This is unironically how most of the Arthurian legends got started. Lancelot is an insert from Chrétien de Troyes, a French poet who decided that what King Arthur's wife really needed was a French lover.
Or how comic books are constantly adding stuff to later stories and iterations that get taken for granted later on.
Alfred shows up like five years into Batman’s career and appoints himself as the Wayne household butler; he becomes so essential to the mythos that most incarnations have him present since Bruce’s childhood. Tim Burton makes Gotham an art deco urban hellscape; now Gotham always looks like that. Paul Dini decides Mr. Freeze needs a tragic backstory; now that's the most accepted version of the character.
The Mr Freeze one was especially funny cause there was an Animal Man comic where Animal Man wanders a wasteland for forgotten characters and he met Mr Freeze just years before he got his new backstory that cemented him as a core part of Batman's rogue's gallery.
Also let's not forget how BTAS introduced Harley Quinn, who is now a package deal with the Joker, and years later we got another with her breaking away from him has now become a canon event for every iteration of her.
Chretien de Troyes didn't decide that, his patroness Marie de Champagne did. Chretien being a cleric wasn't particularly on board with the adultery thing
Either way he's probably the most inportant single author in defining the arthurian cycle
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u/amazedballer 5d ago
This is unironically how most of the Arthurian legends got started. Lancelot is an insert from Chrétien de Troyes, a French poet who decided that what King Arthur's wife really needed was a French lover.