>>378394
>Hey /co/fags:
The lady's opening sentence opens this up to more than just capeshit:
<In the post-Marvel Cinematic Universe era, it’s hard to find a savvy pop culture maven who can’t define “continuity,” whether they’re talking about comics, movies, TV, or video games.
<My sibling in Christ, I am begging you, do you know the story of King Arthur and the Lady of the Lake? Of Persephone and Hades? Of Robin Hood’s friend Little John?
<You don’t, because there is no “the story” for any of those. They’re all legends born of oral tradition and popular writing from eras and places in which authorship was a very different idea, if it was considered at all.
No, the Lady of the Lake comes from Walter Map (Claiming that he translated official records of Camelot), with later additions made by Thomas Malory. The Rape of Persephone comes from Early Sumerian mythology (Which we
currently have very few records of because that was 8000 years ago). And Little John was created by Andrew of Wyntoun and Walter Bower. Just because the average person doesn't know where these elements comes from
DOESN'T mean that we cannot trace it.
>Any version of these stories that you know was cobbled together from the best bits of every version of “the story” that came before. The lack of a single “canon version” or “continuity” to Arthurian legend, Greek mythology, or Robin Hood hasn’t kept the stories under those umbrellas from being widely known hundreds and thousands of years after they were first told.
The "definite" stories of those particular characters and events are the originals we have. Or in
this particular case, the earliest copies that we have, such as Malory's
Le Morte d'Arthur (
Unless you want the original original, then there's Map's Vulgate Cycle), Hesiod's
Theogony, and
A Gest of Robyn Hode. As far as we can find, these are the closest you can get to have the "original" tales.
But this isn't the case with material like capeshit, where we
DO have copies of every single
Superman comic book, short story, comic strip, film serial all available for people to find and experience.
>Everyone writing Spider-Man comics today is cobbling together their personal version of the best bits of the Spider-Man comics, shows, movies, and games that came before — and deemphasizing the rest. And so are the folks making The Acolyte, or Star Trek: Prodigy, or Captain America: Brave New World, or next month’s issue of Action Comics, or any story with Sherlock Holmes in it.
And that's why people stopped caring about this stuff. We liked the original Gene Roddenberry
Star Trek, people bought the comics to read about Jack Kirby's Captain America and Steve Ditko's Spider-Man. And that material only managed to exist for so long because the people in charge of making that material, after the original creator moved on, made damn sure that the people continuing the works stayed true to the original material that drew people into the original and sold them on the concept.
>Our most enduring stories didn’t need consistent continuity to remain compelling today, and there’s no technological advance — from the movable-type printing press to the internet — that successfully rendered that near-infinite potential for variation down to a single accepted version.
What about how, for example, people keep returning to
the original trilogy of
Star Wars movies? We're a few years away from the 50th anniversary of that series yet, despite the sequels that "attempted" to "remain true" to the "vision" originals (Opinions may vastly differ), and the prequels that were entirely controlled
by the creator of the original, people keep going back to the original three films.
>Anyone arguing to the contrary is arguing against thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of years of human history.
How?
>In fact, I and many others who actually make these stories would argue that a lack of strict continuity is what allows these ideas to stay relevant even in the present.
And that's Communist gobbledygook!
Stories don't need to be "updated" for the purposes of still being influential and relevant. A good story drafted 200 years ago is still a good story to read today. While much of it was a bore, I did enjoy some parts of Washington Irving's
The Sketch Book. Dashiell Hammett's
Red Harvest was a downright awesome read. And I still think Walter Tevis'
The Hustler is is perhaps the best and most inspiration novel I have ever read. The
ONLY people who see this material and think it's "outdated" or "irrelevant" are pseudo-intellectuals who cannot respect their predecessors because they think they're "smarter" than everyone else. You don't have to like the originals, for example
Robinson Crusoe is downright trash and
Silas Marner is a bore, but you should respect them as much as you do any other piece of media (New or old).
>Reboots, retcons, alternate universes, and Hypertime — these are the methods that modern franchise creators use to tell stories that break continuity, because they want to make their story better.
No, it's just to get people to stop flooding their literal mailboxes with endless complaints.
>And it’s not meaningfully different from a storyteller in oral or folk traditions fitting their telling to their audience.
No, people are actually incredibly autistic about material remaining true to it's roots.
>The audience doesn’t need to know every version of Robin Hood’s story to know Robin Hood, and it shouldn’t need to know every version of Wolverine’s story to know Wolverine.
And I don't need to experience your material if you're not going to give me the characters that I want, which you aren't and arguing that you shouldn't be expected to provide.
>There is no “the story” of Batman or Wolverine.
And the original
Detective Comics and
The Incredible Hulk series these characters appeared in don't count because...?
>Nobody was at all bothered that a new X-Men writer took over five minutes later
Because no one is reading it?
>So when I say that continuity shouldn’t matter, I mean that, as a Batman fan, it’s in my interest for there to be lots of different versions of Batman — so that the versions of him that best fit the moment can be offered as a fit for the moment, so that there will keep being more Batman stories.
But I
DON'T want more Batham stories. I already have my "favorite" version of Batham (
2004 KidsWB The Batman, followed by Batman Beyond). In fact, I actually want to see about reading the
ORIGINAL Batman that was created '39 up to when Finger left in '64. Are you incapable of moving on from Batham?
So I just wasted the past hour writing this, and the lady addresses
NONE of the issues that I have. Go figure.