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Retroactive continuity, or retcon for short, is a literary device in fictional story telling whereby facts and events diegetic are adjusted, ignored, supplemented, or contradicted by a subsequently published work that recontextualizes or breaks continuity with the former.
There are various motivations for applying retroactive continuity, including:
Retcons are used by authors to increase their creative freedom, on the assumption that the changes are unimportant to the audience compared to the new story which can be told. Retcons can be Diegesis or nondiegetic. For instance, by using time travel or parallel universes, an author may diegetically reintroduce a popular character they had previously killed off. More subtle and nondiegetic methods would be ignoring or expunging minor plot points to remove narrative elements the author doesn't have interest in writing.
Retcons are common in pulp magazine, and especially in by long-established publishers such as DC Comics and Marvel Comics. The long history of popular titles and the number of writers who contribute stories can often create situations that demand clarification or revision. Retcons also appear in manga, soap operas, , movie sequels, cartoons, television shows, professional wrestling angles, , radio series, role-playing games, and other forms of serial fiction.
A printed use of "retroactive continuity" referring to the altering of history in a fictional work is in All-Star Squadron #18 (February 1983) from DC Comics. The series was set on DC's Earth-Two, an alternative universe in which Golden Age comic characters age in real time. All-Star Squadron was set during World War II on Earth-Two; as it was in the past of an alternative universe, all its events had repercussions on the contemporary continuity of the DC multiverse. Each issue changed the history of the fictional world in which it was set. In the letters column, a reader remarked that the comic "must make you the feel at times as if you're painting yourself into a corner", and, "Your matching of Golden Age comics history with new plotlines has been an artistic (and I hope financial!) success." Writer Roy Thomas responded, "we like to think that an enthusiastic ALL-STAR booster at one of Adam Malin's Creation Conventions in San Diego came up with the best name for it a few months back: 'Retroactive Continuity'. Has kind of a ring to it, don't you think?"
An early example of this type of retcon is the return of Sherlock Holmes, whom writer Arthur Conan Doyle apparently killed off in "The Final Problem" in 1893, only to bring him back, in large part because of readers' responses, with "The Empty House" in 1903.
The character Zorro was retconned early in his existence. In the original 1919 novel, The Curse of Capistrano, Zorro ends his adventures by revealing his identity, a plot point that was carried over to the 1920 film adaptation The Mark of Zorro. In order to have further stories starring Zorro, author Johnston McCulley kept all the elements of his original story, but retroactively ignored its ending.
One notable example is Isaac Asimov’s 1950 fixup novel I, Robot, a collection of science fiction short stories originally published in Super Science Stories and Astounding Science Fiction from 1940 to 1950. Compiled into a single publication by Gnome Press in 1950, the collection features a framing sequence in which the stories are told to a reporter by Dr. Susan Calvin, chief Robopsychology at U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men, Inc. Changes necessary to fit the new version included the name of the company (originally the Finmark Robot Corporation), new, earlier references to the Three Laws of Robotics, and new interpolated scenes featuring Dr. Calvin herself.
The TV series Dallas annulled its entire ninth season as just the dream of one of its characters, Pam Ewing. Writers did this to offer a supposedly plausible reason for the major character of Bobby Ewing, who had died onscreen at the end of season eight, to be still alive when actor Patrick Duffy wanted to return to the series. This season is sometimes referred to as the "Dream Season" and was referred to humorously in later TV series such as Family Guy and Community as a "gas-leak year". Other series such as St. Elsewhere, Newhart, and Roseanne employed the same technique.
Notable examples of subtractive retconning include (2019) , which is a sequel to the first two Terminator films and ignores the events of every other film in the franchise, and Halloween (2018), which is a sequel to only the original film and disregards all the other sequels.
Stories that involve time travel can be used to undo the events of poorly received installments. After (2006) faced criticism for abruptly killing off characters such as Cyclops and Jean Grey, its sequel, (2014), features the character Wolverine traveling back in time to 1973 to prevent an assassination that, if carried out, would lead to mutant extinction. The result of this is a new timeline where Jean and Cyclops never died.
Though the term "retcon" did not yet exist when George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four, the totalitarian regime depicted in that book is involved in a constant, large-scale retconning of past records. For example, when it is suddenly announced that "Oceania was not after all in war with Eurasia. Oceania was at war with Eastasia and Eurasia was an ally" (Part Two, Ch. 9), there is an immediate intensive effort to change "all reports and records, newspapers, books, pamphlets, films, sound-tracks and photographs" and make them all record a war with Eastasia rather than one with Eurasia. "Often it was enough to merely substitute one name for another, but any detailed report of events demanded care and imagination. Even the geographical knowledge needed in transferring the war from one part of the world to another was considerable." See historical revisionism (negationism).
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