External Retcon

While some works of fiction expose the "truth" about historical figures or events, others expose the "truth" behind the events of earlier works of fiction. This is mostly confined to parodies or works that attempt deconstruction of the work(s) they reference.

This is most common in Literature, due to their ability to reference other novels hundreds of years old (and out of copyright). Fan Fic, of course, can and does cheerfully ignore the copyright issue, frequently merely to try to justify the source material's tropes by means of Fan Wank.

When very well done, this can result in interesting and thought-provoking works. When not done well (more often), it can turn into commercially-published Hate Fic, or a shallow and irritatingly self-righteous attempt to impose contemporary moral or ideological standards on a work written in a different era.

Sometimes overlaps with a Perspective Flip. Often a form of Twice-Told Tale. See also Fractured Fairy Tale.

Related to Demythification, which applies this to Mythology into Historical Fiction by Doing In the Wizard. The catalyst of an External Retcon is often a Been There, Shaped History character. Contrast with Sadly Mythtaken, where legendary creatures or things are presented differently in a work than the real legend through a lack of research or care, and Legend Fades to Myth, where the events of an earlier work have become distorted into myth by the time of a later work set in the same universe.

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Examples:

Comic Books

• The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen:
  • The version of the events of The War of the Worlds told in the second story arc reveals that what killed the Martians was not just Earth microbes, but a virus deliberately engineered by none other than Dr. Moreau, at the behest of a steampunkish Men in Black organisation.
  • Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is explained as a trip to a horrible world where the rules of logic did not exist, and after Through the Looking Glass, Alice starves to death because the chirality of her body's molecules has been reversed and thus proteins from Earth food can no longer bond with her (which is also an obscure reference to the original work, where Alice considered the very possibility).
  • The later Century series turned out to be a vitriolic attack on Harry Potter, in which a lawyersafe version of Harry massacred all the other characters in his original story and turned out to be the Antichrist.
  • The Black Dossier book revealed that the events of Dr. No never happened, and was instead an American coverup of James Bond's assassination of a British industrialist.
  • Most of the members of the league, who are all characters lifted from existing works of fiction, are revealed to have faked their own deaths before the beginning of the narrative. The prose at the end of each volume also contains many, many retcons of other works.
• According to IDW's Ghostbusters comics Elwood Blues' real name is Ray Stantz. In the Blues Brothers universe Ray was orphaned at a young age and rechristened by the Catholic orphanage he wound up in where he became Jake's adoptive brother while in the Ghostbusters universe his parents survived and he grew up to become an occult researcher. Because both timelines, among others, feed into the same afterlife Joliet Jake's spirit occasionally appears to help out his brother's counterpart in the Ghostbusters world.

