Eventual second lorebook fear

[Anonymoose]

I can only speak from personal experience, but as far as I know, the team loathes retcons as much as you do and will only actively do them when they have no choice. However, this requires some specificity.

Retcon is short for retroactive continuity, and specifically refers to any new story information which explains or changes previous story information (or attaches a new significance to it). Only certain types of retcons are the kind everyone seems to hate.

For example, the team seems to love relying on additive retcons (new information does not create a paradoxical contradiction, but may explain, change context, or reframe existing information) and, more rarely, altering retcons (a contradiction seems to exist, but new information attempts to explain it away). They're used under the pretext of "People are dumb." / "Poor assumptions were made." / "New revelations!". Example: the time we tried to predict Ishgard's bastard feudalism structure and couldn't reconcile 1.0's mention of a duke (the Hildibrand script has a great joke about this that flies right under the radar for most).

The general feeling seems to be that if it makes sense in-world that this mistake could have happened - that's where it happened. Organic information gathering, narrative puzzle solving, writing your way out of a pickle. Altering retcons are rarely perfectly clean; even today if you look too closely at a longitudinal study of Nael van Darnus, you can see the stitches.

What more people are worried about are subtraction retcons ("That never happened. We're ignoring that.") and revision retcons (directly editing the source material). Every time something like this has happened, we were given an apology and explanation. It clearly bothered the team as much as players, if not more.

Keep in mind, MMOs are forever. Avoiding retcons entirely eventually just becomes a prohibitive menace. Moreover, the internal documents relating to 1.0, and especially the change in narrative trajectories between 1.0 and ARR, were obviously not anywhere near as consistent and complete as Oda, Koji, et al. have made it appear. The idea that "THE LORE" is a monolithic object that is occasionally represented mistakenly is itself mistaken, and on top of that text bugs and misleading phrasing can slip through the cracks when the workload gets heavy even when the lore is solid.
(Report them to the LOC forum.)

For how hard they've worked to maintain the illusion and work towards it being a reality, and for how often they take it upon themselves to write out of a puzzle the hard way, I try to just let it go when a revision occurs, lol. They probably stressed over it more already than I ever will, I'm not gonna complain about it (even if I will joke a little).