The retcon

Picture a story that painted itself into a corner. The hero's uncle died in part one. Part nine needs the uncle. The writers have one tool that needs no restart: they say the past was different. The uncle was never dead. He was hiding. The old scenes stay; they now mean something else.

People call that a retcon. It is short for retroactive continuity and means a change to the past of a story made by a later story. Two kinds: a reveal, where the old fact was always different, and a rewrite, where it never happened. A third does the job quietly: the drop, where it is never mentioned again.

Part one: the uncle dies. Part nine: he was hiding all along. What kind of retcon is that?

• A rewrite. The death never happened.
• A reveal. The death scene still happened; it now means something else.
• A drop. The death is forgotten.

The famous rewrite is a comic. In 1987 Marvel married Spider-Man to Mary Jane. In 2007, in a story called One More Day, a deal with a devil made the marriage never have happened. Twenty years of stories still took place; the wedding inside them was gone. Readers who had bought those twenty years remembered every one.

Each card is a retcon. Is it a reveal, a rewrite, or a quiet drop?

One card at a time. Tap the pile it belongs to.

What a retcon costs. It keeps the series running with no restart, which is why it is the first tool reached for. But every reader who remembers the old fact pays, and the bigger the fact, the more of them. A retcon of a small detail passes. A retcon of the hero's origin is argued about for years.

Picture a series with a million long-time readers. Move how big the retcon is and watch how many of every 100 feel the story cheated them. Made up to show the shape.

Move the control.

And a retcon is a new promise. The devil's deal is now a fact of the story; the hidden uncle is now a man who hid for nine parts and must have had a reason. A retcon adds to the list it was meant to shorten. That is why the next tool exists.

A game series says in part eight that a city seen in part two was an illusion. What kind of change is that?

• It is a reveal: the part-two scenes still happened and now mean something else, and the illusion is itself a new promise to keep.
• It is a rewrite: part two no longer counts.
• It is not a retcon, because part eight is just adding a fact.