John Dale Beety wrote a pretty good article on Nissa's retcon:
http://www.starcitygames.com/article/31512_The-Nissa-Retcon.html

Hope everyone sees it!

I'm not really sold on his conclusions. The article is, however, an interesting take on what some people will say to justify these changes to themselves.

I disagree with being okay with getting rid of Teeth's story. I know it wasn't great, but I honestly liked it more than Search for Karn, or whatever that pile was called.

And I liked Search for Karn more than just not having novels of any kind.

I don't completely agree with everything in the article and I'm too tired to organize my thoughts.

I really hope the movie won't be about a really big threat immediately. I know it'd be more of a gamble, but ramping up into some sort of Avengers scheme would (probably) be the best way to handle a property as big (in terms of setting) as Magic.

I do agree with the bit about the "values" argument being weird/inconsistent, because Ob and Sorin get away with worse things than fantastical racism. And as long as it leads to a redemption arc, I don't think Elf supremacy is all that worse than Jace's cunonsensually erasing people's mind all the damn time.

(And I'm maybe naive about this, but I think that fantastical racism isn't a bad way to handle racism in properties like Magic. Like, telling stories about racism isn't a bad thing, but you don't want to demonize a real-world demographic.)

Look, part of a retcon is what it represents. This represents trying to wipe out any personality traits of the main five that isn't considered 'marketable'. This'll lead to 'characters' which are just archetypes. People already oversimplify Jace to complain about him (I assure you all, he is nowhere near as bad as you think he is...now), but if this keeps up then all of the Origins 5, and maybe even other walkers, will end up as just oversimplified versions of themselves.

Nissa got over her racism by the time she became Nissa, Worldwaker. It isn't like Nissa is still a racist and they're trying to develop her past that. They wiped out something no longer problematic and created problems. If Nissa isn't racist, why would she attack Sorin, which destroyed the main hedron, which allowed the Eldrazi to fully break free? Getting rid of this is already a case of being overly-pc because it's something she got over, but it destroys Nissa's character arc and it screws up the plot of the last six years.

And my respect for WotC's creative direction has taken a huge nose dive with this. It looks like this wasn't just a new team trying to create their own versions of characters they can handle better, it's a genuine 're-direction' of the characters to create the appeals they wanted.

They couldn't just create... you know... actual NEW characters for that? I mean, I guess in Nissa's case they wanted someone actually _from_ Zendikar, but they could have used Nahiri or Kiora for that! Or they could have redeemed Nissa like they originally seemed to have started going around the Worldwaker time rather than going and doing a retcon later on.

This is just ****, bad, inconsistent storytelling with empty, meaningless characters used as nothing more than puppets for whatever deeds the 'writers' want them to do.

I just actually sighed...

I'm just going to echo you on this one.

Every time I read something about Magic's flavor, it only succeeds in making me glad I'm not actually following the flavor anymore. For the last... Eight? Nine years? It feels like it's always been one step forward, and two steps back.

Honestly, the thing about it is that in a lot of ways, it isn't even creative's fault. Its the brand management and marketing teams butting in. Around the time Kimberly got moved on as liason is where this big push started. Now I'm not blaming her, but she does represent that section of the company in the team.

So basically hypocrisy, no love for characters and outright stupidity.

Great.

Not sure how you're getting that. I'm sure creative cares at least a little. But marketing is marketing and will take priority.

Stories with "good guys" and "bad guys" are boring as hell, and this is shaping up to be one such story. Bad eldrazi, good Nissa, Jace, Chandra, and Gideon. Good guys fight bad guys, good guys predictably win. Good guys are pure, undadulterated good, sympathetic to a mass audience, our heroes.

**** that. Don't give me heroes, give me characters. Give me an elf nazi. Whether she turns on the rest of them to impose her vision of die elfreich, they turn on her when they find her too morally reprehensible, or they grudgingly accept her racism and she decides to temporarily put up with the untermensch for the sake of Zendikar, you can make a story about a racist without condoning racism. Hell, you could even have her see the error of her ways and grow into a character we can sympathize with. But this isn't a story, this is a movie. I'm not saying that you can't have protagonists who are pure good and who the audience can relate to, but I don't think *every* protagonist should be that way, and I think there are a myriad of ways to deal with thorny issues besides pretending that they don't exist. I can't think of any worse message than "Racists will not be challenged on their racism, but simply have their racism written out of history so that they can be shown as perfect heroes."

