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As proven by a talking fourth-wall-breaking squirrel.
"The late James F. Bowman was writing a serial tale for a weekly paper in collaboration with a genius whose name has not come down to us. They wrote, not jointly but alternately, Bowman supplying the installment for one week, his friend for the next, and so on, world without end, they hoped. Unfortunately they quarreled, and one Monday morning when Bowman read the paper to prepare himself for his task, he found his work cut out for him in a way to surprise and pain him. His collaborator had embarked every character of the narrative on a ship and sunk them all in the deepest part of the Atlantic."
— Ambrose Bierce note from The Devil's Dictionary definition of "serial"
Originally referenced in Running the Asylum, this trope refers to infighting within the official ranks of a shared-universe franchise, where creative teams will take potshots at each other, using their own stories to undercut, contradict, Retcon, or just plain insult the work of their rivals. Because these are official stories, each volley becomes entrenched in the overall setting.
If the shots just end up tangling the Canon up, then a Continuity Snarl can be the result. Sometimes, the mess results in a Crisis Crossover — which will inevitably become the target of later writers Armed With Canon.
Recent examples of the Crisis Crossover are active volleys of Canon-fire, as different factions within the companies have a tug-of-war over the "New Direction".
This isn't necessarily bad, often resulting in an Author's Saving Throw.
Ship-to-Ship Combat is occasionally a cause. A lesser shade is Depending on the Writer.
Messing with other authors' characters in a large Shared Universe is a potential Flame Bait and may be off-limits as impolite and sometimes prohibited outright: it's almost someone's Player Character, and in settings made for RPG it sometimes is. Conversely, simply asking the original author before using "their" characters in canonical material is a nice and continuity-enhancing practice. Of course, there's a precarious balance between counterproductive doting over prominent characters by their authors or derailing these characters (and royally vexing their authors) without any good reason by Executive Meddling or another author missing the whole point somewhere.
If fans are the ones doing this, it's a Fix Fic. Has nothing to do with Arm Cannons. note We hope.
Examples
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Anime
- Elfen Lied had the anime team fighting a shipping war with the manga. In the manga, Lucy dies and Kouta gets with Yuka. In the anime, Kouta/Yuka is played down a bit while Kouta/Lucy is played up, and while the ending is ambiguous, it's implied that Lucy survives the Bolivian Army Ending and returns to Kouta. Of course, since it was Cut Short, the Love Triangle is never formally resolved in the anime.
- Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha had a bit of a shipping war among the staff, where the NanoYuuno shippers ran the Sound Stages and tried to torpedo the NanoFate ship by having Nanoha and Hayate suggest that Fate was trying to distance herself from being Vivio's other mother. In ViVid, Vivio kept seeing Fate as her other mother, and Fate once referred to herself as "Fate-mama" while speaking with Vivio.
- Fate's family is specifically shown to be Erio and Caro, lacking Nanoha and Vivio, so the debate rages on. Then again, while Vivio suggests that she should give Fate and her children some space while they spend time as a family, Fate, Erio and Caro think doing so is unnecessary.
- While it wouldn't have helped in the manga, the Nanoha and Yuuno shippers can't have been bolstered by the fact that when Fate and Nanoha's voice actresses armed themselves with canons, it was to come down squarely on the side of NanoFate.
- In this article
 ◊, the two VAs mention that in 10 years, Nanoha will be a housewife for Fate. The original writer, Tsuzuki, also says Vivio "frequently keeps in contact with Fate-mama, as often as contacting the father who works away from home, with a communication tool."
- YuYu Hakusho has a case here. In an interview, the writer of the manga stated that he hadn't intended Hiei+Kurama as a canon couple. The problem, of course, is that several of the anime's artists liked the pairing and drew official art for the anime that hinted otherwise.
Comic Books
- Any Marvel Comics writer who dares turn his hand to writing Doctor Doom is certain to find that a later writer will take issue with his interpretation, and declare that the story was so wildly out of character that it couldn't have really been Doom — it was Actually a Doombot. At least one story suggested that (almost) every single appearance of Doom since the early '60s was a Doombot. Oddly, the story was otherwise quite good.
- When John Byrne took over Star Brand back in the '80s, he proceeded to launch one Take That after another at the departing figure of ousted Marvel Comics editor-in-chief Jim Shooter. Star Brand was one of the Shooter-initiated "New Universe" titles, and was the one that Shooter himself wrote personally. Byrne not only took ad hominem shots at Shooter personally, but had exposition characters hang lampshades on how implausible the events of Shooter's run was, and how stupid the hero had been. Early on in Byrne's run, the hero's girlfriend (a major cast member) got Stuffed in the Fridge; the hero later broke down and passed the title Brand onto some other poor schmuck, destroying Pittsburgh (Jim Shooter's hometown) in the process. This was referred to slightly in the Untold Tales of the New Universe story "Tales of the Mulletverse".
- Writer Alan Grant was told straight up that this would be the fate of his Batman character Anarky, who he'd set out to establish as the Joker's son. Ironically, the series was canceled before this could happen, so, for now, it's still canon. Recent events have only strengthened the "Anarky is Joker's son" issue by revealing that Duela Dent, the so-called "Joker's Daughter" is actually the multiversally displaced offspring of Earth-3's Jokester (so yes, this means that Anarky and Duela are essentially the other's Opposite-Sex Clone— or at the very least interdimensional siblings). But this is to be taken with a grain of salt in that this was introduced during the Countdown to Final Crisis storyline and may or may not by canon.
