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teecupangel · 1 year

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Just pictured it: Desmond with twelve younglings around his legs and a pair of slings on his chest with the twins inside, carrying a padawan or two under the arm 'cause he's a single dad now and they are all on the run – or at least until Dadsmond can get them all to safety and a responsible, functioning non-Bleed adult in charge while he goes to drive his hidden blade through Palpatine's eye.

And if he ends up acquiring one or several million clones down the road, it's all in the name of the free babysitting service, because we all know that foundlings are the future.

The original "Desmond adopts Jedi Younglings" idea.

So this is now the “Desmond adopts lots of people and they have a flying ‘home’” idea.

For the “Desmond stays in Tython to be a dad” with @fanworldbuildingfun, here’s the link.

Desmond was just trying to find Yoda who was in charge of the younglings in the fucking first place, instead, he has to deal with first upgrading his emergency ship because the last time he tried leaving the younglings in his secret hideout (a planet with coordinates that have been long lost), every youngling joined forces to give him sad puppy eyes and begged him not to leave so he’s left with no choice but to upgrade to a more fortified ship with lots of secret hidey holes and ‘tunnels’.

No.

He was not naming it Monteriggioni 2.

… He was naming it fucking Monteriggioni 2 after he finished adding a smaller emergency ship underneath the main ship now with hologram statues of his Assassin ancestors.

Ugh.

His naming sense was absolutely whacked at this point.

He just couldn’t be normal and named it Aquila…

Or Jackdaw.

Wait.

What was a Jackdaw?

Anyway, during all these upgrading, he got in touch with Obi-Wan to ask for information about Yoda and he gets two newborn twins for his troubles as Obi-Wan swans off to god knows where because of…

Okay, Desmond didn’t know why.

Grief?

Self-imposed punishment?

Lost of hope?

Desmond knew he should look for Obi-Wan and knock some sense into him (probably punch him once or twice, Desmond saw it work… in tv back in his time) but Obi-Wan warned him that the Empire would be looking out for any force-sensitive people to either take in or to kill. Obi-Wan was a danger to Desmond and his children (not his children, charge would be more accurate, no matter what others say) before he swans off to god knows where.

Desmond realized that the children had to ‘stop’ learning the force. At the very least, until he was sure he could upgrade his ship to cloak against any doodah that the Empire had to find force-sensitive people.

How does he do that?

He distracts the kids with games instead, gets a droid to help him take care of them and…

Accidentally build a Brotherhood daycare instead because Desmond’s way of playing is very… stealth and freerun oriented.

Look, he knows it’s weird for the ship to have such high ceilings but he needs them, okay? Can’t do air assassinations if there’s not enough vertical distance, of course.

Oh and the dudes who did his repairs? Clone troopers who went AWOL because of one reason or another. And then the empire learned about them while Desmond was there and… things just sorta happened and now Desmond has a crew of renegade clone troopers?

Who may also be helping take care of the kids?

It’s really a good thing Desmond upgraded his ship.

Along the way, he meets up with a surviving Jedi Master and his Padawan who have… been gathering force-sensitive children as well and Desmond just let them in because he wasn’t heartless. Vanzell Mar-Klar starts training the kids and everybody else in force-related things but he does say Desmond’s kids (not his kids) have become… ‘wild’. Desmond has no idea what that means and Vanzell Mar-Klar seemed a bit wary but mostly just curious so Desmond didn’t really push… for now.

But because there were now force lessons all over the ship, Desmond knew he should upgrade their cloaking system so one of the crew members suggested they go to Bracca as they may find scappers willing to upgrade their ship using parts they have salvaged. They get to Bracca and Desmond notices a young scrapper that just pings gold to him.

And then the Inquisitorius came just as he had been talking to the young scrapper and Desmond thought they were there for them then they attacked the scrapper he was with and…

Well…

Vanzell Mar-Klar definitely looked like Desmond got him the best Christmas present ever even though they left Bracca being chased by the Empire.

Hey.

At least Cal seemed to be just as lost as Desmond right now.

Good to know he isn’t the only poor soul winging it at this point.

