This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Working Title: Nameless YKTTW: From YKTTW
Colin: Both the Concerned and El Goonish Shive examples don't really seem t fit this trope.
Also, seeing El Goonish Shive here makes me think that it might be Trope Overdosed now.
Seth: 121 references, yup it's the first webcomic that qualifies as Trope Overdosed
Sci Vo: I haven't viewed Concerned myself, but I think that the description fits this. The El Goonish Shive one seems a little iffy, but that might just be because my memory of those events is so vague.
Mewtarthio: The Concerned example is subtly different. The comic never went Cerebus, and the death of Gordon Frohman was played for laughs. Yes, his invulnerability was retroactively explained as something other than Rule of Funny, but only because it's a humorous explanation that gives him an appropriately funny demise.
EGS probably counts, though. As the comic took itself more seriously, Tedd's mad science was downplayed, to the point where even his trademark transformation gun (which, incidentally, is a good example of Flanderization, since it was initially just a miscellaneous device he had lying around) got retconned as an alien artifact, rather than something he'd invented on his own. The goo's retcon from Tedd's accidental creation to Evil Alternate Universe Tedd's assassin serves two purposes: One is to introduce Lord Tedd as a villain, and the other is to wipe out all traces of Tedd's scientific abilities. I feel kind of sorry for the poor guy: By the time I stopped reading, he'd been reduced to manically staring at a light bulb hooked up to a rubber duck, ranting about free energy and waiting for a flicker.
See also Doing In the Wizard.
Citizen: Removed UT's CLANNAD example. Sanae was a teacher, and this trope seems to be more about the ridiculous Comedy Tropes, not stuff like general comical behavior. Which they had from the beginning anyway, as the tapes show. Plus, spoilers.
Twin Bird: Removed:
- A reason was eventually given: Satan is Andy's girlfriend, (yes, 'girl') and keeps resurrecting them.
Because this has been Jossed by Word of God on multiple occasions...including the rant under the linked strip.
I'm not sure I agree with the Concerned webcomic being an example of this trope. If I have understood correctly, the Cerebus Syndrome is when a webcomic (or similar) starts as a wacky set of short crazy comic strips and evolves into a more "serious" comic with longer and more involved storyarcs. Cerebus Retcon is when in this situation the early wackiness is retconned so that it's "logically" explained, to at least try to maintain some continuity over the entire webcomic. In other words, the Cerebus Retconning is closely related to the Cerebus Syndrome. There's no such change of style (ie. Cerebus Syndrome) in the Concerned webcomic, and the explanation for Frohman's immortality doesn't feel like a retcon to aid in such change (in other words, the purpose of this explanation is not to try to help making the webcomic more "serious" and have more continuity to it). I wouldn't even call it a retcon at all. Maybe just some kind of humoristic plot twist. In my opinion this example could be removed, as it doesn't represent the trope at all.
- I agree. Unless somebody makes a reasonable objection, I'll remove it sometime today.
- It's still there...
- Rebochan: There, I turned off the buddha code. The example has now been deleted.
- It's still there...
Daibhid C: I'm wondering if the same applies to Agrajag in Hitchhiker's. Yes, it's a one off gag retconned into one part of a rather nasty and unfair sequence of events, but the nasty and unfair events are still played for laughs ("What do you want from me, blood?"), and playing nasty and unfair events for laughs has been Hitchhiker's schtick since the Earth was destroyed.
Shouldn't there be some examples from Cerebus in here?
- Ain't that the truth? I was waiting for the definition to grow three heads and protect the underworld and was disappointed.
