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Stradleyism: The act of dismissing an element of canon altogether on grounds of it being "stupid", without taking the effort to do something interesting with it.
As the Discontinuity trope shows, there are certain elements in canon works that fans don't want to remember, because they're viewed as stupid, unpopular, or just plain don't make sense within that universe. If their complaints are loud enough, and if the writers agree, this can lead to the offending element being written out of canon altogether.
See the highly similar Dork Age. Compare Authors Saving Throw, where writers try to explain or otherwise retcon a work instead of ignoring it completely. Compare Discontinuity Nod where the fan hate is acknowledged without necessarily going to the extremes of Canon Discontinuity. A Continuity Reboot turns everything before a certain point in time into Canon Discontinuity.
Sometimes the discontinuity is more subtle, such as a single line of dialogue or the specifics of an event. Besides those things, everything else is in canon. When that happens they are treating it in Broad Strokes. Note that this trope has to do with the creators putting something out of continuity. For the Fanon version see Dis Continuity. See also Continuity Reboot, Alternative Continuity, Broad Strokes. Old Shame works usually get this treatment.
Examples:
Anime and Manga
- The last hundred or so pages of Battle Angel Alita are ignored by the renewed Battle Angel Alita: Last Order; originally intended as an adaptation of the last level of the game of the comic, it has spiraled into a second story longer than the original that is still ongoing. It should be noted that in this case, the original ending was an effort to avoid Author Existence Failure. After He Got Better instead, he decided to do it right.
- Rumors have recently cropped up that neither Four Kids Entertainment nor Konami of America want to touch Season 4 of Yu-Gi-Oh GX or the Playstation Portable game Tag Force 3 (which contains elements of Season 4 in it) with a thirty-nine-and-a-half-foot pole, instead favoring bringing over Yu-Gi-Oh 5Ds and a Playstation 2 game based on the series, instead; whether this is just Executive Meddling in a rush to cash in on the new series, or an active attempt to deem Season 4's Seasonal Rot non-canon in the western world (should the rumors prove true) are unknown.
- Gainax's Nadia The Secret of Blue Water suffered from poor-quality episodes in its second half (23-34, known as the "infamous island episodes", even though three of them are set in Africa), with not only subpar animation, but with episodes and characterizations both irrelevant to and out of character with the main plot. Fans and critics reacted negatively to these episodes; even director Hideaki Anno admitted he only would have saved episodes 30 and 31 if given the choice of eliminating these episodes. In fact, he created a compilation of the series called "The Nautilus Story", which deletes much of the island/Africa continuity.
- The Dragon Ball MMORPG Dragon Ball: Online ignores GT and even certain elements in the rest of the anime. This is likely a result of Akira Toriyama having creative contribution to the series.
- The animated version of Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle contains a discontinuity with the "Tokyo Revelations" OAVs ignoring the last filler arc from the broadcast series and picking up right after the escape from the Rekort library. Given the shoddy quality of said filler this is generally agreed to have been for the best.
- Macross II has been officially been shunted off into its own private universe. 'Do You Remember Love' is officially a film made in the Macross universe.
- Nothing from the Sun Wukong arc of Shamo has been mentioned once in subsequent chapters. The arc that followed it was a flashback arc that followed a different character, and when the series finally came back to protagonist Ryo Narushima he had become a washed-up prize fighter, as opposed to the near demi-god he was at the end of the Sun Wukong arc.
- The second Digimon Tamers movie is mostly about a Digimon attacking on Ruki's birthday and mind-controlling her with a song she used to sing with her father. It also seemed to latch on to the idea planted in the final episode that the Tamers could use the portal Takato found in Guilmon's house to reunite with their partners. It was written and produced without the input of the head writers, however, and a CD drama released later reveals that the kids had yet to reunite with their partners even a year later, and revolved around them sending messages to the Digital World that their partners might stumble upon one day. (One of the writers speaks highly of the movie on his website, however, and the drama has a scene of Ruki humming the song from the movie.)
Comic Books
- The Gargoyles comic, written by the series' original head writer and officially promoted by Disney, ignores the third season, save for the first episode, which it largely retells with the first two issues. Read it.