#single dad!desmond in his ship the monteriggioni 2 #luke and leia grow up thinking desmond is their dad #they know he isn’t #but they still call him dad #obi-wan swans off because i want desmond to suffer being a single dad #vanzell mar-klar doesn’t count #since he’s more like the inhouse tutor #maybe uncle #i kinda want the renegade clone troopers to be the bad batch #is it obvious i started playing jedi fallen order?#yeah #yeah the first game #i suck by the way #i don’t know if i can even finish this game #jesus christ on a pogo stick #i suck so bad on soul-like games #and my brother thought i would enjoy elden ring???#and suggested i play demon souls???#i can't even get to the first real boss of bloodborne

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regarding-stories · 4 days

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Hard to pull: Good Ret-Cons

Ah. The Ret-Con, Retroactive Continuity. At its best, a satisfying twist that recontextualizes everything. At its worst, a stupid rug pull.

When we think about it, it's often meant to introduce something that wasn't established before. But it's hard to distinguish from a late plot twist at times, because so often these go hand in hand.

Let's look at one of the most famous examples: Darth Vader is Luke's father. (Duh duh dunn! Kidding.)

As far as I know, this turn of events wasn't planned for when giving us "Star Wars: A New Hope". But it's ever-so-satisfying. Audiences in 1980 were apparently lapping it up, and there's the funny Simpsons scene where Homer spoils it for all those movie-goers standing in line back in the day. (Long lines for watching Star Wars being a thing back then.)

One of the key prerequisites for a good ret-con that it fits with established facts, mostly in not contradicting them. This is most often achieved by painting in a corner we haven't seen yet. But we know that this impactful plot twist came with a price, because it seems to contradict things Obiwan had been talking about so far.

This got resolved by Obiwan giving the somewhat unconvincing speech about "from a certain point of view." We learn that Obiwan has been hiding things from Luke which gives new nuance to their formerly perfect student-teacher relationship.

And apparently they liked ret-conning so much, they threw in Luke and Leia being siblings next - also impactful, but that makes their budding romance in the first installment, well, weird, retroactively potentially incestuous.

That's the recontextualization at full force. When we see those scenes with the kiss for good luck or Leia using Luke to get back at Han, they seem different to us, with us knowing something that the characters didn't know back then - nor the actors, since it hadn't been established.

Ret-cons work backwards in time, after all. They change the past and make us see it in a new light.

Fallout 2

Now, this might be a spoiler for some, but this game got released in 1998, so I guess we cleared the statute of limitations.

In Fallout 1, we learn that people hid in vaults to survive the nuclear holocaust. We also learn about the problems they had. Quite a few in fact, the broken water purification chip with no spare part being one thing.

In Fallout 2 it is "revealed" to us that for the most part, the vaults were experiments, and we get a lot more weirdness thrown at us. It's impactful because by this point we've seen a fair share of vaults, we think we know what they are for, and now the rug is pulled underneath us.

Here we see it again - if you manage to fit in with previous facts as well as you can, you can use a ret-con to make an impactful plot twist. This is put to good use in Fallout 2 to paint the picture of a Deep State government in league with Vault-Tec and Poseidon to do whatever they want, with zero concern for the population itself.

If you play Fallout 1 after 2 the whole story seems to basically fit into this new mold, that's how good it was in terms of ret-conning.

But ret-cons are dangerous and tempting, and they keep breeding more ret-cons. The Fallout 2 ret-con already put in question how humanity did survive. Was it stroke of luck? Being so resilient? And since the baddies were confined to an oil rig, how would they have remade the world in the first place? Part of this is covered by the Garden of Eden Creation Kit (G.E.C.K.). So now there's a magical means (come on, it's a suitcase-sized chemistry kit) to make a limited nice-to-live area.

But the seeds of sequel ret-conning were sown. Of course you need sequels to ret-con, else it's just a plot twist.

The Why of Ret-Cons

Lore, backstory, ret-cons... they typically serve one thing. You want to move the pieces into place to tell yet another story. Ret-cons are needed where you encounter problems with either established facts ("We need this to be somewhat different to work") or you want to establish new facts (better, but leads to "Why did nobody know or mention this?"). So you either change established facts or you add to them. The latter is typically more convincing and better-received.

If you change facts you need audience buy-in. What you're doing gives the audience something that makes it worth it, because you're changing something about how the world works. So you're effectively taking something away from the audience, or at least that part of the audience that cares about consistency and world-building.