Fan Works

• In the Robotech fanfic Valkyrie Nights, detectives from the Macross City Police Department chase a serial killer into the under-construction SDF-1 Macross. The serial killer detonates a grenade, which damages the hyperspace fold drive, thus causing the fold drive to disappear when it is first used to escape the Zentraedi.
  • It is also revealed that the United Nations does not have a death penalty, although some of its member states do. The United Earth Forces does have a Supermax type underground prison in Russia.
  • In "A Rainy Night", Claudia mentions that she and Roy never spoke about their conversation that they had in that eponymous night. One reason for that, revealed in Valkyrie Nights, was about a minute later, Roy was arrested for the murders that were committed by the serial killer who had damaged the SDF-1 hyperspace fold drive.
• In the COPS-in-Star Wars parody Troops, Luke's foster parents weren't killed by Imperials. Aunt Beru, during a domestic dispute that the Storm Troopers were checking in on (and were quite familiar with), grabs a thermal detonator from one of the Troops and blows up herself, Owen and the farm house.
• The Renegades tries to show what really happened to the six Nobodies "killed" in Castle Oblivion during Kingdom Hearts.
• The Sliders fanfic The Slide Home reveals what happened to Rembrandt and Wade between Seasons 3 and 4, including their move to Los Angeles, the government funding sliding research, with the Earth Prime versions of Maggie Beckett and Angus Rickman involved, as well as the revelation that Elizabeth Mallory had a son named Colin who had died at birth.
• The TV show Alias fanfic halo is notorious for this, with almost endless external retcons trying to recast the character of Irina Derevko, played by Lena Olin, as a misunderstood heroine who just loved her husband and daughter, and meant well. The canonical evidence for loving her husband and daughter(s) is ambiguous, the canonical evidence for 'meant well' is essentially non-existent.
• The Total Drama reimagining The Legend of Total Drama Island has elements of this, as is perhaps the nature of reimaginings. The Storyteller tends to depict the contestants more realistically and multidimensionally than the canon does, justified in-universe by her insider perspective. She also makes references to manipulative editing by the in-universe producers, who wanted the finished episodes to suggest that the teams don't get along as well as they do.
• In the Ace Attorney fanfic Dirty Sympathy: Daryan Crescend and Kristoph Gavin were framed for their crimes from the source work by Apollo and Klavier.
• Professor Layton fanfic Bonds Left Unbroken shows that the shady organization that funded Bill Hawks' time machine was Targent.
• In the Dexter fic “Break Me Every Time”, a key plot element is the revelation that Harry Morgan didn’t kill himself, but he was actually killed by Doctor Vogel when he stated that he planned to try and help Dexter get over his murderous urges, which prompts Dexter and Debra to re-evaluate their thoughts on Harry and appreciate that he genuinely did care about them in his way. It is later confirmed that Tom Matthews was fully aware of Dexter’s actions and discreetly helped cover them up, to the point that he tries to convince Debra that Harrison will need similar ‘training’ after witnessing his own father’s death.
• The Next Frontier takes this approach when reconciling Kerbal Space Program's literal Space Compression and other Acceptable Breaks from Reality with the author's desire to write hard science fiction, treating the Kerbol system seen in-game as a fictionalised version of the "real" Kerbin, Mun etc. This gets quite meta with the inclusion of a reference to a videogame called "Buzz Kerman's Race Into Space", which is basically an in-universe equivalent of Kerbal Space Program itself, and Jebediah Kerman is an avid player!
• In Dragon Ball Z Abridged, the reason King Kai told Goku the planet Vegeta was destroyed by a meteor instead of what actually happened was because Freeza vandalized the space wiki page. King Kai immediately realized something was strange, but Goku quickly lost interest and the issue was dropped. Goku also questions Freeza's ability to tell time some time after he says Namek will blow up in 5 minutes, and it’s implied Freeza was guessing in the first place.
• Sword Art Online Abridged fixes a few plot holes in the source material and tweaks some scenes to make them more palatable. Sachi's death in Episode 3 has a much greater impact on Kirito than in the source material, and is critical to his Character Development. The crux of the mystery explored in Episodes 5 and 6 is changed from one type of animation being somehow mistaken for another despite looking nothing alike, to an obscure but documented glitch in which, under very specific circumstances, the game itself uses the wrong animation. Kirito's sudden hacking prowess in Episode 10 is changed to him having brief access to an open console and admin privileges that someone else unlocked. Asuna isn't hit with the Distress Ball in Episode 8, she's manipulating Kirito into dueling someone on her behalf to avoid some guild drama and teach him a lesson. And Kirito and Asuna's rather young marriage is the result of Kirito blurting out a proposal in the awkward moment after sex, Asuna being so surprised that she accepts it, and then neither of them being willing to "blink" first and admit out loud what a terrible idea it is. Their subsequent adoption of Yui is another move in this game and an attempt to raise the stakes and scare the other into breaking the marriage off.
  • There's also an example that specifically applies to Kayaba Akihiko’s motivations were to make his fantasy world real and death is the most real thing there is. In episode 11 we learn he was so hopped up on caffeine and sleep deprivation that, to meet the deadline for release as set by Bethesda and get a good score on Metacritic, he didn't do some critical bug testing after the beta. So players die when their avatars do, and Kayaba, still incredibly sleep-deprived, decided that, to get the best reviews, he should prevent everyone from leaving and claim he planned to put on a massive death game all along. After finally getting some sleep, he realized how badly he screwed up, but reluctantly decided to keep the game going to keep the cops off his back until he could figure out a plan that didn't result in him getting arrested. However, thousands of idiotic players died within the first few weeks alone, so Kayaba took up the alias of Heathcliff to stop the situation from getting worse, which took up so much time that he never got around to finding a proper solution that didn't involve admitting his massive fuck-up.
• Freeman's Mind rationalizes a lot of the things in Half-Life that don't make sense. Black Mesa's odder architectural choices like the "box-smashing shed" were put in to pad the budget so the facility can keep getting federal grant money. Gordon knows how to use a gun because he foresaw a time when he might need one. Gordon's job appears to consist mainly of pushing trolleys because he couldn't be trusted with anything else, which is also why the retinal scanners in the lab he works at aren't keyed to his eyes - management once caught him playing racquetball in the anti-mass spectrometer room and doesn't want him going anywhere without permission.
• My Love Has Two Lives has two examples:
  • The Nexus is theorised to be rather more complex than simply granting its inhabitants the illusion of their hearts' desires; instead it shows them whatever makes them least likely to leave - whether this is something they want with all their heart or something to make them forget what they already have is dependent on the individual and their circumstances. It then harvests energy from them in order to keep moving. Both Jim and Guinan are troubled by the idea, but they both agree that it makes a lot more sense than the poster child for In Harm's Way to want nothing more than to settle down in a peaceful-but-boring idyll with some woman he knows nothing about, and never becoming dissatisfied or restless.
  • The younger Spock's relationship with Uhura is, in this universe, based entirely on logic, since Spock was under the impression that this was the reason for his parents' marriage. In his desire to emulate what he saw in them, he selected Uhura, and he's now having second thoughts.
• The Super Metroid fanfic Metroid III: Return to Zebes has the power suit randomly and inexplicably change Samus' hair color, a reference to how the Justin Bailey suit in Metroid switched between brown hair for beams and green hair for rockets (the suit's armor switched between green and blue instead of opening the arm cannon's muzzle), while Samus is canonically blonde. Samus spends most of the story with lavender hair. It also randomly upgrades or changes its internal workings, justifying why classic Metroid and Metroid II: Return of Samus has one beam at a time, the beams in the novelized game stacked but the ones in Metroid Prime didn't until 3, and why the spazer is suddenly compatible with the Plasma Beam in Metroid Fusionbut not here.
• The Creepypasta FEL-I.N.E. shows us why the notoriously corrupt, callous, and uncaring Weyland-Yutani MegaCorp of the Alien franchise allows pets on its ships. Jonsey's actually the cat version of a Super-Soldier, genetically engineered to take down the kind of rats that can survive unprotected on a ship going FTL while mostly evacuated ("without air pressure"), because such vermin can cause a ship to experience Critical Existence Failure if they munch on the wrong bit of wiring.
• The Wind Done Gone: Alice Randall is not related in any way to Margaret Mitchel and writes this book as a social critique and extensive commentary on the original novel because of its liberal usage of harmful black people tropes. So, here, the O'Hara sisters gain a mixed-race, extramarital sister called Cynara. She's evidently the product of the unfaithfulness of the sisters' beloved father, who is portrayed in a negative light. This also causes a love triangle to appear between the two sisters, Cynara and Scarlett, and their Love Interests.

