Imaginary Worlds - Retcon-apalooza

Episode Date: March 19, 2020

We're craving an escape into our favorite fantasy worlds, but fans are complaining that all the "retconning" is ruining their suspension of disbelief. Why is retroactive continuity so controversial? Olivia Dolphin and Hayley Milliman discuss how JK Rowling’s decrees have unraveled The Potterverse. Nick Randall and Mac Rogers grapple with recent revelations in Doctor Who. Laurie Ulster defends Star Trek’s familial reshuffling, I try to make sense of the Star Wars canon, and author Andrew J. Friedenthal explains why rewriting the history of fantasy worlds is similar to revising history in real life. Here’s a link to Andrew’s book on retconning: https://www.amazon.com/Retcon-Game-Retroactive-Continuity-Hyperlinking/dp/1496811321 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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We've never smelled so good. Shop Old Spice Total Body Deodorant now. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about science fiction and other fantasy genres. I'm Eric Malinsky. Now, that is not how I usually start the show. But if I claim that it was and then went back and re-recorded all my intros, that would be a retcon. Retcon is short for retroactive continuity. The term comes from comic books, where there's always a need to tell dramatic stories,

where the characters go through big changes, but the characters can't age. So those marriages or deaths or secret identities being revealed always end up getting undone. Andrew Friedenthal wrote a book about retconning, and he says the fan backlash to retcons really began with DC Comics' Crisis on Infinite Earths storyline in the 1980s,

where they changed the backstory of many of the characters. And so that's really, I think, where you started to have a lot of kind of fan backlash. And, you know, who knows what would have happened if the internet had existed in the time of Crisis on Infinite Earths. But the fan press certainly was able to vent their frustrations enough as it was. Now, it's harder to retcon in live action because you have actors aging in real time and the storylines are more linear. But the amount of retconning in science fiction and fantasy right now is unprecedented. And over the last few years, the retconning has fueled a lot of online angst, pitting fans against each other or against creators.

But some of the retcons are revitalizing old franchises, creating new and exciting storylines. And today, we're going to look at how retconning is changing four different franchises, and why it's a big deal for the fans who just want to escape to their favorite fantasy worlds. And heads up, it's hard to talk about a retcon without giving away spoilers. Let's begin with Star Wars. Now, retconning was already happening back in 1980. Darth Vader was originally not supposed to be Luke's father. That's why they brought back Obi-Wan Kenobi as a ghost, so there could be a scene where Luke says to him, you told me Darth Vader killed my father. And the ghost of Obi-Wan says, he did from a certain point of view. I mean, that worked so well that as a kid, I didn't even realize that was a retcon. But it was obvious to me and everybody else that they did not plan on

making Luke and Leia brother and sister, or they never would have had that steamy kiss in Empire Strikes Back. Then came these special editions where George Lucas inserted scenes and altered the meaning of scenes from the original trilogy. We might even call that the most extreme retconning in that it's the only one where you can't see the original anymore. You know, every other retcon I can think of, you can still legally access the previous material. Whereas with Star Wars, you know, there is only the version of the special editions now that are commercially available. And of course, after that came the prequels where he retconned almost everything. There was actually a sketch on the animated TV show Robot Chicken making fun of that. And they even got Mark Hamill to do the voice of Luke Skywalker.

You killed my father! No, Luke. I am your father. That's not true! That's impossible! And Princess Leia is your sister. That's not true! That's... improbable! And the Empire will be defeated by Ewoks. That's... very unlikely. And as a child, I built C-3PO.

Huh? And the Force? Well, that's just microscopic bacteria in your bloodstream called midichlorians. Look, if you're not going to take this seriously, I'm out. But the retconning went into hyper drive with the sequel trilogy. J.J. Abrams began to construct a story with The Force Awakens. Then Disney handed the franchise to Rian Johnson, who disagreed with many of Abrams' ideas and undid a lot of those story elements. But that movie was so divisive for the fans that Disney brought J.J.

