The cost of retcons
The new varus lore controversy seems like an auspicious sign that this may be worth talking about. What is the tangible cost of a retcon and what do you really get out of it? If possible, I'd like to list out some of the pros and cons, as well as some common fallacies about retcons that seem to come up consistently. Ideally just in the vain effort that riot thinks and considers it, because I frequently find myself disagreeing with their logic on the matter.
Costs of rewriting an existing piece of the story in such a way as to render parts or the whole of the previously existing story invalid/false.
-People who like the old thing are upset by the change. EX, Well look at the forums right now, don't need more than that to show a quantifiable cost to retcons
-Things that were removed from the world are lost and must be replaced EX, The removal of the league left a gaping hole in the center of league's lore that still hasn't really been fully replaced from a narrative standpoint. From a complex standpoint, the idea of a central narrative and the scope that goes with it has been lost. All stories now only exist as side stories, even when they incorporate multiple characters and locations. For individual stories, the story telling opportunities afforded by characters that were removed or rewritten are lost, and stories that could have been told cannot, or the elements must be added back in. This is a quantifiable cost.
-Things that were not directly removed, but were part of stories that were rendered non-canon EX, any kind of interaction between characters or descriptions of locations in stories that were rendered non canon are in turn rendered non canon. You could previously argue that anything not directly contradicting "new" lore could be considered still true, but since Riot has a repeated track record of discarding or forgetting about details, regardless of if they would contradict "new lore" I have to assert that it's all non canon unless directly affirmed. This policy is a huge and quantifiable cost as essentially everything is lost in lore updates and has to be actively written twice just to continue existing.
-Devaluation of Canon integrity. It's not a difficult principle to grasp. Every time you make a retcon, the validity of the rest of the story takes a hit. The more you do it, the worse it gets. I remember back when the BIG retcon happened, the prevalence of retcons in comic books was used to justify it, completely ignoring how much retcons hurt comic books as a story telling medium. No superhero death is ever taken seriously because of how readily it can and almost inevitably will be retconned. Even immense events have little impact on comic readers because of how unlikely any of them will have a lasting impact. If any given story is always at risk of being rewritten or invalidated, it KILLS reader investment. It happened with comic books and sales are at an all time low and plummeting, and I've seen it happening with league too. The people who really, really cared about league's lore are all but gone and moved on.
Now of course there can't all be down sides to retcons, as there certainly are people who seem to like the new lore, but I also see a lot of fallacies that go with that.
-Do you like the new lore because it's better than the old lore or just because it's a new thing to consume? I see this all the time and it's a problem because there definitely are people who are so starved for new content that they'll happily consume anything. It's not a new or alien phenomenon, and the people who want story from league certainly are starved of it, exponentially more so when it comes to people who want to hear more about specific places and characters, who may have been waiting years without so much as an offhanded red post about them. The critical question here is, would you be just as happy reading a new story about said character or thing that did not alter existing things about them?
-Do you like the new lore specifically because of what was changed or do you like it more because it's presented better? It's no secret that the old lore is of questionable quality, often tonally inconsistent and clumsily written, so it's no surprise that there are plenty of people who prefer the new lore when compared to the old simply because it's better prose. The question has to be asked; is it the specific details that were changed that added value to the story or was it the better story telling that matters to you?
-It had to be retconned because it had to be updated. This is a really obviously fallacious argument but I keep seeing it for some reason. The idea that a story must be changed wholesale to update a character to a certain standard of writing is so absurd that I legitimately don't know how to address it. The removal of the league of legends from league of legends did necessitate updating a number of bios, but those aren't the only one's riot is heavily ret-conning, and even in those cases what we see is not the tactful replacement of direct references, but complete redos that change things entirely irrelevant to the league. In every case so far, the exact same story beats that drive character arcs can be kept, so why aren't they?
So what is an undeniable benefit of a retcon? This one seems harder to answer, benefits are specific to specific changes and become difficult to quantify when you ask the question "was there no alternative way to do this?". In the end, the only truly quantifiable benefit would be the people who specifically like the new version, and specifically only because of the details that were altered, not because of anything else. This certainly must be a nonzero number of people. Even those who dislike new stories on the whole may prefer specific details and think they are an improvement, but when you take away the trappings of better presentation and it being new content, just how many people are getting something positive specifically out of a ret-con?
At the end of the day, riot is the only body that needs to live with these changes. We all have fanon we can turn to and simply ignore what riot puts out or even just walk away entirely, but look at how much discontent there is over changes. Yes it's a small portion of the player base, and yes, unhappy people are noisier than happy ones, but it's still a LOT of unhappy people and I really don't believe Riot is actually that callous of a company that they just don't care or consider it totally acceptable losses, but they keep talking about this matter like it's just an inevitability of running the show when it's NOT. It's NOT that hard to keep old fans happy. There are SO MANY ways you can build up on the world of runeterra without constantly tearing away at the foundations and that's really what's most frustrating about every update.
