There's also the question of the unreliable narrator. The game has had several character's statements about the function of the world later contradicted (the revelations about the origins of the Dragonsong War are probably the most apparent example to come to mind) and usually new bits of lore come from unreliable sources. While OOC we treat these, rightly, as facts that are true until proven false, it can be said that a character powerfully disagrees with this new fact and disputes its legitimacy based on the same unreliability.Â
And our characters, themselves, are not reliable sources. No one really is on their own life. We misremember, even convince ourselves of lies about our past all the time.Â
For instance: my Miqo'te Noble is a scandalous figure in Ishgard for not being Hyur or Elezen and daring to assume a station of nobility. If a patch suddenly introduced a family of noble Miqo'te everyone was cool with, maybe my character feels insecure and precieves this scandal and hostility when it isn't actually there? My headcanon and revised canon don't have to be in contradiction just because they disagree.Â
Similarly, in the fallout of 3.3 (spoilerish) I'm keeping Andromeda distrusting and largely hostile toward Ishgard because she believes the reforms are being undertaken halfheartedly or dishonestly. We have no reason to believe that Ishgard's reforms are not genuine, but ICly Rommie still has every reason to distrust them and hold them in ill regard.Â
The character probably most at risk for running into a problem with new canon is Illua, who is a defector from the IXth Legion and was, in her youth, the product of a failed experiment to infuse a Garlean with enough aether to make them magically active. A lot of pieces could eventually fall apart there, but in this one I can make Illua an unreliable narrator of her own life. If, say the IXth was involved with the burning of Doma and she said it wasn't, maybe that's shame? Or if there were experiments like the one I have in her backstory that succeeded, maybe she simply is unaware of the results?Â
There's a lot of little ways you can tweak the story to fit new developments if they don't outright blow you out of the water, or even if they do, by playing up the fact that the things people say are very, very open to being lies, half-truths or mistakes.
And our characters, themselves, are not reliable sources. No one really is on their own life. We misremember, even convince ourselves of lies about our past all the time.Â
For instance: my Miqo'te Noble is a scandalous figure in Ishgard for not being Hyur or Elezen and daring to assume a station of nobility. If a patch suddenly introduced a family of noble Miqo'te everyone was cool with, maybe my character feels insecure and precieves this scandal and hostility when it isn't actually there? My headcanon and revised canon don't have to be in contradiction just because they disagree.Â
Similarly, in the fallout of 3.3 (spoilerish) I'm keeping Andromeda distrusting and largely hostile toward Ishgard because she believes the reforms are being undertaken halfheartedly or dishonestly. We have no reason to believe that Ishgard's reforms are not genuine, but ICly Rommie still has every reason to distrust them and hold them in ill regard.Â
The character probably most at risk for running into a problem with new canon is Illua, who is a defector from the IXth Legion and was, in her youth, the product of a failed experiment to infuse a Garlean with enough aether to make them magically active. A lot of pieces could eventually fall apart there, but in this one I can make Illua an unreliable narrator of her own life. If, say the IXth was involved with the burning of Doma and she said it wasn't, maybe that's shame? Or if there were experiments like the one I have in her backstory that succeeded, maybe she simply is unaware of the results?Â
There's a lot of little ways you can tweak the story to fit new developments if they don't outright blow you out of the water, or even if they do, by playing up the fact that the things people say are very, very open to being lies, half-truths or mistakes.
