The internet is going nuts!

Waarom? Hierom. En hoe nuts dan? Nou, deze thread heeft op het moment van schrijven bijvoorbeeld 41 pagina's.

Wat is er dan aan de hand? X-fans zijn niet blij met schrijver Paul Jenkins, omdat hij even tussen neus en lippen door vermeld dat [SPOILER] Rogue naar bed is geweest met The Sentry wetend dat Mike Carey al jaren bezig is met Rogue's charachter development en dit past daar nou niet bepaald tussen. Op het internet maken X-fans er geen geheim van dat ze er niet blij mee zijn, maar Carey heeft al laten weten deze uitspraak niet te willen retconnen.

Op zijn facebook account meldde Carey het volgende;

Okay, guys, I'm going to comment here in a fairly circumspect way. I've responded to some of you in one-to-one message threads, and I'm going to ask you not to come back to me on this, because there won't be anything I can add.

As everybody knows, I try not to do ret-cons - and as I type that, my nose just ... See Moregrew by about a foot and a half. What I try not to do is "type 2" invasive ret-cons that erase things that are commonly supposed to have happened. I'm shameless about type 1 ret-cons, where stuff happened but you just didn't know about it until now. The whole of the Professor X incarnation of Legacy was made up of stories of that kind.

This is a type 1: it happened, because Rogue says on-panel that it happened. It was behind the scenes, invisible, and the chronology isn't clear, but it happened. Is it surprising? I think so. In terms of Rogue's behaviour in relationships, her sexual morality insofar as we can infer it, her personal history up to this point, this revelation is hard - on the face of it - to reconcile.

But as someone says above (sorry, thread is too long to find the reference again quickly) what we know is minimal, and we can fill in an infinite number of stories around these few details. There are ways it could have happened that would make sense. I won't be the one who tells the story of how it actually did happen, but I'm accepting that it happened and the story is there to be told.

Characters in a shared fictional space are created by a kind of consensus. Someone dreams them up and puts them onto the stage, but a whole lot of someone elses then fill in the blanks. When you get contradictions, or apparent contradictions, fans build their own conception of the character from the parts they like most or believe in most.

This is a dangerous and frivolous analogy, but look at the Bible. I'm an atheist, but I'm happy to acknowledge that there's a core of teachings in the Bible that vast numbers of people base their lives on - but crucially, it tends to be a different core for each of them. You take what makes sense to you, and you view the rest with some mixture of tolerance and caution.

I think you have to do the same with shared universes.

Duidelijk.

Aan de ene kant kun je je afvragen waar X-fans zich zo druk om maken; het is uiteindelijk maar een comic. Aan de andere kant komt de issue van het-serieus-nemen-van-comics-als-medium natuurlijk onder druk te staan als verschillende schrijvers niet in overeenstemming kunnen werken en al die verdomde retcons. Naast het feit dat de sales van Marvel niet zijn wat ze ooit waren en daar draagt dit nu niet bepaald op een positieve manier aan bij. Maar goed, misschien voed ik nu de hype...