Continuity

[PrimeDirective]

It's not that Star Wars fans(of which I proudly declare myself to be) have bought any "hype" about there not being any inconsistencies between the movies and the novels(also betwen novels), it's that there aren't very many , lol. If you pay very close attention, about 99% of Star Wars is consistent. So, live long and suck it! Lol.

 

[Captain Robert April]

But what if it's not "to please the masses" (whatever that means), but to tell a better story? Should they have kept Scotty out of the GENERATIONS movie just because it didn't quite mesh with his appearance in "Relics"?

In cases like this, where the story isn't anything to rave about in the first place, Yes! Scotty shouldn't have been there, because, to put it simply, shoehorning him in there when it's already been established that he wasn't is cheating. A competent writer should know better than to write himself into that kind of corner.

Or, to put it another way, if your story requires you to commit a major continuity error, it's time to admit you screwed up, your story is a mess and it's time to chuck it and start over.

Or what about when TNG decided that Betazoids couldn't sense the emotions of Ferengi . . . even though Deanna had done so previously? It was a good idea, even though it meant tweaking the rules a little.

Perhaps Deanna, thanks to some fluke in her half-human genetics, can sense Ferengi emotions, while Lwaxana's full Betazoid telepathic skills just bounce off that four-lobed Ferengi brain. Basically, Deanna, being more of an empath, can pick up the broadband transmissions of emotions, whereas full Betazoids, being more fine tuned for full telepathy, have a harder time with crude surface things like emotions, and can't read Ferengi at all.

Consistency is a virtue, but it shouldn't be a straightjacket. Sometimes you just need to fudge things to make the story more exciting.

I think it needs to be seen as the guard rails that keep you on the right path, and those times you run up against one should be seen as opportunities to either put a little more thought into the story and make it better, or your last chance before you commit a fatal error.

To be perfectly honest, I really can't think of any deliberate breaking of established continuity actually making a story better (and surface details like bumpy foreheads on Trills don't count; what a Trill looked like was never a story point). And every claim to the contrary only comes across as laziness on the part of the writer, who couldn't be bothered to rethink a certain premise and bring the story closer to the line.

 

[PrimeDirective]

Captain April, I would serve under your command no matter what, lol. You have no idea how good it feels to have someone else back me up when it comes to consistency in a story.

 

[captcalhoun]

SW novels are no more canon than Trek novels. any fan of the Republic Commando novels who watches the Clone Wars and the recent Mandalore episodes will tell you that, because the bastards shit all over the novels with a story that contradicts the pre-existing novels and which could've been told with a few name changes and not ruined the continuity.

To be perfectly honest, I really can't think of any deliberate breaking of established continuity actually making a story better (and surface details like bumpy foreheads on Trills don't count; what a Trill looked like was never a story point). And every claim to the contrary only comes across as laziness on the part of the writer, who couldn't be bothered to rethink a certain premise and bring the story closer to the line.

the Trills were changed more substantially than mere bumpy foreheads and spots. Odan's symbiote completely subsumbs the host in "The Host" whilst Dax and all DS9 era symbiotes are more symbiotic by blending personalities with the host.

 

[F. King Daniel]

I was always surprised by the level of prejudice shown by Gene Rodenberry (and his chief stooge, Richard Arnold) toward the tie-in material during the 90’s. It wasn’t so much “we do our thing, they tell their stories while following our lead” as it was “they are garbage. Utterly worthless. You are an idiot and a sucker for having bought them but please keep doing it so we get more money”

This of course gave rise to Star Trek’s institutionalized discrimination, “Canon”, which has very little to do with CBS/Paramount’s licensing rules and is frequently used thusly: “the new film wouldn’t be canon if the Enterprise is 725m long, but it would if it’s 366m long”, “I hated episode X, it’s not canon” etc.



Bad Robot seem to have a lot more respect for the tie-ins than the old guard did – according to trekmovie.com interviews George and Winona Kirk were based on the characters from Final Frontier and Best Destiny (well…name, rank and hair colour at the very least), and Chris Pine and Zach Quinto auditioned by reading lines from Prime Directive and Spock’s World.

(that said, they did cancel the first wave of nuTrek books, so who knows?)

 

[Christopher]

You want to tell one good story, not multiple kind-of-good ones.

See, your mistake is assuming that quality and consistency are the same thing. That's rubbish. If anything, a set of tie-ins that are required to stay rigidly consistent with each other as well as the source are going to be far more creatively restricted and thus less likely to be as good as they can.