In both cases, there's a question of pay-off - which is also true for plot twists. I mean, it's okay to make us gasp and give us a temporary emotional high. But ideally the ret-cons and/or plot twists give us something in the story from that point onward as well. Don't just yank us around, give us developments based on plot twists.

The new facts about Darth Vader, Luke, and Leia gives us new dramatic developments and conflict. Conflict with Han. Darth Vader provoking Luke into an angry outburst. This is the real payoff - this return to a consistent narrative unfolding from this point forward.

It's not just about undermining expectations or changing facts. If that was satisfying by itself, "The Last Jedi" (Episode VIII) would be more well-received and not considered the hot piece of garbage it is. It constantly destroys setups from Episode VII, quite intentionally, and it constantly throws plot twists at us. I was watching it on two separate long distance flights. It took me that long because every five minutes I went "This can't get worse!" and then it did. And I switched it off a few times.

Some people like that. I don't. It was really painful to watch, this lack of continuity. Continuity is a rewarding thing, so are setup-and-payoff relationships. There is a cost to pay with ret-cons, and your ret-con has to pay it - it has to better than continuity. It has to result in a better story. I think Star Wars succeeded here - by which I mean the original trilogy.

The Sequel Problem

Establishing new facts in sequels is best done honoring continuity. As I said, you best paint in corners where you don't touch the original, or follow developments implied in the original (but not played out). This often means new characters (like a change of management), new locales, new challenges.

All of this ideally abides by continuity. Ret-cons happen when you can't make your new facts mesh with the old facts - changing the past. This can be jarring. But as I said, if you manage to cast a new light on old facts, like the above examples, which qualify as plot twists (or, in case of Fallout, "lore twists"), this is usually received much better.

Tolkien did one of the former kind, though.

"The Hobbit", as far as I know, grew from a series of stories told to his kids when they were young. It's effectively a children's tale, and it has this feel of going in installments to this day when you read it.

When writing "The Lord of the Rings", Tolkien based not only a whole world-spanning conflict on that innocuous magical ring, he also reused Gollum as a major character into the whole thing. Gollum is woven into the story at several times, including his capture by the dark forces.

In order to make this work, Tolkien revised "The Hobbit". The version you might know is probably the revised edition, with a Gollum that meshes with the "Lord of the Rings" books. But the Gollum scene was rewritten, and other things adjusted to mesh with the world-building of those books to begin with.

So in order to pull of his major work, Tolkien revised his earlier work. This is a plain ret-con that changes things. To readers of "The Hobbit" it's also a sequel plot twist - "Wait, that magical ring is that important??" You wouldn't know from "The Hobbit" alone, after all.

In spite of changing facts, this change has been very well received, because the payoff is so huge. Yes, this might change what earlier readers had in their heads when reading the book. But "The Lord of the Rings" is so good, so enthralling, so captivating, it seems like people didn't mind. It's one of the series of books that created an entire genre and had enormous impact on authors and story-telling after, and also gaming.

Yes, Tolkien had to tamper with "the facts." But it's still considered worth it, so it's a ret-con with the stamp of approval from history.

A Straight-Forward Example Of What Not To Do

The longer you wait to change a fact, the more resistance from your audience you will meet. You're basically upsetting the foundation built over years or decades.

Nothing made this more apparent than "Doctor Who".

"Doctor Who" has been on screens since the 1960s (though with a considerable gap, mostly in the 90s). So fitting things into the continuity of a show based on time travel is always a challenge, especially since nobody planned forward for this.

Hell, they didn't even keep the original tapes. (Well done, BBC...)

So anytime you fit something in there, something else might break. Luckily enough, Whovians are tolerant of this kind. A lot of "Doctor Who" episodes don't really have a lot of continuity within the episode and resolve by "plot magic," after all. (Or so it felt to me, binging them.)

And while changes to the character in its many reincarnations have been controversial - like the 6th Doctor being such a dick during his run (redeemed later) or how the 11th Doctor became almost the center of the Universe, basically - there were things you didn't mess with.

Until the 13th Doctor.

It's one thing if you need to cram more reincarnations in to make the series continue in spite of "established fact." (This life extension happening during the tenure of the show-runner for the 11th and 12th doctors.) It's a whole another thing when you completely uproot the character's backstory.