Films — Animation

• Beowulf works with the idea that the famous poem was embellished over the centuries, even outright using Unreliable Narrator for scenes where Beowulf is by himself.
• Disney's Robin Hood purports to tell the real story of what happened in Sherwood Forest, using a World of Funny Animals cast.

Films — Live-Action

• Ever After begins with the Framing Device of an old woman informing The Brothers Grimm that their fairy tale, Cinderella, was inaccurate to the life of the real Cinderella, her ancestor Danielle de Barbarac, and segues into her telling Danielle's actual story.
• The film Gojoe tells how Minamoto Yoshitsune was actually a deranged, superpowered mystic who wanted to destroy all religion in Japan, only that he died fighting Benkei. The Yoshitsune and Benkei that became famous in history were lieutenants of the Genji impersonating them.
• Maleficent: The premise is that Disney's original Sleeping Beauty was based on inaccurate information regarding the title character and her relationship with Princess Aurora. The film's Narrator — eventually revealed to be an elderly Aurora — lampshades this at the beginning and end of the film. At the same time, there are enough changes in the film to classify it as an Alternate Continuity.
• There is Without a Clue in which Holmes is a character Watson uses to make his stories more interesting, but public demand forces him to hire a clueless actor to play the part.
• According to director Rocky Morton, the Super Mario Bros. (1993) movie was meant to show the "real" story that the games were based off of which became distorted over time like classical myths, which is supported by the post-credits scene where Iggy and Spike are commissioned to make their own video game.
• Dora and the Lost City of Gold posits that while Dora did go on adventures as a kid, the talking objects and Edutainment aspects were either just the result of her overactive imagination or (given it was the only animated sequence in the film) being hopped up on hallucinogens the entire time.

