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"Now it is a curious fact that this is not the story as Bilbo first told it to his companions."
— Prologue to The Lord of the Rings

A Retcon which directly ignores, contradicts or alters information in the Backstory.

The introduction of a Cousin Oliver or Long-Lost Uncle Aesop is often a Revision, while Chuck Cunningham Syndrome and Remember the New Guy? is often a rewrite. Another Darrin may be either or both.

If the previous story is literally rewritten to match the new version of events, it's an Orwellian Retcon. If it happens In-Universe, it is Orwellian Editing.

Sometimes a result of Canon Discontinuity.

A Cliffhanger Copout is a short-term example, where the events that just happened last story are rewritten.

Contrast Revision, in which the retcon does not contradict existing information.

Not to be confused with Key/Visual Arts visual novel of the same title.


Examples:

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    Anime And Manga  
  • From the Death Note franchise comes the two Death Note Rewrite movies. However, these movies are generally just recaps of events that happened in the anime through a different perspective and the name is a pun on the show's premise.

    Comics  
  • The comic book Strangers in Paradise, in Vol. 3 issue #43, presents us with both an actual and a metafictional rewrite: It apparently takes place years later, when Francine and Katchoo are an elderly couple with a daughter named Ashley. Ashley has submitted a novel to a publisher, which turns out to be the story of Strangers in Paradise itself, and the publisher suggests a rewrite to make it flow better. After some minor outrage from Francine and Katchoo, they back the idea of a rewrite to make it more true to the "love story" aspect of their history, and the issue ends with the phrase, "End of Version 1." In the following issues, we see different takes of Francine revealing her first pregnancy, finally resolving in Francine going back to Katchoo, causing the rewrite to morph into a "saving throw" of removing a flash forward plot-thread from the start of volume three of the series where it's revealed that Katchoo and Francine had broken up and not seen each other in years (changed to several months and due to Katchoo being caught in bed with Casey). David's death remains intact however.
    • Less overt but still a bit of a major sting, was the issue of Katchoo's step-father's death. Terry Moore had stated in the book's letter page that the step-father, who sexually assaulted Katchoo, was long dead when asked about the character's family. But he later opted to have him die during the middle of the series' third volume, with an issue dedicated to Katchoo (who didn't know about it until after he was dead and buried) racing to his grave in order to vandalize it with the word's "Child Molester" burnt into the tombstone.
  • Garfield: In the original strips, Odie is seen as moving in with, and being owned by, Jon's roommate, Lyman. When Lyman was written out, flashbacks tended to show Jon buying Odie at a pet store.
  • The first two Calvin and Hobbes strips shows their first meeting, which Bill Watterson felt was important at the time. In later strips, Hobbes implies that he is older than Calvin and has memories of his birth.
  • The Rocket Raccoon and Groot back ups in Annihilators strongly suggests that pretty much all the events of the original Rocket Raccoon miniseries were Fake Memories based very loosely on the true events of why Rocket left Halfworld. Instead of defeating the evil toymaker Judson Jakes, curing the Loonies and setting off with Lyla and Wal Russ to explore, he left alone to stop any Loonies escaping, after the kindhearted doctor Judson Jakes succumbed to a madness plague spread by the telepathic Star Thief. As the shift in Jakes's occupation suggests, the details of exactly how and why Halfworld functions as an asylum were changed as well, with the animal inhabitants going from simply being intelligent therapy pets to qualified mental health professionals.
    • In issue #271 of The Incredible Hulk, which introduced Rocket and his world, a few details of the Halfworld setting were different from how they were depicted in the later miniseries. E.G.: the Keystone Kops were the only humans, Judson Jakes controls the Spacewheel, Mayhem Mekaniks was called Inter-Stel Mechanics, and Lord Dyvyne doesn't exist.
  • Kid Colt (2009): The series revises a few things about Colt's past, with no attempt to explain the contradictions. His real surname is now Cole, not Colt. The circumstances surrounding his family's murder, and the identities of the killers, have also changed - the villains are now the McGreeley family (previous Kid Colt comics had already changed this backstory several times).

