Salvaged Story / Literature

• The Boy on the Bridge: The ending does a lot to avert the Inferred Holocaust feelings of The Girl With All the Gifts, due to revealing that humans living high enough in the mountains are safe from the spores Melanie released, and she wants to peacefully coexist with them.
• In-universe, and somewhat more literal, example in the fifth Captain Underpants book (sorry, EPIC NOVEL), Captain Underpants and the Wrath of the Wicked Wedgie Woman. Ms. Ribble (who, via a screwed-up hypnosis session — apparently the Hypno-ring George and Harold used works in reverse on women — turned into Wedgie Woman) sprays spray starch on Captain Underpants, rendering him powerless. George and Harold, in an effort to save the Captain, quickly write a comic book to try to negate this weakness. To make a long story short... it worked.
• Euripides wrote two versions of the story of Hippolytus. Only the second version survives, but it is widely believed that in the original version outraged the audience because Phaedra (wife of the great hero Theseus) lusts without shame after her step-son Hippolytus, and brazenly attempts to seduce him. The second, surviving version bends over backwards to make Phaedra blameless (she's deeply ashamed of her feelings, and only seems to come on to her step-son because her nurse betrays her). She still comes to no good end, committing suicide and attempting to frame Hippolytus for rape.
• A Frozen Heart: One of the chief complaints about the film Frozen was the character Prince Hans, namely that he was Evil All Along, causing him to become the film's biggest Base-Breaking Character. This Tie-In Novel gives him a more sympathetic portrayal by showing more of his personality and inner thoughts during most of the story and giving him a backstory with a Freudian Excuse in the form of an abusive family that includes a father who encourages ruthlessness.
• In Great Expectations, Charles Dickens wrote a new Earn Your Happy Ending ending for when the original Bittersweet Ending wasn't well received by fans.
• A Karen Traviss example: Her first Halo book, Halo: Glasslands, was despised by the fandom for demonizing the scientist Catherine Halsey while portraying her rival Admiral Parangosky as a model of honesty. In reality, both of them have committed plenty of unethical acts to defeat both the Insurrection and Covenant. Thus, in her second book Halo: The Thursday War, Parangosky was now depicted as more sinister and ruthless (willing to starve an entire species by secretly making their crops and meat inedible) while Halsey gets some sympathetic reveals, such as that she still cries over the death of her daughter Miranda Keyes.
• Harry Potter:
  • Many fans complained that, since catching the Golden Snitch basically scored 15 times as many points as a goal and ended the game, the Seeker made the rest of the game irrelevant. The World Cup game shown in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire demonstrates that is it at least possible for a good enough team to beat even a superior seeker. The Weasley twins successfully manage to win a bet that Ireland's team will win the game, but that Bulgaria's Seeker will still get the Snitch, showing that catching the Snitch doesn't guarantee victory. Of course this doesn't really refute the initial argument, as it does show that it's not literally always true. Everyone in universe also acknowledges how incredibly unlikely this is (which is why they win big on the bet), with most of them finding the idea of a team catching the Snitch but losing absurd.
  • One of the most disliked elements of the series was the idea of sending Harry to live with the Dursleys. Even if they didn't know the Dursleys would turn cartoonishly abusive towards Harry, they certainly did know what they were like by the end of the first novel. The original explanation - Dumbledore wanted Harry raised away from the Wizarding world to guard against Harry growing up arrogant and entitled - only served to inflame the readership's condemnation, pointing out that if that was all that Dumbledore wanted, Harry could have been simply dropped off at an orphanage or another place where Harry was guaranteed to find a loving Muggle family. Come Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, we find out that Harry's Crazy Cat Lady next door neighbor was actually Dumbledore's agent, sent to make sure Harry was safe. Then in the final chapters, Dumbledore reveals the REAL reason he sent Harry to the Dursleys: because of the nature of Lily's Heroic Sacrifice enchantment, it meant that as long as Harry was under the guardianship of her family, he had magical protection away from Hogwarts from the Death Eaters. Petunia Dursley, Lily's estranged older sister, was the only remaining relative of hers, leaving Dumbledore with no choice but to leave Harry there. Later, Dumbledore apologizes to Harry for putting him through all of that and admits that Harry grew up to become a much better person than anybody would have expected under those kind of circumstances. He also gives the Dursleys a much-deserved telling off for the abuse and neglect they dished out, acknowledging in-universe that they'd treated him abominably.
