This past weekend, it was great fun to discover that the bookstore clerk-owner I know as “Steve at Tsunami” has written a new book!  It’s a fun book, too, a Jungian look at Star Wars, and on Saturday we attended the book’s launch party, which was also tremendously fun.  (Steve can sing!) 

In the first chapter of the book, he looks at how complicated the Star Wars universe became for its fans when Disney bought the property from George Lucas and relegated the years and years of related Star Wars media to the status of “Legends,” so that Disney could tell its own stories and have them become the official “canon.”  Now the movies were still “true” – including maybe that fun 1984 TV movie, An Ewok Adventure — but the many, many Star Wars novels were not, like Dave Wolverton’s The Courtship of Princess Leia, which I’d enjoyed, and the Timothy Zahn books that my husband still talks about.  The twins born to Han and Leia never happened, nor did fan-favorite Mara Jade, who married Luke.

I first saw Star Wars on 7-7-77 at the long-gone Mayflower Theater on East 13^th, here in Eugene.  I remember that the floors were very sticky, probably from the many wildly enthusiastic kids spilling their sodas in excitement.  I then saw The Empire Strikes Back in Beaverton, and Return of the Jedi at some theater near the Oakland Airport.  What a fun story!  For me, those movies were the Star Wars canon – I didn’t need the others, although I’ve seen four of them (I, II, VII, and Rogue One).  However, George Lucas did authorize an entire Extended Universe of all of those novels published up until 2012, and many of my favorite authors were among the contributors. 

In his book, Steve talks about the fact that Star Wars is a living mythology, and he takes more of a “polyphonic” approach, noting that just as in ancient mythologies there were numerous stories of the gods and their doings that were not always necessarily compatible with each other, so too we can embrace all of these versions of Star Wars as valid.  (I wanted to say “true” instead of valid, which is an amusing way to think about fiction, isn’t it?)  For a new viewer, focusing on what happens to Rey can be even more vital and compelling than what happened in the older movies, so their understanding of the Star Wars universe will be much broader and deeper than mine.

I’m not that far in Steve’s book, so I don’t know if he’s going to address the problem I’m concerned with, which is the frustration fans feel when they encounter “retconning.”  Short for “retroactive continuity,” a retcon is when what happens in a newer book or film tells us that something in earlier books or films wasn’t correct.  A handy example for people who are my age or older is the moment in the TV series Dallas when J.R. Ewing wakes up and the viewers discover that the entire previous season was “all just a dream.”  That is, things Dallas viewers had learned about the story world were not actually true in that world, after all.

A great recent example is the anime series Blue Exorcist.  Anime is often based on graphic novels (manga), and sometimes the filming schedule gets ahead of the manga, so the anime writers will have to create filler.  In Blue Exorcist, the anime writers had to invent a story for episodes 17-25 for season one… but meanwhile the manga writers had their own ideas of how to resolve the problems raised in episodes 1-16.  Season two of the anime then followed the manga – the anime just ignored episodes 17-25 and jumped back in time to the end of episode 16 and went on from there, with no in-story explanation at all.  Very confusing!

Adaptations change the story all the time.  In The Fellowship of the Ring, readers know that Glorfindel takes on the job of delivering a badly injured Frodo to Rivendell, but in the Peter Jackson movie, it’s Arwen.  There is no “really happened” to compare notes with; we just have two versions of the story, with one being true in one context and one being true in another.  A retcon would be if J.R.R. Tolkien had then gone back and told us that Glorfindel had never existed.  Poor Glorfindel.

Fans generally don’t like retcons.  They’ve created the story world in their minds, based on what they’ve read or watched, and they have feelings about the characters and what happens to them.  They very well might like to expand on what’s official, writing their own fan fiction or enjoying authorized or unauthorized works by others, but they still want things to be backwards-compatible with what they already know.  Taking that away feels like a violation of something they value.

Here’s a real-world example.  As of 2006, Pluto is no longer a planet.  Our solar system has eight planets.  How do you feel about that?

