This. We barely even knew Darth VALER anyways, while we knew Nissa well.

[quote="[url=http://forum.nogoblinsallowed.com/viewtopic.php?p=394876#p394876]
Just like there are players who care about the game but not the story, there are players who care about the story but not the canon.[/quote]

Sure there are, does that make it acceptable to blow off the people who are heavily invested in the canon so that you can win some support from the larger group? That's showing a lack of respect to a demographic of your fanbase.

Failing to live up to expectations isn't disrespect. They let you down, but that doesn't make it a personal slap in the face. All it is is a story you don't like much.



I didn't mean to say "If you were okay with Anakin Skywalker's retcon in Empire, you should be okay with Nissa's retcon in BFZ". What I wanted to say was "If you were okay with Anakin Skywalker, maybe that means that not all retcons are horrible crimes against storytelling". The idea of a retcon isn't inherently bad. It lets authors with long-form stories have a bit more freedom with their work and potentially create better stories as their work evolves. A storyline's canon isn't sacred, and sometimes (although honestly not much in Nissa's case) change is good.

I'm not saying wizards has necessarily offended, but by making retcons casually and frequently to improve the story in various places, you are essentially throwing any concept of a long-term canon aside, which I would argue is a slap in the face to people who were invested in it.

Also, at least retcon stuff to be interesting. I have a lot of tolerance for people trying something weird or hard and failing, but hardly any for those who take a safe route and still fail. The people at Wizards are supposed to be professional storytellers. It's like Keeper often says: If R&D screwed up this badly and this frequently, nobody would be taking that ****.

Incompetence isn't a form of disrespect, but some of WOTC's actions can be best explained by assuming that they have no faith in our intelligence, which is pretty insulting.
The Star Wars case wasn't even a retcon since it was explainable in-universe. Retcons don't just contradict assumptions. They contradict established facts. For an in universe source to have been lying doesn't contradict facts- he still said what he said; we were just wrong to assume it was true. Of course, Star Wars does have a long history of retcons. Can "Nissa shot first" be a meme?


Oh god yes. WOTC's apologized publicly for R&D's mistakes (I believe they did it over Snapcaster Mage) but I don't think they've ever deigned the flavour crowd worthy of swallowing their pride. I know we're not the primary consumers, but we're worth more than the cost of an apology.

Maybe we were wrong to assume that Nissa was an Elf-supremacist too?

Seriously though, there are no "established facts" in a work of fiction, only things that you're willing to suspend your disbelief about and things you're not. I deliberately picked Star Wars as an example where the story changes were well-integrated into the script and widely accepted as being pretty good, but I stand by my claim that Anakin/Darth got retconned hard.

If all you've ever seen is Episode IV, it might be tempting to say "Darth Vader killed Luke's father," but because this was never shown, it would be inaccurate, regardless of the other movies. If you've only seen Episode IV, saying "Kenobi said Darth Vader killed Luke's father" is an accurate and true statement. If you've seen all of the movies, it remains a true statement.

If all you've ever read is the first few Nissa pieces, including the Zendikar novel, saying "Nissa was a xenophobe" is an accurate statement. Now, because of the way these retcons were done, that is no longer a true statement.

The difference between these two retcons (if so you can call either of them) is all the difference, and as Barinellos said it's why one is acceptable and the other is not. A good retcon isn't a retcon, but a continuation or development of a story. A bad retcon is one that takes what happens and alters it to the point of unrecognizability. An example of this would be when comics say Issue X didn't actually happen, it was all an illusion! or something like that. A TERRIBLE retcon is one that completely dismisses the past and pretends it never happened. For this one, I cite Nissa Revane.

In terms of your general thesis, Fallingman, I agree with you that a retcon isn't bad merely because it's a retcon. It depends on how it's done. In general, my opinion is that adding to a story is acceptable, taking away from one is not. And that is why I dislike Nissa's retcon so much. Well, one of the reasons, anyway.

If archeologists said new evidence means we should rethink how we look at the Punic wars, then that wouldn't be a retcon.
If god removed the Punic wars from the timeline, then that would be a retcon of history.

If you read a story where god altered history, then you could argue that it was a retcon of the story's world, but it wouldn't be a retcon to the story.
If the author of a story changed the story in one of their books, then that would be a retcon.

