<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Arial">quote:</font><HR>What in the unholly hell are you talking about Q? The dates in CH are wrong because Chris McCubbin (author of the Confed Handbook) messed up (yeah, lets blame it on fictional characters! ). But I can assure you, there was a war going on.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
Uh... fictional characters? Chris McCubbin is quite real
. Anyway, what in unholy hell am I talking about? From the CIC's News Archive, for February 1999:
(On Feb 3rd, Chris McCubbin says)
"[...] I must take exception to one of the main points you made - that I disregarded, forgot or altered continuity in the book. It's not the Confed Handbook that changed continuity, it's the movie itself. Everything in the Confed Handbook follows RELIGIOUSLY from the continuity of the MOVIE. However, that continuity is deliberately, extensively and consistantly DIFFERENT from the continuity of the games.
I like to explain it by reference to Batman. Batman has a comics series, a series of movies and an animated series. Each one uses the same characters, basically the same motivations, and all have certain benchmark events in common. However, things fit together differently - they are different, although related -- realities. That's the way it is with the movie and the games (and the animated cartoon too, for that matter). They are not part of the same story, they are different stories about the same people. [...]"
(On Feb 4th, Chris McCubbin adds)
"[...] It's the damn Pilgrims' fault. EVERYTHING is the damn Pilgrims' fault. If they hadn't decided to make Blair Pilgrimerific, the continuity could have been a LOT closer to the games'.
Specifically, re. the date of the Iason incident ... OK, Blair's in his early 20s. His parents were both killed in the Pilgrim war when he was a toddler (actually, the script implies he was a bit older, but I fudged). If I stuck with the games' chronology, this means that the Pilgrim affair either *immediately* preceeded the Kilrathi dustup, or they actually overlapped.
So why is that a problem? Well, to me at least, one of the central themes of the whole Wing Commander milieu has always been the resonance with real-world history. Call it the "Pearl Harbor" metaphor. (Bill Fortschen has carried this metaphor sometimes to extremes in the game novels.) The assumption has always been that when the Kilrathi attacked, Confed was big, peaceful, reasonably enlightened and more than a bit complacent - just like the US when the Japanese attacked Pearl. If the Kilrathi had immediately followed the Pilgrim thing, Confed would have been a bit more battered but a LOT more ready. Like America going into Korea. That just seemed wrong, so I juggled the timeline to give Confed a few years' buffer between the wars. (And let's emphasize here that if I hadn't changed the dates, the Pilgrim thing would have still introduced discrepencies into continuity, they just might have been a bit better camoflaged.)
Basically, it was a choice between sticking closer to the chronology of the games, or to the central themes of the games. I decided that theme was more important to keeping the book a "real" Wing Commander experience. [...]"
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Good enough for you? It was neither an intentional nor an unintentional mistake. It was a well-thought-out change, and it's here to stay, no matter how hard you try to ignore it. The WC Movie is a different continuity.
I should point out that I've always been a great supporter of what McCubbin says in that last paragraph - that the Movie was true to the WC theme in spite of the chronology.