Abrams back to re-retcon everything in Rise of Skywalker. For instance, Abrams set up this mystery around Rey's parents. In the next movie, we learned her parents were nobodies. End of story. And then Abrams came back and made it so that her lineage is so important, the fate of the entire universe depends on it. Now, personally, I'm in the Rian Johnson camp. But the tug of war between the different factions of fans online got so vicious, it was depressing. And other fans have just begun to disengage, declaring that the whole Skywalker storyline is a contradictory, incomprehensible mess. And it's funny because so many fans

complained that Lucas was tinkering with Star Wars to death. But we had to admit, he made up this world. He had the right to do with it what he wanted, including selling it to Disney. But the most extreme case of a creator going full Lucas without any sign of giving up control is J.K. Rowling. And that's where things get a little bit more complicated. Retcon number two, the Potterverse. Now, I have been deep into Star Wars fandom since 1977, but to take the pulse of Harry Potter fandom, I needed to talk with some Millennials. The first big

retcon that JK Rowling did was in 2007. Right after the books were finished, she declared that Dumbledore had been gay all along. Hayley Milliman was one of many Potter fans who reacted to that revelation with a bit of skepticism. It seemed that she was trying to grab headlines is kind of how it came across to me as it didn't seem like a really genuine character choice because if it had been it should have been in in the books to begin with. Olivia Dolphin is also very active in Harry Potter fandom and she edits the literary magazine Wizards in Space. At first she gave Rowling the benefit of the doubt. Because the series is told from Harry's point of view,

there's so much that's left out of the series anyways. So I think that does give J.K. Rowling the option as an author to play with some of the holes that were in Harry's vision. But for Olivia, the real problem began with the prequels. Like, one of the many retcons in the Fantastic Beasts movies is just the fact that Professor McGonagall is in them. Originally, it said that McGonagall was born in 1935. In Fantastic Beasts 2, she's shown in the movies, which takes place in the early 1920s.

And she's also shown in a flashback, which would be like the 1910s. So they just totally shifted McGonagall's timeline. the 1910s. So they just totally shifted McGonagall's timeline. And it felt like a cheap trick. They're trying to bring in old characters into this new franchise to make you feel more connected to Harry Potter. And then there's Nagini. In the books, she was Voldemort's loyal, evil, giant serpent. In the prequels, we learn that she was an Asian woman who was fated to turn into a giant snake. Haley says if that was an attempt at diversity, it did not work for her. I'm an Asian woman. There's one Asian woman in all of Harry Potter, and her name is Cho Chang. And so to find that the next one was this woman who's under this curse and who is then

enslaved to Baltimore and again has been and was seen as a symbol of evil through most of the original canon. It was like, it's insulting, frankly. It's like, oh, yeah, don't worry, there is a woman of color, but she's been there all long. But not only that, like, you know, you probably hated her this whole time. The retconning kept going with the play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, which is about Harry's son going to Hogwarts. Some of the retcons were logistical, like the time turner can now bring you back years instead of hours. But the biggest change was in the casting. Hermione is played by a Black actress. Olivia saw the play. She thought the actress was

great. What I didn't care for is that instead of J.K. Rowling just like owning the casting choice and saying, well, you know, people of different colors can play white characters and, you know, we never said Hermione was white. And you can actually go into the text and see places where she'll say Hermione turned pink or Hermione's white face was sticking out from behind the pillar. So it just feels like she's trying to, like, put herself in a better light instead of owning up and saying, I didn't do diversity super well, you know, in the books. And then there are the retcons that jk rowling revealed over twitter the most baffling one was in january of 2019 when she tweeted quote hogwarts didn't always have bathrooms before adopting muggle plumbing methods in the 18th century witches and wizards simply relieved themselves wherever they stood and vanished the evidence. And that was truly when I lost it, I think. Because it sounds like you want it so badly to be like an April Fool's joke.

And it wasn't. There's so many questions like, is that the first spell you learn? I hope so. I would hope so, because who's doing it? Yeah. Like, you know, you're not allowed to do magic until you're 11 and then you're not supposed to do magic when you're not in school. So that means like you have like 14 year old kids that are going home and they're not allowed to vanish their own business. There's something about it just truly did not add up to me. allowed to vanish their own business. There's something about it just truly did not add up to me. I asked Olivia, what about trying to ignore J.K. Rowling and saying,

we have the original books, nothing can change that. J.K. Rowling, first and foremost, is a mystery writer. And I've always said this about her books, like she loves mysteries. And a lot of the books tend to read as a classic whodunit. Her clues and her world building and the way that the magic works and the canon of everything fits really well together. It's a really thought out book and there's very, very few plot holes in the whole series. She was very particular about her canon and she taught her fans to be very particular about the details. And so we learn to comb line by line, symbol by symbol within the books. And now that she's going backwards and changing things and changing when McGonagall is alive and changing the background of Nagini or adding these things that don't really make sense,

it takes the mystery of Harry Potter and the passion that the fans developed of trying to solve what was going to happen. It takes the fun out of that because we don't have any rules to play by anymore. Hayley agrees. There's a number of reasons why I don't engage with Harry Potter

