[NRW] National Retcon Week 2008 (6-12th April)

No, it's not a joke...

National Retcon Week is a (semi-)annual event here at TF.N, where you are all invited to offer creative reinterpretations of Star Wars canon.

It was a great success in 2005, a bit too much of a success in 2006.

In 2007, something seems to have gone wrong, and it didn't happen properly. But we're back now, relocated from late summer to the second week of April...

That means you DO NOT POST YOUR RETCONS YET: wait until the week of 6th-12th APRIL. This post is just to tell you it's going to happen, and to get you all to start thinking.

Also, in a change from previous practice, we ask that you post your retcons in THIS thread (or maybe in a second thread we'll start up on the 6th - you'll see it anyway): do NOT start separate threads with individual retcons.

Thank you!

***

NRW: THE RULES

There are, really, no rules to National Retcon Week.

The basic expectation is that your retcon should offer a reinterpretation of something that we thought we knew about the whole vast Galaxy of Star Wars.

There are two basic situations where this is appropriate:

1.) A point where there's a known contradiction or puzzle to explain in the stories/"source material.

2.) Anywhere else in canon, where you think you can offer a new perspective on some aspect of the story, some incident, some character, whatever....

And a few more pointers:

3.) Try, where possible, to base your idea on canon evidence, and avoid contradicting the official continuity wherever possible. If you do dispense with something, try and provide an entertaining and coherent reason WHY.

4.) Keep it simple. Don't cram lots of different ideas into one retcon... unless that's the purpose of the retcon.

5.) You don't have to listen to my advice, though; other people may have different tastes from me. Read the old NRW threads (linked to at the top) to get a sense of what people have done before now.

6.) There is no rule 6!


***

There will, however, be winners in the following categories, chosen from all the, and announced after all the retcons have been posted:

Best Retcon

Most Likely Retcon

Most Unlikely Retcon.

***
So, remember... no retcons until the 6th... but, get thinking!!

- The Imperial Ewok

 

I thought retcon week was in August, good to see it back though!

 

Oh hellz yes, NRW is back! Let's hope it doesn't become National Retcon Trimester like the last one did.

 

I'm trying to track down my Noghri/Sith War Droid/Vader armor retcon, but maybe it wasn't made in one of those threads.

Not that I forgot the retcon.

edit: Does poking holes in agreed upon canon count?

 

There was a request made to have it during my birthday by me. So I used the last of my powers to make it so...

And it will NOT be a trimester.

 

Sweet...it's during my birthday too!

And yes...no trimester.

WE ARE GOING FULL TERM THIS TIME!

Giving birth to a 9lbs 4oz bundle of EU correction and clarification goodness!

Dp...since you requested this moved up event...I declare you to be Da NRW Baby Daddy.

 

Shouldn't we wait for the paternity test?

 

I heard they have a store-bought paternity test now...we could do it up cheap!

 

Maury's going to be out of a job.

 

Um...bump? This started yesterday, people! Get cracking!

I'll start with something I posted a while back. It's not really a retcon so much as it is an examination of an assumed retcon. Many people refer to the "Vergere = Sith Retcon," and saw the end of the Legacy arc, "Claws of the Dragon" as confirmation. However, I believe the comic actually showed us the opposite. Vergere was not a Sith, and the Sith did not factor into her plans.

 

Great stuff, Matt.

I was going to say: "But what about the bit where she says she might share Krayt's philosophy with her disciple?"

Then I realised that this could be read as: "I'll tell him you're out there, and I'll sick him and the rest of the Jedi on you"

 

Matt - awesome!

Not disimilar from my own thoughts on the issue way back, but much more clearly arranged than I could have managed. Thanks for posting that!

 

Actually, Uli, I took it as condescendion. And thanks Bec!

 

Matt - good point about condescension: I'd never looked at it that way.

Though it does occur to me that Vergere teaches Hett and he chooses to use the dark side to survive the Embrace of Pain. So, the next Force user we know she has access to, what does she do? Take away the Force. So that Jacen didn't have the ability to use the dark side to survive.

I'm not sure if we can attribute a motivation to that, but certainly it's a change in operating procedure that I would very much like to look at as learning from her previous experiences. It almost looks as though she doesn't want Jacen to learn the same things as Hett learned.

 

Yeah, great analysis. I remember when that issue came out, and I loved how that Legacy issue fits the current canon of Vergere being Sith but is just ambiguous enough that Vergere might not be Sith as well. And I'd prefer that to the current canon, but can't do anything about that... yet. And its always hard to tell when Vergere's being sarcastic or just mean.

Now I just wish I could think of something else to try and retcon, hm....

 

My dear pseudosis... you are so awesome!

No more mazing for a while.

 

Since I have a tendency to post Sith retcons for the NRW, I'll try to do something similar this time as well.

Hmm...

I have to think about it some more, but just a few notes on the two stories I posted the last times:

The first, "The King of the Sith", is quite amusing today, since every single issue it deals with has been taken care of by now. And in far more entertaining ways, I must admit.

The other one, "A Sith Perspective", is far more interesting. Apart from the nature of the previous Wyyrloks, nothing in it has been used yet. We still don't now anything more about the Outer Rim scientist or his assistant, nor about the nature of the early New Sith Wars (apart from the newly revealed Creed of Ruin). I still strongly believe in this story, and apart from substituting Wyyrlok with, say, Tenebrous and fixing all the typos I think it could pass for a believable retcon.