    Fan Works 
  • In a strange in-universe example, the Lemony Narrator of Equestria: A History Revealed unashamedly rewrites history and facts to suit her goals and interests. At one point she even admits to it, but it's not as though she sees anything wrong with it.
  • Family Guy Fanon and The Cleveland Show Fanon rewrite the history of Family Guy and The Cleveland Show, adding new scenes and episodes, taking minor characters and giving them more depth (majority of them were Creator's Favorite of Boyariffic and The Super Blackwing) and changing the timeline out of universe.
  • The Child of Love: After completing the fic Axel decided rewriting it, abandoning the script format and adding a greater level of detail. The only rewritten chapter was very superior to the original. Unfortunately, it was not completed.
  • The author of Last Child of Krypton wasn't entirely satisfied with his story, so he published a rewritten version a while after completing the original fic.
  • Shinigami Phantom was rewritten after thirty chapters, with the author eventually deleting the old chapters entirely.
  • The Star Wars/Mass Effect crossover Fractured (SovereignGFC): The "Epilogue" got pretty much thrown out the airlock to enable the sequel Origins to be written. Other aspects of the sequel are less-contradictory of previous material and fall under Retcons instead.
  • Early chapters of My Family and Other Equestrians were rewritten in order to fit more closely into canon (things such as the Tree of Harmony were added to this rewrite when they were not in the original) and setting the story as taking place before "Equestria Games". This rewrite was also an attempt to make Blade Star not as OP, something that the author was worried that would happen in the course of the fic.
  • A.A. Pessimal expanded a couple of Assassin characters who only existed in Discworld canon - apparently - as bit-part players and cameos who were no more than a one-line name and job description. The character expansions were done based on shrewd guesses and extrapolation. Later information not available to him at the time (the canonical Assassins' Guild Yearbook) carries sparse information that Terry Pratchett's interpretation of the characters was somewhat different. The 'personality'' of Madame Deux-Epées is broadly correct but the portrait of her is of a woman of different physical appearance to Pessimal's description, for instance. And far from being young and "South African", as intelligent extrapolation suggested, Miss Smith-Rhodes turned out to be a dour middle-aged spinster in a mob-cap who teaches Domestic Science. Word of God is that pessimal prefers his own interpretations and that it's too late to change, although aspects of Madame Deux-Epées' canonical back-story have been Retconned into the Pessimal Discworld.
  • Pokémon: Nova and Antica is actually a rewrite of a different fanfic entitled Pokemon Story 2: The Great Adventure. The basic premise is the same, but if you endeavor to peek in the original version (it's accessible on FanFiction.Net), you'll see that... it was for the best.
  • The Apprentice, the Student, and the Charlatan is currently undergoing one of these, at least up until the later chapters, due to the author feeling that the quality difference between the earlier and later chapters due to his growth as a writer during that span needed to be corrected. Some of the readers weren't convinced at first, but the newest chapters got to the point where they were far and away the better specimens compared to their older counterparts.
  • Total Drama fanfic Monster Chronicles author made a rewrite of the original version of Voodoo's Disciple because he considered the first one poorly written.
  • No stars in sight is a rewrite of another fanfic called Stargazer. The reason behind this was because the author Keltoi felt that Stargazer's plot was losing cohesion and found himself dissatisfied with the direction that the original story was headed.