as much as I have or as much as I used to. But I think that the retconning has really played a big role in that. I think it's just kind of, it feels like it's grounded in a lot of like Rowling's desires to stay relevant or to make some kind of commentary and not for the sake of kind of the novels themselves. And it's, it's ironic because her doing that has really eliminated what she did successfully before, you know, so she was, she was creating these worlds before that felt very inclusive and felt like a place that a lot of people wanted to be in. And now that she's kind of trying to like consciously make them inclusive, it becomes decidedly less so. I really don't engage with the series very much anymore. And I deeply loved it enough that I like hosted Harry Potter

fan events across the country. So in the last few years, I've just kind of completely fallen off. I mean, I used to read the books at least once a year, and I haven't read them in years at this point. Harry Potter and Star Wars both began as limited series. But the market is hungry for content. J.K. Rowling and George Lucas were not ready to let go. And neither were the fans. And when Lucas sold Star Wars to Disney, he knew perfectly well they were going to open everything back up again.

And as fans, we do want more content. And we want the new stuff to feel fresh and connect with what came before. Also science fiction and fantasy right now are so into mysteries with surprise plot twists and easter eggs that only the hardcore fans will spot. And if you're telling stories like that I mean it's hard to avoid retconning. Telling stories like that, I mean, it's hard to avoid retconning. But what happens with franchises that are older, where the original creators are long gone, and the series has a momentum that just keeps going and going? That's where I think the most interesting and creative retconning is happening. We will teleport there in just a moment. baking soda. It's made with pH balancing minerals and crafted with skin conditioning oils.

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Retcon number three, Doctor Who. A few years ago, I did a mini-series on Doctor Who. It is one of the few times that I've covered something that I did not know much about, but by the time I was done, I had become a full-on fan and continue to be so. And this last season of Doctor Who had one of the biggest retcons in the history of the show, and I am really excited about it. Now, the main character, the Doctor, is part of an alien race called Time Lords. They fly around in ships that can go anywhere in space and time. And when a Time Lord dies, they can regenerate into a new human form. And that is how we've had 13 actors playing the Doctor since 1963.

And the last time the Doctor regenerated, he morphed into a woman for the first time, played by Jodie Whittaker. And the Doctor, you know, remembers everything that happened to him or her before that regeneration. And, spoiler alert, in the last season, the Doctor discovered a Doctor we have never seen before, played by the actress Jo Martin. At first, Jodie Whittaker's Doctor thinks that this must be a future version of her. But this other doctor doesn't recognize her and says, no, you must be a future version of me. I've never been anything like you. Trust me, I'd remember, especially that shirt.

So would I if I'd ever been you, which I haven't. What? That's not possible. Unless it is. But what would that mean? It doesn't make sense. Stop doing that. Same brain.

It turns out this is a previous incarnation of the Doctor from before the entire run of 13 Doctors that we've seen on television. Somebody has erased the Doctor's memories. And eventually she discovers that a long time ago, she was the first and only Time Lord. She was an orphan who had come through this mysterious portal. And the other Time Lords experimented on her, stealing her regenerative powers for themselves. And before they wiped her memories, they used her as part of a secret

government agency. So there are countless other versions of the Doctor from the past doing things that the current Doctor would be mortified by. One of the Doctor's enemies thinks that this revelation is going to devastate her. But she feels invigorated. You think that could destroy me? You think that makes me lesser? It makes me more. I contain multitudes more than I ever thought. This idea did not come out of nowhere. There was a Doctor Who episode in the 1970s which hinted at the idea of previous incarnations of the Doctor, but that episode had always been dismissed as an outlier. Now a lot of fans are angry, saying that the whole canon is ruined. But I thought it was brilliant. I mean, I am a new Doctor Who fan,

so I checked in with Nick Randall, who's a lifelong fan. He also works for the BBC and hosts the podcast SNS Online. I was so, so excited because I just thought, I mean, it was such a mystery. This totally floored me. It hasn't ruined the show at all. If anything, it's enhanced it.

What Nick loves about this retcon is that it goes to the heart of the show. The title is Doctor Who because the Doctor's real name and backstory had always been a mystery to other characters. Now the Doctor is a mystery to herself. It's allowed the mystery to extend. Doctor Who? I mean, there's so much more stories to be told rather than just the standard set of stories. We've got backstory to explore now. Mac Rogers is a writer and another lifelong Doctor Who fan. On the plus side,

he says that discovering other doctors is a great way to add diversity to a show that's featured only one female doctor since 1963 and no people of color playing the doctor until this year. On the other hand... Just out of pure long-term fan habit and numerical association with certain characters that I'm very fond of.