And now it’s time for me to connect things up with political psychology.  On October 9, Trump issued a proclamation of the importance of Columbus Day.   It’s today!  In his proclamation, he described Columbus as “one of the most gallant and visionary men to ever walk the face of the earth” and said that “we pledge to reclaim his extraordinary legacy of faith, courage, perseverance, and virtue from the left-wing arsonists who have sought to destroy his name and dishonor his memory.”

Ironically, as Heather Cox Richardson explained in her blog post last night, the creation of Columbus Day was actually intended as a celebration of American diversity.  The Christian nationalist Ku Klux Klan had been persecuting Catholics, and FDR wanted to acknowledge the value of our many Catholic citizens, including Italian-Americans, so this new holiday was created.

Nowadays, the persecution of American Catholics no longer makes the news (although individual Catholics like Joe Biden may beg to differ).  And nowadays, many people have come to think more critically about the European conquest of the Americas, acknowledging that tens of millions of Native people died in the process and that it has taken centuries for those of Indigenous descent to be treated with respect by the European-American majority.  Instead of recognizing Columbus, many states (including my own) now celebrate Indigenous People’s Day.

This reappraisal of our history can feel very much like retconning feels to fiction fans.  My grandpa was proud of his ancestor William Bradford, who came over on the Mayflower (the ship, not the movie theater).  I was taught to feel proud that one of the original Pilgrims was part of my family tree.  (Bradford has something like ten million living descendants, so I’m not that special!)  However, since my grandpa’s time, we’ve been reconsidering Bradford’s legacy.

It’s my understanding that Bradford and his fellow Pilgrims did negotiate with the local people to be allowed to live on a specific patch of land, so I don’t feel too awkward about him.  However, a precedent had been set, and dozens and dozens of other people who came from England in the first half of the 1600s are also among my ancestors.  Surely they didn’t all ask the Wampanoeg and Narragansett and other locals for permission to claim other patches of land, nor did they stay put.

Those of us growing up in Oregon were also taught that our pioneers were special, helping to settle and civilize a vast continent that had been wilderness, or at least not optimally managed by the people who had already lived here, who had mostly “vanished” anyway.  Books like Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous People’s History of the United States have helped set the record straight.  We now know that the United States largely stole the land we now live on.  Sometimes we made treaties that were ignored, and at other times we took the land we wanted and moved the Native people elsewhere.  If my grandpa were alive today, he might no longer be quite so proud of his own grandfather, who’d come out on the Oregon Trail and helped drive cattle between Oregon and California before settling, first in northernmost California and then up near Salem, Oregon.  Or if he had felt proud, now he might feel retconned.

There’s another important context in U.S. history where retconning has happened, and in this case it was deliberate.  In the South, the entire Lost Cause movement that romanticized the Confederate side in the Civil War – and even slavery itself – has been a deliberately orchestrated effort to help Southerners feel okay about how the South used to be and even to give them a sense of grievance for its loss.

One key difference between historical retconning and retconning in fictional worlds is that with history, the facts exist.  There can be different perspectives on what happened, but they can all be fact-checked.  Further, there’s an important arbiter of how we should craft our understanding of what happened historically, and it’s not the decision of who owns a fictional world’s intellectual property.  It’s ethics.  You and I are responsible for understanding what our ancestors did, and for listening to those who have most directly born its consequences. 

The thing is, when we learn more about the settlement of the United States, we get a much deeper and richer understanding of our world.  All of our ancestors were doing what they thought best, given the contexts in which they lived and their need to do well by their families, even though we now know that the net effect of their hard work also included costs to others.  We can value our ancestors and their decisions and the stories of their lives, and we can also value the Indigenous people and their decisions and the stories of their lives. 

In a way, it’s like fan fiction – giving us new layers to appreciate, more nuance, more perspectives. But it’s the real world – the Extended Universe of U.S. history looks not to Disney nor to George Lucas but to historically documented facts to tell us whether the stories we’re telling ourselves are valid.