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This page is not compatible with the Alternate Universe page.
Alternate universes for fun and profit.
Anime has several different distribution paths in Japan, depending on its format -- motion pictures in theatres, OVAs in direct-to-consumer sales, and 26+ episode-long series on television. It is not uncommon for an anime to transfer from one distribution path/format to another. This is most frequently seen in shows that enjoy great success as OVAs; they jump to broadcast, and what was once effectively a miniseries becomes a story it takes an entire season to tell. Alternately, a successful series can become a movie.
When such a move is made, it's common for the story to simply be retold in the new medium, often with radical changes in both plot and characterization. The result is an Alternate Continuity -- a story that is no less "official" than the original, but which cannot be reconciled with it. It effectively lives in a different universe. Sometimes this forms the basis of a Series Franchise.
Oftentimes, an alternate continuity is unintentionally started when a show based on an unfinished series of a different medium runs out of material. See Overtook The Manga for this trope in detail.
Be warned, though: sometimes an Alternate Continuity is the occasion for Adaptation Decay. See also Elseworld and Canon Discontinuity.
When a show's writers make the Alternate Continuity their new "main" Continuity while discarding the old one, it becomes a Continuity Reboot.
Examples:
Anime and Manga
- El Hazard The Magnificent World was an OVA series that became El-Hazard: Wanderers on TV. In the process most of the relationships Makoto had with the women in his life were altered dramatically, with his primary romantic interest shifting from Ifurita to Princess Rune-Venus. Ifurita, the OVA's breakout character, suffered greatly in the shift, changing in appearance, personality, and story role; her tragic/romantic arc was completely obliterated, and she was turned into a cheap comedy device.
- Later, a second OVA series based on the first was produced that continued the plot, but introduced several new characters and a new "ultimate weapon of doom". That success was then followed with a 12-episode TV series which pulled a All Just A Dream at the end. A final special was released for the TV series, the required Beach Episode.
- The TV series Revolutionary Girl Utena was turned into a movie, Adolescence of Utena, which attempted to retell the 39-episode story in 100 minutes by filtering it through the hindbrain of Salvador Dali and lacing it with LSD. The result, while visually breathtaking, bears only the most rudimentary resemblance to the original. This is further complicated by the fact that the film is based on an actual book of manga, which is in turn a stylized adaptation and condensation of the series, et cetera.
- RahXephon also made the leap to a movie from TV, attempting to cram its extensive and complex storyline into less than two hours while at the same time providing new Back Story. In the process, one character was completely eliminated, and several others rewritten dramatically (including putting one literally to sleep for most of the film).
- A television series of Ah My Goddess (which had been made into a 5-episode OVA in the early-middle 1990s) premiered in Japan in January 2005. The first episode alone makes it clear that it is an Alternate Continuity, although the exact degree by which it will diverge from the manga and OVAs remains to be seen.
- It ran for one and a half seasons, plus two extra episodes that have not been translated except for Fan Subs. The series was better than the OVAs, in this troper's opinion.
- Tenchi Muyo is perhaps the king of alternate continuities, with at least eight different alternate "worlds" (some, such as Pretty Sammy, have more than one continuity themselves). Oddly enough, the Tenchi movies are not separate continuities in and of themselves, but dovetail into one or the other of the TV series.
- Futakoi and the second TV series, Futakoi Alternative are a quite obvious example. The first being a fairly normal harem-type anime, while the second was much more madcap comedy.
- Mai-HiME branches off into a few distinct alternate continuities (and even the plots of its anime and manga are distinctly different from one another). There's the Mai-Otome anime and mangaverse, where most of the characters from the previous series are rewritten and placed in a different universe and mixed in with a slew of new characters; and there's the Mai-HiME Destiny light novel series, which does the same thing, but simply moves the girls to a different part of the country.
- Sister Princess and Sister Princess Repure contradict each other on several key points, most notably on whether or not the sisters are living with Wataru. Since these cannot be reconciled, the series are clearly separate continuities.
- Mega Man NT Warrior is essentially an alternate version of the regular Mega Man universe, with the major change being that the Robot Masters and other major characters are sentient programs instead of robots.
- Meanwhile, the games, anime, and manga of NT Warrior are all separate continuities.
- The anime adaptation of Rozen Maiden differs significantly from the manga - to the point that none of the events in the second season even happened in the original.
- Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha is an Alternate Continuity of the game and OVA Triangle Heart where her brother and sister are ninja-like bodyguards battling a terrorist group that killed their father (who is alive in Nanoha.)
- The Digimon series had at least six continuities.
- Futari Wa Pretty Cure has two others; Futari Wa Pretty Cure Splash Star and Yes! Precure 5.
- After the series-ending choices the creators of the first Mahou Sensei Negima made, Negima!? decided to not even attempt to follow the manga plot after the basic plot and character concept.
