Imagine you are an artist and you’ve created a beautiful painting, with a green landscape and trees.
This painting is displayed in a museum.
You feel that it’d look better with a desert backdrop.
So you quietly sneak into the museum at night and change the
green landscape to a desert landscape.
When the next day, viewers come to see the painting, you
confuse them by saying that it was always a desert, that it was never a green
landscape.
This is an example of something call “Retconning.”
Retconning is short for “Retroactive Continuity.”
It is a storytelling device in which we introduce new
information that will rewrite the historical facts and historical elements in
the story.
It is mostly used for fixing mistakes, fixing the contradictory
parts of the story, or fixing plot holes.
It is also used to create spin-offs and sequels.
For instance, bringing back a character that died in the previous
part of the story.
It’s just like a train.
Once the train leaves the station, someone quickly changes
the track behinds it and then tells you that you always arrived from this track
and the original track never existed.
It is consciously creating confusion to rewrite the historical facts and it is a brilliant tool in storytelling.
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