Until the 13th Doctor it has always been clear that the story starts with the 1st Doctor. This is how the character remembers itself. This is what we saw on the screen (if we had access to the first episodes). Already ret-cons took place to establish some other behind-the-scenes facts (thanks, 11th Doctor and Clara, the Impossible Girl). But every Who writer left this fact intact.

Not the showrunner and writers of the 13th Doctor. They weren't satisfied with hollowing out the character until it was barely recognizable (see a really long but good explanation here). They wanted it to be impactful, they wanted major plot twists, and they certainly had a tendency to be unpleasantly preachy instead of entertaining or consistent.

So they established a Doctor before the Doctor, and this Doctor had been not a Time Lord, but a very powerful being that was horribly mistreated as child (actually tortured and experimented on) and from whom the power of reincarnation was stolen for the Time Lords.

I do hope that the main backlash for this lore change was not the fact that she was a woman of color. I really do. But frankly, "Doctor Who" had already been taking a nosedive in terms of writing, popularity was waning, the 13th Doctor herselfy already had been a poorly written, arrogant, judgemental character. And then they went to change one of the core facts of the setting after more than 50 years.

Fans were apparently not convinced that the payoff of all this was worth the destruction in terms of lore. The show lost viewers over time and against previous precedent, the showrunner didn't get to do another reincarnation of the Doctor. In a huge attempt of fan service, the original showrunner and David Tennant (technically, the 10th and most popular Doctor of the new run) were brought back to salvage this flagship show. (Not that the BBC always treated it like one.)

There was a sort of one-upman-ship going on here, you could say. Already under the Moffat era (the showrunner of the 11th and 12th Doctors), ret-cons and plot twists were way too common and used to invest us into a particular plot arc or season. But this one was too much, too far, and clashing with a central established fact of the Who-verse. Because people love their continuity of Doctors.

When Moffat inserted Clara Oswin everywhere into the time stream, he still paid homage to keeping this lineage intact, at best adding an unseen bit. But when you drop a setting-altering bomb that changes one of the facts that most fans care about after decades, you better be prepared to blow up in your face instead.

Frankly, I had high hopes for the 13th Doctor. A woman doctor seemed exciting. The flood of bad writing and plots and controversy that followed does not invalidate the idea, but it did burn it quite a bit.

Kinda convincing, kinda flat

Add too many ret-cons, and original ideas get undermined or become flat or unconvincing. Let's revisit the Fallout Universe, but let's look back at the Fallout TV Series.

In Fallout 1, the vaults were the means for humanity to survive. Playing that game you got the strong impression that everyone in there hailed from a Vault that opened at some point.

Fallout 2 already undermined this idea by the ret-con we mentioned above. The reasons why the Vaults were plagued with so many problems wasn't incompetence but malice and intent - the people in them were often used as lab rats, a fact that has been used for humor and weirdness in every Fallout game since.

Now, this setting "fact" was never that convincing. At least for the direct nuclear attacks, no power in the world can destroy every town, village, etc, especially in countries with huge surface area like, let's say the US, Canada, China, or Russia. (Though the fate of everything but the US has never been a real concerns of Fallout canon.) This is by the way especially true of China where huge swathes of the population are located in areas separate from each other by mountains and hills of all sizes.

I'm unclear on what the origin of most of the survivors in the later games was, but since we're already more than two centuries into the future, it tends to come up less and less. Also, due to the sheer size of the games in the 3D era you're not likely to keep track of lore the same. Fallout 1 and 2 were more focused experiences with good chances you saw most anything in it.

So, when the TV series "revealed" that most "plain folk" resented the Vault Dwellers because they were the rich folks sealed away while they descend from the outside, I balked. But I also looked it up, and yeah, it makes kind of sense. Most would be the descendants of humans that, by whatever means, survived fallout and nuclear winter with even less to go with than a Vault that experimented on you. Also, from the intro of the first game it was clear you had to pay for the privilege of being allowed into a Vault.

So, this actually works so far.

But this is just the tip of the ret-con iceberg taking place here, the writers moving one piece into place for the show's central reveal.

It was Vault-Tec all along. They sabotaged peace talks, they even wanted the bombs to fall, to make over society in their image. Instead of being a company relying on fear-mongering to extract money, they wanted to perpetuate themselves as the new humanity. Lip service was paid to the whole experiment idea by inciting the other companies to come on board and allowing them to do whatever they want. They also sabotaged clean, perpetual energy that would have ended the Resource Wars.