- Yu-Gi-Oh, which not only consists of the original anime/manga, [[Yu-Gi-Oh GX GX]] and [[Yu-Gi-Oh 5 Ds 5D's]], but also Yu-Gi-Oh R, a Side Story to the original series; an alternate retelling of GX; two Non Serial Movies (one for each anime); and the Capsule Monsters mini-series (also non-canonical).
- X/1999 was released first as a movie, then again as a TV series five years later. The movie, for reasons of length and limited information, had an extremely simplified plotline. Also, both were finished before the manga, and all three killed different characters and resolved the plot in different ways.
- Kujibiki Unbalance has the OVAs included in Genshiken (consisting of episodes 1, 21, and 25 of an imaginary TV series); a radio drama based on this series; and a TV reimagining of the concept, which features very different character designs.
- The manga-ka gave a nod to this difference in the manga, in which the original Kujibiki Unbalance is discussed as though it were also a manga. The changes made in the Kujibiki Unbalance TV series is discussed by the characters in the manga as though it were the first adaptation of "Kuji-an" to video, rather than the second, as it is in our world.
- Bubblegum Crisis does this with its sequel Bubblegum Crisis: Tokyo 2040. Ironically, while the initial hardsuit designs were more or less lifted directly off the end of the original series, of the characters, only Big Bad Brian J. Mason has any resemblance to his OAV counterpart. This was done for legal reasons: the team making 2040 had the rights to the hardsuit designs, but not the character designs.
- Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei: Subverted/parodied in the first episode of season 2. The episode initially sets itself up as an alternate continuity, but switches right back to normal half way through the episode.
- Gravitation has some major differences between the manga (that came first) and the anime adaptation. Because the anime series was only 13 episodes long, one character (Maiko) is completely written out. Also, in the anime, Shuichi is already out of high school and signed to NG when he meets Eiri, but in the manga he is still a high school student whose talents are undiscovered.
- The three manga adaptations of Code Geass are all Alternate Continuities of varying degrees. Lelouch of the Rebellion is mostly a straight adaptation of the show, but with no Humongous Robots and a greater focus on humor. Suzaku of the Counterattack focuses on the Childhood Friend to the point of distilling three of the anime's characters into a single new one to better suit the plot. Nightmare of Nunnally is a completely alternate take where the hero's Ill Girl little sister becomes a super-powered Loli with a mystical mecha fighting other super-powered Lolis with mystical mecha.
- Gundam tends to spawn a lot of these, given how many versions of the same story they have (TV series, movie trilogy, manga, novel, video game...) in addition to the seven different Alternate Universes the franchise has created.
- The Death Note live-action films eventually veer away from the plot as seen in the Manga and Anime versions.
- In Neon Genesis Evangelion's last episode, Shinji has a vision of his life as a typical high school comedy anime (except, you know, it still has Humongous Mecha) during a Mind Rape. This concept was so popular as to spawn several Dating Sim games and the manga Angelic Days.
- Another Alternate Continuity titled Gakuen Datenroku goes way farther in its differences: NERV is a Catholic boarding school; EV As are actually unique conventional weapons (i.e., Asuka wields a whip while Shinji has a handgun, etc.); Angels are instead disembodied consciousnesses that can kill and take over any body they choose; and the motivation for killing the Angels is to collect their Cores so Yggdrasil won't collapse, destroying all realities.
- Ai Yori Aoshi started as a manga (now concluded after 17 issues) that became the anime. The anime rearranged the order and details of some events, but maintained much of the same storyline. It ran for one and a half seasons, unfortunately ending before the manga, leaving the primary Story Arc (Kaoru and Aoi) unresolved. Very roughly speaking, the anime covers much of the events from issues 1-10 of the manga.
Live Action TV
- When the original Doctor Who series was taken off the air, the BBC chose to allow it to continue as a series of novels. Oh, and some audio books. And some comics. Each of these ignored, and often contradicted, the canon of the other media. Exactly which, if any, of these the new series takes as canon is unknown; the fact that one of the novels was adapted into a two-part episode with a different Doctor to the novel (and many of the themes removed, and a vastly reduced body count) further complicates this.
- The final novel in the Eighth Doctor Adventures series, The Gallifrey Chronicles, suggested that the complex events of the Eighth Doctor's lifespan led to the creation of three possible Ninth Doctors - presumably, one for each of the major spin-off lines (novels and audios) and one for the 2005 series.
- Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles branches off from the movie continuity after T2: Judgement Day, disregarding Rise of the Machines. The upcoming Terminator Salvation will continue the Rise of the Machines continuity.
- Stargate SG-1 continues from Stargate the movie, disregarding Devlin and Emmerich's backstory and the five novels based on it. And if the two movie sequels to Stargate had been made, they would have disregarded both, resulting in yet a third continuity.
Video Games
- Ultima Online is set in an alternate continuity wherein the Avatar never returned to Britannia after the events of the first Ultima game.
