This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
(moved from The Da Vinci Code Discussion)
Citizen: What if someone wants to start a page on the The Da Vinci Code *book*? I would like something else to this title to indicate that it isn't about the book... or movie... =/
Dark Sasami: Agreed. Standard procedure is to reserve titles of shows for the shows themselves. Rename, please.
Citizen: What ought the new name be? I have two:
- The bizarre: Beethoven Was an Alien Spy
- The perhaps-more-precise: Historical Ret Con
Seth: Historical Ret Con works.
Ununnilium: I say, for the book, we just use The Da Vinci Code, and leave the trope name as it is. ...although Beethoven Was an Alien Spy has a certain amount of appeal.
Citizen: Oh, right, Literature is a different section... But still, don't you think this trope name is a bit confusing? If someone made a page for the book/movie, then it would two pages of the same name would show up, right?
Dark Sasami: Besides, this is the default page. Which means that people will constantly get it wrong.
And I really like Beethoven Was an Alien Spy. Reminds me of the bit from Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency when the works of Bach turn out to be a time-traveler's successful attempt to preserve a snippet of the product of alien technology that records the harmonies of the interaction of every moving atom in the universe, or something like that.
Citizen: We could always create both and have one be a redirect; a silly name, and a more precise name. Just a suggestion. In any case, that's one vote for each new name... And assuming this trope gets a new name, I was planning on moving the content over and leaving a stub here for the movie/book. But since "Literature" has its own section, would that have not been correct?
Ununnilium: Eh; the book's the original, so it gets the Main entry. This is a rename I actually support, but we should pick one or the other, and Beethoven Was an Alien Spy is more awesome and harder to confuse with other tropes.
Citizen: I sort of favored Historical Ret Con, but the other seems to have slightly more support. Doesn't seem like anyone else is going to do anything about it, so I'm moving it now.
Something similar to this, but slightly different is when a main character is revealed to have encountered a famous historical personage in the past; this is especially common with characters who have lived supernaturally long lives (such as vampires) or with time travelers (Quantum Leap's "kisses with history" are one such example). Angel and Spike did a few of these (Angel was at Elvis' wedding, Spike inspired Billy Idol's look, etc.) but Spike once memorably subverted them by scoffing at a vampire's claim that he had been at the crucifixion ("if every vampire who said he was at the crucifixion was there, it would have been like Woodstock"). These differ from "The Davinci Code" in that the historical personage's involvement is more passive.
Ununnilium: Hm. I think this should be its own trope - for one thing, it applies to time-travelling characters while Beethoven Was an Alien Spy doesn't, and Beethoven Was an Alien Spy doesn't usually involve characters in the present day.
J Random User: I remember that DS 9 episode, and I think it goes more under Historical Injoke than here. There weren't really any famous historical personages in Little Green Men, unless you count the Ferengi's role as the Roswell aliens...and it hardly showed them having a more fantastic life than people would expect.
Ununnilium: I agree. There was something bothering me about that for a while, and now I know what it was. And hey, it's actually on there.
Aubri: The Dracula reference needs to be removed. He has nothing to do with Vlad except the name. Bram Stoker originally intended to set the story in Austria and give Dracula an Austrian name, but during his research decided that Transylvania had an ominous name, so he'd set it there. Some research on local history turned up Vlad Dracul, and since it was a creepy name, he borrowed it. And that was pretty much it.
Nevrmore: I'd just like to say that I object to using the word "reasonable" anywhere in the vicinity of "The Da Vinci Code", much less "Dan Brown" himself. That is all.
Scifantasy: So change it. "Internally consistent," maybe?
Ununnilium:
- An Alternate Reality Game connected to the 2007 Transformers movie plays with this a little, portraying the entire franchise as a massive cover-up to hide the presence of real transforming alien robots by making the story into a cartoon. This page
at the Transformers Wiki explains it pretty nicely. But mum's the word, got it?
This is something else entirely, dealing as it does with fiction instead of real people. I think it's External Retcon, except that it's not really external. Mythology Gag?
Daibhid C: Looks like a varient on the Literary Agent Hypothesis.
Red Shoe: After rereading this page, I would like nothing so much as to write a Steampunk Power Rangers Fan Fic starring Nikola Tesla, Jules Verne, Marie Curie, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Jack London. With Mark Twain as The Obi-Wan.
I am a sick, sick man.
Big T: You mean something like The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen? (But with real people?) Cool. By the way, where would the aforementioned work fit?
Novium: Does the Age of Unreason book belong under this trope? If it is the series I am thinking of - and I could be wrong, I only read about half the book- I was under the impression it was more alternate reality than secret fantastic history.
Cambias: Agreed — that's an alternate history so there's no secret that Franklin, Newton, etc. are working with magic. Heck, London eventually gets flattened by a comet, so it's not like this is supposedly "our" history at all!
Man Without A Body: Removed this following thing, for being completely incomprehensible:
- The recent book franchise The 39 Clues, pretty much trhives on thsi si which EVRY MAJOR HIOSTORCLA FIGURE is a meber of the chaill family which is broken up into four harry potter remisnet branches
Cambias Again: I deleted a couple more entries which miss the point of this topic. The Bruce Sterling story "Mozart in Mirrorshades" isn't secret history at all — it's showing an alternate timeline which has been openly and hugely messed with by time/universe travellers from what may be our own future. Not a secret history.
- Also, the "Deadlands" example doesn't qualify, because Deadlands doesn't fit into our history at all. The Civil War in that world is going on ten years longer than it lasted in our world, lots of peoples lives are changed, and none of it is secret.