    Film — Live Action  
  • Terminator:
  • Rocky Balboa ignores the events of Rocky V. In the montage of clips shown from previous films, any footage from Rocky V is notably absent, and the brain damage Rocky suffered in Rocky V is completely ignored. This is due to Sylvester Stallone being unhappy with Rocky V and creating Rocky Balboa as the "suitable" conclusion to the Rocky saga.
    • The Broad Strokes of Rocky V did happen, like him being retired from boxing and virtually broke. Stallone provided a Hand Wave in supplementary material that said the head injury wasn't as severe as his doctors initially believed, and he presumably never got a second opinion because Adrien insisted it was time for him to call it a day.
  • Godzilla (2014) gives Godzilla a new origin story that slightly modifies his traditional one: at least some nuclear tests were, in fact, attempts to kill the monster after humans woke him up.
  • Many cinematic serials, such as Undersea Kingdom were notorious for rewriting Cliffhangers. "Oh no, Crash Corrigan collapsed in the certain death room! Oh, wait, they introduced a floor-hole between episodes and had Crash jump through it, and thus he's no longer being showered in sparks."
  • The Little Shop of Horrors: At the beginning, Seymour claims that he doesn't know what Audrey Jr. is, and that he bought the seeds from an old Japanese man on Central Ave, who got the seeds in an order from a plantation next to a cranberry farm. However, around the half-hour mark, Seymour claims that it's a cross between a butterwort and a Venus flytrap. Fans tend to subscribe to the latter, though the former was used as the basis for the plant's origin in the musical.
  • Burnt by the Sun states unequivocally at the end that Kotov was executed in 1936 and his wife Marusya died in a gulag in 1940. And Mitya, the antagonist, is seen committing Bath Suicide in the last scene. When sequel Burnt by the Sun 2 was released some years later, all three characters are somehow still alive in 1941. And the character of Nadya, aged six years old in 1936, has somehow grown to adulthood by 1941 (in Real Life the actress who played Nadya had aged into adulthood during the Sequel Gap).
  • The Waltons made-for-TV movies of the 1980s-1990s are notorious for these, contradicting details given in the series, and sometimes contradicting each other. To give one example: In the last movie, A Walton Easter, John and Olivia celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary during the same year as the moon landing (1969). That would put them as being married in 1929. However, the TV series was set from approximately 1933 to 1945. When the series begins, John-Boy is in his last few years of high school, making him around 16 at the very least. That would mean he was born around 1916-1917 in the series timeline, with John & Olivia getting married some time before that. These errors may have been because the writers in the movies didn't do their research, or they figured that nobody would notice.
    • Timeline consistency would have been tough given the nature of the story-arcs in the last movie, if they still wanted to keep the movie in the late 1960s. For example, John Boy is a newlywed with his first child on the way. This would have been an unlikely scenario for a man of 52 or 53 years old. Also, Elizabeth in the film is obviously younger than middle-aged, but keeping to the original timeline would have made her around 41 years old in 1969 (Kami Cotler was actually 31 or 32 when the movie was made).