- This seems to happen to Spider-Man often:
- The infamous "Clone Saga" has been widely dismissed by fans as a disastrous glitch, whilst much of the continuity established in it has been subsequently ignored even by Marvel Comics itself, Marvel have never entirely forgotten about it, using elements for the MC2-based Spider-Girl canon.
- The more recent "Sins Past" storyline — in which Spidey's dead ex, Gwen Stacy, is revealed to have slept with the Green Goblin, resulting in superpowered twin babies — is, if not quite Dis Continued just yet, considered to be well on its way there. Note that this was due to Executive Meddling; the original reveal was that she had slept with Peter and they were his, but higher-ups felt that having children would make him "too old".
- Another series written out of continuity was Spider-Man: Chapter One, which ineptly updated several bits of Spider-Man's origin; for instance, the Sandman and Norman Osborn were now related, as a way to explain their similar-looking hair.
- Marvel's vague statements either wrote Trouble out of continuity, or said it never was officially part of continuity. This limited series implied that Peter's Aunt May was actually his mother, and gave birth to him when she was a teenager in high school. (Note that it couldn't be in continuity anyway, as May is explicitly in her seventies when Peter is in his twenties.)
- The writers of the Disney Adventure Power Rangers SPD comic conveniently retcon the reasons behind A-Squad's defection, turning it into Mind Control instead of a voluntary Face Heel Turn. Apparently, they don't like the idea of Not Brainwashed Rangers (up until then, all evil Rangers were either created that way as monsters, or were Brainwashed And Crazy if they were to join the team).
- The infamous "25 Years Later" arc of the Archie Comics Sonic The Hedgehog series depicted two different alternate futures for Mobius, one of which was ironically created as a result of attempts to change the other. Neither one was mentioned again after the arc ended. Even more egregious, the character of Lara-Su, Knuckles' and Julie-Su's future daughter and a major player in the arc, vanished along with it, even though her character was introduced in yet another alternate future story written before "25 Years Later".
- Although Sonic Universe seems to be picking up where it left off with the "30 Years Later" 4-part story (in which Lara-Su is a major character).
- Although the current Author has stated that Mobius ___ years later in general isn't canon, and is only one possible future.
- Jon Sable Freelance: Creator Mike Grell's later uses of Jon Sable have ignored the 27 issues of Sable written by Marv Wolfman.
- In the finale of The New Titans, Starfire is revealed to be pregnant. It's never mentioned again. But it's not unusual for Titans members to be subject to Dis Continuity.
- The third volume of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic book, published by Image Comics as the official continuation to the Mirage-produced series, was completely ignored when TMNT co-creator Peter Laird returned to write volume 4.
- In the rebooted series The Hulk, an angry response to writer/artist John Byrne's reboot of the titular character, particularly his "Man of Steeling" of the Hulk in Annual #1, was responded to in the title's letters page by something along the lines of, "When you not like what happen, do what Hulk do: Pretend it never happened." Thus, the six issues and an annual were simply removed out of existence. (And in fairness, probably rightfully so.)
- A particularly brutal version happened in the first issue of the Clan Destine / X-Men mini-series. In one line of dialog, Alan Davis (Clan Destine's creator and artist/writer on the original Clan mini) rendered the entire second half of the original mini (i.e. The Issues He Didn't Write) as All Just A Dream.
- The 2006 series of The Warlord has been largely ignored in The DCU continuity. With the 2009 series continuing the original series, it seems the 2006 series has slipt completely into the realm of Canon Discontinuity.
- And Mike Grell's 1992 mini-series off-handedly dismissed the death of Tara which occurred in isues after Grell left the original series.
- Countdown to Final Crisis was so bad, that Grant Morrison basically ignored the entire series when putting the finishing touches on Final Crisis. This was mainly due to the fact that Countdown was derailed so badly, that the events soon had little to do with what the series was actually counting down to. Two cases in point: Jimmy Olsen never got superpowers and turned into a Turtle-Boy and wrestled with Darkseid in downtown Metropolis, and the very nature of the Monitors was so far off than what they were intended to be in Final Crisis, they literally could have been a separate species.