- As far as Duela goes, her creator Bob Rozakis intended her to actually be Harvey Dent's daughter. However, since he established that she was born after he became Two-Face (which would mean she'd be a child and not a teenager), it created a plothole that annoyed other creators and confused fans. Marv Wolfman took the opportunity to then reveal Duela as a liar in the pages of New Teen Titans, though she would refuse to identify her true father.
- Dan Slott's final issue of She-Hulk was devoted entirely to explaining away events from other comics as alternate-universe doppelgangers who were visiting the Marvel Universe on vacation; this has since been largely ignored. The reveal was a "fix" to a story in Uncanny X-Men which had She-Hulk uncharacteristically sleeping with the Juggernaut. Before coming to our world, the doppelgangers were supposed to learn everything about their other self by reading a handbook, so they could act in character.
- The Marvel Universe Crisis Crossover Secret Invasion, seemed like it was going to do this ("X wasn't really X, just a Skrull impostor!") much more than it actually did.
- The comic Spike: Shadow Puppets plays with this trope by having the Japanese Smile Time puppets literally armed with the Smile Time Official Cannon. Spike barely dodges the blast and gingerly gets to his feet, muttering, "I hate the official cannon." Hey, after the way it kicked him around, who could blame him?
- The What If version of Spider Man: The Other, by Peter David, basically starts with the Watcher explaining that the fundamental premise of the original story (by J Michael Straczynski) is flawed, and this version is based on what was really going on.
- Geoff Johns is generally thought of as one of the best DC Comics writers when it comes to sticking to continuity, but almost every book he's been involved in has undergone some degree of change to his character or just plain retconning. Most of these have the catch-all excuse that Infinite Crisis, a crossover he created, re-wrote the DC Universe's history at large and changed various details that are just now being explained.
- Reversed Jerry Ordway's characterisation of Black Adam, so that instead of a demon-worshipper in the body of a contrite murderer, he's a Namor-type Knight Templar in the body of an unrepentant killer. (Although this change at least didn't generate too much vitriol from the fans in the way some other examples on this page have, and some of the stories it generated - such as the Black Reign arc in JSA - are quite popular)
- Completely abolished the backstory written by Kon-El/Superboy's creator, that he was the clone of Cadmus director Paul Westfield with implanted superpowers, in favour of his being the clone of Superman and Luthor. Johns eventually acknowledged that that was what Superboy (and Westfield) believed. Regardless, he continued to have Kon suddenly agonizing about being the clone of a villain, despite that having been his opinion of Westfield.
- In the letter column from an issue of the 1990s Superboy series (the one that starred Kon-El/Conner Kent), a certain young "Geoffrey Johns" suggested that Superboy was created from the combined DNA of Superman and Lex Luthor. Karl Kesel, who was writing the book at the time, responded by politely yet firmly telling him that it wasn't the case. Fast-forward to 2003, when Geoff Jonns became the writer of the relaunched Teen Titans series, which just happened to have Kon-El is a member of the main cast. Guess what the very first issue of the series was about. Come on, guess.
- Then again, there are those who see the decision as arguably being for the better, since it just goes to show how much of a control freak Luthor is: to have his own personal weapon to use against Superman. For Superboy to suddenly agonize about his parentage is more understandable. Westfield was evil. Lex Luthor is Evil. The two cannot be compared.
- Most recently, claimed that every single appearance of the Post Crisis Brainiac wasn't really him at all, but was a Doomb... sorry, a Brainiac-probe. Even Milton Fine, who was taken over by nanoprobes, rather than psychically possessed by Brainiac's intelligence (as readers of the original story saw happen). This isn't quite as extreme as other examples, though, since Brainiac's probes were under his total control and basically secondary bodies for him to use.
- The same goes for Toyman since his Darker and Edgier revamp in 1992, despite the fact that Superman knows Toyman is a master at constructing realistic automata, and regularly x-rays the guy to ensure he hasn't pulled a fast one in this fashion. This is explained away by Toyman simply saying "my robots are good enough to fool Superman."
- After Hawkman was rendered "radioactive" in the wake of Zero Hour, Johns resurrected the Golden Age Hawkman while leaving the Silver Age alien one in limbo. While this version worked out well, Jim Starlin (for reasons known only to him) decided to retcon the Johns-written character, making the Hawkman who was part of the JSA be the alien Hawkman. It's gotten so confusing, Hawkman is now somehow both the Gold and Silver Age Hawks at the same time.
- Tangentially related to the Hawkman snarl is the volley handling of his son, Hector Hall, and Hector's surrounding characters once he was reincarnated as the new Doctor Fate. What makes this particularly headache inducing is that Johns was volleying against himself, as if he couldn't decide which direction he wanted to take the character. As just one example of this, first all the prior Fates live in the amulet, then they're just hallucinations conjured up by Nabu, then, no, they're actually real again, then they all disappear again.