Edit: Maybe a short addition, to tie the characters back to the established history: Say Nubyl lost her master somehow, preferably in an experiment gone wrong or something similar, and continued his research into arcane Sith knowledge just to try to bring him back to life, since she didn't feel ready to take his mantle just yet. But when she tried to summon his spirit back from Chaos into his mumified corpse, she got someone else instead. Someone ancient and deadly. Someone like... Xendor. And the rest is known history.

 

Nice!

 

I got me a pet retcon that I've sort of passed around the Wookieepedia IRC channel in the past, but I suppose I'll give it a whirl here.

[image=http://images.wikia.com/starwars/images/0/07/Defender.jpg]

This is a TIE Defender. It is awesome. It is also supposed to be as rare as hen's teeth.

It is not.

In 3 ABY, we see an almighty tousle over control of the TIE Defender, and with good reason. But in that time frame, there are two instances where the TIE Defender crop up that just seem...out of place to me.

The first is in Imperial Ace, which shows us that the Executor had its own detachment of TIE Defenders for use against the Alliance-held Mygeeto. The second is in Decipher's card game, which places TIE Defenders of Onyx Squadron at the Battle of Endor. At which, as we all know, the Executor was present.

Now, of course, it's just feasible that there were enough TIE Defenders to go around, and that the contention over them between Zaarin and Thrawn didn't affect Onyx Squadron. But that's just not interesting.

But what if Onyx was a part of the Executor starfighter detachment, and what if that was at the behest of Vader?

Vader clearly doesn't like his master. At all. That much is clear in several sources, and it was pretty clear that Vader hoped to have Luke at his side and not Palpatine's. Presumably, that would have led to a swift toppling of Palpatine, since "treachery is the way of the Sith."

But Palpatine had 40, 50 years of political connections and allies and the like. Not to mention the military forces directly responsible to him. And Vader was generally reviled throughout the Imperial community, at least amongst the naval officers. So, he couldn't just take Palpatine's place and just expect everyone to cow tow. He needed a bit more leverage in the military department to make his coup possible.

That's where TIE Defenders come in. Sure, that's not going to turn the tide, but if they're worth devoting as much time and resources as are seen in TIE Fighter, they're going to count for something. They can tear up run-of-the-mill Imperial craft easily, for starters. Plus, Zaarin had almost taken over the Empire himself in recent months, using the TIE Defenders and Arden Lyn. If a technology-obsessed Grand Admiral, an ancient Force warrior and TIE Defenders could seemingly have Palpatine and the Empire at their mercy, well, surely the Chosen One, his son, and TIE Defenders could achieve the same thing. Hell, Vader himself was at the controls of a TIE Defender when he helped to save his master, so he knew what they could do.

But how did Vader get them if they were being devoted to the Zaarin campaign? Well, we know that one of his apprentices, High Inquisitor Antinnis Tremayne was on the hunt for Arden Lyn following Zaarin's own botched coup attempt, after a little personal revenge for the humiliation he had suffered at Lyn's hands years ago, but what if he was also after Zaarin's TIE Defender blueprints and designs? And what if he got them? And what if that allowed Vader to have a full complement of the ships under his command circa the Battle of Endor (and Mygeeto)?

All Vader has to do then is ensure that his Death Squadron is present when Luke is captured...

...

Well, I thought it made sense.

 

this was originally posted in the "fanon and canon" thread.... but i would like to submit it to natl retcon week.

 

A note about this, since it's a common misconception: the dark Jedi who injured Irek and was in turn killed by him was not Cronal. Cronal helped cyborgify him after that happened.

 

Also, speaking of Set Harth, can we get this made official in canon, already:

He survived from about the Battle of Ruusan - give or take a few decades, depending on when and how he died after leaving the Jedi - to about 1000 years later. All we really know about him so far is that he survived, and that his existence was suspected but never proven by the Jedi Council.

The implication, of course, being the post-Ruusan, Old Republic Jedi Council.

So what happened to him?

Quality cloning is, apparently, expensive. Rich, extravagant customers for top cloners are likely well represented in a Cloning Entity's ledgers. Rich, extravagant, repeat customers over the course of 1000 years, well...they're likely to be conspicuous. Even if Set Harth took pains to hide his identity, no paper trail can be obscured 100%. Of course, assuming Set Harth was as good as protecting his identity as his cloners were at protecting the identity of their client, he was likely to be just fine, considering there probably were not a very many people interested in looking through the books of what seems to have been considered a shady, disreputable business.

Until, of course, a shady, disreputable Emperor comes along looking for some really great genetecists to engineer him a longer life span - as he did with Ko Sai - only to find evidence of the legendary Set Harth.

Could...could it be? The man who discovered the ability to transfer his consciousness to other bodies and endure for 1000 years?

Lord Vader. Fetch him for me.

 

this thread...hell this event is TOOO funny..especially for the Star Wars universe!! I can only imagine the topics/subjects up for discussion!! Endless!! why else do you think they have Star Wars Infinities or other "what if" comics!! possibilities are endless!!

Shadojoker

 

At this rate we're going to have to extend the event, though...c'mon, people, step it up!

 

honestly...

I'm not ready for this.

Get back to me in August.