Lore and unreliable texts (Destiny)

by EffortlessFury , Tuesday, July 11, 2023, 11:47 (519 days ago) @ Cody Miller

There's some buzz around 'retcons' to the Des2ny story.

As far as I can tell, the retcons amount to lore books being 'unreliable', much like real life religious or ancient texts.

How's everyone feel about that? Is this an ok way to retcon? Does it devalue the lore as lore if you know it might not be literally true? Is it a legitimate unreliable narrator device, or just an excuse?

I think the only thing I would want, in general (not speaking about what Destiny does or does not do), from an IP that did this was establishing the possibility for it as early as possible. It's actually one thing that I like about some stories.

For example, Genshin is a game with a relatively strong anthropological angle, where the stories and histories you uncover are usually either allegorical, likely to be biased, or second-hand. There's rarely a definitive source of truth about anything you don't see with your own eyes. However, as with real history, the best guess about the past at any given time is based on the cross examination of all available points of data. We do also have the benefit of many aspects of the story being paralleled by real world locations, history, religions, and fiction. These give us additional meta-level insight into the possible truths.

But all of this is to say that it can be quite enjoyable for lore to be unreliable, as long as you know ahead of time that that's the case.