Literature

• A Series of Unfortunate Events: In explaining the difference between "denouement" and "end", Snicket "reveals" the distant endings of several different fairy tales, involving the rather non-fantastical deaths of the heroes.
• Several works have suggested that Sherlock Holmes's archnemesis Professor Moriarty (who, you will recall, nobody got to meet in "The Final Problem" but Holmes himself) was either entirely non-existent or an Innocent Bystander who had unwittingly become the focus of Holmes's delusions. (The full explanation usually brings up Holmes's drug habit at some point.) Possibly the most famous version is Nicholas Meyer's novel The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, which was made into a movie.
  • Speaking of Sherlock Holmes and The War of the Worlds, Manly Wade Wellman's Sherlock Holmes' War of the Worlds features Holmes and Professor Challenger discovering that the creatures H. G. Wells identifies as 'Martians' couldn't possibly have come from Mars at all. As part of the conceit something of a feud has developed between Dr. Watson and H. G. Wells over what the former believes to be the latter's deliberate efforts to distort the truth and cover-up Holmes' deductions.
    • The same work also does something of a retcon on Mrs. Hudson, Holmes' widow landlady; although she's not described in much detail in the original stories, she's usually depicted in later pastiches and adaptations as a rather matronly lady around late middle-age. Wellman casts her as a young widow who is having an affair with Holmes. The reason Watson doesn't mention this in the original stories? He hasn't cottoned on, because he's a bit oblivious about these things.
    • And then the Wold-Newton essay "The Kissable Mrs Hudson" does an external retcon on that, suggesting that the real Mrs Hudson is the way we always pictured her, and this "Mrs Hudson" is actually Irene Adler.
  • Another variation is Michael Dibdin's infamous The Last Sherlock Holmes Story, in which Holmes is completely insane and turns out to be both Moriarty and Jack the Ripper.
  • In a short story by P. G. Wodehouse, a character propounds a similar theory that Moriarty is Holmes's evil alter ego. Nobody believes him.
  • In Kim Newman's The Hound of the D'Urbervilles, the theory that Holmes is the alter ego of Moriarty is brought up. The only person who ever sees them together is Colonel Moran just before he assassinates Moriarty at the falls... Also, going back again to The War of the Worlds, one story involves faking a Martian invasion.
  • Moriarty was there was an essay published by Doyle’s Fandom trying to upgrade Moriarty from Break Out Villain to truly Big Bad status for the Sherlock Holmes book series by doing a Revision about Holmes's cases and arguing that Moriarty was there as a Man Behind the Man for various Big Bads cases: after all, canon has established him as a Diabolical Mastermind, with vast criminal resources that can be exploited by minor criminals for a fee. For example, the essay proposes that the criminal of the very first novel, A Study in Scarlet, after losing his Memento MacGuffin and recognizing he was Lured into a Trap by whoever put the ad in the paper to recover it (Holmes), then consulted Moriarty, who commissioned a Master of Disguise to pose as an elderly woman to get it (it worked!)
  • Michael Kurland's Professor Moriarty novels propose that while Moriarty is still a dangerous crook, he's nowhere near as bad as Holmes believes, and has moral principles that go well beyond Even Evil Has Standards.
  • Colin Dexter's "A Case of Mis-Identity" is a retelling of "A Case of Identity" which starts off as almost identical to the original, save for the presence of Mycroft Holmes in the background. Only after Windibank (here called Wyndham) has fled and Holmes is explaining his reasoning does Mycroft dismiss it as assumption built on assumption, and say that, having established Wyndham doesn't need money, he considers it far more likely that the fiance was invented by mother and daughter in order to use Holmes as a Detective Patsy to discredit the stepfather. And then Watson announces they're both wrong: the fiance was real, he was mugged, and he has been in hospital ever since, unable to identify himself until earlier that day when Watson's treatment restored his memory and his voice. At which point Wyndham returns with his lawyers...
• The Dracula Tape by Fred Saberhagen, in which Dracula explains how the events described in Bram Stoker's novel resulted from a series of terrible misunderstandings.
  • Similarly, Saberhagen's The Holmes-Dracula File reveals that one of the characters in Dracula, Jack Seward, became a criminal mastermind who planned to extort London, and other cities worldwide, with the Plague.
  • Saberehagen's The Frankenstein Papers likewise deals with what "really" happened between Frankenstein and his creation: the creature wasn't created by Frankenstein, it was an alien who got Easy Amnesia and was told it was his creation, so he believed it. Frankenstein's attempt to create life was a failure, and was even more morally dubious than in the original: his research had been funded by slave traders who wanted to market his creations, hence his aborted attempt to create a breeding female.