    Literature 
  • Alien: River of Pain (the final part of the book trilogy in the revamped Alien continuity, produced in 2017) changes the nature of the xenomorph siege on Hadley's Hope significantly from the way it was portrayed in the films. As shown in both this book and Prometheus: Fire and Stone, Rebecca 'Newt' Jordan was not the only survivor — at least four others (including Captain Brackett, a Marine guard, a small girl named Luisa and a doctor stationed at the Colony) escape on a colony ship that was heretofore unknown or unreferenced by other characters until the end of the book, while a separate group of survivors fled earlier in the siege on a different ship, the Onager, that eventually crash-landed on a different planet. This is at odds with both Aliens: Newt's Tale and the marketing for River of Pain, which both unequivocally state that Newt is the Sole Survivor of the infestation and that no one else escaped.
  • Perhaps the most famous (and best handled) example is Tolkien's rewriting of The Hobbit, where Bilbo obtains a ring that confers invisibility in the Misty Mountains. As The Lord of the Rings reveals this to be the One Ring, Gollum's Back Story could no longer have him offering an Artifact of Attraction as a prize to Bilbo for winning the riddle contest; instead, Gollum would never forgive "Baggins" for stealing his ring. A revised edition of The Hobbit was published, and the prologue to The Lord of the Rings explained the inconsistency: the original version was the story Bilbo maintained (building on the idea that The Hobbit was actually an autobiographical novel by Bilbo himself), but Gandalf eventually learned the true story by persistent questioning, and the revision is a re-write by Frodo, telling the true story. In-story, Bilbo finally tells the true story publicly (and to Glóin,) for the first time at the Council of Elrond, more than 70 years after the event.
  • The second Jurassic Park book The Lost World (1995) had Ian Malcolm very still alive, despite his apparent death in the first one. (There's even a line in the epilogue about the Costa Rican authorities not permitting his burial).
    • The author hangs a lampshade by explaining that rumors of Ian Malcolm's death were exaggerated, and he still suffers ill effects.
  • In Gary Brandner's The Howling, the character of Marcia is specifically shot through the eye by a silver bullet and drops dead. In the sequel, Marcia is revealed to be alive after the bullet just grazed her. Her eyes are fine and in human form the only sign of injury is a streak of grey hair. Unfortunately, the silver made it so she could no longer transform properly.
  • J.T. Edson wrote several novels that were 'expansions' of earlier short stories. These novels usually change substantial details of the earlier stories. Perhaps the most significant of the changes is revealing that Dusty Fog had married much earlier than Edson had previously established.
  • In the Warrior Cats series, the authors came out with a guide book, Secrets of the Clans, when only the first two series were out. It explained how the Clans formed and said that the warrior code was created by the four founding leaders. In the following years, they came out with more story arcs and special editions and heavily expanded on the world, leading the authors to declare parts of it Canon Discontinuity. Code of the Clans shows that the warrior code formed over time in response to difficult situations rather than being established by the Clan founders. Dawn of the Clans, the fifth series, is about how the Clans formed, and the authors have said to consider the Secrets of the Clans story as an elders' tale.
  • In BIONICLE: Tale of the Toa, the climax involves the titular Toa heroes defeating their evil shadow clones through Opponent Switch. Later material changed this to them absorbing their doubles into themselves upon realizing that shadow is a part of their being — which was allegedly the original plan for how the scene should play out. The book was also wildly inconsistent with other media (for example, the actual climax in which the Toa face the Big Bad is ignored entirely), so rewrites were necessary to tie the story into the overall mythos.
  • In the Apprentice Adept series, Robot Adept has Bane (a human from the fantasy world in the body of his robot counterpart in the sci-fi world) and Agape (an amorphous shapeshifting alien) decide to have a child together. This child is clearly described as being a cyborg, with Agape undergoing asexual reproduction and the part that's split off becoming the "brain" in a robot body. In Unicorn Point, where the child actually appears, she's a shapeshifter who can turn into a robot. This doesn't get explained on any level.
  • The whole point of the Harper Hall Trilogy of Dragonriders of Pern novels is that woman can't be Harpers, and while Masterharper Robinton might disagree with this, it requires something truly remarkable for him to go against centuries of tradition and the deeply-held beliefs of his fellow Harpers. In Masterharper of Pern, we learn that Robinton's late wife was a Harper, and after her death the Harper Hall vaguely discouraged women from joining in case they reminded him of her.

