The Out-of-Text Retcon

Retcon is short for retroactive continuity, which basically means that something stated later on alters events that already occurred, sometimes completely. It tends to come up fairly often in comic books, but there are tons of other examples in the Wikipedia article linked to there.

What got me thinking about this was that J.K. Rowling "revealed" this week that Dumbledore was gay. You know what? I don't care if he was gay. The sexuality of old men wasn't really a topic that was explored by the books themselves. This is going to have a lot of people up in arms, but it doesn't actually matter at all because Rowling took the wussy way out. What bothers me isn't that she's made this decision about Dumbledore's character, but the fact that she didn't put it in the freaking books.

In a text chock-full of gradual revelation of plot-changing details, much of which falls under the retcon heading, why shy away from one more? Is it to avoid getting the book banned in more locations? I don't know. It just bothers me that an author who is so widely read can change everybody's perception about her story without using legitimate means to make that change. It feels very cheap.

I'll be interested to see how this affects the next movie. I wonder if Michael Gambon will try to play swishy. I wonder if he can play swishy.