• In the world of The Dresden Files, it is stated that the White Court of Vampires convinced Bram Stoker to write Dracula in order to expose the weaknesses of the Black Court of Vampires, one of several factions of vampires that each conform to different vampire mythologies. This resulted in the near destruction of the Black Court, as almost all of humanity learned their weaknesses.
  • The licensed RPG, written by Billy the werewolf with help from Harry and Bob, has the three authors discussing this in margin notes as well as how this very book could likewise be used to help Muggles against other supernatural predators.
  • According to Word of God, H. P. Lovecraft wrote his books to spread knowledge of Outsiders. Furthermore, Abdul Alhazred the "Mad Arab" was killed by the Gatekeeper and the Necronomicon was a book of rituals that was distributed by the White Council after his death to lessen its power (each ritual can only give so much power at once and when too many people try to draw on a ritual's power source, it is rendered so weak as to be harmless).
• It's mentioned in Vampire High that this is one of the reasons that relations between humans and vampires aren't so great. Dracula (who was really a decent guy) agreed to tell Bram Stoker all about vampire society, and Stoker proceeded to ignore most of it and make the vampires all look like a bunch of baby-killing demons. This pissed off the vampire community so much that plenty of them wanted to off Stoker, and only didn't because Dracula had promised him protection. Even in present times, vampires call humans that they hate "stokers". They call humans that they're out to get "brams".
• The Phantom of Manhattan was written as a sequel to The Phantom of the Opera, which was only possible by retconning Erik's death out of the story. This was done in the introduction by explaining why Gaston Leroux's "sources" were unreliable and thus events must have played out differently from how he described them. It is probably no coincidence that the novel fits in continuity with the popular Andrew Lloyd Webber musical exactly.
• The Time Ships by Stephen Baxter continues on from the end of The Time Machine; among other things, it explains that the "dying sun" period near the end of the original book was earlier than current scientific estimates because the Morlocks had been messing with it, and that the time traveller had been given a helping hand in the early development of the time machine by his own future self.
• Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys is the story of how Bertha (Rochester's first wife) from Jane Eyre went crazy. Rochester is far less sympathetic than he is in Jane Eyre, even though part of the book is narrated by him.
• Grendel, by John Gardner, is written entirely from the perspective of the oldest villain in English literature. Beowulf scarcely merits mention. The most interesting passages of the novel concern Grendel's relationships with Hrothgar and the Dragon, who serves as the Obi-Wan to Grendel's Luke.
• In the Thursday Next novels, crucial scenes from classic literature turn out to be caused by people from the "real world" entering the story (or vice versa). For example, Thornfield Hall in Jane Eyre was burned down by "real-world" criminal Acheron Hades, and Miss Havisham's death scene in Great Expectations is the result of a fatal car crash (in a drag race). Indeed, in Thursday's universe, Jane Eyre originally ended with Jane going away to India to do missionary work with St. John Rivers and wondering what could have been; it's only through Thursday's intervention that Jane ends up marrying Rochester, and that pisses off elements of Jurisfiction to no end.
• The Looking-Glass Wars starts out by revealing that Alice (actually spelled "Alyss") is a lost princess of the real Wonderland. When she ended up in our world, she told Charles Dodgson her plight in the hopes that he'd write a tell-all book, and he proceeded to get everything she'd told him wrong.
• Neil Gaiman has done this, most notably with Snow, Glass and Apples ("Snow White" from the stepmother's point of view) and the film adaptation of Beowulf.
• The Moneypenny Diaries novels and short stories by Samantha Weinberg (writing as Kate Westbrook) chronicle the life and times of MI6 mainstay and James Bond flirting partner Jane Moneypenny.
• The Anno Dracula timeline of several of Kim Newman's novels is an external retcon of Bram Stoker's Dracula, with the premise being that vampires around the world drop the masquerade after Dracula defeats Van Helsing (who, with his offsiders, are revealed to be less virtuous than Stoker depicted them) and goes on to marry Queen Victoria.
• Lenore Hart's novel Becky is told from Becky Thatcher's point of view—apparently, Mark Twain lied about quite a few of the events in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Specifically, Becky was One of the Boys, and Injun Joe was framed.
• C. S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces is a retelling of the myth of Cupid And Psyche, told by Istra (Psyche)'s older sister Orual. Orual is inspired to write the story after hearing the myth and being angered by what she sees as the gods' self-serving version of the events. Turns out her version is somewhat self-serving as well, and the second part is itself a retcon of the first part, revealing that some events were closer to the original version than Orual's.
