Retcon

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The term retcon is a contracted form of the phrase "retroactive continuity". It originated decades ago from comic-book collectors, though its usefulness has proven itself far beyond that medium. It refers to any plot development or revelation that introduces new information about previously-established events, especially if the new information had not been an intended element of the original history.

Being slang, there is no strict definition of what constitutes a retcon; the most liberal usage applies the term to any new backstory introduced with sufficient distance from the original material, be it in terms of time or authorship or both. However, a stricter usage would confine it to developments that change or contradict past events. Thus, for some, "retcon" carries a negative overtone, no doubt due in part to the fact that the term is naturally brought up when people are talking about continuity problems.

Examples

Using the broadly benign sense of the word, one notable retcon occurs at the end of the Beast Wars cartoon's second season, when Tarantulas is revealed to be a Predacon Secret Police lieutenant who had allied with Megatron to keep an eye on him. This changes the viewer's perception of Tarantulas: Previously, he had been merely a strange loner amongst the Predacons with schemes all his own, but suddenly his independence and agendas could be interpreted with a motive beyond self-interest. This development does not contradict previous stories, and can be seen as adding a layer of depth.

The introduction of the Matrix of Leadership in The Transformers: The Movie is a clunkier retcon. Viewers are asked to accept that Optimus Prime had been carrying the Matrix around with him for the last two years' worth of cartoon episodes. Despite being a cosmically-powerful artifact with monumental importance to Autobot history and culture, it had never been relevant to the plot or even mentioned in passing. Still, the closest thing to a contradiction involved is the handful of views or scans of Prime's interior which had shown no sign of the Matrix. But fans have concocted a number of explanations for this discrepancy, so it is generally viewed as a merely awkward retcon and not an offense to continuity.

The Generation 1 cartoon also contains one of the more famously contradictory Transformers retcons, this one involving a redaction of previous events. Specifically, the episode "Dark Awakening" ended with a severely-damaged yet still clearly alive Optimus Prime piloting the Autobots' flagship through a massive space battle into a Quintesson booby-trap that triggered a supernova, apparently destroying him. However, "The Return of Optimus Prime" features two humans encountering a different ship drifting through space with a pristine-yet-lifeless Optimus Prime aboard and no space battle anywhere to be seen. They salvage Prime before the ship once again hits an asteroid that triggers a supernova, the explosion looking identical to the one in "Dark Awakening" because it's the same animation. This drastic revision of Prime's fiery suicide run, the circumstances changed to the point of nonsensicality, certainly counts as a retcon (and an infamous one, at that).

For sheer scale across continuities, modern revelations about Unicron constitute possibly the biggest retcon in Transformers history. Beginning with the Universe comic and continuing in the Dreamwave Armada comic's "Worlds Collide" storyline and the Fun Publications Cybertron comic, Unicron is established with increasing firmness as a single being who does not have different incarnations in different continuities like other characters. Rather, all of his various appearances are, it seems, one Unicron migrating from universe to universe. With this retcon claiming relevance to and priority over every Transformers story ever told, it has naturally encountered some opposition among fans who object to its perceived absurdity and the irreconcilability of Unicron's varied portrayals.

The most drastic form of retcon, wherein an entire past storyline is invalidated by new events in the same continuity, has technically never occurred in Transformers. However, this is due in some part to the fluid view of "continuity" held by both fans and creators. For example, the Fun Publications Classics comic takes place in the future of the Marvel Generation 1 comic, but it actively disregards the Generation 2 comic despite the fact that that exists in the post-Marvel-G1 universe as well. In a more tightly-managed franchise, this could be taken to mean that Generation 2 is officially nullified via retcon. But in the fractured multiverse of Transformers, the Classics comic is simply accepted as a "splinter timeline" that leaves contradictory branches of continuity like Generation 2 untouched and intact.

Retcons and this wiki

Some fan wikis and reference books are written from a (mostly) in-universe perspective, making few (if any) references to real-world events that influence the fictional stories they cover, and thus treat current retcons with priority, while trying to ignore, deny or reconcile conflicting information from previous stories. (For an official Transformers example of this, see Transformers: The Ultimate Guide.) TFWiki.net uses a hybrid approach: While fiction-related sections are indeed written from an in-universe perspective, we also have (often lengthy) sections covering real-world details that relate to, and occasionally influenced the fiction. Retcons are typically explained as such in the trivia notes at the very least. In some cases where a retcon significantly alters the perception of fictional events and characters, additional notes at the top of the relevant section might also be required to inform the otherwise unsuspecting reader.

For example, the (originally unnamed) "U-Haul Robot" who was seen in a flashback in "Five Faces of Darkness, Part 4" was declared to be the cartoon version of Sentinel Prime, previously a comic-only character, by the Allspark Almanac II, a book that was released over 20 years after the episode in question had originally been aired. While TFWiki.net treats the retcon (which was established by an officially licensed publication) as canon, and thus has merged the "U-Haul Robot" article into the "Sentinel Prime (G1)" article, the merged article goes out of its way to identify the retcon as such in all its relevant sections.