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From the very first page of Don Rosa's very first story, and he's already throwing several references to Carl Barks' stories at you. Primarily used in Comic Book fandom, Continuity Porn is a sometimes derogatory phrase sometimes affectionate name for a story overly focused on continuity, to the detriment of the story.
There are two main types of continuity porn, although they often overlap:
- The first is a story that exists primarily or only to resolve or explain continuity problems, without having a strong story of its own — sort of a canonical Fan Wank or Fix Fic. However, anything that promises to "fix all those niggling little problems we've accumulated over the years" is likely to not do that to the satisfaction of anyone, but nearly always produces something that just manages to introduce even more problems. It often involves a thick soup of Ret Con. This tends to be the most common type, especially for series with long histories and many writers/contributors behind it.
- The other type is where the Continuity Nods have become so thick and integral to the plot that the story is incomprehensible without detailed knowledge of the continuity. Nobody likes stories where there's no continuity and writers just ignore whatever they feel like, unless it's firmly established that Status Quo Is God or Negative Continuity is in place. On the other hand, only the most hardcore fans appreciate a reference to something that happened 14 years ago in Weird Anthologies #224½ (the issue that only came out in Guatemala with a run of 42 copies) to explain a key plot point.
Drawing the line between "good" and "bad" continuity is pretty subjective for either type, though, since fans have different expectations of exactly how much continuity is a good thing for the series. One fan's shameless continuity porn is another's "taking advantage of the rich history" or "cleverly and entertainingly fixing a long-standing problem."
This usually only happens with Long Runners, because they're the only ones with enough continuity to support it. Usually the introduction of Continuity Porn is a good sign that the inmates have started Running The Asylum. Continuity Porn is also a form of Pandering To The Base.
Despite being primarily associated with comics, the term seems to have originated in Star Trek fandom, perhaps ( unsurprisingly). It reached a wider audience when Enterprise executive producer Brannon Braga, who read the Trek forums once in a while during his tenure, mentioned in a Cinescape interview that he found it an apt description.
Compare Continuity Creep, Continuity Snarl and Armed With Canon.
Examples
Comic Books
- DC Comics
- One of the common criticisms of Infinite Crisis was that it was continuity porn in both senses of the term. DC in general is perceived to engage in 'hard continuity' (i.e., inconsistencies are deliberately explained) versus Marvel's 'softer' kind (inconsistencies, especially bad ones, are eventually just ignored).
- Zero Hour was explicitly supposed to clean up continuity problems caused by Crisis On Infinite Earths. Writer Geoff Johns' run on any book (Green Lantern, Flash, JSA, etc) will indulge on this at one point or another. As will Grant Morrison's.
- 52 veers into the second variety of continuity porn, though that might depend on who you ask. In its defence though, it is hard to do a yearlong series touching on every character in the DC Universe without getting a little esoteric sometimes.
- Alan Moore's League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen is assuredly the ultimate embodiment of this trope, being continuity porn for all continuities ever. Many sequences and moments in the stories seem to have no purpose other than for Moore to reference as many fictional places and characters as possible. To the extent of explaining Hyde's slow transformation from human to monster, and having a very small date range for the actual events (1891-1894, during Sherlock Holmes' supposed death after falling off a cliff with Moriarty. It is actually considered one of the Holmes sub-works despite having neither Sherlock or Watson).
- Roy Thomas's All-Star Squadron is the best example, often going to great lengths to "solve" continuity problems that nobody but Thomas even knew existed.
- In Pre Crisis Bronze Age Superman comics, DC's guy in charge of Superman continuity was Promoted Fanboy E. Nelson Bridwell. Bridwell adored the minutia of the Superman mythos, and whenever he personally penned a story, it was chock full of Continuity Nods, often to obscure Silver Age stuff. In stories focusing on the history of the character and his world (such as the original, pre-Crisis Krypton Chronicles and World of Krypton miniseries), this worked very well, but in stories that were set in the present day, the constant references did sometimes feel intrusive.
- Marvel Comics:
- Wolverine: Origins exists to "fully" detail Wolverine's mysterious past, has also been called continuity porn. Note that pretty much all of the hinted-at elements of Wolverine's past have already been revealed; Origins deals with this by making up an entirely new Ancient Conspiracy and trying to work it in around the edges. At this point, anything dealing with Wolverine's Expansion Pack Past is probably continuity porn by default.