It's only a retcon if it the change came from outside of the story. If it had a coherent in-world explanation, then it wasn't a retcon.
To be a retcon it can't merely add new material, or a new perspective on existing material; it must directly contradict canonical material.

The only way Nissa wasn't a xenophobe was if she had another reasons for doing, saying and thinking all those xenophobic things she thought, said and did. Since I never heard any alternative explanation, I'm going to have to call it a retcon. Also, I think official sources blatantly stated that she was a xenophobe.

I dunno, if the prequel movies altered details in ways that contradicted other stuff that Obi-Wan told us about Anakin in episode IV people would definitely call that a retcon, even though all we had was his word for it. We all know that Obi-Wan has lied about Darth Vader before, so Lucas could have had free reign to make him a liar again without directly contradicting canon. Except that the audience wouldn't have accepted that. The twist at the end of Empire wasn't a special technical exception to the "retcon rules", it was just a story well told.

I'll accept the fact that "retcon" is a word that's only used in a negative way. I suppose that's just the definition of the word. But the difference between "That character was lying", "Those events were just illusions", or "That chapter got deleted" is really just a matter of degrees. You can spin a story around an elaborate deception, you can create drama around an unreliable reality, or you can reboot a character in a way that makes them better than they ever were before. Everything in fiction is malleable, the only restriction is whether the storyteller can convince you to come along for the ride. In Nissa's case, the storytellers bit off more than they could chew, but the lesson isn't "never contradict canon in any way ever again", it's just to do a better job of telling the story.

Honestly I don't like the "unequivocally good guys fight unequivocally bad guys" type of story very much. It makes any choices the characters make seem hollow, and the characters themselves seem shallow. I think retcons can work in some situations, but completely changing the identity of a character isn't one of them. How are we supposed to become attached to characters when we know that who they are could change at any moment? Her mechanical identity got overridden as well, from a planeswalker who dealt with elves to a planeswalker who dealt with lands. On top of that, the reasons for the retcon are really stupid. You can have a racist character without telling a racist story.

It's not really a matter of degrees. There's a hard line between a retcon and hidden information. Obi-Wan was lying and was always intended to have been lying when he told Luke that Luke's father was dead. The audience was just given access to new information that put a different spin on established events. It would only be a retcon if the scene where Obi-Wan said those things was altered in future releases. When the meaning of events changes, it's not a retcon; it's only a retcon if the events themselves are altered. Everything said by an in-narrative source is liable to be inaccurate. Only what the creators or reliable, omniscient narrators say can be taken as beyond suspicion because it is effectively outside the world of the narrative.

Narrators are only reliable or omniscient if we, the audience, believe they are. There's no difference between a narrator who is unreliable and deceptive and one who is apparently reliable but later gets contradicted by something else. What they're saying is purely imaginary either way.

A retcon is about changing the nature of the story. If the change is handled with elegance and style, it feels like a stylistic choice. It's a twist ending, or a deliberately unreliable narrator, or just another hiccup in the plot. It only looks like a retcon when that ball gets dropped and the audience is hit with a change too big and unbelievable for them to buy into the fantasy any more.

(I'm also fairly sure that the Vader plot twist wasn't planned out from the beginning. Star Wars's plot went through tons of revisions, and nobody was even sure if a second movie would even exist. I could be proven wrong though.)

This or maybe Sunk Cost Fallacy is kind of what I ended up concluding was what bewitched me into staying in the fandom.

Between this and My Little Pony I now have such trust issues with fandoms now! >_<


And honestly I do see certain things--most prominently the debacle with Xantcha's heartstone--as a slap in the face, because they showed such total disregard for stories that, frankly, are way better than anything Wizards has put out since (or, you know, any kind of basic thought whatsoever) that it felt very much like a slap in the face. I admit, I have invested more in the character of Xantcha than I maybe should. But still, taking her entire narrative arc, which was about finding identity and autonomy beyond Phyrexia, and making her the carrier, through Karn, of Phyrexia's rebirth... is just... vile, I'm sorry, but I'm never going to not be upset that this was ever even floated as a possibility.

That's not to say everyone should feel upset in the same way I do (or that most people will--I've noted before that for me Xantcha's character arc is tied pretty strongly to genderstuff) but it is to suggest that there's plenty of ground to take things personally when you're being asked to have a deep, personal, meaningful relationship with art, and then you're essentially told that actually you're kind of dumb for having formed that attachment because it's not interesting to New Players.


