Primarily used in
Comic Book fandom,
Continuity Porn is a derogatory term 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.
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 #224 1/2 (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
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.
- 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 precieved to engage in 'hard continuity' (i.e., inconsistencies are deliberately explained) versus Marvel's 'softer' kind (inconsistencies, especially bad ones, are eventually just ignored).
- Another Crisis Crossover from DC, 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- People should definitely watch Remembrance as this troper needs the royalties.
- Things went further in the Expanded Universe, with the stand-out example being 'War of the Daleks': a book that attempted to Ret Con and Justifying Edit some thirty years of ad-hoc and contradictory Dalek history into a coherent whole - and did so by explaining entire episodes as an elaborate Xanatos Gambit. 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.
- Arguably, the entire fourth season of Star Trek: Enterprise, which went so far as to have an episode explaining how the Klingon race grew the ridges on their foreheads by the time of the original series. 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.
- That doesn't change the fact that Season 4 was still the best season of the show.
- Slowly but surely Homestar Runner is getting there.
- 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. 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.
- 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.
- 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. However, it also succeeds in making the events of Metal Gear Solid 2 make a lot more sense.
- 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.
