1 that SHIELD was this new agency with a really clunky name, and it took till the end of the film for someone to figure out that cool acronym. Suddenly, in Iron Man 2, SHIELD was much older. And by now it's clear than it was called SHIELD from day one. Ruins a perfectly good running gag. (I will also add that Iron Man 2 makes it sound like Nick Fury was there when SHIELD was formally founded, and that seems to be retconned as well, judging by Winter Soldier.)

2. In Iron Man 2, Tony apparently has a Captain America shield, left in all his father's junk. Which didn't really make a lot of sense anyway. But Cap had the shield all along. So what was up with that?

[bjornwilde]

As to #2, I just figure it was a failed prototype and not the real thing, especially since it was in pieces and not complete.

[kd7sov]

Two words: Dark Dawn.

Certainly, a lot of what it contradicted was headcanon of one flavor or another. But even taking that into account... the first part of Dark Dawn takes place entirely within the area covered by the first game. One place is destroyed, fine. One place is unaccountably relocated a considerable distance east. One place is replaced by two vaguely similar places, with no mention of the old one. Several places are not seen, but that's understandable. And in the wake of thirty years of geographic upheaval, there is suddenly an "Endless Wall" (which has two perfectly good ends, what even) stretching perfectly intact across half the continent, which has apparently been there for thousands of years.

[bjornwilde]

Brimstone and Andrea Nash get a pass on this one. They're from book canons that don't contradict themselves.

Jess's major retcon is that her father was working for HYDRA. Which I kind of like, to be honest. I do wish things were vague on if her mother was dead or not, just to make the waters with Madame Hydra murkier.

Hank's canon seems to be making him able to shift from human to beast when he gets "upset", if interviews are to be believed. I guess this makes sense (as much as X-Men science makes sense) since he used Raven's DNA for the formula that made him furry in the first place, but it is a little off compared to the comic and previous X-Men movies. If this is the case, I will likely make it that his body is actually still mutating from the formula and at some point he will be stuck in his furry body. I, also, miss the cat-like beast design of XMFC.

Mulan...when last we saw Mulan on screen, it was heavily implied that she joined RObin and his Merry Men. Now, in the second half of season 3, Robin and his men are in Storybrook but there is no Mulan. Grrr. I have a tentative plan that Mulan got waylaid by Zelena and thrown into a portal to some other realm for fear of Mulan's sword interfering with her plans.

Quin doesn't have any retcons but he almost did (link has a few medium sized images). Had the Clone Wars gotten a seventh season, it looks like they were going to be doing his infiltration of Count Dooku's organization. Beyond that, he would have confronted Maul, fought either Obi-Wan or Dooku himself (it's hard to tell by the storyboards exactly who the bearded man is he's standing triumphant over) and either rescues Asajj Ventris or carries off her body (again hard to tell from one panel.

Anton doesn't really have a retcon, though movie canon is different than book canon. In movie canon, he uses the Chalk of Destiny to make himself human again while in the books it is used for someone else, though for someone very close to him and his future.

[minkhollow]

ahahahahaha ahahahahahaha hahahahahaha haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa YES ABOUT THAT CURVE BALL. (For those wondering: We're having a lot of fun noodling with it in side stuff, but it's still not going to make an appearance in Millicanon proper. It'd be doing so already. There's no way we could put it off until we hit... whatever S5 equivalent we even end up with.)

As for my others:

Villains By Necessity can't throw curve balls unless Eve Forward writes a sequel, but I don't think that's very likely.

Percy Jackson 'verse: SURPRISE ROMANS. I really do think that twist could've at least been mentioned in the first series, even if it was just 'oh, we don't talk about the Roman aspects.' Especially after Apollo FREAKING SAID HE WASN'T THE SUN GOD UNTIL THE ROMANS GAVE HIM THAT.

Discworld: Well, Imp pretty much disappears after Soul Music, which makes me sad. But the epic plots stopped retconning themselves out of existence and being allowed to stick around as of The Truth, so.

Harry Potter: I don't think Regulus having tried to bust out of the Death Eaters surprised anyone as of 'R.A.B.' other than harry, because he was too despondent to care about the mystery in the moment.

OUaT: There's a reason I didn't even attempt to voice-test Ruby until canon covered Red's backstory. TALK ABOUT A CURVE BALL. I'm not keeping up with the show anymore, so other than its habit of giving people prominent episodes and then doing nothing with them, I don't know about retcons as such.

