Week 4 Seminar: The Soft Reboot
Keep the name and some of the cast. Stop honouring the rest of the continuity, and never say which parts.
17 March 2027
The technique#
A hard reboot starts again and says so. A soft reboot keeps enough of the old continuity to keep its audience, and stops honouring the parts that got in the way. It never announces which parts those are. The audience finds out one missing reference at a time.
The case: the Merge#
Ninjago: Dragons Rising (2023) follows fifteen seasons of Ninjago. It opens with the Merge, an event that fuses the realms and scatters the ninja. Some of the cast carries over. A new lead, Arin, arrives. The old continuity still happened, officially. The show is built so that a new viewer never needs it.
In the seminar#
The soft reboot sits between the retcon, which changes a meaning, and the multiverse, which changes the universe. We map what Dragons Rising kept and what it dropped, and rank the drops by how soon a returning viewer would notice. Then the Retcon Proposal’s question: what did it cost, and who paid?
Learning outcomes
This seminar works towards:
- Design a repair (retcon, reboot, multiverse or recast) and argue what it costs.
What to bring
Have these done before the seminar starts.
- you have watched the first episode of Ninjago: Dragons Rising (2023)
- a list of what that episode keeps from the earlier series, and what it stops mentioning
Teaching team
- Sam Adeyemi — tutor