- Countdown has become sort of an Elephant In The Living Room over at DC; they can't really declare the whole thing discontinuity because there are still some effects of it around (the people who died in it are (mostly) still dead, Ray Palmer is back and the Red Robin suit had to come from somewhere) but they seem determined to just pretend it never happened.
- Years before the well-known Continuity Snarl of Hawkman, there was a story, in the original Silver Age 1960's Hawkman series, which threatened to reveal Carter Hall's identity as Hawkman. He ended up protecting his identity but publically revealing that he's a space alien. Needless to say, this was ignored later.
- An odd example is The Sovereign Seven, a team of humanoid aliens created by Chris Claremont for DC Comics. They were part of the Genesis Crisis Crossover, and at one point Power Girl became a membe of the team. And then, in the final issue, it turned out they were entirely fictional within the DCU. This appears to have been for the opposite reason to most Canon Discontinuity; Claremont wanted to seperate his (creator-owned) characters from The Verse once his book was cancelled.
Film
- Superman Returns ignores Superman III and IV, instead having Superman leave for five years at some point after Superman II.
- Rocky Balboa ignores the premise of Rocky V; as Rocky considers coming out of retirement in the sixth movie, the another-punch-could-kill-him brain injury that keeps him out of the ring in the fifth movie is never mentioned.
- G-Saviour, the Live Action Adaptation of Gundam.
- The Godzilla franchise is particularly infamous for this. In fact, there are so many alternate universe that all but TWO (IE: Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla and Tokyo SOS) of the Millennium (1999-2004) films take place in different timelines.
- When the Godzilla franchise was rebooted with the Heisei series in the '80s, they ignored every film produced up to that point besides the original Godzilla.
- Likewise, the Gamera films of the 1960s do NOT take place in the same universe as the Gamera films of the 1990s.
- Highlander is possibly one of the most retconned canons in existence. Pretty much all iterations of the franchise except the original movie as canon, with a few various Retcons, but tend to ignore each other:
- The second movie retcons when MacLeod and Ramirez first met, now taking place on an alien planet.
- The updated version of the second movie re-retcons when MacLeod and Ramirez first met, now taking place on Earth, but in the distant past.
- The TV series ignores the second movie, and retcons the ending of the first.
- The cartoon TV series... well... Does anyone really know if it follows ANY sort of previous canon?
- It accepts some of the flashback stuff from the first movie (there are immortals, two of them are Connor and Ramirez) and ignores everything else, including the bits of the first movie set in 1980s New York.
- The third movie ignores the TV series and the second movie.
- The fourth and fifth movies follows the TV series' continuity, while ignoring the second and third movies.
- ...and apparently someone has bought the rights to (insert drumroll here) remake the original.
- George Lucas has very publicly decreed that the Star Wars Holiday Special does not form part of the Star Wars canon. Which is a shame to those of us who have always wondered exactly how Harvey Korman fitted into the Empire's plans for galactic domination.
- The second X-Files movie I Want To Believe only really acknowledges the events of the last few years of the series and the alien Myth Arc as much as it has to. Baby William and Mulder's being in hiding get a mention, but other than that the focus is on a stand-alone X-File in the style of the show's best years. It's not quite Canon Discontinuity as the creators have said they *might* revisit the alien invasion plot at some point, it's more like the unwieldy plot of the last few seasons has been Put On A Bus for now.
- Gene Roddenberry stated that he found Star Trek V The Final Frontier to be "apocryphal in some respects". It is unclear what aspects these were but numerous fans have taken it to mean that he didn't consider Star Trek V Canon at all.
- On a related note, for some reason there are people who think Roddenberry threw out Star Trek VI The Undiscovered Country as well. However, the closest he ever got to that was rejecting an early draft of the script, and demanding some footage be cut from the final product (he didn't get his way with the last one).
- The second and third installments of the Sleepaway Camp series were rendered non-canon by Return to Sleepaway Camp. There really seemed to be no justifiable reason for this.