- Johns also restored the Silver Age era Green Lantern Hal Jordan to the "star" of the book again. Since Hal had been turned into an evil supervillain named Parallax however, this required retconning Hal's previously evil deeds by claiming "Parallax" was actually a fear-based mental parasite who was corrupting him. The fear bug is now considered a mythical part of the mythos, but almost no one could have predicted that this act would turn out as good as it has.
- Geoff also did a Take That against Brad Meltzer and his Identity Crisis series, which, at one point, had a series of offhand scenes showing some B and D list heroes Jack Bauer interrogating the Rogues, enemies of The Flash, one of the most powerful heroes on the planet, whom Johns was writing at the time. Cue next month's Flash showing those exact same scenes playing out to the end, with the Rogues soundly thrashing the heroes and going on their way.
- Geoff Johns has become so well-known for retconning things (both in good ways and bad) that he's earned the Fan Nickname "Geoffcons."
- Garth Ennis and Frank Tieri had a back-and-forth feud fought in the pages of their respective books The Punisher and Wolverine. It started in Ennis' Punisher #16-17, where Frank Castle blasts a wildly over-the-top Wolverine in the face with a shotgun, hits him in the balls with a baseball bat, and runs him over with a steamroller. Tieri responded in Wolverine #186 by implying Punisher was gay.
- Something similar happened a few years earlier, when Eric Larsen had the Darker and Edgier Dr. Octopus deliver the Hulk a severe smackdown during the "Revenge of the Sinister Six" storyarc in Spider Man (the early 1990s series with no adjective). Hulk writer Peter David responded shortly afterward by having the Hulk wipe the floor with Octopus, and commenting on how he was having a "bad day" during their previous encounter. He even went so far as to put Doc Ock in his old green spandex costume which he hadn't worn since the early 80's and flanderized him into a sniveling mad scientist when he was being built up by many spider-writers as a serious world threat.
- This debate kicked up again years later in the letter-pages of The Savage Dragon where David wrote in to accuse Larsen of making a personal attack when he wrote the Spider-Man story. Larsen explained that since Doc Ock was using Applied Phlebotinum in the story (he had much stronger adamantium limbs), it made sense to use the Hulk for the Worf Effect. David was not amused.
- Squirrel Girl is almost an Armed With Canon game of tennis. First, she was shown beating Doctor Doom. So a later appearance of Doom mentions it was Actually a Doombot (see above). Then Squirrel Girl beats Thanos, and Uatu is present just to say that it isn't a "Robot, clone, or simulacrum". Later on, Thanos mentions that he can create clones of himself that even the Watcher cannot tell aren't him. So then another Squirrel Girl adventure goes back to the beginning: by having Doctor Doom be unwilling to fight her when she shows up in his castle.
- Note that all of this except the Doombot reveal was written by Dan Slott; he's having fun at one-player Canon ping-pong.
- Although the first story where Doom is beaten by Squirrel Girl was written by Will Murray and (as mentioned above) Steve Ditko. It can be argued that Slott is simply following Ditko's lead.
- There are some fans theories about Thanos lying about that just to avoid admitting defeat.
- After Mark Millar turned Iron Man into a fascist in Civil War, many other writers have had their character walk up to Tony Stark and berate him for his actions. This may stop now that he's gotten his karmic comeuppance in World War Hulk and Secret Invasion.
- Only Brian Michael Bendis came close to rationalizing Stark's actions and that was in a uber-last minute filler story published AFTER Civil War ended, via retconning all of Tony's actions based around a never seen sequence where Tony Stark learned about Project Wide-Awake and the fact that the government was going to activate it and unleash the Sentinels upon the super-hero community. Bendis also outright absolved Hank Pym of his involvement in Civil War by way of a Skrull impostor.
- Reed Richards sadly remains unredeemed/fixed, in large part because of Armed With Canon, as far as people refusing to let Marvel forget that Reed once single-handedly killed the Mutant Registration Act via pointing out how forcing super-heroes to register wouldn't work.
- One reason there's bad blood between John Byrne and Peter David has to do with Lockjaw, The Inhumans' dog. As created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, Lockjaw was just a very large, mutated dog with a normal canine intelligence level. Byrne later wrote a Thing issue in which Lockjaw spoke for the first time, begging that baby Luna not be subjected to the Terrigen Mists, since their effects weren't always pretty — implying that he was a full-fledged Inhuman like the others. It was a touching, fan-favourite story, but it had Unfortunate Implications: the Inhumans had always treated Lockjaw as an animal, and now this was solely because he looked like one. Thus Peter David revealed that Lockjaw's "speech" had been a prank on Ben Grimm. (As he tells it, this was a request from editorial.) This fixed the problems with Byrne's story, but now the Inhumans were Jerkasses for a different reason: pranking Grimm in the middle of an important debate, at Lockjaw's expense. Fans of the Byrne story remain sore about this... and others remain sore about the Byrne story.
- Deadpool's origins has been so Depending on the Writer that eventually Deadpool himself accepted that his real origin wasn't his problem anymore, and arguing about it was just a waste of time.
