It's worth noting that most modern fiction doesn't actually use an omniscient narrator. The story is very often described from a third-person perspective, but generally the narrator gives a very limited viewpoint that only tracks a single character and their own internal thoughts and feelings. Anything that the protagonist isn't aware of, like things happening in other places or what another character is thinking, is something that the narrator doesn't know/tell either. Even if the narrator doesn't have a persona, the information the reader receives is shaped by the character that you follow. Just a side tangent...

On reading this thread though, I'm starting to change my mind on the importance of continuity. I've always thought that when reading/watching a work of science fiction or historical fiction or even just a regular human drama story, the knowledge that the audience brings with them should always enhance the experience. Knowing a lot about science should make the science fiction even more intriguing. Knowing a lot about history should make the backdrop of a historical drama even richer. Understanding basic human nature should make the characters deeper and more realistic. And I find that often the audience who cares about that kind of thing will end up having a worse experience. If basic laws of physics get ignored, or the historical background is full of blatant errors, or the human characters behave in ways no real person would, then the disbelief in the fantasy gets broken.

I still think that any kind of strict laws protecting the lore from tampering are a bad thing, because authors need some amount of freedom to tell their own stories, and a 20-year running story has a lot of baggage that's going to get in the way from time to time. And it's really hard to judge when a reimagining/reboot/retcon is going to improve on the original and when it's going to be a mess. As convenient as it sounds to lay down a rulebook and have everyone follow it, you can't just tell the authors "don't write bad stories, mkay?" and have that solve everything.

But without putting the canon on some kind of sacred pedestal, I will say that the people who are heavily invested in the past storylines of MtG (or any long running plot) should have their story experience enhanced by that shared knowledge. If that knowledge actually detracts from your enjoyment of the story (like a science-savvy scifi fan getting turned off by bad science), then something has gone horribly wrong. Knowing who Xantcha is should be a bonus that makes the Phyrexian storyline richer, and that's something that it sounds like the story team missed on.

I haven't read the books, but I have watched the game of thrones TV show, and I'm ambivalent about it. On the one hand, it does present multiple perspectives and some of the plot, especially the courtly intrigue in the first 2 seasons, was pretty good. On the other hand, a lot of it is """"mature"""" (read: "let's throw in some blood and naked women to pander to our audience"), and Tyrion, especially in the later seasons, feels like a bit of a Mary Sue. These problems have gotten worse as the show progresses, although they're present from the first. I don't know if it's better or worse than the books, but it has its virtues. And its flaws.

To be fair, the blood is to be expected given there's fighting.

The nudity was at its most egregious in the second season, though I can't say it ever bothered me. Naked bodies. We all have them, it's just a part of who we are, our bodies. Afterward it was dialed back. Dany's the one I feel suffers from having it too easy. One thing I liked in the books was, her sledgehammer approach to Essos's slave market came back to bite in the fifth book. Here, the slave cities of Essos have their navies deployed to Meereen to get rid of Danaerys for fear of the threat she poses to their economy. The cities she sacked have also united and are converging on Meereen by land. Those camped outside Meereen have started catapulting dysentery victims into the city. It's a lack of consequence for some of the plotlines that I take most issue with in the show.

I rather missed Victarion Greyjoy doing those smash and grabs on various ships en route to Meereen. It was kinda funny in its absurdity.

Season three is the peak, then season five, four, one and two.

That was part of the reason I started drifting away from League of Legends, and ultimately quit.

The changes to Nissa are going to become a major thing, because the Marketing team needed a core team of people to advertise the product, and Nissa is part of that team. Which means she is going to keep showing up.

I think I read somewhere that Emilia Clarke had it added to her contract that she wouldn't perform any more scenes with nudity. I don't blame her. It's really degrading that even if you're talented enough at acting to play one of the main characters in a show that costs $60,000,000 per season to produce and has 8 million viewers, you're still required to be take off your clothes on camera.

To bring it back around, didn't creative already talk about the whole Nissa retcon thing at that shindig HairlessThoctar went to? I remember one of the big questions being about the Origins retcons and how they dance around the question.

But really, trying to not call the Origins retcon a retcon is sorta silly.

I'm curious what people think was the worse retcon: The Time Spiral remaking of the 'Spark, or the Origins rebuilding of the planeswalkers?

What was the origins retcon?

