Case study in this trope.

Welcome back to another edition of Trope Tuesday, our weekly sojourn into the abyss that is TV Tropes. Each week we aim to look into a literary theme, device, or quirk that gives some color to our favorite entertainment. On the docket this time around: Depending on the Writer.

In some stories, a character is very different every time they appear — so different that it’s almost a different character with the same name. This is particularly common with Long Runners and comic books, due to the large number of writers on staff. But there are some characters where even the same writer makes them different every time.

This is not Character Development — nothing happens in the story to justify the personality change. Writer on Board or Creator Breakdown might, though.

Don’t get this confused with characters with some actual depth. Just because you can’t predict a character’s moves 100% of the time doesn’t mean they’re inconsistent. Now, if you can predict a character’s moves 100% of the time only when you know who’s writing, then they’re definitely inconsistent.

Different writers with different ideas and understandings of the work are also the usual culprit of Continuity Drift.

Talk about a trope that is tailor-made for the Star Wars Expanded Universe. Let’s just take a look at the last major series that wrapped up, Fate of the Jedi. In my review of the series as a whole, I hit on something that really hurt it in my mind: the stark differences in how Luke Skywalker was written. On the one hand, you had Aaron Allston who erred towards the Luke you saw in the films. Somewhat optimistic, someone who hadn’t strayed too far from his Tatooine farmboy roots. On the other hand, you had Troy Denning’s Luke Skywalker, who regularly says that family members and sixteen-year-old girls are beyond redemption. Yeah.

Two ends of the personality spectrum for one character. These are the kinds of things that happen when you have so many different authors working with pre-established characters. You might get a Allston-style Luke, who feels very grounded into the source material. You might also get a Luke that veers perhaps too much into Darker and Edgier territory. When it gets really strange is when you get these different Lukes in back-to-back books. Going from Vortex to Conviction was a relief in one sense because the latter felt significantly more like Star Wars than the former, but there’s no denying the jarring shift in tone and themes when jumping between authors in a series like Fate of the Jedi.

Welcome to another edition of Trope Tuesday, where we hit up the black hole of productivity and investigate a literary theme or device that helps our favorite entertainment chug along. This week, we’re hitting on one that many Expanded Universe fans are intimately familiar with: Retroactive Continuities, or Retcons.

Reframing past events to serve a current plot need. When the inserted events work with what was previously stated, it’s a Revision; when they outright replace it, it’s a Rewrite. The ideal retcon clarifies a question alluded to without adding excessive new questions. In its most basic form, this is any plot point that was not intended from the beginning. The most preferred use is where it contradicts nothing, even though it was changed later on.

While the term comes from comic books, dating to All-Star Squadron #18 in 1983 and shortened to “retcon” by the end of the decade, the technique is much older. Often, it’s used to serve a new plot by changing its context; however, it’s also done when the creators are caught writing a story that violates continuity and isn’t very plausible.

In Marvel Comics, the person who pointed out the problem and at the same time provided a plausible explanation was awarded a Genuine Marvel Comics No-Prize by editor Stan Lee, a tradition that was kept alive by other editors after he became publisher.

See also Ass Pull, which is something that was not properly set up before it is sprung on the audience. It is related to Deus ex Machina. Some but not all retcons are Ass Pulls, and a good retcon can actually improve the current narrative. A good way to get away with a retcon is to reveal new implications or motivations for events that have already been established.

Where do you even start in Star Wars? This is a franchise that ties itself into knots trying to explain away any minor-to-major inconsistency that crops up whenever a new book accidentally invalidates something an older book said. Or when The Clone Wars television series simply steamrolls swaths of the Expanded Universe. The latter (among other things) got author Karen Traviss to ragequit right before she was scheduled to start writing the Fate of the Jedi series.

You know retcons are important to a franchise when they hire a guy to keep tabs on all of them. Hello, Leland Chee, the Keeper of the Holocron.

Granted, all sorts of series in all sorts of mediums have needed to resort to retcons to keep things straight. The Other Star Franchise, anyone? No one, however, seems to be in the same league as Star Wars when it comes to making sure anything and everything fits into a lone canon.