My Favorite Retcon (plus an audiobook giveaway!)

This week I’m plunging deep into the first act of my next-next book. At recent conventions, I realized I confuse people when I say I’m working on my “next-next book.” People know me as the author of one book, and can’t be expected to follow the continuity that mostly exists in my head. How deep into book-land am I? Let me clarify.

My first book: Someone You Can Build A Nest In, a love story about a monster and monster hunter. It was published in April of 2024.

My next book: To be revealed soon, a story of gods, their biggest fans, and their pet monsters. I turned in a draft a few months ago. Scheduled to be published in 2025.

My next-next book: The thing I currently have twenty-three thousand words of, alongside piles of research and notes. It’s one big train of unhinged vibes.

This is a lot to keep straight, especially as I’m bouncing between the edits on the nextbook and composition on the next-next book. Messing with these ideas also means undoing a lot of prior assumptions and broken worldbuilding. It has me thinking about retcons once again. And whenever I think about retcons, I think about my favorite retcon. Can we talk about retcons?

Retcons are the practice of changing the continuity of a story in a way that contradicts earlier established plot, and which establishes something else to be true for future stories. Imagine a detective series about orcs, all trying to figure out what criminal mastermind keeps stealing all magic bone dust. For the first three books the entire series everyone is clearly an orc. Then in book four, it turns out that everybody was actually an alien all along. There was no evidence in the earlier books that aliens existed, nor that any orcs were aliens. Going back and rereading it, the twist contradicts what came before it. It seems to come from nowhere. The continuity was changed retroactively.

Before we get any further into retcons, let’s have a giveaway. My publisher gave me a bonus copy of the audiobook of Someone You Can Build A Nest In for one lucky reader. It’s narrated by the splendid Carmen Rose, who gives Shesheshen an amazing voice.

In order to enter the giveaway, simply do the following:

1. Subscribe this newsletter. You’re probably already doing it.

2. Post one of your own favorite retcons in the comments section.

And that’s it! All entries will be collected and a winner will be selected at random.

To be clear, a retcon is not the same as a twist. The endings of Christopher Nolan’s Memento or Vajra Chandrasekera’s Saint of Bright Doors have major revelations that recontextualize what we already read and challenge how we felt about it. The challenge to the status quo is deliberate and plays off the earlier text. Or in the case where a story does build up to “this was all a dream,” that is a deliberate anticathartic twist. You now understand things about the story you didn’t before.

Retcons are most common in long-running series, like soap operas and superhero comics. Here the franchise probably is restricted to the same few characters, and often the same premise or setting. If too many stories get told, there is a temptation to go back and change things, to give you liberty to tell new stories about the same figures (yes, at the risk of infuriating the audience). And other times a new writer joins the series and decides to change some of the lore or established characters to suit what stories excite them. With franchises like Batman or The X-Men, so many writers have revised the characters over so many years that characters become almost unrecognizable from their first appearances.

If you know just one nerd in your life, then you know a nerd who is angry about some retcon or other. Even I’ve written an entire essay about how the many retcons to Professor X destroyed him as a disabled icon without replacing him with what was necessary.

At the same time, the retcons to Magneto were amazing. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s original depiction of Magneto was a two-dimensional genocidal maniac who wanted to steal of Earth’s nuclear weapons to burn the world down. After Chris Claremont took over writing The X-Men, he retconned Magneto to be a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, giving a stark window into his motivations for confronting humanity, and allowing new stories where Magneto had psychological depth and serious points about confronting human bigotry. Since then, other writers have taken these traits in many different directions, but the character in inarguably more memorable because of those retcons.

Some retcons, though, are so much wilder. They dare you to accept this big change. My favorite retcon is one of this stripe. It’s one so ludicrous that I can’t help laughing at it. You couldn’t get away with it today.

(Jason Voorhees getting his groove back in Friday the 13th Part 6: Jason Lives)

If you know me, then you know that I love Friday the 13th. It’s cheesy and gruesome and transgressive. It is a twelve-movie-long series that rests atop a retcon.

Friday the 13th Part 1 is about someone going on a rampage at a summer camp, attacking all of the counselors before it can open. At the end it turns out the killer is the mother of a disabled child, Jason, who drowned when the previous counselors ignored him. She’ll do anything to stop the camp from reopening and disrespecting his memory. She gets decapitated and the lone survivor goes home for a lot of therapy.

Friday the 13th Part 2 is about someone going on a rampage at a summer camp, attacking all of the counselors before it can open. Sounds familiar, right? Except the killer is Jason. That Jason. Literally an adult man who is clearly the son of the previous killer. Didn’t he drown? How did he grow up in the woods next to the camp without anyone noticing? How did his obsessed mom never notice he was alive? And wouldn’t that have altered her plans for revenge?

All the movie does is have one counselor hear his story, and speculate that maybe Jason didn’t really drown. It’s not even a fig leaf of justification. It’s a shred of a fig leaf. No further effort is put into justifying it. The previous movie didn’t have much plot going on, and somehow this retcon manages to completely blow up everything about it.

What would the contemporary equivalent of this be? That the shards in Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere are all made of LSD and everybody is just hallucinating them doing magic? That Tony Stark was a robot Pepper Potts’s built when she was lonely? That Gone Girl never goned?

Imagining what could be as bad today as this was back in the 1980s is a fun mental exercise. It bends your brain, because these days cinema brands are much more protective. Even the most drastic changes in the MCU aren’t close to this silly.

But it’s just a mental exercise in absurdity, because there’s another dimension to the undrowning of Jason retcon. It holds a hidden lesson about all retcons.

With Friday the 13th, this ridiculous retcon enabled them to make another movie that followed the same Slasher formula. If the campers were sympathetic enough, and if the kills were good enough, and the atmosphere was tense enough, then despite sitting atop this flimsy excuse, it was more of what the audience wanted. As the sequels went along, the excuses for how it was possible kept piling up, until Jason hadn’t just survived drowning, but was a zombie, or a wraith, or a spirit of vengeance haunting the lake. Because the movies kept giving a core audience what they wanted, that original became a joke everyone laughed at while they kept watching.

Now, you all obviously enjoy more thoughtful entertainment. You would never stoop so low as to enjoy campy movies like this. That’s for lunatics, like me.

But there is something to the promise of the retcon in a series we enjoy. Even milder retcons violate the time we’ve invested. We know in our bones they aren’t proper continuations of what were reading. They’re the acts of creators trying to get out of a spot that is otherwise beyond them. Unlike a good twist, they don’t give us additional appreciation for the story we paid close attention to. Instead they break the suspension of disbelief.

The promise a retcon makes is that this break will be worth it. When this bold, new story reveals Magneto’s secret origin, you will care for him like you never have before. Stories about him going forward will be more powerful. They’ll explore inhumanity and the source of righteous anger, as well as his ruthless tactics.

This risks splintering the audience. There will be people who rightly feel betrayed, or who can’t get over that something was broken. But if it’s compelling off the bat, people like me will keep reading, to see that it makes good on its promise.

If a story does it well? Then Magneto is right.