- Interesting James Bond example. Diamonds Are Forever ignored the continuity of On Her Majestys Secret Service and instead followed on directly from the events of You Only Live Twice (Bond is in Japan hunting Blofeld and there is no mention of his wife's murder). However, as OHMSS became more widely regarded, it became accepted as canon again with mentions of his wife in The Spy Who Loved Me, For Your Eyes Only, and Licence To Kill.
- Depends. Some consider Bond is chasing Blofeld at DAF's beginning to avenge his killed wife.
- Despite its battle with sequelitis, the A Nightmare On Elm Street series forms a single, continuous storyline as it goes on, with one exception - Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge. Made by eager executive producers after the runaway success of the first movie, it totally disregards Freddy's usual dream-world killer premise and veers off into its own strange direction. Fans didn't like the end result, and neither did the studio. The third movie brought Wes Craven back as a producer and writer, and was intended, according to Word Of God, as a replacement sequel to the first film. The following sequels continued building on the third movie's story, while the events in Freddy's Revenge were never, ever brought up again.
Literature
- In Tom Clancy's The Sum of All Fears, terrorists manage to successfully detonate an improvised nuclear bomb at the Denver Skydome, nearly causing a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. While the events of the novel are in continuity, the actual bombing is never mentioned again in the Jack Ryan series. Ever.
- It's mentioned in The Bear And The Dragon, when making an observation concerning how both Russia and the US began true disarmament after the nuclear bombing in Denver.
- Of the Dale Brown novels, Day of the Cheetah, Sky Masters and Silver Tower have all been removed from continuity
- However, the Russian limited nuclear attack on much of the US strategic forces in Plan of Attack has not been removed and impacts later novels.
- A recent Dale Brown novel (don't quite remember which one, possibly Act of War) made reference to the events of Silver Tower, even going so far as to bring back one of the major characters. Admittedly, Silver Tower didn't ever really seem to fit with the Patrick McLanahan series, having never mentioned any of the major characters established with Flight of the Old Dog.
- Zorro: At the end of The Curse of Capistrano, the main villain was dead, and Zorro publicly unmasked, revealing his identity to everyone. By the third book, neither of those events had ever happened.
- The issue of Lord Soth from the Dragonlance novels, represents perhaps the unholy lovechild of Canon Discontinuity and Executive Meddling. In the novel Knight of the Black Rose, TSR took the famous Dragonlance character into Ravenloft, where he became a Dark Lord. This did not sit well with one of the original authors of the Dragonlance series, Mr. Tracy Hickman who, according to rumor, demanded that TSR/Wizards of the Cost RetCon Soth's trip to Ravenloft, and killed off the character for good measure.
Live Action TV
- Galactica 1980 was long considered by fans to be non-canon. With the revival of the franchise in the 2000s, several novels and comics set in the original series continuity were released, which made it official that the events of the series had never occurred. (Notably, the episode "The Return of Starbuck" is considered by most fans to be canon, with the proviso that Starbuck somehow made it back to the fleet alive afterward.)
- The new series of Doctor Who has quietly forgotten the Doctor stating he was half-human in the Made For TV Movie. Just as well, since fans generally consider that revelation a real Dork Age moment. (But then Doctor Who has historically had a Broad Strokes approach to Canon anyway. Except when it hasn't.)
- Well, maybe not quite forgotten. During the Series 1 Season Finale, Rose suggested that the Daleks were technically half-human and they all shouted "Blasphemy!" in chorus and at great length.
- It was actually mentioned in the comic "Doctor Who: The Forgotten," that the 8th Doctor actually managed to fake being half-human to put "The Master," off balance.
- Interestingly, Russell T Davies (the current showrunner) has been heard to say that he considers the Doctor to be 100% alien, while the BBC Doctor Who FAQ Page
 has made reference to the revelations of the TV Movie. There can be only one solution...
- In the finale of Series 4, a clone of the Doctor with his memories is distressed that Donna's DNA has made him half-human, which strongly implies that the Doctor was never half-human. There's also a quiet little observation that there has never been any such hybrid.
