Unintended Implications and Headcanon - You didn't think this through, did you?

[Judge Dredd]

Internet term "shower thoughts" describes realizations that come to you after the fact. While movies have the term "fridge logic" that describes a similar idea.

Two things inspired this thread. First is The Amazing Digital Circus. Bully and generally mean character Jax has been retconned by parts of the fandom to be a trans allegory, with some of the creators of the show even seeming to support that interpretation as the official one. This leads to several problems as the show itself doesn't have this message, and it creates unintended consequences, sending an anti-trans message which I don't the lefty side of the fanbase intended with the "Jax of trans" headcanon retcon.


The second is I've been looking into lore for FBC Firebreak and Control. These games (which I've never played so I could be 100% wrong on this) have an SCP like setting, but with an American government organization collecting the anomalies. The timeline follows our own, so if it's three years between games, three years passes in the plot.

The game released in 2019. You can see where this is going.

The devs were well into the culture war at this point. Declining quality, race swaps, and a "strong female protagonist" that saves a dude in destress, as was the style at the time. The plot has the office complex in lockdown to contain a viral outbreak that turns people into hive mind zombies. The "strong female lead" is left in charge by the end. The spin off, which was released 6 years later, depicts the complex in shambles due to short term bureaucratic thinking causing problems to spiral out of control. And the lockdown is still going on. And all of this is under Strong Female Mary Sue's watch. Oops.


These examples happen to have a culture war element to them, but they don't have to. There's lots of films, books, and games that have unintended implications. What are your favourites?

 

[$5.3 Million Dollars]

There's a bunch of these but these two shows are the first that come to mind currently.

- House of The Dragon is based on Blood & Fire, the Velaryon family is described in it as having classic Valyrian features. They shoehorned the head of the family, Corlys Velaryon into being black. The actor is actually pretty good, but the show runners didn't seem to account for this when changing the character for the show. In the book its heavily implied his bastard grandsons are instead his own sons, and that he kept them far from his royal wife so that she wouldn't find out about them and have them killed. In the show they made the dynamic much more strained, with Corlys (now black) being seen as a more absent and uncaring father. There's also a lot more evidence due to the skin color of his gay son not being the biological father of his grandsons.

Tl;dr - They changed a character to be black and then turned him from a loving father into an absentee parent and overall more impotent character. His grandsons being bastards was made to look much more obvious than it was in the book making it a foregone conclusion rather than something various characters actually struggle to determine the truth of.


- The Rings of Power is based (very loosely) on the appendices of the Silmarillion and made quite a few changes in the name of diversity. One of the most jarring early on was the fact that the single black elf is shown in a sea of white elves. There's no fellow black elves stationed with him, and the local humans seem to throw out more slurs to him than to his white girlboss elf counterpart. They also tried a very heavy handed allusion to racial tension by making him essentially the warden of a bunch of humans whose ancestors committed terrible acts, and he acts like their resentment towards foreign occupation generations later is undeserved. Again he is the only black elf and he is the main one seen interacting with the humans in this capacity.

In the same show there's also the unfortunate implication of saying all the proto-hobbits were mixed race, especially when the group we're presented with isn't presented in the best light. At this point in the story the hobbits as a race aren't as homogenized, and have three very distinct subgroups, the implication then being with what we see in the future is that some flavor of racial cleansing took place. The dwarves suffer from the same implication.

Tl;dr - Throwing in random skin colors in a prequel has some fucked up implications when works set later don't do this. Especially when those races being tossed in aren't even fully acknowledged by the show and the prominent majority seem to be the only flavor of their minority in a group. Galadriel has no command over fellow female warriors, only male. Black elf doesn't have any black elf friends at his human watching party, only whites. Black Dwarf has no other black dwarf friends or attendents.