Revising Reality: How Sequels, Remakes, Retcons, and Rejects Explain the World

"We record history, as it was and as it happens, sequentially. However, new discoveries and decisions made every day force us to revise and rethink what came before. Free from such sequence, novels, comics, films, and TV shows continue previous events (sequels), reveal previously unknown events (retcons), or restart events (remakes), and audiences can still ignore any of these revisions if they chose (rejects). But what if these revisionist tropes adopted by popular media now provide us with the essential tools and rhetoric for understanding the nature of the real world and how we discuss it? Deriving revision types from those present in fictional franchises such as Star Wars, Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings and the Marvel comics, Chris Gavaler and Nate Goldberg apply them to events and debates in U.S history, politics, law, science and culture to explore how storytelling frames our engagement with historiography, metaphysics, society and current events. Covering case studies such as the reversal of Roe vs Wade, identity politics, the discoveries of Copernicus, memory, cancel culture, supreme court rulings, revisionist history, critical race theory, paradigm shifts and much more, this book makes our perceptions of the world and their relation to an ever-changing reality accessible and coherent"--
The past is fixed – what happened happened. But our descriptions of that past are in constant flux, creating branching networks of contradictory accounts more complex than any fictional franchise. Revising Reality uses pop culture and media concepts of revision to untangle our real-world histories – with startlingly revelatory results.Novels, comics, films, and TV shows can continue previous events (sequels), reinterpret events (retcons), or restart events (remakes), and audiences can ignore any of these revisions (rejects). Drawing on these four kinds of revision derived from franchises such as Star Wars, Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, and Marvel comics, Chris Gavaler and Nat Goldberg make sense of the stories we tell about a remarkable range of actual events, including scientific discoveries, Supreme Court cases, historical moments, folk heroes, and even trans names and human memory.They ask: –What happened to the original, green-scaled dinosaurs after scientists decided dinosaurs had multi-colored feathers?When overturning Roe v. Wade, did the Supreme Court end the right to abortion, or did the Court claim that the right of the previous half century never existed?Since Ronald Reagan increased taxes, expanded government, and championed amnesty for undocumented immigrants, who is the Ronald Reagan whom today's conservatives champion as a model president?When a trans person comes out as trans, has their gender changed or has their gender remained consistent?Are our memories accounts of real events or some kind (or kinds) of revision? And if our memories are in flux, what does that say about our memory-dependent identities?Revising Reality answers these and so many more questions, providing surprising new tools for explaining the world and our relationship to it.