    Live Action TV 
  • Our Miss Brooks: There are two versions of Miss Brooks' arrival in Madison. The first episode (First Day) and the later episode Spare That Rod! have Miss Brooks already teaching at Madison when Mr. Conklin is appointed principal. The later episode, Borrow Money To Fly, features a major rewrite. Miss Brooks arrives to teach at Madison High School, and is greeted by longtime principal Mr. Conklin. The cinematic series finale follows the new continuity, albeit having Miss Brooks meet Mr. Conklin and Mr. Boynton in a slightly different manner.
  • Red Dwarf underwent continuous rewrites; or to be more precise showed a cavalier disregard to its own backstory when there was a gag to be made. Most notably, the idea in the early seasons that Lister had barely spoken to Kochanski was contradicted in the novels, where they had a brief relationship before she dumped him. Later episodes would follow the novels' version. Another major one is Rimmer's light bee; it went from being Rimmer's remote projection unit to actually being Rimmer.
    • Not to mention that the light bee originally didn't exist. The only way for Rimmer to leave Red Dwarf was within the confinement of a "Hologrammic Projection Cage."
    • There were originally 169 crewmembers aboard the titular ship. Given the ship was meant to be five miles long, three miles wide and have hundreds of floors, this was later decided to be a bit small and was revised to 1,169.
  • At one point, a TV series was in production that would focus on the nephew of MacGyver, who was an only child in the series.
  • On Full House, Uncle Jesse goes from being Jesse Cochran to Jesse Katsopolis.
  • In Game of Thrones's first season, Tyrion Lannister and Theon Greyjoy meet while Tyrion is departing Winterfell, and Theon is pretty cordial, even offering tips of which brothel to visit, while Tyrion has a few barbs about the Ironborn and the Greyjoy failed rebellion. Come season 6, Tyrion remembers the meeting as Theon mocking him with dwarf jokes, which Theon doesn't dispute.
  • Gilmore Girls has a ton of these:
    • In series 1, the grandparents tell Rory and Lorelai at one of the Friday-night-dinners about Richard's departed mother, Rory's great-grandmother. They clearly talk about her in the past tense, she was a wonderful woman, wish you could have met her, etc. Later on, she appears and causes much entertaining havoc. Clearly the writers were embarrassed at having so thoughtlessly thrown away a great opportunity for family dramatics, and just introduced her (Lorelai the first) without even the grace to lampshade-hang the fact that she was supposed to be dead. There is another trope here whose name I don't know, where an actor re-appears in a different role: When Lorelai the first eventually dies, the actress appears at her funeral in the role of her niece /Richard's cousin Marilyn, continuing the legacy by telling adventurous tales about the demised matriarch. Marilyn appears again in the episode when Richard and Emily renew their vows; the writers must have loved her acting, but wanted to switch roles as matriarch Lorelai probably began to wear everyone out (and her death and ensuing funeral shenanigans complete with Emily's breakdown were just too much writer's gold to pass up).
    • Jess's parents: when Jess first appears, Luke tells Lorelai that "the prize" that is Jess's father left them 2 years ago, i.e. when Jess was 15. Later on, it is stated that Jess never really knew his father as he left just after Jess was born.
    • The way that Jess's mother Liz is talked about also changes quite a bit; again, I guess as the writers realised that here was an opportunity to introduce another promising character, they couldn't quite keep portraying her as the horrible screw-up, unreliable and not really caring about her son enough, as no viewers would have taken to her. They managed quite well by twisting her story into that of a hippy-chick who has finally found her way, given up drugs and promiscuity, and getting her life together, but from the way they talk about her when Jess first appears, you'd never know she was such a likeable person. They do well though, by having both Luke and herself mentioning, a lot, how she used to be a screw-up. It's a better integration into the story than just having a supposedly dead character suddenly appear without comment...
