Retcons you approve of and disaprove of.

I always think that you can judge how devoted a fan is by their reaction to retcons. I understand even batting an eye out of the ones approved of, kind of like how I would be shocked if someone came along and changed Darth Bane regardless of whether it brought new fans and regardless of whether or not it was better.

I approve of the above and I approve of TFU: I actually think it makes Vader look like the Sith he should be. Powerful despite being beaten.

I approve of most all retcons and The Clone Wars animated series does not bother me even although I am not a fan.

The only thing that gets under my skin is the General Grievous concept.

Discuss retcons you approve and disapprove of.

 

I honestly have no idea what a retcon is.
I've been away from this site for a long time--but last time I was around, this forum was purely dedicated to discussions which bridged topics and themes from the six films.
Not sure if you'll get your best responses here.
Just a thought.

-Seldon

 

The Film Formerly Known As Star Wars, 1977

LUKE SKYWALKER: How did my father die?

BEN KENOBI: A young Jedi named Darth Vader, who was a pupil of mine, helped the Empire hunt down & destroy the Jedi Knights. He betrayed & murdered your father.


The Empire Strikes Back, 1980

DARTH VADER: Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your father.

LUKE SKYWALKER: He told me enough. He told me you killed him.

DARTH VADER: No. I am your father.


Greatest retcon in history.

 

A retcon is a fact in a fictional story that has been changed, while keeping the continuity. It is "retroactive" continuity. You still make stuff fit together while expanding on the story.

True! And to add to it a bit more, it was expanded on in ROTJ. Obi-Wan told Luke in ANH that Vader murdered his father, and then later in ROTJ says that it was only from a "certain point of view", the story was altered, yet it was not really changed and still made sense. I like this.

Here's another one: C-3P0 was owned by Luke in the OT and clearly did not know that Anakin/Vader built him. I'm sure Lucas never imagined that Darth Vader built C-3P0 when the ANH came out! However, the plot was tweaked by showing that Anakin did build him and the story was smoothed over when C-3P0 gets his mind wiped at the end of ROTS. It's weird, but it works!

One that I do NOT believe works, was that Leia said she remembered her mother in ROTJ, but in ROTS, she was with her mother no longer than Luke. I suppose she was more "force sensitive", but I think it's a lousy explanation. It would have worked better if the kids were separated and she was with Leia for a while.

 

Favorite retcon:

The (nonexistent) Empire strikes back ? It's rather nice Lucas didn't let anything like an opening crawl and celebratory coda stop him from pushing the reset button to the Empire/Rebellion dynamic. I always prefer that my heroes be underdogs.

Mum dies in childbirth ? Why adhere to the backstory from an anesthetized Carrie Fisher when you can be operatic? Frankly, I'm at a loss to remember a time in Star Wars when Darth and Lady Vader weren't shedding tears of blood to the tune of Qui-Gon's Funeral. And you know what? I'm not gonna try.


Least-favorite retcon:

We're twins! -- It's not the twist itself that rankles, but rather the missed opportunity. Leia deserved a more substantial role.

 

I disapprove of 3PO being at the Lars homestead anytime before ANH. He should have been in a diplomatic enclave on Coruscant or someplace similar.

 

I strongly disapprove of the way the Mandalorians have been changed around.

 

The way I always dealt with this by assuming that maybe Bail and Breha showed Leia holovids of her mother. I mean without giving her any details, but with Padme having been as public a figure as she was there would have had to have been hours and hours of video footage they could have rooted through looking for things they could show Leia and she just didn't explain that she had never actually met their mother when talking to Luke.
I mean, if she had seen a short video or something of Padme and then Luke asks what she was like I can see it being reasonable to give an answer like, "She was very beautiful. Sad, but kind." Those are things you would be able to interpret from just a video or photo, especially if you're viewing it with the kind of romanticism that a child would have when viewing images of their dead parent (kind, but sad). She didn't really give Luke any information that would come from actually knowing a person.

 

As far as I know, the "Leia remembering her mother" issue isn't a retcon, it's a minor plot hole, one best left alone in official continuity.

Return Of The Jedi (1983)

LUKE: I have no memory of my mother. I never knew her.

Says a Jedi Knight-to-be. What, baby Luke had his eyes closed, baby Leia's were open? Give me a break.

But, perhaps Leia's adopted parents opened one of the most dangerous threats to the Emperor to even further risk by revealing charming little tidbits of information to her as a child that she definitely didn't need to know or could fully comprehend. Uh-huh.

Plot hole, slight though it is.

 

I can't get my mind around liking the story of The Force Unleashed. Some say it makes Darth Vader more like a Sith, but I kinda think it takes away some of Vader's handling things on his own, like for example it undermines the Jedi Purge, IMO.

 

Like I said, that is just how I decided to patch that hole. It's a better explanation for me than Leia being a super-baby who remembers her own birth. If super-baby works for you, more power to ya!

 

I agree. I also don't like it because it makes force powers too extreme. I'm sorry, but Vader could not jump up and create a force wave that made everyone collapse around him like that... or simply bring down a star destroyer with the force. On the bright side though, none of this is considered canon to the saga. According to Lucas I'm pretty sure that the only things that are Canon are the movies and the Clone Wars series.

