Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Hi all,

Just quickly, can anyone give me the definitive meaning for:

"retconned"

I have PMd a few members regarding their use of it, as it varies, and received mixed responses.

From some usage, I have gathered it is a combination of:

Retracted & Contradicted

Can anyone confirm?

That's it more or less. It's commonly used when the authors have contradicted existing background or story with the release of new fiction.

It's "retroactive continuity" where a certain work rewrites a previous one. Sometimes it's a matter of grossly reinterpreting the previous work and saying "actually what you saw wasn't what you saw at all". This could be the case for when they bring characters back from the dead who were very obviously killed outright and not wounded in their last appearance but apparently we have to assume that head shot was just a flesh wound after all. Other times it's just a total contradiction and you have to ignore the past. For example a character's date of birth will be altered to better fit the series leaving fans in the position of having to assume the character in question was either lying or forgetting in the original story.

Marvel comics do it all the time. In relation to GW, well the continuity have been reworked a few times meaning that things said in older fluff has been contradicted and replaced by newer fluff.

It's not a new thing, Tolkien changed the way Bilbo got the ring in the hobbit for the purposes of writing Lord of the Rings, then went back and adjusted The Hobbit accordingly. Oh you Lucas.

Howard A Treesong is right: it's retroactive continuity.

There's a bit of subjectiveness. a good story lets people get away with a lot. For GW, the entire Horus Heresy series of novels has a number of retcon, big and small, as the entire thing is an 'untold story.' A lot are pretty minor and acceptable, as they have to make things work in the framework and may even be dealign with GW's sometimes wacky past.

Balance wrote:There's a bit of subjectiveness. a good story lets people get away with a lot. For GW, the entire Horus Heresy series of novels has a number of retcon, big and small, as the entire thing is an 'untold story.' A lot are pretty minor and acceptable, as they have to make things work in the framework and may even be dealign with GW's sometimes wacky past.

There are some big ones in TV/film though. In Star Trek there are the Klingon heads which change between the old series and films/Next Gen. No one ever mentions this. Roddenberry was happy to assume that Klingons always had heads with the ridges and the fact they had otherwise was merely a budgetary thing and not part of the story and thus for years it was merely an accepted retroactive change and most people should move on. Then there was that episode of DS9 where they went back in time and saw old Klingons and queried Worf about them. So then it became canon that they had changed afterall. But Worf declined to comment on it. Some years later Enterprise felt the need to spell it all out with some big story for the audience but I was never a fan of Enterprise anyway. The final irony is that Enterprise quite possibly had its own retcon at the end of the series in which could be claimed the whole run was merely a set of holo-programs that may not be an accurate depiction of history anyway!

The only retcon I think did annoy me was done in the series Alias. At the end of season 3 we were left with a cliff hanger of Sydney finding a series of documents on some project. But in series 4 it was revealed that these related to her father being authorised and carrying out the execution of her mother. Well from the lead up to the series 3 finale and the glimpses of the documents in the cliffhanger, they clearly were not heading in this direction at all but must have made a call to drastically change the direction they wanted to take things and the misleading result of the cliffhanger was painfully obvious, even more so upon rewatching.

I quite enjoyed the series Heroes, but is seemed to be a chronic sufferer of retconning throughout.

Anyway, this page may help for varied examples, you could argue against some of these and forward a lot more...
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RetCon

GW is generally pretty good about retcons. With a 10,000 year time line and million years there's a lot of space to slip new stuff in without contradicting the earlier fluff. But still there are a few from 40k that come to mind.

First off there are the things that GW has put away and not referred to again like Squats. No one ever said they never existed but they just quietly disappeared. Similarly the Sensei and the Star Child were introduced in RT days but then ignored in 2nd edition. They were referred to once in 3rd edition as a heretical cult stamped out by the Inquisition. Not really a retcon.