Special mention for Woolly: I honestly wasn't expecting to hear about him again, and it was natural to assume he was the agent Helena killed that spooked her into asking to be bronzed. It had to be someone she was close to, to hit her like that. Aaaaand then they did the pirate-hoard thing and distinctly said the agent killed in action was Wolcott.

So, well, Helena was poking at time travel... XD

[yakalskovich]

Now I sorta want to know what happened...

[damncompass]

I can whitetext a summary if you're interested.

[yakalskovich]

Yes please!! I don't even follow W13 all that closely, but I do love the premise, and the charries as you play them!

SPOILERS WHITETEXTED IN THIS COMMENT.

[damncompass]

In the s4 finale, there was a bomb dropped that "Claire was still alive", which.... basically dropped another sister on the Donovan family. We didn't know anything about Claire until this week, when we found out that Claire was slightly younger than Joshua, and she was actually whammied by an Artifact which was subsequently burned. The resulting Clairenado (the Artifact causes kinetic outbursts fueled by anger) caused the crash that killed the Donovan parents. Claire survived, but was put into an Artifact-coma by the Warehouse because they couldn't de-whammy her. Claud found out.

As far as we know thus far, Joshua knows shit-all about anything that's going on. He's conspicuously (at least conspicuously to me) absent.

There!

[yakalskovich]

Wow, that IS a curve ball!!

[damncompass]

I know.

A few more spoilers: We don't know what Joshua knows or doesn't know, because there haven't been any blatent references to him yet. I'm hoping that he'll come back, because we really can't resolve this without him actually being there.

We won't be doing anything with it in-bar because we've already established other things, but, yeah.

[yakalskovich]

Ongoing canons can be very mean, but as you can see from my comment further down, not even 19th century canons are exempt from that effect.

[ceitfianna]

Yeah, the Surprise Romans are why I've never gotten into the second series. I know there are some great characters in there but it all made me go huh. Though in the Kane Chronicles, he figured out how to allude to the other mythologies easily enough with a line about them being across the river. He knows how to do that and it would have made the second series flow easier.

[minkhollow]

Lost Hero was good, and I like many things I've heard about the second series (particularly the twist with Nico!), but... SURPRISE ROMANS. I just can't. There was plenty of room to make that less jarring.

[not_his_pa]

I liked Lost Hero as well and I've flipped through some of the other books but the retcon jarred me.

[death_gone_mad]

The only retcon that affects Amascut directly is the rework of Prince Ali Rescue, but really, that just retconned Keli Raven into being another of Amascut's disguises.

The developers have been doing a retcon of sorts for quests created early in the history of the game, but most haven't been straight retcons. More like a hiding of unimportant details and revelation of a more important or entertaining (less grindy) story. Or just expansion and embellishment of the original. The replacement of Romeo and Juliet with Gunnar's Ground, the replacement of Prince Ali Rescue with Stolen Hearts and Diamond in the Rough, and the replacement of Black Knights' Fortress with Death of Chivalry are instances of this. The reworks of Demon Slayer and Rune Mysteries are straight up retcons though. Wally, an important hero (well, used to be) disappears from history because of the former and the secrets of runecrafting were never forgotten and the entire history and nature of the Wizard's Tower changed because of the later.

There are a group of players who are peeved that an April Fools' Joke got retconned into being an actual god with a backstory. And, nope, not Evil Chicken! It is Brassica Prime, God of Cabbages and Deliciousness.

[damncompass]

Brassica should meet Anoia, the Goddess of Things That Get Caught in Drawers.

[yakalskovich]

Teja came in with strict views about what women can and can't do, from his original canon -- and then I discovered a side canon/prequel the author wrote ten years later where the main character is an Ostrogoth woman, Hilde, married to a Vandal prince, witnessing the downfall of the Vandals in northern Africa which happened before Byzantium attacked the Ostrogoths -- and she grew up with Teja, and trained at fighting with him, and finally ends up going into the final battle with her husband... Yay for kickass fighting women in 19th century historical novels, but I had to retcon Millicanon mightily because it now had turned out that Teja approved of women fighting after all.

[genarti]

Enjolras: His age, although I tend to think the mistake was the later version given. Other than that... I mean, there are a few similar minor continuity errors, but I can't think of anything I'd actually call a retcon. Ditto for Cosette. (Who also has a minor age thing that I'm pretty sure is just accidentally unclear wording -- Hugo makes it sound like Fantine is pregnant, rather than that she has a toddler underfoot, but then several months later Cosette is more than two years old.)