  • One common complaint about the series is that Slytherins are always portrayed as evil, to the point that Peter Pettigrew is the only antagonist stated in the books to not be from the house.^note Other antagonistic characters are actually from other houses—Quirinus Quirrell is a Ravenclaw, for example—but this is not explicitly stated in the books. Similarly, Snape was the only remotely good character to come from the house for most of the series and even that isn't apparent until near the end of the series. Horace Slughorn in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is often seen as Rowling's saving throw, creating a Slytherin character who's definitively on Dumbledore's side and more or less a good guy. How moral his character is is up for debate, but he shows regret for indirectly helping a young Voldemort work out creating horcruxes and is, if not perfect, at least a nice guy overall. And in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows prior to the Battle at Hogwarts all of Slytherin house are directed to leave Hogwarts grounds under the presumption they won't help defeat Voldemort; during the battle Slughorn and some of the Slytherin students (though the students accompanying him was revealed by Rowling after publication, not in the book) later return having gathered more reinforcements from outside the school to fight against Voldemort.
• Honor Harrington: The People's Republic of Haven started the series as a welfare state gone wrong, with the majority of its citizens on welfare, not contributing to the economy, forcing the Republic to conquer in order to survive. A lot of people have taken this as an attack on the concept of a welfare state. In the novella I Will Build My House of Steel, found in the Manticore companion book House of Steel, Weber mentions that several other star systems, influenced by Haven, enacted similar reforms, but they actually pulled it off without gutting their economies, by virtue of having relatively honest politicians... until, that is, they got conquered by Haven.
  • When Weber introduced the concept of the prolong treatment in the second book of the series, The Honor of The Queen, it's explicitly stated that the 3rd generation prolong treatment, which is given in infancy, extends all stages of life, such that people from a planet without prolong are stated to be disturbed to be visiting a Manticoran warship that looks like it's crewed mostly by teens and pre-teens (really crew in their chronological 20s and 30s). Later in the series it's also mentioned that the (mixed sex) crews are required to have birth control implants while serving on ships because sex between consenting crew members who spend long periods in close quarters is considered inevitable, and is tolerated. When the Unfortunate Implications and Squick factor of those two facts considered together was pointed out (and that this would be true of the entire culture, not just the military), later stories in the universe make a point of mentioning that prolong also includes treatment that causes one to physically age at a normal rate until they reach adulthood, at which point the slowdown of physical aging is allowed to happen.
• The Lightbringer Series: The Blood Mirror had several revelations that were not particularly popular with readers. The sequel, The Burning White, barely mentions and even retcons away some of them. For instance, Andross revealing to Gavin/Dazen that Gavin was not a full spectrum polychrome at all, and was in fact a black monochrome drafter that stole other colors from people he's killed is almost completely ignored in the sequel. The Burning White, aside from a very brief mention of Gavin confusedly recalling this incident, operates under the assumption that Gavin is a true prism and full spectrum polychrome who has simply lost his ability to draft. Why Andross believed otherwise and told Gavin this is never explained.
• The Magic: The Gathering novel Scourge had the Big Bad, Karona, gather five powerful beings representing the colors of magic, namely Multani, Teferi, Fiers, Llowalyn, and Yawgmoth, revealing that Yawgmoth (the Big Bad of the Weatherlight Saga), who was dramatically killed, was hanging on in some form. The storyline fans were not amused at the news. A few years later, the Time Spiral block trilogy had Teferi deny his meeting with Karona, and several characters stated that they'd personally confirmed that Yawgmoth was dead.
• One element of the first Mary Russell novel that upset even those Holmes fans who like the books was the Rathbone-movie-style Adaptational Wimp portrayal of Dr. Watson. Although Watson has never played a big role in the books, later novels strongly suggest that Mary's initial judgement of him was adolescently arrogant and hasty.
• In-universe example in Misery; a fan kidnaps a writer to force him to do an Author's Saving Throw after he killed off a beloved character in his series.
• The Missus: A complaint of The Mister was that neither Alessia or any other characters did much to help the other women being trafficked by Dante and Yili, to the point Alessia (who had managed to escape) barely seemed fazed by any of it. In the follow-up, there's a subplot involving Alessia attempting to find a trafficked teenager she was friendly with and experiencing some survivor guilt. Although it turns out the girl escaped and finds Alessia by herself, Alessia at least tried to help and provides the girl with a place to stay. The epilogue also has Alessia deciding to try and rescue the rest of the women and shut down the slave ring for good. The trafficking plotline doesn't get much focus in the novel, but it's not completely brushed aside like it was in the first book and Alessia shows more concern over the situation.
• Some people thought the Mog book "Goodbye, Mog" was too sad because of Mog's apparent death, so "Mog's Christmas Calamity" was written, in which she has an Unexplained Recovery.