• Cthulhu Mythos stories constantly retcon each other. One of the most notable issues is Hastur, a name which H. P. Lovecraft dropped only once in his stories as a reference to Robert W. Chambers's The King in Yellow short story collection. In the original story, Hastur seemed to indicate a place, not person (it was almost always invoked along with the Lake of Hali and the City of Carcosa). However, Chambers himself borrowed the term from Ambrose Bierce's "Haïta the Shepherd", where Hastur was a deity of shepherds, and not a place. Derleth, likely knowing the reference, made Hastur into a Great Old One. Hastur, Hali and Carcosa later made an appearance in Marion Zimmer-Bradley's Darkover series.
• In L. Jagi Lamplighter's Prospero Lost, Miranda explains where William Shakespeare's The Tempest diverges from the facts. For one thing, she did not get married.
• Tom Holt does this in several of his books:
  • In Flying Dutch, he does this to Wagner's version of the Flying Dutchman. It turns out that Captain Vanderdecker was not cursed by the devil to keep trying to sail around the Horn for eternity. He and his crew accidentally drank a magic potion that A) made them immortal, and B) made them stink so badly that people who get near tend to pass out. So they spend their time at sea; it's only polite. Also, it's not that he's allowed to come ashore once every seven years to seek the love of a pure maiden who can break the curse, or anything silly like that. Every seven years, the stink simply vanishes for about a month, and the crew can come ashore for supplies and such. Love has nothing to do with it.
  • In Paint Your Dragon, it is revealed that St. George was actually a cheating, murderous bastard, and the dragon was, well, not exactly the good guy, but certainly a much more sympathetic and stand-up fellow than George.
• Gregory Maguire, author of The Wicked Years (Land of Oz), Lost (not that Lost - A Christmas Carol), Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister ("Cinderella"), Mirror, Mirror ("Snow White"), etc., has pretty much made a career out of this. The Next Queen of Heaven is his only novel for adults that isn't a revisionist take on an existing tale or setting.
• The Mists of Avalon is a retelling of the Arthurian legends with a feminist and neopagan slant.
• Confessions of a Teen Sleuth is an external retcon of the Nancy Drew series, narrated by Nancy herself.
• Both Daniel Levine's Hyde and Valerie Martin's Mary Reilly offer alternate takes on The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The former is told from Hyde's point-of-view, the latter from a servant's. Both warn that Jekyll's own account of events in the original novel is a product of an Unreliable Narrator.
• Kim Newman wrote a short story called Further Developments In The Strange Case Of Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde, in which Hyde is Jekyll's secret lover. Notable in that it uses lengthy quotations from the original work to back up its assertions.
• The True Story of the Three Little Pigs features the Big Bad Wolf (real name: Alexander T. Wolf) telling the real story of his hunting of the pigs: he only wanted a cup of sugar from each pig, but his sneezes had the unfortunate accidental result of demolishing their houses and causing their untimely deaths. No one's going to leave a perfectly good dead pig just lying around. So he ate them. As for the third pig, he insulted Al's granny, resulting in Al trying to break down the door by the time the cops came by...
  • A single-panel cartoon had the wolf and the pigs sharing beer and sandwiches while they laughingly reminisce about "how I blew down your houses for the insurance."
  • The Guardian advertisements about getting the story behind the story also has it as an insurance scam, but with the wolf as an innocent patsy. "I know that wolf! He's got asthma!"
• In The Lord of the Rings, the Nursery Rhyme "Hey Diddle Diddle" is given this treatment, effectively de-fracturing it. When tavern patrons in Bree ask Frodo for a song, he sings "The Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late". The narration explains that Bilbo wrote the song, but "only a few words of it are now, as a rule, remembered." In this longer version, every element that is complete nonsense in the nursery rhyme gets explanation and context. Because this kind of deadpan humour is a little unusual for The Lord of the Rings, and because of Tolkien's scholarly reputation, some readers are left confused as to which is the true original version.
• The Whateley Universe is a superhero world, so the retcons often relate to comic books. In-universe, it is known that The Baroness of the G.I. Joe stories was a blatant rip-off of supervillainess Lady Hydra, but she was retired for long enough that the comic book authors didn't get killed. It is also recognized in-universe that the 'age one year every four years' Comic-Book Time is in honor of the legendary Miss Champion (later Lady Champion) of the 40s and 50s (who is still aging so slowly that she looks like she is in her early thirties even though she is now a mid-seventies school headmistress).
• Eaters of the Dead tells the "true story" of what happened with Beowulf and Grendel.