You could say, as a ret-con, that this kinda works. It adds facts. It adds a secret framework of privileged Vaults for the upper crust to survive as is. The ultimate dream of all villains: I, unchanged, in a world that completely is mine to shape. (Muahahaha.)

It doesn't necessarily contradict established facts. Vault-Tec was already part of the Deep State and a horribly corrupt company that didn't care about "the people." Vaults were already a privilege, experiments, and at times, a trap. And one sequel ret-con begets another. Fallout 4 already introduced working cryo technology.

But is it convincing?

Yes, the series has a message critical of capitalism, but it styles capitalism in a heavy-handed way, money being the root of all evils. You could argue this is the case, certainly, but it's the manner of delivery. Capitalism in the Fallout TV series is a cartoon villain, a cardboard cut-out.

The contradictions start to pile up, too. Vault 33 (where Lucy starts) is hidden so badly, it should have been raided by the Master (villain of Fallout 1) long ago. All the locations are right where the first game happened. This thing is nigh-impossible to miss. Then, for two centuries, everybody missed the existence of master Vaults that monitored the other Vaults - in a Universe that relies on a much more analog, visible technology than ours (partially to withstand the EMP effect of the blasts).

In fact, all of it hinges on the conspiracy being practically perfect until the point in time it is revealed. But when Norm enters Vault 31, he finds an incompetent Robobrain ... I mean Roomba-Brain (a former vice president) in charge. The whole plan seems to be full of holes and the usual Fallout Universe incompetence (corporations were always portrayed as hotbeds of graft, laziness, and maliciousness) is immediately restored. So, falls apart in minutes, was secret for more than 200 years...? (Also, Coop uncovered the conspiracy easily two centuries before.)

Depending on how you liked the series (I did not), you can be on the fence about this, definitely, or ignore it even for the most part. It kind of works, you know...? But it also flattens everything into one big bad, making it more cartoon-ish, more one-sided. The nigh-perfect conspiracy. The plot (and lore) holes. And again, how late the ret-con comes in the series.

The TV series is generally not afraid of establishing new facts (yet another Brotherhood of Steel chapter in yet another sequel popping out of the woodwork) or just changing the lore for dramatic impact (the fall of Shady Sands). Moving the pieces into place wasn't subtle, it literally comes with the force of yet another nuke.

It's this bulldozering of the lore I dislike the most. Fallout's big bads from the past kept getting more and more unconvincing as time moved on. Fallout 2 already established a Deep State hiding behind the whole Vault business - the Enclave. In "Fallout: New Vegas" Mr House (presented as sentient computer version of himself) was at least only one faction influencing that world, not a central big bad. In Fallout 4, the Institute perpetuated itself in secret for 200 years. And now Vault-Tec was the big bad all along.

It gets stale and flatter each time it is rehashed. And it effectively flattened the lore progression we see from Fallout 1 to Fallout 2 to Fallout: New Vegas. In that strand of continuity, the world expanded, went from tiny "points of light" to city states and proto-nations to warring nations. This was the potential future of the Fallout setting, a gradual emerging of a new, sometimes familiar, sometimes alien world. A different world influenced by the past but setting out to shape its own future.

But the writing of the TV series, while fulfilling the technical aspects of a ret-con, just drags all of this down because it's oh-so-dramatic. That's why I would argue on the side of it not being a good ret-con, though somewhat decently execute, but a cheap one. Your mileage may absolutely vary.

Less Sequels Please

In the end, continuity and ret-cons are issues most sequels have to tackle in some shape and form, and the popularity of plot twists and sudden reveals doesn't improve the situation. But at this point, ret-conning has been overdone and I could do with some continuity instead...

Or less damn sequels and more original works! Fallout 1 by itself is a weird masterpiece. We are apparently unwilling to let these go and create another, new one. For each good sequel there are quite a few bad, trying to minimize risk and smothering creativity. And in the end, often doing their fictional universes, if they "exist," no favor.

We looked at notable exceptions like "The Empire Strikes Back" but in general, I could do with some fresh ideas.

#retcon #retcontinuity #star wars #a new hope #the empire strike back #return of the jedi #luke and leia #i am your father #fallout 2 #vault tec #fallout series #the hobbit #the lord of the rings #doctor who #thirteenth doctor #fallout tv series

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