I am getting slightly confused on all the movie talk. Are people talking metaphorically or was something extra announced about the Magic movie that I'm not aware of?

Or is my memory failing me and there was never news of a Magic movie coming down the pipes?

There are plans for a movie, but as far I as can tell nothing real yet. Just talking to studios. And I've said this before, but using an existing 'walker would probably be a mistake.

@Cato: You might want to check out Worm.

Well, at least this let's me get somewhere on the same page as the rest of you when you talk about retcons. Have to say it disappoints me a little. Flaws are good. Racism is fun.

also, what was with the random feminism tangent in the article.

Trying to pretend that Nissa's now a model female character, even though she is slightly less engaging than a cardboard.



Marketing is important, yes, but it rarely justifies character changes. If they wanted so much to have someone like the "Nissa" they're writing now, why couldn't they just kill off the original Nissa and create a new character that actually fits their needs for a land-oriented planeswalker?

Honestly, because they were banking on recognition to sell a lot of this crap about her, but they seem to have forgotten how generally unhappy people were with Nissa until world waker.
So the fact they effectively removed the arc that made her that way means it was sort of pointless to try to give us the character as she is now. Hence all this wonderful backlash they're getting.

I already had my rant about our retcon-packed new "central cast" (with Nissa in particular) and Magic suddenly having "values" etc. only recently, so I'll leave it at that for now. All I have to add is that, should it be true that Marketing is behind all this (which it probably is at least to a considerable extent), they clearly overstepped their boundaries there. In that case, I hope the negative backlash continues for as long as possible so that they'll know not to interfere with Creative doing their job next time. Well, I'd hope for a huge backlash regardless of whose fault it was actually, because that's clearly not how you handle your characters. People don't want Magic to have any **** "values", they want it to be a cool game with a cool storyline. I thought they'd got that when they reintroduced demons to the game and realised they didn't have to give a ****. Seems like a step 15 years back. On the other hand, it's not completely unlike Creative to just retcon inconvenient things, so...

Edit: Also, is it just me or do they make things worse every time they try to actually explain a stupid decision?

My thoughts as well. Though to be honest, seeing how they've been treating their own storyline in the past year or so, I don't even want there to be any Magic films anymore. If not even Wizards can handle their IP properly, how could we expect a film studio to do a better job? And the chances of seeing a movie adaptation of one of the really epic novels like Brothers' War are long gone anyway. The films are going to be all about marketing and Rule of Cool storytelling as well, because . And that's not even talking about the quality of the sets, costumes, special effects etc. or the choice and performance of the actors, because there's a lot about all of that that you can screw up. Odds are it would be A LOT closer to that Dragon Ball film than it would be to, say, the Avengers or any other really good franchise film you could come up with.

could someone cliff-notes the issue here? I haven't been following closely, but it sounds from this thread like people disliked the original Nissa, so they made a version people liked more, then retconned some of the stuff from the earlier version to support the newer, better version. so are people mad that they got rid of stuff we didn't like, or is there something I'm missing?

1) Nissa Revane was an unlikeable, arrogant, incompetent elf supremacist.

2) Nissa released the Eldrazi and got taught a hard lesson of the "your entire tribe was massacred" variety.

3) Nissa, Worldwaker was Nissa after some character development, seeking redemption. It was awesome. People liked the new Nissa.

4) Nissa, Vastwood Seer retconned Nissa's backstory and turned her into a generic shallow do-gooder, undoing all the work that had been done to redeem her.

Or, from another point of view:

1) Nissa was a planeswalker nobody liked because of her narrow mechanical focus on elves.

2) As a response, her mechanical focus was changed to lands and elementals. People liked the new Nissa.

3) Nissa, Vastwood Seer retconned Nissa's backstory and turned her into a generic shallow do-gooder, attracting the attention of no one except hardcore Vorthosi.

People keep complaining that Wizards changed Nissa because no one would have liked racist Nissa. I always thought they changed her because "elf supremacist" doesn't really fit with "elemental summoner."