Retconning Convenience

I discussed in an earlier post how we writers sometimes use bits of what we’ve previously written and expand on it to give the illusion that we looked far enough ahead to foreshadow so subtly that only geniuses(we, of course, are in that category) really saw it coming.  But once the audience “got it,” they were wowed with our abilities, even if that ability was as real as pulling a rabbit out of a top hat.

Unfortunately, this tendency also gives some writers the mistaken belief that all retconning is a good thing, not understanding that sometimes it can turn off readers or destroy the story itself.  JK Rowling retconned Dumbledore into being gay, despite no indication of this one way or the other during the course of the books.  This was just a small nod to part of her audience that really wanted something in there like that, and she could do it without it having a major impact on the story.

Other retconning, however, is truly absurd.  Take the Yuuzhan Vong of the New Republic series of Star Wars books.  That there is an extra-galactic race that poses a threat to all life is not the offensive part; what’s offensive has been the tendency of many writers, including writers I like such as Timothy Zahn, to make claims that the reason the Emperor rose in the first place and started building Death Stars was because he foresaw the emergence of the Yuuzhan Vong threat, so he was working the whole time to counter it.  Now maybe it’s just me, but doesn’t this kinda defeat the whole raisin d’etre of the rebellion in the first place?  The Death Star was Palatine’s attempt to rule the galaxy through terror, and making it so that he meant to build a fleet of them to counter an inter-galactic threat sorta makes him a hero as opposed to the ultimate villain.  After all, he was just trying to save everyone, and the rest of that oppression and terror bit was just nuisance details before the big storm.

It's this kind of retconning that drives me nuts.  Leave stories alone, and if you must retcon, maker sure you aren’t overturning the entire reason the initial story was told in the first place.