Retroactive continuity or retcon is the deliberate changing of previously established facts in a work of serial fiction. The change itself is referred to as a "retcon", and the act of writing and publishing a retcon is called "retconning". Retcons are common in
comic books, especially those of large, long-established publishing houses such as
Marvel Comics and
DC Comics, because of the lengthy history of many series and the number of independent authors contributing to their development; this is the context in which the term was coined. Retconning also occurs in
soap operas,
movie sequels,
professional wrestling,
video games, radio series, series of
novels, and can be done in any other type of episodic fiction. It is also used in
roleplaying, when the
game master feels it is needed to maintain consistency in the story or to fix significant mistakes that were missed during play.
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/ret'kon/ retroactive continuity.
The common situation in fiction where a new story "reveals" things about events in previous stories, usually leaving the "facts" the same (thus preserving continuity) while completely changing their interpretation. For example, revealing that a whole season of "Dallas" was a dream was a retcon.
This term was once thought to have originated on the
Usenet newsgroup
news:rec.arts.comics but is now believed to have been used earlier in comic fandom.
[
Jargon File]
(1994-12-08)
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