- Lampshade Hanging/parody in an issue of She-Hulk, which promised to fix almost all of Marvel's past and future continuity problems. And did, sort of: any appearances by a character you don't like are actually a tourist from another universe cosplaying as that character.
- Not to mention that the entire Dan Slott run of She-Hulk abounded with often obscure jokes about Marvel continuity - to the point where they had the law firm with a COMIC BOOK COLLECTION and She-Hulk reads the first issue of... well, her.
- Chris Claremont's quasi-trilogy X-Men: The End pulled together tons of old storylines he either left hanging or were quashed by editors/other writers, along with a number of others, into a semi-Bad Future story that tried to reconcile the tangle that the X-Books had become.
- The infamous Continuity Xorn escapades. Three different writers gave three different takes in order to clean it up but each just got more and more convoluted and complicated that really the best thing to do was just throw it all into the sun.
- Avengers Forever features this heavily. Among other things, it explains how almost every major event in the history of the Avengers - and the histories of the Avengers in every parallel universe - was either caused by Immortus or cleaned up by him afterwards as part of a massive Xanatos Gambit to save the human race from the Time Keepers. It also spent an entire issue detailing the history of sometime Big Bad Kang the Conquerer. However, because time travel is an important part of the series, and because the story is generally good, it usually manages to get away with it.
- Marvel recently pulled one of these with Secret Invasion. Character derailment you say? Alien mole! Too many of one guy to make sense in universe? Alien double! Character death of your favorite minor character, even though it was a powerful move and strongly effected the rest of the characters? Alien doppleganger!
- Don Rosa's epic comic book series The Life And Times Of Scrooge Mc Duck, in which he carefully explains every single reference to the events of Scrooge's early life that Carl Barks ever made. Incredibly, despite Rosa's severe obsession with continuity, he still manages to tell a fantastic story at the same time. In his commentaries, he discusses the issue of how Barks kept changing the dates and timelines, and how many issues relating Scrooge's turn from a villain-character into a hero posed problems. He managed to insert some of them, like how Scrooge Mc Duck, who made his entire fortune square nevertheless managed to be a ruthless robber baron in Africa, but others he just gracefully ignored, such as a magic timeglass that was claimed to be the origin of Scrooge's wealth in one Barks story. If there's a lesson to be learned from these compromises, it is that knowing when to temper Continuity Porn with Broad Strokes helps make a great story.
- Depending on your definition for too many continuity nods, Hellboy may suffer from this to a degree. The great thing about the series is its rich interconnected story rewards those who know the fine details of the canon. The downside of this is that Hellboy's continuity spans 16 years worth of miniseries and oneshots spread out across five different comic series. Suffice to say that is a lot of baggage for the casual reader to unpack. A recent example of this problem is readers can only understand that the old man speaking to Gruagach in issue two of Hellboy: The Wild Hunt is the demon lord Astaroth if they read Hellboy: Box Full of Evil issue two (published about 8 years before Wild Hunt), which then means that Hell has offered its tacit support to the Queen of Blood and suggests that things are going to get much worse. For the informed all of this is implied without being stated, to the detriment of those who are only now entering the series.
- JLA/Avengers. It's nerd pornography from start to finish, from both universes.
Anime and Manga
- Macross Frontier. Notably, the continuity porn is only really noticeable to people who have been following the Macross franchise from the very beginning; it isn't so much the plot, as it is nearly every single scene having a reference to a different Macross series.
Film
- The Star Wars prequel trilogy. Sure they're good, but the whole thing is devoted to explaining the retcons in the original trilogy. And, to get as many characters from the OT into the backstory. I mean come on, there's supposed to be one hundred thousand trillion individuals in the entire galaxy, but they kept on bringing it back to old characters. Did Anakin really have to build C-3PO? Did the father of Boba Fett really have to be the template for the clone army?
- Die Another Day - everything from the title onwards is a tongue-in-cheek reference to other films in the series. It was basically a 20th film Milestone Celebration special.
Literature
- The Harry Potter series has more-or-less averted this. How? Basically, JK Rowling relegated Continuity Porn to Word Of God, thus (mostly) keeping it out of the actual books.
- David Brin's Foundation's Triumph is an extremely well-executed example.
- To specify, Thieves World was a series of books created by Robert Asprin where various authors would write short stories in a Shared Universe, the town of Sanctuary. As time went on authors would make references to their and other's stories in earlier books. But since the authors were off writing their own stories and not sitting in a room together to make sure it all fit, various problems started to arise and eventually the idea was abandoned.
