How much retcon is too much

You must scare easily.

I take it you haven't seen a full size original Darth Vader costume? I have, Vader is huge.

I was powerless against it.

They ALL float down here. When you're down here with us, you'll float too!

@Starflier

Actually, that's more of an addition than a retocn - Grredo shooting first is a retcon, because it changes something that was already established - but midichlorians were just an extra layer of detail - they didn't actually change anything that had already been established - they just gave an explaination for something that was previously unexplained.

I missed a few years of CoH so I don't have any idea what you're talking about. What did Statesman retcon and how did it lead to the incarnate content?

Heh, I thought both the Heinlein novel and the completely gratuitous action movie were both very entertaining in their own ways.

Back to OP, things get retconned because they think that it will sell better. Sometimes I read things that I really enjoyed 20 years ago and think to myself "boy that would never make a movie nowadays." But they already sold that book/movie to me 20 years ago. They are trying to get new (and mostly much younger) audiences. I don't blame anyone for that. But I don't plan on watching the Teen Wolf on MTV either.

....Reeeally? You were expecting He-Man, already a bad cartoon, to be a decent movie?

Okay, the idea is possible to be interesting, though admittedly fantasy and kind of campy. The movie is just... terrible. Nostalgia Critic ripped it pretty well, though I'm amazed he didn't point out the thing I thought was hilariously bad in the original: how "musicians just aren't valued in our world." Seriously? That made me laugh out loud when I saw most of the movie on TV. Groupies do entirely stupid things for bands they love, and scads of people want to learn to play an instrument. Musicians are hardly lacking in value in our society.

Father XMas, changing things like genders or other slight things in a Shakespeare play is part of what has kept those plays around for so long: that movie wasn't the first to do it, either. The Globe Theater did a version of The Tempest with Vanessa Redgrave in the early 2000s, and I doubt that was the first production to play with the idea.

Who knows what you could call Ran. It's basically the Lear plot in feudal Japan, so it's somewhere between a production of the play and an homage of some sort. Shakespeare's plays are, after all, plays, and any play can be quite different depending on who is playing each character, who is producing it, etc. I think plays are kind of in a class all of their own, because of that. Movie remakes will generally have different scripts they are working from, as well as any play or movie based on a book. I know that plays can be edited a little differently, but not as much as the other stuff I mentioned.

Spiderman dealing with the devil killed the character for me.

Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.

Hey Vegita! What's the scouter say about his midichlorian count?

IT's OVER 9000!!!!!!!!!

Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.

Hah. Very nice.

Yeah, mainly because I was 6. I still thought a giant rabbit came a crapped out multi-flavor jelly beans once a year.

Dude, how do you think you get to the point where you think Vader is? What you've typed is one of the types of people it takes to become Vader, and not just because it was shown, but because that's one path to take to end up somebody like Vader. The only thing you missed is the part where for all his control through fear and intimidation, he spends his entire time in the employ of somebody else and only considers taking over when he sees that there's somebody else there to help him to do it.

Vader has always been a bit of a wimp too.

So you haven't, then.

I know, thank you for confirming my statement?

Statesman didn't originally get his powers from the Well of Furies and become an incarnate.

His original story was that after the war (WW1) he travelled the world and in some generic mystical place learned to harness his inner will which gave him his powers. Or that's it as best I can remember. Although looking at the wiki entry for him it looks like they tried to incorporate that origin into the new one as well.

They ALL float down here. When you're down here with us, you'll float too!

@Starflier

Yes, that was Cole's first origin story. When CoV came out 18 months later, they retconned Statesman and Lord Recluse as drinking buddies and co-adventurers who discovered Pandora's Box. Opening it let all that power into the world, creating the new era of demigods we call superheroes. Drinking from the Well of Furies was in there somewhere, too, but it wasn't the source of all power.

In the beginning of the game, it seemed like they were going to go with "multiple sources of power" with all the talk of ancient African deities and such, but that got abandoned. Now they're trying to shoehorn everything into the Well of Furies nonsense, even to the point of making the Well not an actual water well but some vague "locus of power." Which talks. Or something.

That really is an excellent example of a retcon that's gone too far.

There was a point when Henry McCoy, in his own book, after he left the X-Men but before he joined the Avengers, would wear a mask to hide his new blue-furred mutation. It could apply here. It's a reach, but it could be the case here.

I was watching an episode of The Clone Wars animated series the other day and it struck me how different Anakin's character in the animated show was from the character portrayed in the movies. Their personalities were so different I wouldn't have known they were even the same person. It felt like Lucas wasn't satisfied with his portrayal in the movies and decided to rewrite the character. The petulant kid from the movies was replaced by someone much more mature and confident and entrusted with great responsibilities. The scene I watched showed Padme irritated they couldn't spend more time together and Anakin telling her how duty must come first - it was a complete reversal of their roles in the movies.

Well, originally he used a serum to change back and forth as a way to diguise himself while investigating the Brand Coporation, his employer at the time. He was permanently stuck in his more bestial form when he waited too long to counteract his serum and change back to his "human" form.

The First Class movie could take place when he was going back and forth- in X2 he was not using the formula because he was working for the government and had no reason to hide his identity, but his altered form in X3 could have been due to resuming use of the serum for the enhancements it provided to his abilities and becoming trapped in said form or as a delayed mutation resulting from his initial use of the serum.

The Incarnate thing was first alluded to prior to Issue 3. When they first introduced the concept of the Epic Archetypes, and started rattling off all of the ones that they were planning on. I'm not even sure that something from 5 months after launch is definitely a retcon, and not a case of having a purposefully vague bit of story misdirection used as a placeholder because they didn't want to reveal everything at that time. Some of the later stuff with Incarnates, and thus the Well, being the source of the other origins does smack of retcon, though.

pandora's box according to what i know isn't a source of power but rather a seal and a contract. interacting with it caused the seal and contract to break thus allowing te gods to interfere and the powers that were once sealed to flow again, releasing it in a torrent, causing more than normal to rise.


Also... to call it a retcon is a bit misleading considering the "retcon" has been around longer than the original continuity if it actually wasn't part of it...

It's like... what Haruhi does when summer vacation doesn't end the way she wants.