Retconning is Despised for the Mental Incongruence It Creates
Retconning is like playing with emotions, people generally dislike it. EA Motive has done it with the Dead Space remake, at some points half-heartedly and not well thought through. In this topic I will go over some of those points and how EA Motive can improve them in the current Dead Space - which is quite good overall - and in future remakes and iterations.
A conclusion/TL; DR is at the end for those who want a quick summary. This post is also a critique to the developers about a specific debate mentioned and how shoehorning this debate creates inconsistencies, argued from the perspectives of storywriting, world building and lore. I still recommend glancing over the character parts, as you will be surprised that this is not the usual post that you would expect about this topic.
Inclusivity by its name and semantics does not do away with differences or tries to reconcile them, it only makes them co-exist. The true way to deal with social differences is by actually integrating and overcoming them. A third gender pictogram or mentioning "All genders welcome" just creates even more distinction.
It is more than justified to make the claim that by having such a signage, you actually discriminate against gender, instead of doing away with it and speaking to all genders. Just speak to people themselves or rather, their needs.
And what about agender people? They are not represented at all by such a signage, because semantically they do not have a gender. The true way would be to just have a toilet pictogram nothing else, except for some additional facility pictograms, a truly "unisex" toilet.
Just read up upon how toilets were before the 19th century, especially at the time of the Roman Empire. They were as non-differentiating as you can get.
The toilet signage in Dead Space Remake is not thought through in its entirety and really is a disservice to the issues, mainly inclusivity, it tries to address. If you really want to respect all genders, leave out gender entirely and reduce it to its basic function. Our basic needs are the same for all of us, regardless of sex, gender, skin color and so on.
Unisex toilets with singular toilet pictograms reconcile and integrate all parties.
They cannot force the gender debate on unsuspecting people.
They respect and integrate all genders.
By not distinguishing between genders at all, they therefore respect the wishes of all parties involved.
The ancient Romans already had such toilets and made no gender distinction at all. I would consider this the best solution to address the issues of both conservative and progressive players. Differences will only go away when people stop making up differences. Also, if you really wanted to be culturally sensitive, Japanese squat toilets would have been appropriate for the USG Ishimura.
For advertising to be successful, advertisers have to speak to the target audience, and this necessitates cultural understanding and sensitivity. It is the same reason why you – usually – don't advertise with white – speak Caucasian – people in South Africa or with black – speak African – people in China, where these skin colors are no naturally common parts of society. It has less to do with racism and more with homogeneity and commonality. The US and its melting pot are an obvious exception to this, but their model is not applicable to the predominantly Asian/Japanese Ishimura.
Something like this can still happen occasionally though, when – now remember my sentence from the previous paragraph – the person on the billboard is an integral part of this society. They are not foreign anymore and as such are not considered a foreigner, but a part of the community. Often these exceptions are well respected people, like good mayors, governors, politicians, entrepreneurs, artists, etc. It is the same way in Dead Space.
Even though the society in Dead Space is international and interplanetary, each part of Earth and space still has their own culture.
The Ishimura is predominantly Japanese, as already indicated by its name, and the United States would likely be one of Japan's main cooperation partners in the space age, so it makes sense that its staff and therefore people depicted on billboards are mostly white. As a side note: Isaac Clarke is from the American Republic, so that's a good indicator that this guess might be true.
From the Dead Space lore, Hans Tiedemann is a good example for being an exception to the rule, being a black governor with a German name. Even though we do not know much about him, from the billboards we can infer that he as quite the social standing in the Dead Space universe, despite Dead Space's message of the government not being trustworthy.
Imagine African Ships, with names in e. g. Xhosa, Zulu or whatever language is spoken in their homeports. The crew will likely be sourced locally, so how will the advertising look like on their ships? The same in reverse: mostly the native African people on billboards and occasionally a well-integrated Caucasian or Asian.
That would actually make for some good and culturally sensitive writing and is actually a very good opportunity for the diversity you often wish for that integrates naturally in the game. But writing is key here and just writing a story part for diversity will backfire, because the diversity feels forced and unnatural.
So, under this pretense I ask EA motive stop retconning the advertising billboards aboard the ships and stations, make them closer to original Dead Space and instead maybe send us to stations and ships of other cultures, like African countries, in coming DLCs or Dead Space 4 and show us some billboards of Africans.
If a remade character differs too much from the original, the character feels alien, foreign, despite voice and name saying otherwise. It feels incongruent to our memory.
For Officer Johnston, imagine how it would feel for you, if one of you coworkers was swapped with someone completely different, but with same name. Of course, this feels weird, uncanny, because your previous memory and current experiences do not line up. The more a connection and conscious memory there is, the weirder it feels. It is also one of the reasons why the change of Johnston is insignificant to the rather detached writers, but disruptive to an invested audience, that memorized the scenes of the game, especially the first scene.
That the new officer Johnston, Hailey Johnston, gets spared by the necromorphs is a bit hard to believe for me to be honest, given that the necromorphs are smart enough to know how to sabotage stuff or at least their hive mind is. If I remember correctly, this was even mentioned in other Dead Space media that predates the remake. They can also reason that the gravity panels can kill them from just observing. Hailey working and moving in the Kellion's cockpit, would be easy to pick out from distance. Other necromorphs would likely have spotted her and would have quickly boarded the ship.