In the '90s, Star Trek novels were tightly restricted by a man named Richard Arnold, Gene Roddenberry's assistant, who kept them rigorously conformed to what was established onscreen and stifled individual creativity, and the result was a set of bland cookie-cutter novels (on the whole, though of course there were some good entries here and there). In the '00s, though, the books were given far more freedom to develop in their own direction and the result was a far higher quality of storytelling. Also, you're wrong to assume that greater adherence to onscreen canon means more consistency among the novels; in the case of ST, the exact opposite was true. Under Arnold, the books were forbidden to cross-reference each other, but in the modern, freer era, the authors and editors chose to make the books more consistent. And it was the choice, not the consistency per se, that made them better stories. Enforced consistency is no better than any other enforced storytelling parameters.

 

[TheAlmanac]

Different franchises create different expectations in their audiences.

With Star Trek onscreen including multiple series and movies which all interconnect--and a series like Deep Space Nine being able to bring in elements of TOS, TNG, and Voyager as part of one big, happy universe--I think it's understandable that the audience might extend that feeling to the tie-in material, even though they don't expect the same thing of every franchise, because this particular franchise encourages the idea of this metanarrative.

For some reason, Batman comes up a lot as a counterexample, but DC Comics cared enough about the contradictions in its overall continuity to write Crisis on Infinite Earths (and subsequent crises) just to explain and resolve them, creating a metanarrative in which every story "really" happened on some alternate Earth. Similarly, the new Star Trek movie still felt the need to explain its changes in-story relative to what had come before, so the same desire for that sort of continuity clearly exists amongst the creators themselves, and the audience shouldn't be chastised for sharing it.

When somebody says, "I wish the Star Trek novels and comics were more like the Star Wars novels and comics," that doesn't necessarily mean that they think the same thing about every single franchise. Just because people only think of there being one version of Indiana Jones doesn't mean they also expect all of the James Bond movies to be consistent with one another.

People can hold the idea of different approaches to continuity in their head at the same time, but each franchise should realise and acknowledge the role it plays in which expectation it creates in its audience.

 

[Cybersnark]

Like the Nasat, I'm a continuity junky; the then-nascent Expanded Universe is what got me hooked on Star Wars when I was a child, not the movies themselves (I never cared much for Jedi; I was more interested in the smugglers and fighter pilots ).

I've always felt that having a strong and diverse canon helps storytelling --a writer doesn't need to describe something because he/she can trust that the audience knows it (in all the Star Wars novels I've read, the Millennium Falcon is only actually described a couple of times --usually it's just "a Corellian light freighter" or "horseshoe-shaped").

And yes, different authors doing different things is part of it.

Part of what I grew to love about Star Wars (and post-Crisis DC, and Trek) was how the fans themselves were invited into the story to try to reconcile the apparent contradictions (caused by Writer B not having read Writer A's book). This only served to add new details into the ever-evolving tapestry --which spawned more errors, and resulted in more "patches" growing over them. It's like a vast, organic, ongoing work of collective art.

Just last month, The Clone Wars did a 3-episode Mandalore arc that, I gather, invalidated a whole multi-book series of popular Star Wars novels by an author named Karen Traviss.

And even here the fans are already vaulting into action:

Traviss' (far superior, IMHO, and I say that as someone who loves The Clone Wars) novels openly admit that Mandalorian government isn't like anyone else's --it's not unbelievable that Satine might have set up a "front" government to interact with the other interstellar powers.

Shab, at that point they didn't even really have a proper Mandalore --Jango Fett died on Geonosis and Fenn Shysa was still trying to consolidate a power base. (Which itself would cause problems: the thought of a nation simply not having a head of state and not particularly caring would be incomprehensible to the Republic and the Seps.)

Traviss' novels are also seen (pretty myopically) through the filter of Kal Skirata (and his children/associates, who inevitably share his viewpoint), who freely admits that he's not like most other Mando, and who has a fairly low opinion of many other Mando'ade (and thus may not be entirely reliable as a viewpoint character). And Kal'buir's family was actively trying to avoid Jedi attention, so there's no reason for Obi-Wan or Anakin to know about them.

 

[captcalhoun]

no, they're incompatible because the Mandos in the novels are all warriors whilst in the Clone Wars they're all pacifists because they fought a devastating civil war.

 

[Christopher]

I've always felt that having a strong and diverse canon helps storytelling --a writer doesn't need to describe something because he/she can trust that the audience knows it (in all the Star Wars novels I've read, the Millennium Falcon is only actually described a couple of times --usually it's just "a Corellian light freighter" or "horseshoe-shaped").