- When John Byrne took over as writer on the West Coast Avengers, a title previously written by Steve Englehart, he proceeded to undermine four years' worth of characterization. Hawkeye went from confident leader to sidelined jerk. The Vision and Wonder Man relationship, that had evolved into a bond of close fraternity, returned to one of jealous contention. And The Vision and Scarlet Witch marriage... was altered. After the Vision lost his emotions, their children were discovered to be pieces of the devil, after which The Scarlet Witch went insane. For some reason Byrne decided to hit the Reset Button and return the characters to a status they had outgrown in over a decade of stories. Some have accused Byrne of wrecking a title that Englehart had arguably made a success out of resentment over how Englehart had written the Fantastic Four, a title John Byrne had made a hit, although it is just as likely a case of Creative Differences.
- James Robinson's Justice League Cry For Justice reveals that following Prometheus's original appearances in Grant Morrison's JLA, someone else has been using the suit, while the original Prometheus lay low, until now. Since Prometheus has been subjected to galloping Villain Decay over the past few years, this is probably a good thing. Although Prometheus's death at the end of the story makes it somewhat pointless.
- The villain decay was started by his own creator. Many fans forget, after all the build-up, Prometheus was defeated in his first caper by being whipped in the 'nads by a disguised Catwoman. And it was all downhill from there.
- Cry For Justice had a controversial scene implying that Green Lantern Hal Jordan had at some point had a drunken threesome with Huntress and Lady Blackhawk of Birds Of Prey fame. Gail Simone wasn't very happy about that and revealed that what that scene was really referring to was that the girls had once seen Hal pass out drunk at a pilot convention.
- When Chris Claremont wrote Margali Szardos as "Sorceress Supreme" over in X-Men, the writer of Doctor Strange responded with a story revealing that she had been possessed and really had no magical powers at all.
- In one issue of Captain Atom, writer Greg Weisman attempted to explain multiple personifications of death in DCU, as aspects of death - the Black Racer represented Death as an inevitability, Nekron represented death as the ultimate enemy, and Death of the Endless represented "the peaceful death that comes to the righteous". This annoyed the creator of the Endless, Neil Gaiman, who responded in interviews and a scene in which Death declared that she represents the death of everything, including the Universe itself, without any single exception.note Which comes across as more than a little petty, since it's tantamount to saying "Kirby's creation is just a pretender. MY creation is the real deal."
- Kurt Busiek's Untold Tales of Spider-Man featured stories set in between and around the early stories of Spider-Man by Lee and Kirby. It stuck closely as possible to the old continuity of those issues. Many fans considered it the most entertaining Spider-Man book, especially since the series appeared around the time all the regular Spider titles were entangled in The Clone Saga mess.Then John Byrne came along. Spider Man Chapter One was his attempt to update the old Lee and Ditko stories and he pretty much disregarded most of what Busiek had done in his Untold Tales series.
- Not too long afterwards, Paul Jenkins penned a Chameleon story-arc in Webspinners: Tales of Spider-Man - explicitly referencing his first appearance in Amazing Spider-Man #1 instead of Chapter One. Note that Jenkins didn't do so based on his own opinions. He simply asked editorial which story he should reference, and they answered with the original. To add insult to injury, this went down while Chapter One was still in progress - Bryne's mini-series being disregarded months before the final issue was on the stands.
- The people responsible for the Angel: After the Fall comic at IDW are pissed at the people responsible for Dark Horse's Buffy the Vampire Slayer comic for the reveal that Angel is Twilight. So much so, they've created promo pictures for their new Spike series wherein Spike burns a Twilight mask while saying, "He's definitely not Twilight."
- V4 Legion of Super-Heroes, having been written by fans, has a lot of this. For instance, fan speculation had had it that Element Lad is gay, but the previous writers gave him a girlfriend. When the fans got to write the book, his girlfriend was retconned into a man taking sex-change drugs. (Weirdly, they wrote Element Lad as unaware of this, so its relevance to his own sexuality is...unclear.)
- John Byrne's revival of Doom Patrol fused this with outright Canon Discontinuity and Cosmic Retcon by ignoring all but the first of the comic's previous versions, in particular Grant Morrison's beloved tenure, which had itself been mildly fired upon during Rachel Pollack's run for Vertigo. This was rectified by Geoff Johns and Keith Giffen making everything from past writers canon... Which, considering the nature of the strip even before Morrison's entrance, fit just fine.
- Paul Kupperburg's first revival of the Doom Patrol established that Larry Trainor (Negative Man) had somehow managed to survive the explosion that killed the team at the end of the series. However, Keith Giffen's run retconned things so Trainor actually did die in the explosion, and was covertly cloned by the Chief. Giffen also revealed that the "Negative spirit" is actually Larry's disembodied soul and that he had inhabited Valentina Vostok (Negative Woman) for some time, causing him to take on some of her memories. Furthermore, Giffen revealed that Larry's current body is that of a brain-dead man who was genetically altered to resemble him.
- Valentina herself turned up towards the end of the series Checkmate, as the new White Queen and without her powers. However, a throwaway spread in Final Crisis#4 depicted a dead Negative Woman. In Resist, the civilian Vostok is then shown again, under Darkseid's control. Keith Giffen decided to count the appearance of the dead Negative Woman as canon, ignoring Vostok's later appearance, and used her in the "Blackest Night" tie-in to Doom Patrol.
