Retcon, short for retroactive continuity, is the phenomenon commonly used in video games, comic books, and soap operas where something from a past plotline is changed in order for what’s happening in the present to make sense. Also along those lines is a ret canon, used to blow up a problem from the past. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Retcon Phenomenon”
I learned a new word this week. Grant, you may already know it, but this was sent to us by Aaron Harmon of Sacramento, California, who learned the term retcon while playing role-playing games. Do you know this term?
I do, yeah.
Retroactive continuity?
Retroactive continuity. You go back and you change a previous storyline so that new things can happen to your characters.
Yes. Aaron says soap operas are notorious for this when writers reveal that the character who died in season five actually didn’t die but really moved to Guatemala and had plastic surgery.
And that is how it makes sense that he is able to interrupt Susan and Doug’s wedding in season eight while being played by a different actor.
They do it in comic books as well.
They explain it with the multiverse, many universes where there are multiple Earths with similar versions of all the superheroes and different things can happen on different Earths.
And you’re like, oh, it turns out that when he died, that was a different verse.
So he’s actually alive.
That’s it.
Very similar, the comic book world and the soap opera world, right?
Right.
And improv, you know, you’re justifying what just happened.
A more complicated version of retconning is when you go back to real history of the world and you do a big what if.
What if the cavemen had never left Africa?
Something like that.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah, that makes sense.
Historical retconning.
Is that the way you would say it?
I think they have a better term for it, but I can’t remember it right now.
Something like that.
The concept’s the same, though.
Okay.
Yeah, and Erin also says that an especially blatant example might also be described as having used the ret cannon to blow up the problem.
Nice!
The ret cannon.
I would like to take a ret cannon to certain things in my life.
Bring out the ret cannon.
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