It’s impossible for Blizzard to write a story without making copious retcons. Why act like you can’t do the same?
But I digress. My point is that the existing retcons render the backstory nonsensical. It’s impossible not to make retcons simply to make sense of the mess that is canon.
To what? What is happening? The backstory is so nonsensical that it is impossible for me to imagine a sequel no matter how far into the future. The story of Starcraft is just that freaking stupid.
If you want me to imagine a deliberately stupid sequel, then I can do that easy.
Anyway, I had a couple ideas for rebooting Raynor and Kerry and the campaigns.
The campaigns are not the be-all-end-all of the franchise’s story, but serve as introductions to the setting. The scale is much smaller than canon, with the character’s having far more limited power compared to canon’s epic fantasy god heroes. There’s no fixed number of campaigns either. Any interesting story could get its own campaign. I guess you could think of them more as mission packs if the terminology better fits.
The below suggestions are intended as advertisements for a particular character or faction.
Arcturus Mengsk campaign: This is basically episode 1 from Mengsk’s perspective, showing him steadily going from morally questionable hero to broken borderline villain. The player gets to chose which atrocities to commit and the campaign deliberately gives you only bad options. Sometimes the campaign mocks you by offering seeming good options that end in game over because grim-dark (e.g. if you decide to save/spare Kerry then you die, either to assassins or zerg). To twist the knife further, Kerry is a romance option but dies either way.
Magistrate campaign: Raynor teams up with Tassadar to protect Mar Sara rather than glassing it. They team up with the Mar Sara Separatists, led by the Mar Sara Magistrate. The Magistrate is the player character and is a synthetic person (which are technically canon) so the player can project onto him/her like the main character of an RPG with dialogue choices and such. The terran campaign is basically WoL but without the crazy Kerry romance or space magic macguffins.
Kerry could go in many directions, but why choose? Kerry dies and is resurrected by Möbius’ experiments. She is rescued by Valerian, who joins Team Raynor, and they plot against Arcturus.
Raynor, Kerry, Valerian, Tassadar, etc are all romance options for the Magistrate. This is a transparent attempt at cashing in on rule34.
Junior Cerebrate campaign: At the same time, the zerg make another clone of Kerry to be the player character cerebrate’s pet, similar to how some cerebrates have pet torrasques. The PC cerebrate has RPG-level dialogue options for the player to project on it. The QoB advocates violence at every opportunity no matter how unnecessary, even towards other loyal zerg, but fawns over the PC to the point of being a romance option. The zerg campaign is evolution focused and goes to great length to show how cool and interesting the scary vicious zerg are without making them forced heroes.
PC ultimately revealed to be, gasp, the rebooted Amon! Well, technically the xel’naga essence consumed and apportioned by the Overmind, but this still makes the PC the big bad evil guy. His zerg motivation to consume the strongest species to pursue perfection automatically makes more sense than the canon motive to be pointlessly nihilistic.
Conclave campaign: The protoss campaign takes place during the invasion of terran space. The PC serves the Conclave. The story is pure propaganda intended to make the Conclave and Khala and Protoss Empire as interesting and cool as possible while taking every opportunity to make the dark protoss look bad.
Confederate campaign: like the Conclave campaign, this is propaganda intended solely to make players invest in the Confederacy.
Valerian/Umojan campaign: This campaign is about the Umojans, with Valerian as the PC. It features their forgotten plot points like the cold war against the Confederacy, alliance with the protoss, etc.
KMC campaign: Another campaign intended solely as advertising for a particular faction.
Stukov campaign: Showing his progression from earthling boy-scout to heartless cyborg zerg abomination.
Duran campaign: The rebooted Duran isn’t a xel’naga (they were all eaten by the zerg) but a protoss replicant. He has the downloaded soul of a protoss whose tribe was exterminated during the Aeon of Strife. He is responsible for creating the warp rift between Earth and Koprulu, and Doran Routhe was an identity he assumed. His goal is to exterminate ALL protoss in vengeance for the loss of his tribe. He’s completely insane with grief. His original protoss name is Durandal.
I know a lot of these are kinda silly, but I’m typing on my phone and I’m lazy right now.