    • Kirk veers between personalities, getting quirkier and quirkier as the series goes on. He seems quite reliable and organised in the first season, when he manages Doosey's market, or checks Lorelai's house for termites. He goes more and more nuts, to create more writing (writer's) fun. He also "can't drink coffee" in one episode, but is seen drinking coffee at Luke's diner all the time, both before and after this. Although that could just have been a temporary non-coffee-drinking quirk, like his one-time juice diet.
    • In season 2, Emily tells a horrified Lorelai that once on holiday in Thailand with Richard, they spent the entire holiday eating incredibly spicy food and skinny-dipping. However in a much later season, when they are "separated" and Richard lives in the pool house and comes into the main house unannounced, and Emily protests "What if I had been sitting here stark naked?!" Richard replies: "you've never been stark naked! We went skinny-dipping once, and you wore an overcoat!"
    • Paris's friends Louise and Madeleine are always into boys, but in series 1 they are portrayed as also being studious and A- and B- students respectively, whereas later they get bad grades and are portrayed as always having had bad grades and no interest in studying. Bad girls are more fun to write in that respect, but it makes it weirder that they would be friends with Paris.
    • And let's not forget, of course, the retroactive modification of poor Dean's character! When he first appears Lane Kim tells Rory how Dean is into very cool, hip, of-the-moment bands and literature, and then when love-rival Jess comes on, they have to dumb poor Dean down and have Rory tell Jess how she basically has to educate Dean on cool music (Jess: "Does he know Bjork?" Rory: "I've played him some stuff"). Even much later, when he and Rory are back together and she then meets Logan, Dean gets the bum end of the stick AGAIN, when Logan can discuss journalism and politics and give Rory detailed and superior opinions on her writing, and the have Dean sit in Doosey's market with her, eating day-old sandwiches for a discount, and comment on her article with "I can't comment on this stuff, I just know that I read it and I liked it!"
    • Rory changes a lot in later seasons, which can be attributed to being influenced by a wealthy life, snobbish friends and boyfriend and being more engaged in other social and intellectual circles with all the positive and negative consequences that stem from that. It doesn't explain, though, how her 'past' changed as well: early seasons described her childhood as a relatively 'normal' one, and that she was a disciplined kid who liked to read and who'd been largely influenced by her mother's street-smart approach and pop culture. Later seasons described pre-teen Rory as a virtual prodigy with eidetic memory (on one episode, she claimed she'd only need to read an obituary once and she'd remember the person's relatives' names a decade later). Partly plot-justified: early seasons depicted a struggle to work her way up at Chilton and eventually get accepted in the Ivy League, so it was more believable if she was a good student but not an actual genius; later seasons led her to be ridiculously successful at Yale (e.g., editing the daily news despite spending a lot of time partying and dropping out and what not), which could only be remotely possible if she was, in fact, a female Einstein.
    • Lorelai's general cleverness was also rewritten to contrast with Rory's: in early seasons, Lorelai was quite well-read and street-smart and quite an academic match for Rory despite her lack of Ivy League background, etc., which perfectly depicted her as a role model for Rory who wanted to give her the opportunities she missed out on. Later sessions keep Lorelai as street-smart, but dumb her down academically to contrast with Rory's increasing (and, as mentioned above, unrealistic) portrayal as a genius. Compare Rory's high-school graduation valedictorian speech with her graduation from Yale later on.
    • Christopher's role in Rory's life changed according to what the plot dictated. Sometimes he was described as an almost-permanently absent sperm-donor who knew next to nothing about Rory's life, sometimes it was mentioned he talked to her once a week, depending on how sympathetic the writers wanted to portray him, and depending on how much they wanted to contrast him with Luke, or contrast old-Christopher with new-Christopher (especially after his father died and he wanted to be much more involved in Rory's life).