- After a long and well received run co-writing Strontium Dog with Alan Grant, John Wagner left the strip with Grant; who promptly killed off all the main characters. Skip forward a few years and Wagner resurrected the strip, declaring the last twenty years of comic null and void. The official line is that hose stories were "the legends of [main character] Johnny Alpha and the new stories are what really happened". Cue lots of fans shouting Nooooo! in unison.
- Reading The Mighty Avengers you might get an impression that Dan Slott has some sort of continuity-war with The Incredible Hercules writers Greg Pak and Fred Van Lente - every time they tried to set the series in larger continuity on page or via Word Of God, Slott would write something contradicting them. And when they poked fun at Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe Marvel gods were using back in the days, but stopped in early 00s, Slott wrote Herc returning to it.
- Sonic The Hedgehog: The feud between writers Karl Bollers and Ken Penders tended to come down to this, with them retconning each other's story ideas in favor of their own all the time. Of special note is Antoine's attitude change after the Time Skip: Bollers wanted it to be natural Character Development, and it would have been the lynchpin of several ideas he had planned for later on. But Penders disliked the change, so he made it that Antoine had instead been switched with his Alternate Universe Evil Twin.
- And then, both of them then left the comic at the same time, allowing new writer Ian Flynn to scrap the majority of their ideas and replace them with his own.
- Actually it's not as simple as that: with the bridges between Ken Penders & Archie/Sega permanently burned, the writer has launched lawsuits concerning the characters & concepts that he created, stating the belonged to him and for them to be removed from the comics. Since this would essentially gut a very good portion of the comic's universe, Flynn may wind up having to take the "Infinite Crisis" route of retcon with the Genesis Wave, to get rid of Penders' creations if the need be.
- During the time Wolverine's son Daken and Daredevil's enemy Bullseye were members of the Dark Avengers, Daniel Way and Majorie Liu, writers of Daken's ongoing series Dark Wolverine, tried to establish some sort of rivalry with a lot of sexual tension between the two, with Daken using his powers to manipulate Lester's emotions For the Evulz. Other writers decided to ignore it and wrote them as good friends with no rivaly or sexual tension whatsoever.
- Subverted in the 2011 Alpha Flight mini-series. Alpha Flight members were resurrected during Chaos War but without Puck, who appeared in Hell in one of Wolverine's stories after Chaos War. When he later appeared very alive in Alpha Flight's new ongoing, you might have expected the writers handwaving it and saying he returned with the others and that Puck from Logan's adventure wasn't him, right? Instead Puck admits he was indeed in Hell. He slew the devil, took over Hell, and then gave up his throne to return and save his friends.
- The death of Ace in the final Seventh Doctor arc of the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip was widely seen as an aggressive attempt to prove that the comic was an Alternate Continuity to the Doctor Who New Adventures (the strip had tied into the NAs for a while beforehand, so they were retconning themselves with this as well). Following the series' return to TV, the comic's made mention of strips both during the tie-ins and after the split, but "Who" is the series that gave us the Timey Wimey Ball...
- The website "Comics Should Be Good" has a collection of Armed With Canon "meta-messages."
- Maxwell Lord. Back in Justice League International, he was a Lovable Rogue who genuinely believed in his team, even if he'd only formed them because an evil computer forced him to. Then in Countdown To Infinite Crisis, it turns out he's a ranting metahuman-hater who set his League up to fail. Then, in Booster Gold, Geoff Johns says "Remember that evil computer? Remember how it took over Max again after his apparent death, and he became the new Lord Havok in the post-Zero Hour League that no one read? Yeah, that's when he turned evil." And then, in Justice League: Generation Lost, Judd Winick says "Well, maybe. But he always disliked metahumans, even if he did grow to care about the particular ones in his team." Note that Johns and Winick were two of the three writers on Countdown in the first place!
- The original Terra had been subjected to this trope in more recent years. In Marv Wolfman's original telling of "The Judas Contract", Tara Markov was a teenage sociopath who joined with Deathstroke in order to help him kill the Titans, who she loathed for being such "do-gooders". At the end of the arc, she wound dying when she brought the HIVE headquarters down on herself in a blind rage. In a followup story, she was also confirmed to have murdered Beast Boy's first adoptive father before she'd met Deathstroke, and was always manipulative and a ticking time bomb. Fast-forward to Brad Meltzer's "Last Will and Testament". Meltzer, a self-proclaimed fan of Terra in his youth, decided to retcon the tale and state that Tara Markov was simply a normal innocent girl driven to madness when Deathstroke drugged her. He also changed the details of her death, stating that she'd intentionally committed suicide as shame for her failure. When JT Krul wrote the "Blackest Night" tie-in for Titans, he gave a Take That to Meltzer's retcon by having Beast Boy rage at the undead Terra and ask if she expected him to believe any lies she'd tell him, such as her "being drugged".
- In the second issue of the Terra miniseries that introduced Terra#3 (Atlee), Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti tried to explain that Tara's sociopathy was a result of psychosis after she'd been given her powers, with the mineral "quixium" being the culprit. However, these first two issues of the series were written back during 52, when it was originally scheduled to be released before DC had it put on hold. In the time that followed, Meltzer's retcon had passed. Gray and Palmiotti then told readers to forget about their explanation, and refer to Meltzer's version as canon. The same issue also featured a reference to an event that was to occur at the end of 52, but changed due to overhaul in editorial: Terra 2 was to originally snap and become a villain, and would have to be killed by Atlee (rather than her remaining a hero and being killed by Black Adam in the final product).