Live-Action TV

• The common External Retcon for Holmes is given a nod in the Season Two finale of Sherlock, where Moriarty convinces everyone that he's an innocent actor and Holmes only cooked up the "Moriarty" arch-nemesis so that he could commit crimes himself, "solve" them, and look good. Since the Holmes of that series is such an extreme Insufferable Genius, it's plausible for so many people to believe it.
• The television adaptation of Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister (by Gregory Maguire, mentioned above) even lampshades the retelling, with the narrator saying that viewers who liked the magic explanations of the fairy tale aren't going to be happy with learning that the "true story" was more ordinary.
• A similar thing happens in the 2004 TV movie Frankenstein. When a main character mentions Frankenstein to the original creature, he says, "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was a fiction based on fact. I am that fact."
• Spike is miffed with the Buffyverse Dracula for much the same reason as in the Dresden series (See above), as he spilled the beans to Stoker on many of a vampire's weaknesses. Also, Dracula owes Spike eleven pounds.
• Jekyll starts by establishing the main character as a descendant of Dr. Jekyll and then elaborating on his powers and love-life.
• Once Upon a Time frequently combines this with Fractured Fairy Tales.
• Supernatural: "Slumber Party" reveals that Oz is real, and Dorothy Gale was actually a hunter, but she didn't kill the Wicked Witch, nor did the Witch have a weakness to water. L. Frank Baum was Dorothy's father, and Dorothy is rather miffed that he made her stay in Oz sound so pleasant.
• Highlander: it's revealed in one episode that not only is Lord Byron an immortal but inspired the creation of Frankenstein when Mary Shelley witnessed him narrowing winning a duel and thus seemingly "resurrected" by the power of the quickening. It's also implied that learning of immortals inspired the idea of a "monster" that's misunderstood, feared and forsaken by the world not for his actions but purely for what he is.

Theater

• Wicked shows the events behind The Wizard of Oz from the Witch's perspective.
• At the end of Ebenezer, Charles Dickens, upon learning the truth that Scrooge knew and didn't care about Marley's crimes, storms out in a disgusted rage. It's implied that the A Christmas Carol we know is what he deemed worthy to publish, omitting said events, as well as keeping Scrooge's love interest alive.
• A Very Potter Senior Year says that Gilderoy Lockhart was going to write a series of books based on Harry's adventures in the style of the real life Harry Potter books and sell them to the Muggle public.

