should blizzard do retcons or continue/end what they did ?
A bit of both, as any long-term ongoing story needs.
Some retcons are necessary in an open-ended story like we have here. The authors do need the freedom to invent new cultures, challenges, villains and goals to care about that they didn’t plan for 20 years ago.
Since the world needs to feel as real as possible to have us care about it at all, and retcons usually undermine what we thought we knew about the world, retcons should be used as sparingly as possible, though, and if they are used, they should usually be used in the least invasive ways possible. Telling us that we were wrong about the world, because our sources were fallible (or treacherous) works quite well, especially when we are talking about facts about the world’s history. Telling us that what we actually played through didn’t happen, or that basic facts about the setting and culture that our characters should be expected to know about are wrong on the other hand undermines our connection to the world, and is never a good thing.
If the authors dug themselves into a hole so deep that only a retcon of important, character-relevant stuff can fix it, the story is pretty much ruined already. But since the show must go on… yeah, some form of retcon can’t really hurt, and might make it better. So… yeah, I’m all for some kind of retcon of much of Shadowlands, for example. A soft retcon, where they just try to avoid the topic until the lore falls into obscurity might be enough, but I wouldn’t mind actual contradictions in that case either… Whatever happens in such cases, I feel that the writers being open about the reasons and intentions behind retcons can help lessen the damage they inevitably do. Which, of course, won’t ever happen in an IP as big as this one.
Retcons are bad. They damage the lore. Most prominent late thing would be centaurs. Somehow they existed now even before Desolace.
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Retcons are somewhat inevitable in the format Warcraft inhabits, however it’s more of an art han a science, with great many pitfalls into which Blizzard keeps falling with clockwork regularity.
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