The Retcon Thread

This thread is for when, midway through writing something, you have a new idea for the backstory that explicitly contradicts what you were previously imagining. :)

So, in my story, the antagonist is an Antichrist-type figure, but I had previously been thinking that he was just some random kid who wound up becoming the Antichrist thanks to circumstance (he joins an occult sect and, in a magical accident, gains untold power and a drive to bring about the end of the world). I've now decided to go with a more traditional portrayal wherein his father was a demon, and the accident that made him a world-ending figure was always destined to happen. This also makes his mother's hatred for him slightly more sympathetic - he's a child by rape, but she was pressured into keeping him by her family.

during one characters backstory, she has her family murdered save herself and her little brother by her best friend for unspecified reasons.

initially it was a "its dark, but i'll leave it to your imagination" thing.

but then in the final story, where this plothread came up again, i changed my mind and actually specified what it was (and making it somewhat lighter than the immediate first conclusion), and more of an example of her being in a bad situation and wanting revenge, but being in a position where she had multiple methods of dealing with the issue and choosing the most disproportionate one, and never owning up to how badly it affected everyone around her, instead choosing to run away from the issue and play the entirely blameless victim.

im not sure why it took me so long to make this retcon, considering the big theme of the series was that the people in the stories have all done horrible things that cannot be justified and the responsibilities passed off on someone else.

My Post-Cyberpunk story underwent so many retcons that various versions of it seem more like completely different stories that happen to have some of the same names turning up - attached to completely different characters.

• The exact backstory of Ein Woe is hard to find. At first, I wanted him to be despondent Acturian Royalty responding to how thoroughly cast out a "freak" like him would be in medieval society, and deciding the world is a farce and that he should end it. Then I decided to make him a rich Earth man's son, instead of a Gaean, and worked in a completely new backstory. Problems came when Ein appeared with his new backstory, remembering things that happened on Gaea and referencing them. And then he appears on Old Terra, more than sixty five million years before my current stories take place. The resulting retcon is incredibly confusing; He was the cast out son of a man from Earth, and then he was sent back in time, where he met the first protagonist, Vonh, and then had these adventures, and as a result was sent flying forward in time during the cataclysmic ending of events in that series, and then he landed on Gaea, wherein he reinstated himself as Grand Duke of the Demons, and stole the identity of the actual other Acturian heir, and used his magic to cosmic retcon himself into this person's place, and then he returned to Earth just in time to mastermind the events of New Dawn I. Whew!

• The YSD. What was it originally supposed to do? Was it originally a weapon repurposed to guard an entire planet against a sentient planet that goes around eating other planets? Was it a cosmic balancing force that carried Rebirth and Destruction? Or was it an entire race's Heroic Sacrifice result, which was supposed to be used to seal Terra off from the universe to avoid a Black Hole caused by the Big Bad? Somehow, I managed to have radically different accounts told by people who theoretically should have the same information, and Balmunc has no reason at all to give all these different accounts, given its in his own interest to make Vonh pursue the damn things. It only gets worse once they show up after being scattered across the universe. And were they gems, ala the Chaos Emeralds? Or were they boxes?

• Ignius' origin story is almost as convoluted and littered with retcons as Ein Woe's. First he was evil Matthew from an alternate universe. Then I decided I didn't like that, so I completely retooled Ignius into being "Lord of Strife and Annihilation", a Dimension Lord who is actually an alternate reality Matthew's son pretending to be his own reality's Matthew who then temporarily swapped with Reality 1 Matthew. Then it was retconned in that there was yet another alternate reality and who we thought was Ignius / Cole Streika the whole time was his evil twin actually named Ignius who had been stuck in a reality run by a Mad God until he escaped, impersonated his twin brother, and ruined his name with an insanely convoluted, needlessly complicated impersonation / take over the world scheme all for the fact Cole grew up in a loving home, while he had to stomach a Mad God's depraved whimsies. So what we have here is one guy pretending to be another guy pretending to be another guy pretending to be another guy.

edited 19th Jul '13 9:57:12 PM by NickTheSwing