Retcons are done for many reasons, including the accommodation of sequels or further derivative works in a series, wherein newer authors or creators want to revise the in-story history to allow a course of events that would not have been possible in the story's original continuity.

Retcons are also sometimes used to either correct or cover up a perceived error.

Retcons are common in pulp fiction, especially comic books published by long-established houses such as DC, Marvel and leading manga publishers.

Retcons also appear in soap operas, serial drama, movie sequels, professional wrestling, video games, radio series, and other kinds of serial fiction.

Retcons often add information that effectively states " what you saw isn't what really happened " and then introduce a different version of the backstory.

If he had married her, he'd have been asking for trouble.

`` We've been looking for work, but all the ranchers have turned us down ''.

She seemed to have come such a long distance -- too far for her destination which had wilfully been swallowed up in the greedy gloom of the trees.

A detailed scouring of the entire area revealed nothing beyond a ledge of rocks that might have been the rifleman's hiding place.

Yet had he not visited the girl at Saw Buck he would never have been involved in this latest tangle.

At once my ears were drowned by a flow of what I took to be Spanish, but -- the driver's white teeth flashing at me, the road wildly veering beyond his glistening hair, beyond his gesticulating bottle -- it could have been the purest Oxford English I was half hearing ; ;

Their product had been endorsed by Good Housekeeping, the A.M.A., and the Veterinary Journal, among other repositories of higher wisdom, and before much longer if you didn't have a cake of their soap in the john, even your best friends would think you didn't bathe.

`` The commercials have just been for money, there hasn't been any real incentive for me to do them, but in Underwater Western Eye I'd have a chance to act.

If it were not for an old professor who made me read the classics I would have been stymied on what to do, and now I understand why they are classics ; ;

They were married over the week-end, though he was easily sixty and she could not have been even thirty.

( Would she have been able to had she known that the blanket belonged to a young ballet dancer Nicolas had found his first night in one of Walter's marked bars??

It had been a mistake, but anything would have been a mistake, as it turned out.

`` They wouldn't have sold me in the first place if there'd been food enough to go around ''.

The body may have been two or three weeks' dead.

She might have been someone he had once loved.

Benson said, and Ramey wondered how close their thoughts might have been.

And he would have enjoyed it just as much if he had been a Nazi.

The deeds of countless western bandits and outlaws have been glorified almost to the point of hero-worship, but because Billy Tilghman remained strictly on the side of the law throughout his action-packed career, his achievements and the appalling risks he took while taming the West have remained almost unsung.

Something was beginning to stir and come alive in her, too ( it may have been there for a good while, since she was twenty now ; ;

Had Dandy been older or wiser, instinct might have warned him that he would be well advised to flee from the Lalauries' tender care if he valued his life.

He said, `` Some have criticized your book as being neither literary criticism nor history.

On being criticized for his arbitrary behavior -- he answered: `` I have to make decisions.

Some church leaders, both clerical and lay, have criticized the university for not taking the lead in desegregation.

Alcott's philosophical teachings have been criticized as inconsistent, hazy or abrupt.

Anthroposophical ideas have been criticized from both sides in the race debate:

The thesis that the Third Reich went to war on the basis of " blitzkrieg economics " was criticized by Richard Overy in the 1980s and Historian George Raudzens highlighted the many, somewhat conflicting, senses in which historians have used the word.

William Reginald Hall, British Director of Naval Intelligence criticized the agreement on the basis that " the Jews have a strong material, and a very strong political, interest in the future of the country " and that " in the Brown area the question of Zionism, and also of British control of all Palestine railways, in the interest of Egypt, have to be considered ".

In the second century Christianity was criticized by the Jews on a various grounds, e. g. that the prophecies of the Hebrew Bible could not have been fulfilled by Jesus, given that he did not have a successful life.

Socialist economists, such as Robin Hahnel, have criticized the term as an ideologically motivated attempt to cast what is in their view the fundamental problems of capitalism as avoidable irregularities.

Coalition governments have also been criticized for sustaining a consensus on issues when disagreement and the consequent discussion would be more fruitful.

Just as Claudius had criticized his predecessors in official edicts ( see below ), Nero often criticized the deceased Emperor and many of Claudius ' laws and edicts were disregarded under the reasoning that he was too stupid and senile to have meant them.

The club nickname and its cartoon logo have been criticized for perpetuating Native American stereotypes.

This book has been heavily criticized on theoretical and methodological grounds, but some of its findings have been confirmed by further empirical research.

Despite being one of Mather's most well-known works, many have openly criticized it, labeling it as hard to follow and understand, and poorly paced and organized.

Graduating high school students with Ivy League caliber academic records have given the Honors College a closer look as a result, and this has had a trickle-down effect in improving the image of CUNY as a whole, which prior to the inception of the HC had been criticized as ' an institution adrift ' by the Giuliani administration.

However Robert Spitzer later criticized his own work on it in an interview with Adam Curtis saying it led to the medicalization of 20-30 percent of the population who may not have had any serious mental problems.

In addition, current diagnostic guidelines have been criticized as having a fundamentally Euro-American outlook.

Lactantius criticized Diocletian for an excessive increase in troop sizes, declaring that " each of the four strove to have a far larger number of troops than previous emperors had when they were governing the state alone ".

These secondary works ( e. g. Deconstruction for Beginners and Deconstructions: A User's Guide ) have attempted to explain deconstruction while being academically criticized as too far removed from the original texts and Derrida's actual position.

Some have criticized the obvious stagings in this film as being at odds with Vertov's credos of " life as it is " and " life caught unawares ": the scene of the woman getting out of bed and getting dressed is obviously staged, as is the reversed shot of the chess pieces being pushed off a chess board and the tracking shot which films Mikhail Kaufman riding in a car filming a third car.

However, some have criticized these methods as taking away the right to seek redress of grievances in the courts, suggesting that extrajudicial dispute resolution may not offer the fairest way for parties not in an equal bargaining relationship, for example in a dispute between a consumer and a large corporation.

A popular way to gauge teaching performance is to use student evaluations of teachers ( SETS ), but these evaluations have been criticized for being counterproductive to learning and inaccurate due to student bias.