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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.
Compare Continuity Creep, Continuity Snarl and Armed With Canon.
Examples
- 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.
- Mr. Thomas spent so much time on time-travel-to-explain-continuity that he forgot to have his characters do what they were supposed to do, which was fight in the bloody Second World War!!
- One of the common criticisms of DC's 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).
- Marvel's Wolverine: Origins series, which 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 a recent 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.
- This troper fully expects it to be made explicit with Iron Man in short order.
- 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.
- Avengers Forever is a famous one.
- Parodied in Narbonic, with "Continuity Repairs with Rob & Andy".
- 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.
- 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, "Remembrance 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 onthirty 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 "Rememberance 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". This Troper is an obsessive new series fan, and even he was a bit confused.
- "Journey's End". Good Lord, "Journey's End".
- Otherwise known as "Crisis on Infinite Series".
- 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 DS 9). 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.
- On a side note, Trek fandom appears to be where the term "continuity porn" originated (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.
- 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.
- 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.
- At times, Angel approached this in its references to Buffy The Vampire Slayer.
- The Fully Absorbed Finale Batman Beyond episode of Justice League Unlimited, "Epilogue". In spades. And it was so worth it.
- David Brin's Foundation's Triumph is an extremely well-executed example.
- 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.
- -and poor Rahne still didn't get to tell Dani she loved her...
Opinions differ on how much more sense it made than the main books, or if it should be the official future.
- Thieves' World descended into this as it went on.
- To specifiy, 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.
- Until three or four years ago, when Asprin's co-editor Lynn Abbey revived it for another try.
- 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.
- Not every single one; 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.
- 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.
- This is generally to be expected in any continuity-heavy series; while series in other media vary along a continuum from largely standalone episodic works to strictly serial stories, videogames are often assumed by default to be exist at the standalone end of the continuum, which can lead to a somewhat disproportionate response when a series like MGS comes along that very emphatically does not.
- 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...
- Marvel's 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.
- That was inside his head. Or not.
- 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.
- 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?
- Considering how lame some of the new characters were...
- Why does nearly every single fighter craft from before A New Hope resemble an X-Wing, a TIE fighter, or some combination of both? This extends all the way back to Knights Of The Old Republic Era, whose Cool Ship, the Ebon Hawk, happens to look vaguely like the Millenium Falcon, and is also believed to be the fastest ship in the galaxy.
- 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.
- 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.
- HA! Compared to the Wold Newton Universe, LoEG is practically a three-character fairy tale!
- 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.
- Here's a music example: 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.
- 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.
- Pretty much all of This Troper's fanfiction for Warcraft III, Fallout 3, and TES 4:Oblivion falls under this heading in some way due to her being overly fond of minor characters from video games and wishing to expand on vague notations in original canon.
- 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.
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