The Primarchs, Horus Heresy and Chaos Space Marines were introduced after RT came out and contradicted some early fluff but nothing major. They're a retcon but not a bad one, more of 'we never mentioned this but...'.

The Ultramarines got a major and clumsy retcon. Early on it was established they lived on a Dune-like desert world, had a half-Eldar librarian and were 3rd founding chapter who took the name of an earlier chapter that fell to chaos. GW never tried to integrate this into later fluff and just asks us to pretend we never saw that.

Here's some 40k Retcon. The original battle between the Emperor and Horus was in a bunker. Then it moved to Horus's ship.

In the first incarnation of the ship fight, there were guard that went with the marines. There's actually a guard hero that supposedly jumped in front of the emperor when Horus was about to kill him (I have the book RT compendium I think, but don't want to pull it out to give the name). That allowed the Emperor time to strike as Horus was distracted presumably retracting his claws from the guardsman.

The latest story (to my knowledge) has no guardsmen and the Emperor finding a chink in Horus's armor made by Sanguinus, after Horus had second thoughts about killing the Emperor.

Then the Guardsman (Olanus Pious) became an Imperial Fist Terminator, then an Adaptus Custodes before becoming Sanguinius, if I remember correctly.

The story of Ollanius Pious is the only retcon I can't accept, it's just too awesome. However, everything else it's just fine, it is GW's IP afterall they can do whatever they want to it.

Squats were a big one, though I thought that they had explained that away as their homeworld being eaten by the Tyrannids.

Did they ever retract / rewrite the infamous "Orcs are space mushrooms" lore?

I'm not 100% if this counts, but the total change in the behavior/drive/motivation of the genestealers from creepy infiltrating "enemy within" types to the slavering shocktroops of an intergalactic hive mind eating machine was pretty big. As well as the brief appearance of zoats, though I think that MIGHT have been explained sufficiently as the nids just absorbing their psychic ability and eating the actual zoats.

And, as someone pointed out in the Space Marine thread, the original RT fluff had the marines as conscripted from hive gangs and prisons before their operations.

Still, considering the length and breadth of the 40k universe's existence, GW's done a pretty good job of keeping things on an even keel (space mushrooms excepted) compared to comics, television, or even movies. This rosy view might be influenced by the fact that I don't read the novels.

Space fungi was mentioned in some detail in the Gorkamorka books that I recall.

The Genestealers were very much their own entities early on, the Tyranid association was made later, I think.

Aren't Orks still killer shrooms/fungi? Also I though Genestealers are kinda both roles now: creepy infiltrators and deadly shocktroops.

Strelka wrote:Squats were a big one, though I thought that they had explained that away as their homeworld being eaten by the Tyrannids.

True, although reasonably there would still be a few Squats, probably enough to be a stable population, off-world as they were a useful abhuman strain. probably moreso than the ogryns if you get down to it. Big heavy-lifter guys with small brains seem common in the Imperium, but tech-friendly shorties seem like something you'd want to keep around (if not for the models apparently being... poor).

Strelka wrote:
Did they ever retract / rewrite the infamous "Orcs are space mushrooms" lore?

Not that I'm aware of. It's another way of making them a bit more alien and scary, though, so it's not bad. Just think of it as more 'fungus-like' than true 'fungus.' I've heard there's a reference in the Rogue Trader RPG book that included rules for Ork crew that sporing is an 'issue.'

The smallest 'mature' manifestation of Ork infestation is the Squig, I'd guess. Anything smaller is more a weird hybrid between an egg, plant, and mushroom than a 'living creature'. Once the spore reaches critical mass it changes from the spore stage to something more like what we think of as a living animal. For the organism, it's a tradeoff: it loses a great deal of hardiness as it now requires a breathable atmosphere, but it's mobile, capable of affecting the environment, etc. It spontaneously organizes, as cells shift from being relatively general-purpose to much more specialized organs and such.

This is probably quite traumatic, which explains a lot about the Ork psyche.