- There are a few books in the New Jedi Order which are basically nothing but recalls to previous plots strung together with a weak story. There wasn't much cooperation among most writers before then, and so each writer often tried to ignore every other writer's output; NJO sometimes took things too far in the other direction.
- Another one of the rare non-comic examples: The Magician(1908) of William Somerset Maugham is that thick of nods to that time topical literature, the spiritists-movement, illusion-magic, alchemy and other loudy figures (like Cagliostro) that people without a large background knowledge of at least two mentioned topics won't get anything. At the very least, one can enjoy the novel a whole lot more - some might even say it's the only interesting part of the novel.
- "Ayla and the Tests", in the Whateley Universe, is probably this trope, since there is a ton of continuity polishing over every other character's stories for most of the Fall 2006 term, fixing a bunch of little tiny things the fans had spotted (or in a couple cases, things only the author had spotted).
Live Action TV
- Plenty of eighties Doctor Who stories began to suffer from this, but for the absolute nadir of the series, watch "Attack of the Cybermen", or for a lesser but no less relevant example, "Resurrection of the Daleks". Or rather, don't.
- Things went further in the Expanded Universe, with the stand-out example being War of the Daleks by John Peel, which Armed With Canon, did a Ret Con and Justifying Edit on thirty years of ad-hoc and contradictory Dalek history into a coherent whole and did a Take That against a particular Story Arc which the author abhorred. It did so by explaining entire stories as an elaborate Xanatos Gambit against the Doctor, who had set up a Xanatos Gambit in the already Continuity Porn-full "Remembrance of the Daleks". (Dear reader, I hope you got all that. We will have a quiz for you later.) There wasn't really much room for an actual story to fit in the book as well.
- In modern Who, "Turn Left" and "The Stolen Earth". Even obsessive fans of the new series were was a bit confused.
- "Journey's End". Otherwise known as "Crisis on Infinite Series".
- Judging by the cast list, this year's Christmas Special "The End of Time" looks like turning into this too. Russell T Davies likes this trope.
- Whereas the final episode of Torchwood Series 2 took precious minutes out of its running time to Retcon away an extremely minor continuity error which originated in Toshiko's debut appearance as a minor character in Doctor Who two years before!
- Arguably, the entire fourth season of Star Trek Enterprise (specifically the first type), which went so far as to have an episode explaining why the Klingons in the original series lacked the ridges on their foreheads (although there was a brief reference to this by Worf in DS9). Even though there were excellent episodes such as "The Forge", when a show has to go so far as elaborate on makeup changes from the original series to the rest of the franchise, then there's definitely a problem. See Running The Asylum.
- Star Trek novels get even worse. There's a Data-focused novel out there partially dedicated to explaining how Noonien Soong got into androids - and just to show off, they linked it to no less than two Star Trek: The Original Series episodes, "What Are Little Girls Made Of" and "Requiem for Methuselah". The actual plot got even worse, with every sentient machine in the history of Star Trek making an appearance.
- At times, Angel approached this in its references to Buffy The Vampire Slayer. However, some fans appreciated this, as spinoffs all to often ignore the parent show altogether.
- Lost is turning into this through the newer seasons. If they're not pandering to old continuity, they're throwing in new plots that intertwine with the current continuity and continuity we don't even know exists yet. And that's why we love it so much...
Music
- When the Police got back together to remake 'Don't Stand So Close To Me', the Music Video featured primarily excerpts from prior Police videos. The other components are either CGI of Police-related items and features, and the Police themselves standing and rotating (although Sting's costume is cute..as well as what's in the costume, too). At least among the videos were bits from the original song's video.
- Barenaked Ladies had a similar case; their music video for "Thanks That was Fun" is composed entirely of segments from their previous music videos with their mouths altered to sing along.
Video Games
- A major complaint about Metal Gear Solid 4 is that a lot of the story falls between this and Continuity Lock Out; containing references and themes from even the games on the MSX; bringing back minor dangling plot threads and references as MacGuffins, Applied Phlebotinum, and Chekhovs Guns; and fitting in fanservice cameos from almost every character who wasn't confirmed dead - as well as a couple of fanservice cameos from characters who were. Even a lot of the camera angles and character motions were lifted from previous games as blink-and-you'll-miss-it symbolism for the kind of hardcore fans who'd memorised every single cutscene. Of course, to some extent this was the whole point of the game, and anyone who wasn't extremely familiar with the whole saga really has no business playing a game designed to wrap everything up.
