Editing Jander Sunstar (section)

==5th Edition==
[[File:Jander-5e.jpg|thumb|right|350px|What bad retcons do to characters.]]
...And then, out of fucking nowhere, he came back for ''Descent Into Avernus,'' of all god damn places, where, it turns out, he became an integral piece of Zariel's retconned backstory. Turns out that he actually did escape the Demiplane of Dread somehow, and joined an army of good-aligned characters in Elturel, and rode into Hell with Zariel back when she was still just a badass Solar and not the fiendish combination of devil and woodchipper she became. The problem is that dear Jander was quite wrong when he thought that surviving Ravenloft was as bad as surviving literal Hell, and he panicked real bad. He ran for the Prime again and left Zariel to get captured by [[Asmodeus]] when he did. Needless to say, that chipped away at his sanity, and he eventually killed himself after begging [[Lathander]] for forgiveness.

Which, obviously, he didn't get. After pissing off [[Eldath]], [[Torm]], and [[Lathander]] in just one career, nobody listened to his bitch-ass prayer, and he woke up in Avernus with a huge chunk of metal lodged through his chest, staked out on a hill made of iron tree sculptures for [[Stirge|Stirges]] to inject the blood of fellow traitors into him forever, which is [[awesome|metal as fuck.]] Players can rescue his soul from the tree, which at least lets him die for keeps, though doing so prompts a boss fight with the one of Zariel's former paladin underlings who feels no remorse about becoming a narzugon.

Classic example of a clueless lack of understanding of what fans actually want turning what was probably intended as a neat little nod into anti-fanservice; people who knew about Jander generally liked him, and people who didn't know about Jander wouldn't care either way if he'd just been some other random NPC. Instead, it combines character assassination with a confusing and fucked retcon that makes a hash of his story and the story of the plane as a whole. The author of ''Vampires of the Mist'' herself, Christie Golden, vocalized her disdain over Jander's treatment on Twitter, pointing out that it made little sense.

===And Then===

Jander returns in ''Van Richtein's Guide to Ravenloft'' in yet another form.  Now there are at least three Janders (yes, we know it's stupid): one in Morden, one in Avernus, and one other somewhere else. Now everybody gets what they want, right?

No, because now his original self's daughter/ward/adoptee/dhampir is out to murder him (kind of) and he and Strahd are at war again, and Jander duplicated himself with a machine in Morden trying to cure vampirism, which explains ''nothing.'' Oh well, at least now people can have their favorite emo vampire however they want him.

===Etc===
Overall, Jander's treatment in the books (both hardback adventures and the paperback novels that spawned him) has been quite emblematic of how the IP-juggling of Ravenloft in general has occurred. Part of that stems from the wildly different tone in which all Ravenloft materials are presented nowadays that Wizards et al. are more aware of how dangerous the portrayals of the poor, foreigners, minorities, the crippled, and other 'outsiders' to society are in horror, and Jander's history of interactions with Anna are quite hard to read in a modern context. The awkward timing of Zariel and Jander's history retcon makes this even stranger, given how much the timeline has to jigger to allow Jander to have been present as both a founding Hellrider in the 8th century and a companion of Zariel in the 14th century. Still, that's WotC's horror writing in a nutshell: retcons everywhere, with all the awkwardness that entails.

===Gallery===
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SAVRA SUNSTAR CONFRONTS HER FATHER, THE VAMPIRE JANDER SUNSTAR.png
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[[Category:Dungeons & Dragons]]
[[Category:Ravenloft]]