- Terra 2 was also an example of different writers and editors' intents conflicting. Marv Wolfman introduced her with the intent that she not be the original Terra resurrected, or related to her in any way beyond being surgically altered to resemble her and given powers. After Wolfman left Team Titans, Phil Jimenez began to set up hints that she was at least the Terra of an alternate Earth, but this was quickly shot down by the editors. By the end of New Titans, the editor Pat Garrahy mandated a story that would hint that Terra 2 was the original reborn, which Wolfman hated having to do. Geoff Johns and Ben Raab wanted to go with the idea that both Terras were the same, setting up a story (that went nowhere) where their DNA is confirmed to match. Although when it came to Gray and Palmiotti's miniseries, both characters were established as being separate entities, and the DNA match was explained as the second Terra being genetically altered to resemble the original.
Literature
- Appropriately enough, the Star Wars Expanded Universe contains a never-ending series of canonical combat:
- The early Expanded Universe novels contained a great deal of authorial tussling over who Luke's Designated Love Interest was supposed to be. A lot of tussling.
- Jaina Solo was the target of the next bout of Ship-to-Ship Combat, which Dark Horse Comics seem to have "won" by heavily implying that she founded an imperial dynasty with their favoured suitor. Dark Horse had a distinct advantage in this battle: their series was set a century in the storyline's future. While the Del Rey authors were writing about what is happening, Dark Horse got to dictate what will happen. The Del Rey authors seem to have conceded this battle, as they're now writing her as being married to the guy who founded the dynasty depicted in the Dark Horse storyline.
- Karen Traviss became the EU Queen of this trope with her Mandalorian/Clone novels. Apparently, Mandalorians and Mandalorian-worshipping clones (which, until late, were all the clones) are vastly superior to Jedi. Other authors roll their eyes and mostly ignore this.
- Curtis Saxton, originally a Promoted Fanboy, wrote a lot of data in several technical manuals for the EU. Unfortunately, he has been accused of trying to rewrite Star Wars to be more in line with the views of the pro-Wars online Vs. debate, and as such gave hugely inflated numbers for pretty much everything. This caused all sorts of problems, particularly with troop numbers. He established that the Separatists have quintillions of droids. Given that the Attack of the Clones movie novelization, a higher canon source over his lesser canon status, pretty much told us that the "million more well on the way" was a million clone warriors, he had given the Separatists more than a trillion droids for every clone the other side had.
- Some of the work done by Gary Sarli comes across as him trying to fix some of the inconsistencies Saxton introduced, if only by returning details to their original definitions.
- The whole resurrection of the Emperor in Dark Empire pissed off most of the EU's stable of novel authors. Timothy Zahn refused all attempts to tie in his Thrawn Trilogy with the Dark Empire comic book; then, after it was done, he had Mara Jade make an offhand comment about how she privately believed the reborn Palpatine to just be a fake.
- Michael Stackpole's I, Jedi was written at the same time as the Hand of Thrawn, with deliberate Shout Outs between the two, and did a similar Armed With Canon attack on the Jedi Academy Trilogy (inserting Corran Horn in it and having him repeatedly point out how Kyp Durron is getting away with mass murder, people are being idiots, and the plot makes no sense). Some consider it a Fix Fic, others object to how the "fix" involved making Corran instrumental in all the students' battles to protect Luke from the spirit of Exar Kun up to and including giving them the plan for their final confrontation with Kun, so that even some of the people who are otherwise fans of Corran Horn have labeled him a Mary Sue in his book. Which still hasn't stopped some of us from wondering where the brix Stackpole's Horn was during Legacy of the Force.
- An earlier example is Aaron Allston's run on X-Wing, which retconned the cartoonish, stupid Imperial villains of The Courtship of Princess Leia as skillful Intelligence-trained types who project the stereotype as an act to make their enemies underestimate them. And Starfighters Of Adumar has Wedge break up with the Hot Scientist who built the Death Star, who he'd hooked up with in the Jedi Academy Trilogy, and fall for an old flame who'd been in a relationship with him for years in the X Wing Series.
- There was a major pissing match between Karen Traviss and Troy Denning that started in Legacy of the Force, and followed over into the Republic Commando Series and Fate Of The Jedi. Karen Traviss and Troy Denning are about as far apart as people can get in their depictions of Mandalorians and Jedi. When Traviss would throw a Take That at one of Denning's characters, he'd return it. It got so bad that Denning virus bombed Mandalore in one book in order to annihilate anyone with Boba Fett's DNA. That included most of Traviss's characters, who had been established as still alive at the time. And then even this was countered in Traviss's Republic Commando Series novel 501st, which dismissed the idea of a virus bomb being so accurate to destroy all of her characters. Traviss has since left writing Star Wars for financial reasons.
- And now that Disney bought Lucasfilm, the entire canonicity of the EU has been put in doubt.
- Given that LucasArts' official position was, more or less in so many words, "The movies, and the movies alone, are canon", saying the canonicity of the EU is "in doubt" is actually an upgrade.