I don't like the idea that I can't say the second doctor anymore and think of Patrick Troughton. I can't make a substantive defense of that. It's just that like having a certain numerical label for different incarnations the Doctor, characters that I feel more affection for than almost any other fictional characters, that makes me unhappy in a way that maybe isn't substantive, but is still deeply felt. He doesn't have a problem with the Doctor discovering a secret past, although he wishes it wasn't so much like Jason Bourne. His big issue with this retcon is that the Doctor is now the one and only original Time Lord, and her regenerative powers are greater than she ever realized.

I don't like the idea that the Doctor was almost this sort of like, almost this figure discovered like Moses in the rushes in the river with this supernatural power that no other being has. What I've always found inspiring was that the Doctor grew up in a stuffy, very powerful, but very stuffy bureaucratic society. They had a lot of power to do good in the universe, but chose mostly not to exercise that power unless it was in their own interests. The Doctor was kind of repulsed by that hypocrisy and that behavior and was also quite bored living there. He made a choice that any of them could have made, but didn't. The doctor was the one who left and dedicated their life to helping people and exploring and making friends. And that choice is incredibly inspiring to me.

I do see his point. I mean, the Doctor was defined by a choice to be different, to be better. Now the character is a chosen one. And chosen ones are a dime a dozen in fantasy genres. I think that the writer should work very hard to make the retcon a better idea than the thing that was there before.

To get another perspective on this, I talked with Andrew Friedenthal again, who wrote the book on retconning. In his book, he actually created a yardstick to measure whether retcons are being used well or not. There's the ability to use retconning to kind of tell more, to create more stories. And I think there's the ability to use retconning to kind of tell more, to create more stories. And I think there's the ability to use retconning to shut down stories. And I am always much more of a fan of former. And Andrew thinks the debate about retcons is similar to the debate happening among constitutional scholars about how closely we should stick to the literal words in the constitution or to use fan speak how closely should we stick to the original canon and i think that's very similar to with you know constitutional scholars that that there is a way of looking at it where you're just looking at the original documents and saying that it is inflexible

it doesn't change and it's just exactly what the words on the page are. And then there's others that say, well, no, it was a document written in a time with a context and that context has changed. And should we still be governed by wording written for a particular context when our own context has changed so radically? Which brings me to the final retcon that I want to explore, Star Trek. Now, here you have a world created by founding father, Gene Roddenberry, who had progressive

ideas for his time. But the original series was primarily white and male. It went boldly where no man had gone before, on a 1960s TV budget. In 2017, the show Star Trek Discovery was launched. It had a very diverse cast with openly gay characters. And the technology was more high-tech than the original series, even though it took place before the original series. To start, the show was trolled by bigots.

But then on the other hand, you had fans who were just being really nitpicky, complaining that the technology is just too high- tech and advanced given the Star Trek timeline. But the biggest complaint was about the lead character Michael Burnham, who was played by Sonequa Martin-Green. She's a brand new character to Star Trek, and we learn that she's Spock's adopted human sister. The 20-something Spock is played by Ethan Peck. Your words showed me how damaging my humanity can be.

No, your humanity was beautiful. I was a child. You were a catalyst in an attempt to escape emotion, to escape you. I fully submerged in logic. I mean, I have to admit, it did seem weird at first to see this really significant character in Spock's storyline that we had never seen before. But I thought she added interesting layers to his character and helped illuminate his struggle with being half human. Not everybody felt that way. I mean, people were freaking out, as I remember.

They were, how could Spock have a sister? We would have known. You can't retcon. It comes out of nowhere. Lori Ulster worked on the podcast After Trek, and she's a writer and editor

on the site Trek Movie. And so we were all talking about it nonstop, and that's why I said, like, it actually makes perfect sense to me that we wouldn't know. And so I wrote an editorial about it forstop and that's why I said like it actually makes perfect sense to me that we wouldn't know and so I wrote an editorial about it for the site and the comments I was just looking at the

comments on it because people were mad and what were the comments to your editorial oh well people just basically there was a lot of I mean and I also just so you know I also went into all the other Star Trek characters who had siblings that we found out about in one episode where we'd never heard of them before. And there were a lot of them. But like the very first comment on my editorial was, it's still stupid. And in her editorial, she pointed out that Spock in the original, was notorious for not talking about his past unless it was absolutely necessary. In fact, we didn't learn that he had a half-brother named Cybok until that character appeared in the movie Star Trek V. He showed up out of nowhere. We'd

never heard of him before. We know that Kirk thinks of Spock as a brother, and then Spock is like, oh yeah, I have this brother I never told you about. Now, I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to tell you that Star Trek Discovery eventually explains why Spock would never mention his sister, Michael. Her crew ends up on a very dangerous top secret mission and they had to be officially redacted from Starfleet. But Laurie didn't buy it. It just doesn't make sense. We'll never speak of it again.