• In the Old Man's War series, John Scalzi reveals in the afterword of Zoe's Tale that he decided to do a Perspective Flip of the previous book rather than continuing the story, as he was never happy with Zoe's offscreen recruitment of a whole army, and thought the many fans that accused it of being a Deus ex Machina had a good point. He also took the opportunity to provide more closure to the werewolf storyline.
• A few examples from Rick Riordan and his Riordanverse of mythological fantasy books.
  • During The House of Hades, Nico's actions toward Percy in The Battle of the Labyrinth seem much less like a hastily Subverted Create Your Own Villain subplot and much more representative of his romantic feelings after reading The House of Hades.
  • The House of Hades itself irons out some inconsistencies in the previous books, gives the new characters some much needed development, and includes a vast number of references to the previous series that continued several small plot threads that, while not necessarily dangling, could be explored further.
  • The next series had one for an odd line in the very first book about Percy being the son of Nemesis, a goddess, while having a mortal mother. Apollo off-handedly mentions that gods can reproduce with same sex humans in the Riordanverse, a fact that, while in the original mythology, had not been confirmed in the Riordan take on it.
  • Readers were surprised by Magnus, protagonist of the Norse series, using mild cursing in the first book, which many felt was uncharacteristic for Riordan. Come book two, not a single "dammit" appears, though the Hel/hell joke is kept due to Rule of Funny.
  • TJ, Gunderson, and Mallory were practically billed as main characters, yet they were offscreen for most of the first two books when Sam, Blitzen, and Hearthstone took the role of main supporting characters. The third book has them joining the main four, along with Alex, and sharing backstories and fighting alongside him.
  • Alex doesn't go as Anvilicious with their gender fluidity in the third book, but that actually does make sense - the viewers (much like the friends and family members of gender-fluid people) had time to adjust, so Alex doesn't need to mention it all the time.
  • In general the Trials books are a lot better at acknowledging that other books in the series outside of the Classical Mythology ones exist after the last series did not acknowledge them at all outside of easily avoidable short stories.
• A well-known example can be found in Sherlock Holmes stories. In The Adventure of the Final Problem Doyle had both Holmes and his nemesis Moriarty apparently die in a waterfall. After public outrage (and big sacks of cash), he retconned the event, allowing the detective to defeat the Big Bad and survive. In universe, it turned out that Holmes "had no serious difficulty in getting out of [the waterfall], for the simple reason that I was never in it": he'd faked his death in order to pursue the rest of Moriarty's organisation after dealing with the boss.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • The franchise has been up to its elbows in these. First the controversial New Jedi Order books introduced Vergere, and her philosophy that the Force was too complex to be summed up as simple light vs. dark. This ticked off a lot of fans, so the writers did the Dark Nest Trilogy and Legacy of the Force in response, which had Jacen Solo (Vergere's main pupil) become a Knight Templar and fall to The Dark Side as a result of her teachings. Problem was, many fans felt bothered with Jacen's fall, so the Fate of the Jedi series retconned it to have been not because of Vergere's teachings, but because he encountered something during a journey through the galaxy that made him go crazy.
  • Karen Traviss's Republic Commando Series has been very polarizing, due to her single-minded approach to storytelling. After four novels of vicious anti-Jedi sentiment at the hands of the Mandalorian characters, she included two scenes in her last novel to try and fix things up. First, she made Maze call out Skirata for being an asshole, and the renegade clones a bunch of brainwashed slaves, effectively comparing Skirata to the Jedi he was trying to save his troops from. Then, she revealed Djinn Altis' rogue Jedi convent, giving a fresh perspective that was separate from both the Republic Jedi and the Mandalorians, putting a lampshade on the whole series focus.
• Legend says that Stesichorus (a Greek poet, who lived in the 7-6th centuries BCE) was struck with blindness after he wrote his original poem, in which the author bashed Helen for causing The Trojan War. He recants it by writing down another, but not as popular, oral version of her myth. The other version claims that the real Helen had spent the whole duration of the war in Egypt, and the Helen who went to Troy was just a duplicate made out of clouds ^note The Illiad mentions an Eidolon, or image-double, too, but it looks like Homer, or whoever the original author of The Illiad was, couldn't make it fit well with the rest story, so they scrapped it, and the Eidolon concept remains there to be recognized only by hardcore fans of comparative mythology or scholars. Euripides also used a version of this story in his Helen. This became recognized as a palinode, a literary form, in which a poet writes a second poem to disavow an earlier one.

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