- Various writers in the Doctor Who Expanded Universe had different ideas of how the various lines fitted together. Mostly this didn't affect the stories themselves. Then Lawrence Miles began referring to "bottle universes" in both his Doctorless Bernice Summerfield New Adventures and his Eighth Doctor Adventures, with the strong implication that the bottle universe in one series was the Alternate Continuity of the other. This didn't stop other writers continuing to assume there was a single continuity. And then some of them went on to reinterpret the "bottle universe" theory as a Klein bottle; the universe in the bottle is the universe holding the bottle.
- Another well-known Doctor Who Expanded Universe case is the... controversial Eighth Doctor novel War of the Daleks by major Dalek fan John Peel note not the DJ, who had long been angry about the way Davros overshadowed the Daleks in the later TV stories. He used the novel to introduce a wildly complicated Retcon in which literally every major Dalek-related plot development from "Destiny of the Daleks" to "Remembrance of the Daleks" had been deliberately faked by the Daleks note including the entire Movellan War and the apparent destruction of Skaro as part of a Batman Gambit to make the Doctor and Davros fight each other so that the Daleks could do their thing elsewhere without impediment. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view of this whole mess), Peel's novel was not particularly well-received or well-regarded, thus making it much easier for later writers to quietly ignore or overrule pretty much everything in the story.
- From the Big Finish Doctor Who audio line: initially, it seemed their Eighth Doctor line tied into the EDAs, such as a reference to novel companion Sam. This went on until it was suddenly explicitly stated that a lot of the novels never took place in the main timeline, with the Doctor seeing the different ranges as different timelines. Then they introduced their own companion called Sam, but also proceeded to include Fitz in the audios. That said, writers have apparently had no problem bringing monsters and characters from the books over to the audios or vice-versa.
Live Action TV
- When Dallas pulled its infamous All Just a Dream plot with Bobby Ewing stepping out of the shower, the producers of the show's Spin-Off Knots Landing were hacked off as they had already based a number of plot developments on Bobby's death (Gary mourning his brother's death, Gary's ex-wife Valene naming one of her twins after her deceased brother-in-law). In the end Bobby Ewing remained dead on Knots Landing and the show essentially parted ways with its parent. Think of a Gecko Ending, but in the middle.
- When Jo Grant returns in The Sarah Jane Adventures, it's revealed that she's still Happily Married to the man she gave up being a Companion for, contradicting her divorce in the Doctor Who New Adventures. At the end of the episode, Sarah Jane reveals she's been keeping tabs on other former Companions and mentions some of the things they've done since leaving the Doctor. When she mentions what's happened to Ace, it contradicts both of her previously published (and already contradictory) fates in Doctor Who New Adventures and Doctor Who Magazine. (See Comic Book folder above)
Tabletop Games
- Happens occasionally in novels of Dungeons & Dragons settings — both sourcebooks and novels. Large shared worlds can be hard to keep in line even if trying hard.
- When Weis & Hickman returned to write the further adventures of the Dragonlance Companions and their progeny, the Heroes and Preludes novels that other authors had written were considered non-canonical and retconned into "legends or folktales" of the Companions. To be fair to Weis & Hickman, while most of the Heroes and Preludes books were decent stand-alone fantasy novels in their own right, almost none of them lined up with established canon.
- Margaret Weis was so upset with Ravenloft taking her Death Knight Lord Soth that she turned him human and killed him, just so nobody else could have him.
- Forgotten Realms arc The Time of Trials had a few Take That potshots until things settled down.
- On the other hand, for example, Lisa Smedman repeatedly fails very basic research. While the matter of unclaimed dead in Necessary Sacrifices in itself may be mostly explained away, the later incident with the death of Qilué Veladorn looks especially weird: one can't know this character without noticing that her origin is unusual, and the circumstances of her birth show what exactly happens in such cases. And 'wall of force' (Extinction) is, obviously, a solid barrier and thus keeps out bad odors and animated weapons — just like it blocks breath weapons and everything else.
- The "official" Forgotten Realms fan site Candlekeep has many authors answering questions on forum. This repeatedly demonstrates struggles and problems with continuity in the most detailed of massive shared worlds, and just how tricky upkeeping it can be. You usually can't write about other people's characters except a cameo with permission. Elaine Cunningham, as one of the most cautious Realms authors, frequently emphasizes it, and even she accidentally "shanghaied" Elaith: a short sourcebook entry turned out to be a character from the campaign of Ed Greenwood, who fortunately had a similar view of the elf and "let her run with" him.
- It's said that the same thing happened with the first "Castle Greyhawk" module, which was seen as a massive Take That against the then-departing Gary Gygax (who had created Castle Greyhawk and was never able to release it properly while at TSR). It cheesed off enough people that TSR ordered a few years later "Greyhawk Ruins", which was a deadly serious (and just plain deadly) version of the location. Players (and even TSR itself) later declared "Ruins" to be the official version, leaving Castle Greyhawk as a rarely spoken-of joke module.