The neat thing to consider is that any ork Spore presumably has either enough Ork knowledge to recreate the entire species or access to it. I say access because Orks seem to have very powerful, but very unusual, psychic abilities for the setting. There abilities are 'faith' based but effectively unblockable by normal methods (psychic hoods) and seem to resist the influence of Chaos except in rare circumstances. As such, it's entirely reasonable to say that the various 'specialists' that pop up in an Ork infestation are tapping into a psychic resource of knowledge to build technology, provide medical care, etc.

Of course, these are Orks, so trying to overexplain them is going to hurt your brain.



Automatically Appended Next Post:

asimo77 wrote:Also I though Genestealers are kinda both roles now: creepy infiltrators and deadly shocktroops.

I think what people are getting at is the way the Genestealer cults have pretty much been lost. A pity, as they'd be great adversaries for Inquisition forces and such. The Genestealer cults had a lot of 'infrastructure' in that they'd spawn Genestealer Magus and such that could really work behind the scenes to weaken a planet's defenses instead of the current setup, where it seems most Tyranid attacks are just an overwhelming wave of Tyranids eating and infecting the planet.

Read some of the Gaunt's Ghosts works, and see how often a character dies, and is brought back in the next book. Something like he gets shot in the face by an autocannon, but in the next book he is still there, like nothing happened to him, but he has some sort of scar or bionic to replace it.

Not to derail this thread with nid fluff, but mind control, infiltration, slavery, and the like always seemed a little too cereberal, for bugs that go OM NOM NOM. Just my humble opinion of course.

Alien-worshipping/dominated cults with mind control, infiltration and slavery make for awesome, dark, paranoid background and fiction, though. Much more interesting than just "bugs that go OM NOM MOM", IMO, though YMMV of course

btemple0 wrote:Read some of the Gaunt's Ghosts works, and see how often a character dies, and is brought back in the next book. Something like he gets shot in the face by an autocannon, but in the next book he is still there, like nothing happened to him, but he has some sort of scar or bionic to replace it.

What are you actually talking about?

Pretty much never has that happened.

I can think of 6 major characters who have been killed off, and that's just from the top of my head.
Here be spoilers!

If a major character is killed in Gaunt's Ghosts, they stay dead--barring them appearing as some kind of 'ghostly manifestation', and that has only occurred in one book.

There was a snafu, supposedly, where two minor characters who were killed had been given the same name and Dan/the editors didn't catch it. Last I heard, it was fixed in the omnibus reprinting of that book though.

Genestealers do tend to go nom nom nom when unleashed, they tend to lurk and covertly form nests though. It's the Patriarchs and the Magi that are the intelligent ones. There's no problem with that.


When the history of the Emperor was discussed in the RT book there's not mention of his mortal wounding, it's pretty much implied that he took to the throne as a result of old age, but there was plenty of room for that to be fleshed out without looking like a retcon. Also it's described that he needs hundreds of psykers rounded up from the empire and fed to him on a daily basis in order to survive. While not retconned and disputed on later fluff, it's been quietly dropped for the most part.

btemple0 wrote:Read some of the Gaunt's Ghosts works, and see how often a character dies, and is brought back in the next book. Something like he gets shot in the face by an autocannon, but in the next book he is still there, like nothing happened to him, but he has some sort of scar or bionic to replace it.

...Who the feth has that happened to? Dan Abnett is a beter author than that. That sounds more like something C.S. Goto would do. The characters get beat up a lot yeah, but those that die stay dead. Gol Kolea lost his memory then miraculously got it back, but that was SUPPOSED to be a miracle. Gaunt was almost dead, and did get rebuilt with bionics, Domor lost his eyes and got bionics, but I've never seen a character come back from the dead.



There are lots more minor characters, but those the 'main' characters who are dead....

That's right, it was Soric I was thinking of not Gol. Haven't read "Only in Death" for awhile.