#ppl do often complain about retcons—and i sympathize! writers who don’t care about the already established characters & story frustrate me

[the-obnoxious-sibling]

yeah, let’s not call out that specific tweet or the twitter user who tweeted it, since as you say it’s a common enough comment.

…probably because it’s true?

but i think you might be assuming malice or a “(derogatory)” sentiment that doesn’t have to be there. retcons aren’t evil. they aren’t inherently bad writing! any time in serialized fiction where you think X happened, and in a later story learn that secretly Y also happened, or that actually Z is what really happened? that’s a retcon!

and what we were originally told about shanks and buggy’s history is thus:

they were apprentices on a pirate ship

they fought all the time, over silly things and over philosophical differences (re: what being a pirate is all about)

buggy found a map and pretended to eat a devil fruit in order to steal away with both items for personal gain

shanks accidentally cost him both

despite their differences, shanks dove without hesitation into the ocean to save him

that’s it. no roger, no laugh tale, not even their split at roguetown, let alone the reason for that split. now, whether you consider all of these elements retcons or just gradually revealed backstory is a personal preference thing. (some folks get real strict about their definitions.) but one of them is definitely, unambiguously a retcon.

look at shanks’ conversation with whitebeard in chapter 434. shanks’ flashback in that chapter is just one panel, showing two lines of dialogue from the day they went separate ways.

it’s pretty straightforward. shanks asks, buggy refuses, insulting him at the same time. about what you’d expect, given what we already knew about their history.

but then, 650 chapters later…

…that moment is revisited from buggy’s point of view, and it turns out things were not as they seemed. buggy wasn’t just butting heads with shanks, he furiously rejected shanks because shanks changed his mind about his (their) dream!

chapter 1082’s flashback is a textbook retcon of the chapter 434 flashback. it provides us with new details that totally recontextualize that moment for us.

(whether this twist was Intended All Along is, imo, irrelevant. a story element revealed at a much later date that changes how we see the original scene(s) is the essence of a retcon.)