- Just read the Wikipedia page for the story. This Troper did that, then played the game, and it made sense to him.
- Mortal Kombat had at least four examples of this: the Konquest mode of Deception (which was quickly thrown into Dis Continuity despite a halfway-decent attempt to explain Where Are They Now for each of the forgotten characters), Armageddon (which was what Deception's Konquest Mode would've been if They Just Didnt Care), Annihilation (which tried to cram as many character references as possible, to the detriment of the plot), and Conquest (with a C, which gave several mortal characters Identical Grandfathers just so fans of the show can see them despite being 500 years before they were technically supposed to appear). And one has to wonder why people say plot doesn't matter in an MK game...
- The Legend Of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures was supposed to be one of these, with more explicit references to games like A Link to the Past than other games. Shigeru Miyamoto nixed the idea late in development because it would have distracted from the gameplay. Portions of deleted text on the game disc also indicate that elements like the Master Sword and the Ancient Hylian language would have also made cameos. Still, the game does have a lot of plot elements that a casual player wouldn't understand, like explaining how Ganon got his trident.
- Sonic Chronicles seems like it was headed this way at some point, given its extensive in-game history feature of the franchise's events.
- Halo 3, uses the second type a lot. Instead of picking up directly from its predecessor's Cliffhanger, begins with the Master Chief, John-117 (a name which is never directly stated in the games) inexplicably sky-diving from low earth orbit, to meet up with the human military. What's been going on in the meantime is only loosely explained in the game, which prefers to skirt around actual revelations of its plot for a significant portion of the game, instead giving you several Driving Levels to occupy your attention, while the series' plot is fleshed out in Alternate Reality Games, and numerous Easter Eggs. Then the game goes and hides its own Cliffhanger as a lengthened After Credits Scene if you beat the game on the hardest difficulty. There are also many, MANY nods at other Halo media throughout the game.
Web Animation
- Slowly but surely Homestar Runner is getting there.
- And there's DNA evidence to prove it! Witness how an Orphaned Punchline turned into a Call Back turned into a Running Gag gained a short of its own in just seven episodes.
- And then there's the cartoon "hremail #7". It exists to provide an origin story for the Strong Bad Email shorts and to parody the early years of the Homestar Runner website (the artwork is a pseudo-reversion to their earlier art style, and the jokes reference many abandoned early running gags). However, as the H*R wiki is quick to point out, the cartoon actually contradicts many prior cartoons, both old and recent.
Webcomics
- Parodied in Narbonic, with "Continuity Repairs with Rob & Andy".
- Happens quite a bit during the "bROKEN" arc from Sluggy Freelance. It seems like practically every strip for months on end has a footnote linking back to the past strips it references, some of which haven't been mentioned for nearly a decade.
- A noteworthy example is Bob & George. So much weird stuff happens all the damn time that it's impossible for everything to work. And it still does. Nothing happens by accident, everything is explained, everything fits. David Anez is a god when it comes to retconning.
Western Animation
- Arguably happened to Bender's Big Score, the first Futurama movie, though it could be argued that the film's time travel plot is a subversion, or even a deconstruction, of continuity porn itself. Also, when the population of Earth exits the Planet Express ship on Neptune, many characters from previous episodes can be seen.
- The Fully Absorbed Finale Batman Beyond episode of Justice League Unlimited, "Epilogue". In spades. And it was so worth it.
- The revised HD intro of The Simpsons arguably does this, featuring fan-favorite minor characters more than ever before; in fact, one of the first characters you see in this version of the intro is Ralph Wiggum, as opposed to a member of the Simpson family.
- The Allspark Allmanac is a continuity porno if there ever was one.
- Moral Orel, despite being an 11-minute claymation comedy series, has plenty. Orel has a poster for a band mentioned in episode one, and the entire basis for season 3 is a single, seemingly throw-away musical episode.
Fan Fiction
- The epic Star Wars/Star Trek crossover The Unity Saga, which features tons of characters from both franchises, including dipping heavily into the Star Wars Expanded Universe. It's highly advisable to have Memory Alpha and Wookieepedia on standby while reading it.
Real Life
- The Sagas, being semi-accurate descriptions of major events in Icelandic history all happening in the narrow time frame of around 200 hundred years. It's not unlikely for a main character from one saga to become a minor one in another, or vice versa.
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