That communications are down does not make sense since RIG-Link is working between the rest of the crew members and Hammond gave the order for everyone to turn on their RIG. If you consider the circumstances, even with Hammond not knowing anything, leaving a crew member alone on a dead silent ship means to risk losing them. Remember, the Ishimura would be sprawling with people under normal circumstances. The drastic retcon of Officer Johnston and its inconsistencies leaves a bad aftertaste of forced inclusivity, for a character that no one would have complained otherwise if it were not for this and retconning in general.
The initial dialogue with Kendra feels a bit off when you put in contrast with her backstory and her later betrayal. It does feel as forced inclusivity, because Kendra as a government agent would be a rather secretive and distrusting person. Usually, government agencies tend to recruit people that are high in trustworthiness to execute an assignment and can keep a secret. Kendra would be such a person. Her revealing her relationship to Isaac implies to the player she has a closer relationship to Isaac and the crew, which is in stark contrast to the betrayal, we know from the original game.
Therefore, this revelation is badly timed.
A revelation like this would have come later in the game when the dire situation forces the crew to work even closer together and fear and hallucinations start to erode the distance between the crew members.
In the original game, this happened when she told Isaac and Zach about the hallucinations of her dead brother to help them stay sane. This revelation was well timed. This dialogue change would have otherwise gone almost unnoticed if it were not for this and the half-baked inclusivity from earlier.
For Nicole Brennan I have to say, I am a bit annoyed that you had to age her up and retcon her appearance a third time.
I get the point that a senior medical officer would not likely be as young as her, but still, I would have preferred a design that would be more consistent with existing content, like the comics. I hope you do not retcon her a fourth time for the Dead Space 2 remake. 😅
For Isaac Clarke it is very much the same as it was for Nicole Brennan.
I would have preferred a design closer to the original character, with the greying black hair and the blue eyes we know from the original Isaac Clarke. When I see the new Isaac, he looks to me more like a generic main character than the iconic Isaac Clarke from Dead Space.
Terrence Kyne basically manages to incorporate both the criticisms for Nicole Brennan and Isaac Clarke.
Visually and auditorily a drastic retcon, and for me personally, he does look too young for the position of chief medical officer. To me he looks more like the typical prince of a medieval video game. He honestly reminds me a bit of Valerian from StarCraft II. I find the Terrence Kyne from the original Dead Space more fitting in design, appearance, and voice alike.
We have this with both with the recently remade characters, but also with the changes to Nicole from Dead Space 1 and 2.
The redesigns break the immersion for the audience because they mess with the residual images of these characters.
The same goes for story and dialogue, especially for memorable scenes, where the audience has a conscious memory about it. These scenes stayed with us.
And even though I lobby against retconning in this post, I would kindly ask you to retcon the rewritten parts again to be closer to the original, so that it feels less mentally incongruent for your audience when playing, even after the game's release.
Forcing a half-baked inclusivity and diversity debate really makes for unnecessary inconsistencies in story writing, world building and character lore, that you really could have saved yourself from.
The inclusivity approach you have taken, is half-baked, especially for a society five hundred years into the future. A futuristic society would likely not even make the distinction between the genders anymore, wouldn't have a need to write “All genders welcome” and have unisex toilets with singular toilet pictograms through and through.
The approach you have taken neither helps the game nor the debate that you wanted to bring up. You failed at this because you wanted to force it instead of thinking it through and concluding that integration is one step ahead of inclusivity. By forcing it onto people you made it backfire, which is something you don't want. Was that necessary?
You could have achieved it in a much more subtle, effective, and lore-consistent way instead of creating resistance by forcing this debate. This would have reconciled this issue for both opposed and accepting players, because it integrates much more naturally in the game environment.
In-game billboards/advertising should be done in a culturally sensitive way to feel natural and part of the culture and environment and neither foreign nor forced.
Inclusivity is so 21st century and integration instead will become the real way forward for a society in the 25th century.
Retconning should be absolutely avoided if there is not a strong reason for it. It creates mental incongruence when our memories do not feel like ours anymore, because the storywriters toyed with it.
It leads to a mental dissociation and falls into an uncanny valley. An effect that was one of the reasons "The Polar Express" sold badly, because the uncanniness repulses the subconscious. And this effect does not distinguish between appearance or memories because the reasons for it are the inconsistencies the subconscious finds.
Storywriters should avoid anything that rewrites or even just attempts to rewrite story and therefore memories and should instead focus on expanding existing storylines.
For the future please avoid retcons, design- and storywise. For voice actors please try to cast the original ones. We do not want a retconned Ellie Langford or Nolan Stross.
Overall, I would be happy to if you could fix at least some of the issues and inconsistencies that I have listed, especially the immersion breaking and inconsistency-riddled forced inclusivity. Even though addressing these issues implies retconning, which I lobbied against in this post, it is retconning done to fix earlier retconning and return the game more to its original lore.