I think Chandra's home plane was mentioned as somewhere different in an earlier storyline, and Gideon's home plane had been destroyed or lost somehow? All five of the planeswalkers got their backstories fleshed out, and in a couple of cases it contradicted earlier lore (although a lot of the earlier work was done by the Duels of the Planeswalkers creative team so it wasn't exactly canon... I think)

Is The Mending considered a retcon by some? Because that's an example of the changes happening inside the fictional work itself rather than handwaved away. I gather that it pulled similar strings of disbelief for enfranchised players though. If you look too close it's easy to see the underlying motivations for the creative team wanting to redefine the power of planeswalking, and so to a lot of people it didn't feel genuine I guess?

Well it's worth keeping in mind that the Mending wasn't a retcon, it was more like...

Well, like if a zamboni wipes the ice clean, the Mending was more like dropping a boulder through the ice skating pond. Technically all the information is still there on the ice and so are all the hapless skaters!

But yeah honestly I don't think I've seen the community this shook up since the Mending. It's been a while since literally everything Wizards did was treated with this much antagonism.

Canada's rubbing off on you, Keeper.

Creating art is a conversation with the audience. If you're constantly saying: "But I didn't actually say X, I said Y," at some point people are going to stop talking with you. That's how I see the retcons. Which is a shame, because I've enjoyed the "conversation" with Wizards up until, say, Innistrad.

It's possible for someone in a conversation to change their mind and contradict something they said earlier without offending the audience though. I think that artists need the same "escape" opportunity, otherwise a long-running story is just going to collapse under its own weight. There has to be some way for an author to change the direction of a story rather than continuing with a direction they dislike or scrapping the whole thing and starting something else...

With Nissa's story, it would have been better for her to grow into the role that the story needed rather than have her character rewritten. But with The Mending, what would have been the better option? Could the nature of Planeswalkers be gradually changed over time? Could they just ignore the implications of the old-walkers' godlike powers and have them coexist alongside characters with power levels like Liliana or Ajani? Assume that the narrators telling the stories of Urza or Serra were unreliable, and that they weren't truly as powerful as the legends claim? It's an interesting thought experiment, but the version they chose seems like a fair one.
I just don't understand the backlash. Without a better understanding of it, it looks to me like some people are just anti-change...

The problem with Nissa's retcon and the way it was handled should be clear by now.

How the Mending should have been handled? No idea. I wasn't around during the Mending and I don't think it's absolutely terrible. I think that by now we got to the point where we can generally agree that the problem with the Mending is mostly centred around the aftermath. The fans were told the Mending was necessary to tell better stories and have more relateable characters, but this really didn't happen. The transition surrounded the Mending could have been easily been more fluent. There are tons of things I can point to. The planeswalker cards weren't finished by Time Spiral, but they should have been. And they should probably have been a mix of old and new planeswalkers, so that the newer planeswalkers were clearly part of a continuation of the story.

Instead we got five planeswalkers with barely a blurb dropped in a block where they had no impact on the story whatsoever. Which leads us to Lorwyn. I understand that you might want to have a break after a dramatic event like the Mending. That was probably necessary and a well-timed break is good storytelling. But Lorwyn was just an abrupt break with the existing story. Instead, they could have used a block to deal with the repercussions of the Mending and introduce a couple of new planeswalker characters in a way that actually have them impact the story. Maybe show a small-scale conflict on a relatively peaceful plane to introduce the new, say, Red 'walker and, I dunno, Black 'walker, while you also show a 'walker (maybe Liliana?) deal with the results of the Mending.

Just off the top of my head, of course. You can probably come up with better things.

The irritating thing about creative's response was that it basically boiled down to "our change is perfect and if you don't like it, you just don't 'get' it."

Wow, as much as I have fond memories of Lorwyn (I'd been playing for a few years earlier, but it was when I first started going to FNMs and playing Limited) you make some good points. I've always thought that if Planeswalkers had premiered in Future Sight as they originally planned it would have had a much better impact. And now I think you've convinced me that they should have skipped Lorwyn and gone straight to Shards of Alara afterwards, where the planeswalkers were actually playing a part in the plot.

I know that getting planeswalkers up and running was a pretty steep development challenge (and nobody was sure if players would love or hate them), but if things had gone a bit differently...

That's the saddest part. THey did write a story where Nissa learned her lesson and grew as a character, but then they retconned that story out of existence between the release of Origins and Battle For Zendikar. That version of Nissa's story only existed from July to October of 2015 before it was stricken from canon. It showed horrendous judgement on WOTC's part, not only failing to plan for the not-even-long term, but also throwing away a good story to support a bad one. WOTC's done worse things to the story, but this might have be the most indicative of how little they care.