Sure, it can enhance the storytelling, but it's not the only thing that can. I'm not saying continuity isn't a good thing; I'm saying it's simplistic to assume that continuity is the only thing that determines quality, to assert (as PrimeDirective did) that anything lacking in continuity is automatically inferior in quality. That's just plain wrong. Continuity is one factor that can contribute to the quality of a work (or detract from it if it's handled badly), but it's just one of many factors.

 

[JD]

I have to agree here. I've been working my way through the first DC TOS comic series, and even though many of the stories have been inconsistent with what came afterwords, they are still really good stories.

 

[Captain Robert April]

The skill of the writer and the quality of the story execution is always the most important parts of the equation, but frankly, complaints about "overly restrictive continuity" always, to me at least, strike me as laziness and an unwillingness to stay within the lines.

You're playing in someone else's sandbox. Don't like the restrictions or the selection of toys? Find another sandbox.

 

[PrimeDirective]

I don't think it's laziness, I think it has more to do with pressure to write a mostly cohesive story in a very short amount of time; that still doesn't excuse not using the time that a writer is given to research the people and events that relate to the story that they're going to write. This way, the readers of the book can connect more profoundly with the characters, making everything seem more real and personal.

 

[EliyahuQeoni]

I don't think it's laziness, I think it has more to do with pressure to write a mostly cohesive story in a very short amount of time; that still doesn't excuse not using the time that a writer is given to research the people and events that relate to the story that they're going to write. This way, the readers of the book can connect more profoundly with the characters, making everything seem more real and personal.

No, it has to do with valuing a good story over whether or not it contradicts some piece of trivia in another book/episode/movie that 90% of the audience won't notice.

 

[PrimeDirective]

Consistency is one factor that affects the quality of a story, but it's more important than any other factor(besides flowing ideas, of course). It's the most important one because when a story is consistent with what has happened before in the timeframe that it supposedly takes place in, it makes it more believeable.

 

[PrimeDirective]

Consistency is what makes a story be of high quality. I don't know how you achieved the Starfleet rank that you did, but based on your thinking,I would venture a guess that you must've slept with some old and desperate admiral to get it. I'm referring to you EliyahuQeoni.

 

[thumbtack]

no, they're incompatible because the Mandos in the novels are all warriors whilst in the Clone Wars they're all pacifists because they fought a devastating civil war.

Which is fine, since Lucas de-canonized the entire EU nearly a year ago.

 

[EliyahuQeoni]

Consistency is what makes a story be of high quality.

Consistency is-as you said above--one of the factors that can determine the quality of a story. Whether it is the most important or not is a matter of personal taste. Internal consistency of a story is very important, but I personally don't think slavish continuity automatically makes a book (or episode or movie) of high quality.

I don't know how you achieved the Starfleet rank that you did, but based on your thinking,I would venture a guess that you must've slept with some old and desperate admiral to get it. I'm referring to you EliyahuQeoni.

I honestly don't even know how to respond to that kind of nonsense.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Although not entirely to do with the topic at hand, it occured to me that during the 90's, staying consistant with the (then) twenty years worth of tie-ins would have been next to impossible anyway without the kind of easy-access to references like Memory Beta that writers have today.

Although continuity-nuts may disagee, I think that the vast majority of the Trek novels and comics can fit together, if you're willing to overlook little details, like exact dates (which are constantly shifting anyway - what year was TMP set?) or the technicalities of pretend future technology (Final Frontier, Final Reflection et al vs. Enterprise) or even the occasional background character death (T'pau, Captain Garrovick)
Or at least, that's what I think. Does the fact that Worf said he never met Janeway in Before Dishonor when he did in (i think it was) Resistance ruin either? Did the timeline explode? Nope.
YMMV.

 

[pookha]

The skill of the writer and the quality of the story execution is always the most important parts of the equation, but frankly, complaints about "overly restrictive continuity" always, to me at least, strike me as laziness and an unwillingness to stay within the lines.

You're playing in someone else's sandbox. Don't like the restrictions or the selection of toys? Find another sandbox.

so when the tos writers ignored certain things that happened previously they were being lazy rather then being creative and not letting every little thing get in the way of telling a story?

i think continuity to a degree is a good thing that adds depth and texture to a story.
but it can also drive one nuts when it has become so dense that arguements break out and the contradictions make it so easy to trip up.