Thor: Not really, in movieverse. They often keep things ambiguous so that when they decide later it's not technically a retcon, but I haven't noticed any actual contradiction yet. --Oh, sdelmonte rightly points out some inconsistency about SHIELD. The Iron Man movies are not my primary focus, so I'd forgotten that.

However, for the comics version: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

Clare: Less retconning, more a) successive 'everything you thought you knew was a lie' reveals about the things canon cares about focusing on (Claymores, yoma, our main characters) and b) inconsistent/illogical worldbuilding for things canon doesn't care about (economics, economy, other logistics of a working society).

Trowa: Depends a lot on what you take as canon. Uhhh, it's been a long workday; I am 100% certain that the movie Endless Waltz retcons some stuff from the series, but I can't think of what precisely. OH other than the Gundam designs. All the Gundams got upgrades for the movie, despite having theoretically done nothing but sit in storage waiting to be destroyed for the past year. Most notably, Heero Yuy's Gundam, Wing Zero, whose previously robot-y gliding wings suddenly acquired ACTUAL FEATHERS MADE OF METAL for no apparent reason except aesthetics and symbolism. See icon.

River and Regan: The Reavers' nature gets retconned, though arguably that's an 'everything you thought you knew is wrong' reveal. Simon's rescue of River gets retconned -- in the series, he paid for it and made arrangements, but there's no implication that he was actually there, and then in the movie he's right there visiting the Academy with James Bond gadgetry to break her out personally.

[street_sparrow]

I read somewhere an argument that we only hear the 'paid for it and made arrangements' version of the story from Simon, and it's quite possible he was lying for whatever reason. To make himself seem like a harmless-yet-dedicated rich boy, maybe, rather than more action-oriented.

[genarti]

Yeah, it's possible, and that's a valid fanwank... but I'm still kind of dubious, because in all the rest of the series, whenever action-oriented stuff comes up, Simon is extremely civilian-rich-boy-ishly bad at it. He's good at plans, he's okay at deception as long as it's within certain parameters (and pretty bad at it outside of them), but he's not someone on the ground doing Hollywood spy hijinks. If all that is a front, it's one he's really really dedicated to.

Which he could be -- that could be a long game that would have been revealed in season 2 or 3 -- but since that never happened in what we actually see, I feel safe calling it a retcon.

[street_sparrow]

This is true. On his own ground, in the Core, he's brilliant at bluffing his way around. Anywhere else... noooot so much.

[ceitfianna]

Most of mine are okay on curve-balls, it helps that most of them are closed canons.

There are so many versions of the Robin Hood story that I've cherry picked the stuff I liked.

The movie continuity, how XMFC has major differences from the other movies and then I look at the trailers for Days of Future Past and pray for kindness from the canon gods. I know that Charles regains the use of his legs and loses them all the time in the comics but it hasn't happened yet in the movies. I'm really wary about how they're going to do that and dirty, long haired Charles has me side-eyeing. I'm trying to trust since some of the viral stuff has been fascinating but X-Men and continuity have never been the best of friends.

Ivan's canon is open but there haven't been any major things about him as he's a prominent secondary character. When he finally got a book as the main character, there were no surprises just him coming into focus.

William's is closed but the movie has some issues with when in time it happened, that's why I handwave William's dates. He's from some time in the 1870s.

Oddly enough for the canon, Moist hasn't had too many retcons or curve balls thrown his way. I'm not a fan of how he's written in the latest book but he's not the only one who doesn't feel like himself in it.

I would actually love canon to go, hey, this is what the Wallmakers were really like since I've done a lot of handwaving for Sameth.

Jane, Tumnus and the Pirate King are all from closed canons and nothing in them surprised me.

Demeter's from Greek Mythology and pushing it into the future so no problems.

[bjornwilde]

...but X-Men and continuity have never been the best of friends.

That is probably the best description of the X-Men I have ever read. =D

[ceitfianna]

Yeah and honestly if it doesn't work then Charles can end up slightly AU. I think most Marvel pups do in the name of trying to make sense of it all.

[hasthehighground]

If no one else has offered, I should be able to handle DEs for the 1st&2nd and 8&9th! I'm in AZ, so they might show up a little later than otherwise, but I suppose I could post it late the night/early morning before :).

[damncompass]

Thank you muchly! It'll just take a lot of stress off of me. :D

A bit later's no big deal.