- Warhammer 40000 is infamous for retcons and loose canon, but one example in particular stands out: in the 4th Edition of Codex: Space Marines, the Ultramarines are presented as well-trained, well-rounded warrior monks who prize getting the mission done effectively above anything else, and aren't necessarily better than any other chapter. The 5th Edition codex spins the Ultramarines as the shining paragons of what it means to be a Space Marine, so that even other First Founding chapters consider the Ultramarines' leader to be their "spiritual liege," and divides the thousand or so Space Marine chapters into three categories: the Ultramarines and their successors, those who aren't true-blooded Ultramarine descendents but who nevertheless aspire to live up to their example, and a handful of deviant chapters who are fated to be marginalized in favor of Ultramarine successors. This has led to an undeclared edit war between Graham McNeill and Matt Ward, the authors of these two codices. McNeil writes the Ultramarines novels and tries to tone down their Sue-ishness, while whenever Ward writes a codex for an army he'll try to work in something that retcons McNeil's attempts to rein him in.
Theatre and Theatre Sports
- The equivalent behaviour between improvisers in theatre or theatre sport is called "blocking". This is not the only use of that word in theatre jargon, though.
- Michael Scott of The Office gives a great in-universe example of this theatre variant. Inevitably, his characters end up pulling guns and shooting everyone dead before the scene can take off.
Video Games
- When it comes to World of Warcraft, Blizzard and White Wolf (who made Warcraft The Roleplaying Game) have butted heads enough that Blizzard has declared the RPG series to be unilaterally non-canon.
- White Wolf adopts a noticeably pro-Alliance standpoint, with little good to say about non-human or non-attractive races. Blizzard always treated the Alterac Valley conflict between orcs and dwarves as ambiguous, but White Wolf declared that the dwarves were the rightful owners of the valley and the orcs bloodthirsty invaders who deserved death for daring to intrude on Alliance lands. Humorously, some fans now complain that Blizzard has taken on a distinctly pro-Horde bias.
- There's also a whole list of cases where White Wolf took a distinctly different stance than Blizzard. They considered the Warcraft setting to revolve around the conflict between arcane and divine magic, thought that all undead were free-willed, suggested that the Blood Elves were only a small magic-obsessed faction of the survivors of Quel'thalas, and that Illidan was trying to become the new Lich King to conquer Azeroth. Some of these were from pre-World of Warcraft sourcebooks, others don't have that excuse.
- That said, there have been some sources of Retcanons from the White Wolf books, such as the note that Darkspear and Revantusk Troll tribes are more open to female independence due to their inclusion in the Horde.
- A shipping example from the games themselves: Chris Metzen, one of the most prominent writers, hates the very popular Thrall/Jaina ship with an almighty passion, due to Thrall essentially being his Creator's Pet. He hated it so much that he used the Cataclysm expansion as an excuse to firmly sink this popular ship by introducing a Satellite Love Interest in the character of Aggra, involving the derailment of a major questline just so the player can watch her and Thrall get married. The odd/funny bit is that Metzen also wrote during Warcraft III, and voiced Thrall during that time - meaning the very ship he so despised was crafted from his material in the first place. One wonders how he didn't notice it earlier...
Web Animation
- The Homestar Runner short "4 Gregs" contains an in-universe example where each of two comics (Teen Girl Squad and the eponymous Spin-Off) is being written by the other's cast, and the scene cuts back and forth between them arguing over the accuracy of the preceding shot. Of course, in the end, both comics are drawn in the actual Homestar universe by Strong Bad.
Web Original
- In the Whateley Universe, the first several Phase novels were written years (in real time) after the first stories for the other main characters came out: the Canon Cabal finally found someone new to write the stories. The new author retconned a bunch of small moments that she deemed 'out of character' for Phase. So far, these are still standing. This is presumably because Diane's Phase has an incredibly different background, a much more focused power. There were also attempts to keep the retcons small, and still match with continuity. (Which led to fun with Phase forgetting 'his' utility belt.)
- This happened occasionally in the Global Guardians PBEM Universe when one Game Master took over a campaign from another Game Master and immediately instituted story changes that invalidated previous stories. At one point this got so bad that Jack Butler had to stop in, stop multiple campaigns, and reboot the entire universe.
Western Animation
- The sequels to An American Tail had this bad. Fievel Goes West, the Lighter and Softer first sequel, which Don Bluth wasn't involved with, seemed to take a few shots at the first movie, such as Tanya getting tomatoes thrown at her for singing "Somewhere Out There", New York City turning out to be a Crapsack World, and the Mouskewitzes living in poverty and having failed to achieve the American Dream, and in general carried itself as if Lighter and Softer equaled better. Then the third movie came along, with yet another different team of writers. Fievel wasn't out west anymore, but in New York, and the writers decided to throw in a Wham Line about Fievel having a dream where he moved out west, implying that the second movie is now Canon Discontinuity. They then proceeded to erase the Love Interest of Tony Toponi from the first film and pair him with their new character.
- In The Fairly OddParents Timmy/Tootie shippers have a live action movie which shows them getting together as adults. Whether or not the movie is canon is hotly contested by other FOP fans, who do not like the live action movie for various reasons, including Timmy's status as a 23 year old 5th grader who refuses to grow up. What makes things even more confusing is that the live action movie was created by Butch Hartman and Scott Fellows, both of whom worked on movies where Timmy romanced other girls such as "Wishology", yet all other romantic plots are retconned into non-existence by the FOP movie.
- When the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles crossover Turtles Forever was made, the new writers, while throwing the 1980's Ninja Turtles cartoon a bone every now and then, went out of their way to make everyone from the show silly and incompetent.
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