I will say that we could probably incorporate unreliable narration a lot more in our analysis. I'm thinking about that a lot lately because I'm finally, after seven years of promising people I'd read them, reading the Song of Ice and Fire series, and basically that is a series that runs entirely on unreliable narration, inaccurate information, obfuscated perspectives, limited understanding, and just general bewilderment. I DON'T think it's a good setting for fanfiction though because of that dynamic... but I could be totally wrong!

The depth of history in those novels is enough to turn me off fanfiction. I can relate to your experience with Xantacha, KoMN. Out of everyone in the Ice and Fire novels and the HBO show, I felt I could relate pretty heavily to Stannis. I liked how his closest advisors started out as a poor guy from the slums and a slave girl; they earned their places through their talents and abilities instead of their surnames. So it was hard to reconcile that when the show had him burning his daughter; tough to watch at first, but I interpreted it as someone willing to sacrifice what was closest to them for the greater good. It also helped that the sacrifice weighed heavy on him, if the actor's body language was anything to go by. So I took it as a flaw (though in the books the only people that were burned had been given death sentences, so there's some practicality in burning as opposed to just beheading or hanging).

Did Xantcha serve as a conduit for Phyrexia's return? If it's by nature of her stone alone, then we could really implicate the Legacy as a whole. It would be apropos given that the Legacy was built on some unsavory stuff like eugenics with the Metathran Project. If it's any consolation - they can say it doesn't matter now, but you've already got the arc there in black and white. They can handwave it off, but there's no reason you have to accept it. Especially since I don't know if creative even knows who Xantcha is.

Hey, I like a good unreliable narrator as much as anyone. I've used them myself. But to suggest that any given third-person narrator is unreliable is to assign a specific personality to that narrator, and most works cannot support that reasoning. Some certainly can, of course, and some omniscient narrators do have a specific persona attached to them. But if you retcon away what an omniscient narrator's take on an event is, you undermine the validity of the entire in-world universe. It creates a circle of mistrust where it ultimately becomes pointless in reading ANYTHING in that universe, because there is no promise of internal logic.

I know this is a slippery slope, but if we as a community say it's okay to retcon Nissa this way, we're giving implicit permission for them to retcon anything. And the argument of allowing it "if it makes a character better" is inherently flawed, because everyone is going to disagree with what makes a better character. So the only thing left is to disallow the process that allows the retcon.

Obviously, we don't have that kind of authority. But we certainly have the right to be upset about it, and we also have the right to talk about the fact that we're upset by it.

In my view, a narrator is a trust-worthy source until proven otherwise. Most narrators aren't even part of the narrative and it doesn't make sense for them to be incorrect about something. If you watched an action film and the lettering that types itself in the bottom left to display the local of the new scene is wrong, how can you logically dismiss it's accuracy within the narrative? Those letters only appear to the audience; they are effectively outside the narrative, and thus reproach. (so yes, I agree)
I don't see much of a slippery slope argument to be had here. And ot just because anybody thinks the Nissa changes were a good thing. There are plenty of changes they could make to old Magic material that would be huge net positives. I'm all for those retcons. All-out retcon hate is a somewhat essentialist and reductive viewpoint. As with anything, retcons are okay when they do more good than harm, and not okay when the opposite is true. Hate the player, not the play.

Yeah um I actually currently plan to watch the first episode of the series just to see if it's theoretically possible to have identified everything that made the series turn to absolute garbage later purely in episode 1. My guess, having watched the first seven minutes which were abysmal, is yes, yes I should be able to manage this quite easily.

Actually Game of Thrones is a great example of people who apparently had no respect for or understanding of the original material getting their grubby mitts on it and ruining it. Everyone whose opinion I respect in these matters ragequit the show last season.

All of this bodes very well for Magic since the Magic movie is being adapted by these hacks

Anyway for a while the story was that the glistening oil was spread because Xantcha's heartstone cracked and started leaking oil.

Which even a cursory examination reveals to be nonsense on like four or five different levels, so I'm very thankful that they seem to have quietly abandoned it as an idea. Because it was freaking TERRIBLE.

The Very concept of calling an omniscient narrator unreliable is an oxymoron. They're omniscient.

I would actually argue you on this one. Just because someone knows everything doesn't mean that person tells everything.

But again, this is what I mean by assigning an omniscient narrator a persona it does not, in most cases, have.