    Video Games 
  • The Final Fantasy VII OVA did this, and then Crisis Core did this with both the OVA and the original game.
    • The creators have said that the OVA has been replaced by Crisis Core in canon, however, how much of Crisis Core is Revision or Re-Write is arguable. In the original Final Fantasy VII game, we only saw part of the Nibelheim incident, and only from the perspective of Cloud and what he remembered following the experimentation, mako poisoning, mental breakdown/denial, etc., so much of the changes in Crisis Core can be considered Revisions (for example, the fact that Genesis was involved in Nibelheim would seem like a Re-Write, except that Cloud never saw him and Zack never mentioned his appearance to Cloud, so that is likely a Revision).
  • God of War II does this to the first game's continuity. At the end of the first game, the narrator expounds upon Kratos's retaining the throne of the God of War for all time, explicitly showing flash-forwards to WWII and modern counter-terrorist forces as she talks of his presiding over all armed conflict. At the beginning of the second game, Zeus strips Kratos of his mantle of godhood and boots him from Olympus, and Kratos does not regain his godhood by the ending. By the end of the third game, Olympus is completely ruined, so there's no throne for Kratos to reclaim...although the The End... Or Is It? ending of the third game still leaves room for him to possibly return.
  • Harvest Moon 64 and "Harvest Moon: Back to Nature" have the same characters but are completely different in other respects. Almost everything is rewritten, from the personalities and backstories to jobs and who's related to who.
    • This more comes with the territory of the Harvest Moon series blatantly recycling character designs and personalities on a mass level. It's just so blatant in Back to Nature because of the fact that that marked a direct case of copying the entire cast of 64, rather than picking and choosing from the series as a whole as is usually done.
  • The Legend of Zelda:
    • The Master Sword's origin has gone through three primary incarnations throughout the series' history. In the Japanese manual of A Link to the Past, the ancient Hyruleans were instructed by the gods to forge the sword to destroy any evil that would desire the Triforce.note  Twilight Princess rewrites this origin to state the sword was "crafted by the wisdom of the ancient sages". Skyward Sword, which directly shows (part of) the sword's creation, states that the Goddess Hylia created the Goddess Sword, which would evolve into the Master Sword as part of the Link of said game executing Hylia's further plans. That said, because the Goddess Sword's creation isn't directly shown, some fans (example) believe that all three origins are true, concluding that Hylia instructed the people of Hyrule to forge the Goddess Sword, and that its forging was jointly presided by both Hylia and the Sages of that time.
    • The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past ends with a screen showing that "The Master Sword sleeps again... forever!" The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds indicates that "forever" was a couple hundred years tops.
  • While most of the changes between Metroid: Zero Mission and the original game it's a remake of can be explained away as simple retcons, there's no ignoring the fact that Kraid and Ridley have gone from human-sized to a two-story Godzilla clone and a giant flying dragon respectively.
    • Word of God states that they were always intended to be the size they were in Metroid Zero Mission.
  • Metal Gear is (in)famous for this.
  • Originally, the Pokémon series' remakes could be seen as rewrites of the originals. For example, most of the returning characters from Kanto and Johto in Pokémon Black 2 and White 2 used their updated designs from Pokemon Heart Gold And Soul Silver. However, Pokémon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire imply that the originals are an alternate universe from the remake, and Pokémon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon confirm this by pulling alternate-reality versions of characters using designs from their original games.
    • The third release games may count for this as well. In Generation II, it seems like Pokémon Yellow was canon. Pokémon Platinum is usually regarded as canon, though Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon again show that Diamond or Pearl happened instead in other universes.
  • The Resident Evil games and tie-in media made after Resident Evil 3: Nemesis have continually rewritten the details of Raccoon City's destruction. While 3 definitively showed the city being destroyed at dawn by a single nuclear missile, the current canon is that it was done just before daybreak by multiple non-nuclear high explosive missiles.
  • The ending of Star Wars: Rebel Assault deliberately rewrites the ending of A New Hope so that player character Rookie One and his wingman Ru Murleen are the ones who destroy the Death Star, instead of Luke Skywalker. Rookie One fires the missile that travels down the exhaust shaft, and many more fighters are seen to survive the attack (at least seven fighters in Rebel Assault compared to the three fighters from the film).
    • Something similar happens on X-Wing, in which the player character, Keyan Farlander, is the one who destroys the Death Star, ironically, Luke Skywalker does make an appearance in a cutscene of one of the expansions.
  • Tomb Raider:
    • This happens whenever a new developer takes over the series. Lara's whole background is changed to make her more developed. Tomb Raider: Legend also implies that all but the first Tomb Raider game never happened.
    • In Tomb Raider: Underworld, it's implied that parts of it happened or at least Lara mentions encountering a Doppelgänger before. Also, she is closer to Crystal Dynamics Lara than the original. Go figure.
  • Originally, the world of Xenoblade Chronicles 1 was created by the Mad Scientist Klaus when his unfettered curiosity of his experiment destroyed the Earth and elevated him and his assistant into the gods Zanza and Mayneth respectively. Xenoblade Chronicles 2, which initially seemed to be a completely new continuity, revealed that Klaus performed his experiment as a last-ditch effort to win a Hopeless War and that the world in the first game is in a dimension parallel to Earth. Klaus' malice was split off into Zanza, while his moral half remained in the old world, becoming the Architect who created the world of Alrest on top of the ruins of Earth. Xenoblade Chronicles 3 and its DLC further implies that the entire series is in the same universe/multiverse as Xenosaga, albeit with some differences.

    Western Animation 

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