- The Metal Gear series has a few alternate continuities. There are two alternate sequels to the original game: Snake's Revenge for NES (which was actually the first sequel released, as Hideo Kojima hadn't planned on making one) and Ghost Babel for Game Boy Color.
- Metal Gear Acid is an alternate continuity based on Metal Gear Solid. All it really has in common is a quasi-real-world setting, and the main character, whose personality and backstory are both softened slightly. By the second Acid they'd abandoned all premise of a real-world setting and thrown in lots of cyborgs, People Jars and all sorts of mayhem. This time the main character wasn't even the same - he looked the part and had the same name but turned out to be a biological machine made in the main character's likeness.
- In a partially successful effort to salvage the fallen Spyro franchise, the Legend of Spyro trilogy completely discards all continuity from the previous games except the two main characters, Spyro and Sparx, who still go through major changes in appearance and personality. The developers have gone as far as calling the first game A New Beginning to highlight this.
- They're clearly throwing in a lot of shout outs, with Sparx in ANB eating butterflies, and with the upcoming appearance of Hunter - originally a character in Spyro 2.
- The Nasuverse in general.
- The Tsukihime game has five character routes that cannot all be possible in the same universe. The anime adaptation makes deviations of its own. The Melty Blood fighting game is based on a planned-but-unreleased route from the game. Stories in the game's sequel, Kagetsu Tohya, also follow different continuities from each other, following game routes or just making up scenarios. After Kagetsu Tohya was made, the game's creator admitted the "canon" route never made it into the original game.
- Shin Megami Tensei 3: Nocturne and Persona 3 both kick off Alternate Continuities for their series.
- Maybe. Devil Summoner: Raidou Kuzunoha vs. the Soulless Army seems to say that all of the Shin Megami Tensei games happen in the same continuity.
- Besides, all the Persona games are in the same continuity. Word Of God and all that.
- The King Of Fighters may or may not be an alternate continuity to the Art of Fighting and Fatal Fury universe, depending on SNK's mood today (they've said it is and it isn't at different times). What is certain is that the Maximum Impact series is an alternate continuity to The King of Fighters.
- The Legend Of Zelda: The Wind Waker was moved to an Alternate Continuity from the one depicted in Twilight Princess, both of which sprang from the ending of Ocarina of Time. It wasn't due to any real faults with the game; merely that Nintendo understood that most fans didn't really want every new sequel to take place in a flooded Hyrule.
Film
- There's Highlander, then Highlander 2 which considers the original canon, then Highlander 3 which considers the original but not Highlander 2 canon, there's Highlander: Endgame which considers the continuity of the first movie and Highlander: The Series to be true (although that Ret Cons the last season of the show) and an upcoming fifth movie called Highlander: The Source. No, we don't get it either.
- Superman Returns, while set within the universe of the Christopher Reeve movies, takes place five years after the second movie and uses Canon Dis Continuity to ignore the third and fourth films.
- Men In Black had at least two continuities. The first movie ends with J neuralizing K and taking L as a new partner. At the beginning of the second, we find L quit between movies, and the first third of the movie follows J trying to restore K's memories. In the animated series, however, J, K, and L are all agents at the same time. There were a series of tie-in novels with J and L, but these could be slotted into the timespan between movies.
- The most recent incarnation of James Bond in Casino Royale portrays Bond as a new and inexperienced agent. However, it is set in modern times, and therefore after every previous Bond film, and includes several characters that were later additions to the series of films, such as the female M. The movies are also highly inconsistent with the original Ian Fleming novels.
- The Godzilla series has done this several times to the point where each of the movies from Godzilla 2000 and onward (with the exception of the two with Mechagodzilla) are their own continuity branching off from the original.
Western Animation
- Transformers, to the point where even relatively dedicated fans still can't really keep track without a map. This is compounded by the companies responsible for the franchise in the US and Japan actually disagreeing on continuity--Transformers: Cybertron (known as Galaxy Force in Japan), for instance, is a standalone series according to Takara, but Hasbro considers it to be in continuity with the previous two franchises in the "Unicron Trilogy"; Armada aka Micron Legend and Energon aka Super Link. Many toy design elements make it clear that this was the original intent, but that the Japanese makers of the animated series took it upon themselves to declare it a standalone continuity, requiring some awkward redubbing in the American version to link it back to the Trilogy.
- Takara later retconned Cybertron back into being a sequel to Arm/Ene.
- And, of course, the new Transformers Animated is off on its own continuity.
- SatAM Sonic The Hedgehog is very different from the games, the titular character being the only perfect match between them. Unfortunately, Sega doesn't quite understand that that SatAM is an Alternate Continuity, and so has caused sometimes painful Executive Meddling in the Archie comic based on it to attempt to use it as a merchandising vehicle for the almost-completely-unrelated game series. The other TV shows (Adventures, Sonic Underground, and Sonic X) and comics also qualify.
Comic Books
Radio, Literature, Video Games, Live Action TV and Film
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