 

Well even there, we've got issues in TCW like Asoka and Ventress; Anakin is not a master as of ROTS why does he have an apprentice? And why does she disappear? I suppose they're going to kill her or send her into exile. And why would Dooku have both Ventress and Grievous as thugs, and why would he take an apprentice if he wasn't planning on overthrowing Sidious, which doesn't seem to be on his mind in ROTS?

I do wish that some of Starkiller's over-the-top powers were used in the PT for Anakin; I wanted to see Anakin as a sort of Damien-in-The-Omen super-powerful prodigy.

 

Nah, I think George Lucas made the Jedi Purge look too clean. When I heard that the Jedi were killed and dispersed by the Empire, I thought Vader and his agents spent the twenty years in between the trilogies hunting down thousands of them in a grueling effort. Instead, we get a montage tacked on at the end of ROTS that makes most of the Jedi die like chumps. George Lucas deliberately undermined the combat awesomeness of his greatest characters.

 

You misunderstood, neither explanation works for me. It's a flat-out inconsistency between the OT & the PT & one that can't be rationalised satisfactorily (for me) based on what we heard from Leia in ROTJ & saw in ROTS.

About the only explanation that comes close is that Leia is mistaken, & perhaps bases her 'memory' on vague, comforting, & ultimately meaningless half-truths Bail & Breha may have told her. Leia was being protected from the truth of who her mother really was for her own safety, it would have been far, far too risky to show her images of an extremely prominent Republic Senator & say "that was your mother", but one can imagine her being told a cover-story (as Luke was), & naturally, they would have said she was very beautiful & kind, perhaps adding how much she loved Leia & how sad she was to be dying.

However, that doesn't sit right either - GL has revealed on a couple of occasions that a great deal of thought was devoted to the issue of whether or not Leia remembered her mother in ROTJ, it was clearly intended that the memories she recounts to Luke were real.

 

We have precedent for that: Obi-Wan got an apprentice in TPM as soon as he was granted Knight status.

 

What about Darth Vader's first name in ANH?

Obi-Wan calls Darth Vader "Darth." I always assumed that this was his first name, and I think it was supposed to be at the time. Yes, we know his true name was Anakin, but his Sith name was Darth. I remember how weird it was to first hear the name Darth Maul. I was like, whaat? Why does he have the same first name as Vader? But now we see that "Darth" is a title, not a name. The retcon is that now then Obi-Wan was calling him "Darth", it was like him calling him "General" or "Master". It is now a title, not a name, standing for DARk lord or the siTH.

Now some people may say this is not a retcon, and it was always meant to be this way, but I don't think so.

 

Obi-Wan called Vader "Darth" as a means of taunting him.

 

Yes, it can be rationalised that he does that in the same way that Palpatine calls Luke, "Jedi", in ROTJ.

It's still a retcon - in draft 3 of The Star Wars, one of the other, unnamed, Sith Lords addresses Vader as 'Darth' as if it was his first name, as does the script itself:

Also, the name 'Darth Vader' was originally given to an Imperial general, not a Sith Lord at all, in the first rough draft. And yes, there was a Sith knight in that draft, Prince Valorum.

That said, it's possible that GL considered making the name/term 'Darth' a title, rather than a first name, as early as the second draft of ESB, after he changed the character to being Luke's father (in order to explain why he no longer used the name 'Skywalker') - but not before that. When Alec Guinness actually spoke the line, he was portraying Obi-Wan Kenobi addressing his former apprentice by his first name.

 

'Darth' does not officially stand for anything; the 'Dark Lord Of The Sith' idea is fanon.

This is another of those things that I don't really have a problem with; Darth as a name is just, well, a name, and the idea that Obi-Wan is taunting Anakin by calling him that adds a certain level of enjoyment for me. It links nicely with Obi-Wan's attempts to lecture Anakin in ROTS about his "power"..it's like now he's calling Anakin 'Darth' as a way of saying "you think you have power?...look at you, you're a replaceable number two. You've lost alot of what power you did have, everyone you know hates you or looks at you as being replaceable, you're trapped in a walking iron long..."

Although I'll admit I dislike the idea of retconning as a general rule; mythologies are supposed to be vague and uncertain, not categorized and easily referenced.

 

Am I the only one that thinks The Force Unleashed games made Vader look stronger and were good for him?

 

Given how often TFU - a video game - is brought up, am I the only one who thinks it's not relevant to Saga discussions?

 

Pretending the EU is somehow not "Star Wars" because it's not a film directed by George Lucas (which would drive TESB and ROTJ out of the running as being canonical as well, btw) is a losing game nowadays.

Anyway, TFU: Didn't play the game, read most of the novel, which read like scripted booss fights from a video game. Can't say it really changed my opinion of Darth Darth all that much.

 

I DO!!

Considering that the forum is about Star Wars FILMS I firmly believe that the EU shouldn't be brought up.

 

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Includes everything, both movies, books, comics and games.