Video Games

• God of War (2018) does this for Norse Mythology; while traveling the Nine Realms, Mimir will tell Kratos and Atreus various stories from Norse Mythology; however, unlike the Poetic Edda, in these versions of the stories the Aseir (Norse gods) are Villains With Good Publicity, and Odin in particular is a paranoid, manipulative tyrant, while the traditional villains like the Frost Giants, are recast as a persecuted Proud Scholar Race. For instance, the giant Hrungir in mythology was a violent and abusive guest whom Thor killed for threatening the Aesir. According to Mimir, Hrungir was a mentally-challenged simpleton that Odin took into his court so they could laugh at him, and whom Thor murdered out of Fantastic Racism.
• The Fate series and its various spin-offs delves into this from time to time, combining aspects of this and Sadly Mythtaken due to the setting's use of countless historical and mythical figures. Just to name a few examples: Caster mentions the legends of Jason were embellished over time and the Jason she knew as Medea was much more cowardly, and Fate/Apocrypha has Berserker of Black talk about how a book written about her took some of the things that actually happened in her life such as Dr. Frankenstein's initial idea to make a partner for her but scrapping the idea, and her tragic suicide and rewrote and Gender Flipped the events to make her seem more like a straightforward monster.

Web Comics

• Horror anthology webcomic Nightmare World did a variation of the "Moriarty was imaginary" concept where Moriarty was actually a Hyde-like alternate persona of Holmes, created so he'd have an opponent who could match wits with him on even footing. The concept was also used in a stage play (with Jeremy Brett as Holmes) in the eighties.
• Wapsi Square has done this to a couple of stories from Greek mythology. There is an interpretation of the Medusa myth that makes most of the characters more sympathetic, as well as a version of the encounter between Oedipus and the sphinx (warning, some spoilers) that makes Oedipus out to be a simple pawn who padded his own story.
• One early Gunnerkrigg Court chapter gave this treatment to the minotaur story. The minotaur himself was actually a pretty nice guy.
• Starslip Crisis: the Cirbozoids take responsibility for Cloverfield.
• The Snowflame fan comic gives a backstory to the eponymous character, originally a one-shot joke villain from The New Guardians who became ridiculously popular on the Internet. Here he's a Columbian gangster named Fabian Orosco who was possessed by an evil spirit.
• Veowolf acts in a similar promise to the 2007 Beowulf film mention above, with some cases where two characters have their names changed, like the titular hero being changed from Beowulf to Veowolf and Grendel to Gramdel, and Wealthow is the same character as Grendel's mother and it is told by the perspective of the main villain, who revealed that the poem is an inacurate version of the real events like the arm in the meed-hall being fake and Gramdel died of a Mercy Kill, the story also has a lack of christainity, making it closer to the possible all pagan story, even some events get a tragic reveal Hunferth killed his brother with his own sword after he gets turned into a monster like Gramdel and it was used to kill Weltheow, after the Big Bad use her powers to brainwash her, unlike the the actual source it was one of Weltheow's daughters who kiled her in self deffense and not Veowolf, Veowolf leaving the Danes is given a more dramatic reason, He was exiled by King Hrothgar, due to his presence being believed to bring tragedy to his family.
• Port Sherry puts a much happier spin on the infamous flash fiction "For sale: Baby shoes, never worn.". In this version, the parents get so many baby shoes from friends and family that baby Emma outgrows a bunch of them without getting a chance to wear them.

Western Animation

• Phineas and Ferb: Star Wars is an authorized parody of A New Hope in which characters resembling those from Phineas and Ferb are involved significantly in the film's plot (although never at a point where you'd actually see them in the film if they were there).
• Celebrity Deathmatch: The "Sherlock Holmes vs. Jack the Ripper" fight portrays Sherlock as being a bumbling idiot. When Nick points out how strange this seems, Johnny tells him "Well, Nick, you can't believe everything you read."

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