I think Nissa's retcon was poorly handled because I liked her arc of overcoming her racism to better fight for Zendikar, but I think they've also been trying to use her to give green a deeper definition. There's one part of Nissa's whole retcon that's actually stuck with me in a good way. It's the part where she lets Jace see the world through his eyes and he's overwhelmed by trying to comprehend the leylines of Zendikar. I really felt that this part brought out the intricacy of life, which is something that I feel gets overlooked a lot. Green gets a lot of dumb beasts and some spirituality but I feel like its nuance is never really given a chance to shine.

I feel like green has often been a very "smashy-smashy" colour that's had its better parts overshadowed by other colours. white in particular. White tends to pick up the "band together and fight!" motif as well as a lot of the softer parts of green so I'm really happy that there's a more unique part of green being showcased here.

Nissa is supposed to be highly representative of green as a colour and to that end she is very much about community and interdependence. I like how they sort of make Zendikar's various peoples into a sort of massive ecosystem. I feel like she really strongly contrasts with Garruk who came across to me, as someone who didn't read the comics, as the loner wildman more about preserving the wild. Nissa is shown as a green that's more interactive with the other colours and other people. It works with them whereas Garruk was more independent.

I utterly hate reading her squeal "For Zendikar!" though. I have a lot of problems with her character as it is now but I'm happy with some of the development the colour has gotten through her.

I know there's limited room for 'walkers and all that, but we could have easily had an elf-focused Nissa and a land-focused planeswalker that had the cool leyline thing.

Lately I'm getting the feeling that Wizards isn't criticized in light of other decisions they could have made. Like, (not flavor-related) I was on reddit talking about Wingmate Roc and how it didn't feel Mythic at all, which led to people claiming that it would have been overpowered at Rare in Limited. Leaving aside all the other rares that are overpowered in Limited, nobody seemed to realize that "not print Wingmate Roc" was an option Wizards could have actually taken. The same goes here: Wizards was in no way forced to retcon Nissa (Creative might have had pressure from other departments).

So, now that I got some stressful meatspace stuff out of the way, I have the time and energy again to post more than a few lines and get involved in actual discussions. Yay.

That's exactly where I stand. It's also the reason why I keep being snarky about Jeremy Jarvis's statement about "punishing" people. JJ said at one of the recent panels that A) they don't want to punish people for knowing things about the storyline, and B) they don't want to punish people for not knowing things about the storyline. Statement A is completely invalid because they actually punish people for knowing things ALL THE TIME. Statement B sounds like a reasonable thing to say in theory, but they actually just use it as an excuse to prevent cool things from happening. They go like "We can't reuse this character and that old plot thread! We have used them before! They have baggage now! Oh no, it would punish people for not knowing about stuff!" when a much more constructive and healthy attitude would be like "Hey, this seems like the perfect spot for reusing this character and that old plot thread! It's such a great opportunity to introduce this cool and popular character to newer players!". Besides, where do you draw the line between how much baggage is acceptable and how much isn't? Does using the same 'central cast' of characters (who have been around for years even at this point) all the time and making their stories more interconnected not build up 'baggage'? By that reasoning, you'd have to use brand new characters, planes and story arcs for every story. Or, you know, erase everyone's backstory at least every few years.

I guess I can't really add anything new to the genral discussion apart from that as it comes up quite regularly. I'll repost an old rant of mine about the retcons and the sorry state of Magic's storyline, though:

So, yeah, I'm just not prepared to keep following the four Oafs of the Gatewatch given how hard they hit those characters with the retcon stick. I'll probably end up going to the SOI prerelease and buying some packs if the artwork and mechanics look halfway decent just because it's about Innistrad. But me spending any money on new Magic products has become the rare exception rather than the norm since Tarkir block. I've only been following the 'storyline' in a pretty detached matter-of-fact kind of way rather than truly enjoying it since then. And I noticed a weird psychological thing about myself. The more they screw up, the less tolerant I become. It's almost like I feel they 'owe' us a brilliant, stainless block story with zero retcons or continuity screwups and with appropriate characterisation to prove they still care and are still worthy of their position. And the longer I have to wait, the more awesome it has to be to make me care. On the other hand, not retconning stuff or making stupid mistakes for a block doesn't seem like it's asking much, so maybe my expectations aren't that high after all... Though the fact that I'm still tracking down old Magic novels on Amazon and finally catching up with the Ice Age trilogy at the moment probably makes the current material look like bovine excrements even more in comparison. But hey, it's not my fault they stopped printing awesome novels.

For serious, I'm getting real sick of them taking about busting limited, because that is such a luck based format to begin with.

If it's played at the pro tour, not busting it is a pretty important priority.