It's just a TV thing but it's not a real life thing. So you think that was just unnecessary and actually less believable than the idea that just it's in Spock's character to not mention Michael. Yeah, yeah.

I mean the whole we'll never speak of it again thing is not sustainable to me. Like as a writer, I would never use that. The new show, Picard, also has retcons that fans have complained about. As I figured, Laurie didn't have an issue with any of them. But I was surprised that she was upset about the show. Not because of a retcon exactly.

Her issue with the show ties into the question of whether to stick to the details of the canon or the spirit of the canon. She is really bothered by the fact that the show Picard portrays Starfleet as being a corrupt, inflexible form of government, where a legend like Jean-Luc Picard is tossed aside as a relic. Star Trek was created out of this idea of optimism. Humanity has evolved. We're not stupid idiots anymore. We've figured out how to stop wasting our time starving each other, killing each other,

trying to feel superior to each other. And it's a particularly difficult time to do that now because of what's going on across the whole world. So how do you comment on that? And I guess you could choose to comment on that by saying, look, here's another dysfunctional world. But I almost want to comment on that the same way Roddenberry wanted to comment on the 60s, which were very, very turbulent time, which is we figured it out. So that to me is the hardest one. And when you have people in charge of the franchise who I suspect connect to different things in Star Trek than I connect to, they're going to make different

kinds of decisions. In Andrew Friedenthal's book about retconning, he argues that retconning is similar to the way we've been revising history the last few decades. I mean, for a long time, history was told by the winners. You know, it was the story of kings, emperors, and presidents. And now we're taught a more inclusive version of history, taking into account many different points of view. And in his book, Andrew argued that revising history and retconning the history of a fantasy world is something that's very good. And, you know, we shouldn't really question it very much. And then the 2016 election happened. There was a lot of talk about fake news and people being sort of unable to interpret kind of the difference. And I think that what my big sort of mistake was, if I, you know, could could

rewrite sections of the book, if you could retcon your book? If I could retcon my book, absolutely. If I could do a J.R.R. Tolkien and make the ring something meaningful in The Hobbit when it was just an invisibility thing. If I could go back and do that in my own book, I would say now is that I think that there is certainly the potential in rec hunting to prepare the way for a better understanding of history. But there are things that the media can do and can certainly create changes. But ultimately, there also needs to be some aspect of our formal education system that creates a stronger understanding of the way that history is written and the way that history is done. The things that you learn in school, there may be new information

that comes up later that changes that. You know, we can learn bad things about great people, you know, in history, as well as, of course, today. I get what he's saying. We must distinguish between alternative facts that claim that other points of view are fake news, as opposed to learning more about our history and recognizing that multiple things can be true at the same time. Which goes back to the idea that a good retcon should open up more stories, as opposed to shutting them down. That's why I still believe retcons can be a great tool to breathe life into old characters

and make them feel new again. And if all the pieces don't fit together neatly anymore, I'm okay with that. People are complicated and contradictory. Like the Doctor, we contain multitudes. Our stories can too. That is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Andrew Friedenthal, Laurie Ulster,

Mac Rogers, Nick Randall, Hayley Milliman, and Olivia Dolphin. You know, Olivia actually has a lot of questions about Harry Potter she would like answered, but at this point, she's afraid to even say them out loud.

It's like how I wonder how Hagrid was conceived quite a bit. Don't you want to tweet about that? Yes, JK Rowling, the one thing I truly want to know is how Hagrid was conceived. Like, please, of all things, tell me that one fact. If you want to check out previous episodes where I've covered these different fantasy worlds, I did a miniseries on Star Wars in 2015. I even did a whole episode about the retcon Han shot first. I did a Harry Potter miniseries in 2016.

And the Doctor Who miniseries was 2018. Star Trek is all over this podcast from the very beginning. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. You can like the show on Facebook. I tweet at emulinski and Imagine Worlds pod. And let me know what some of your favorite or least favorite retcons are. Now, if you really like Imaginary Worlds, please leave a review wherever you get your podcast or a shout out on social media. It always helps people discover the show. But the best way to support Imaginary Worlds is to donate on Patreon. At different levels, you can get either free Imaginary Worlds stickers, a mug, a t-shirt, and a link to a Dropbox account, which has the full length interviews of every guest in every episode. You can learn more

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