- Several of the Eighth Doctor novels make vague, non-committal mentions of his "ancestry," the audio drama "The Apocalypse Element" comes up with an explanation for why the Eye of Harmony is unlocked by human eyes (so that only Evelyn Smythe could do it), and the comic book The Forgotten says it was all a trick accomplished with a few words and a half-broken chameleon arch. Probably best just to not worry about it anymore.
- It should be noted, however, that the movie itself is canon. Or at least, the existence of the Eighth Doctor has been confirmed visually twice in the new series.
- The old series revised the origin of the Daleks related (but not seen on screen) during their first story, "The Daleks", in "Genesis of the Daleks", which actually took place during the time of the Daleks' creation. This is forgiveable, as the original version of the history was relayed by distant descendants of the people who were actually there.
- The portrayal of the Time Lords has varied considerably (especially during their first three major appearances), though this may count more as a case of Depending On The Writer.
- The production team of Torchwood seem to have tried to pretend that the majority of Series One did not actually happen. In particular, Owen and Gwen's affair seems to have vanished into the ether, along with Jack's ability to kiss people to help them live for longer. Damn Jack, why didn't you plant one on Ianto?''.
- Many Xena Warrior Princess fans do not officially consider the two-part "Friend In Need" arc to be the finale, and neither do the writers of the Xena comics — thank you, Dynamite Publications!
- The notorious Star Trek Voyager episode "Threshold" has been disavowed by its creators (there exists a video commentary of the episode on the DVD with Brannon Braga calling the episode "a royal steaming stinker") and the events of the episode haven't been referenced since. Tom Paris even contradicts it in a later episode, when he says "I've never been in transwarp".
- Until recently, the animated Star Trek series was officially Not Canon, except for some details about Spock's childhood revealed in the episode "Yesteryear". Also writers in the Expanded Universe regularly reference TAS characters, and recent Trek series often contain oblique references to the animated "canon".
- Also from Star Trek Voyager, contrary to the beliefs of one Dr. Jannice Lester, women can be Starfleet captains.
- This editor was present at a convention where officials showed an advance screening of the pilot for the then-upcoming Highlander television series. I personally got to ask questions of them after the airing, and brought up the then-recent Highlander II and its revelation that the Immortals were aliens from the planet Zeist. Noting that the pilot gave absolutely no indication of anything of the sort, I asked if they had decided to operate as if the sequel film had never happened. Their response was, essentially, "Bingo!".
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Next Mutation was one of the inspirations for a whole retcon of the franchise. The producers even reassured fans that Venus de Milo, outside of history books of the series, would never, ever, ever be mentioned again.
- The Ninja Turtle comics also have an example; when the comics started back up again after a period of some years, they ignored the Image Comics-published third volume of the series, which had made a number of drastic changes to the characters.
- The second season of Heroes ended with Peter's girlfriend Caitlin trapped in an alternate future. Since then, Peter has yet to so much as mention her, let alone try to save her — and Word Of God is that he probably never will, as it was an unpopular storyline. Considering that the alternate future she was stuck in was averted, it is unlikely that she could be saved if Peter tried. It is probably better that way.
- Super Sentai sorta does this with the crossover for Timerangers with the next super sentai series for two reasons, one. It will be a milestone celebration of the series and second. The series is unable to produce a plot capable of bringing them together
Music
- The Divine Comedy's first album, Fanfare For The Comic Muse, is very firmly in the Canon Discontinuity bin; it's been long deleted, and nobody - least of all Neil Hannon - seems to want it rereleased.
- Other musicians who do their best to pretend their first albums don't exist include Tori Amos and Genesis. Y Kant Tori Read, like Fanfare, is long deleted, and From Genesis to Revelation probably would be if anyone from Genesis had their way, but they don't own the rights to it, their then-manager does.
- Actually, Tori Amos acknowledges Y Kant Tori Read. She even occasionally performs material from that album.
- Another musician to do this is David Bowie, who never includes his first self-titled album (his second self-titled album was later renamed "Space Oddity") in his discography.
Tabletop Games
- Fans of Paranoia like to pretend that the much-maligned Paranoia Fifth Edition doesn't exist. In fact, the writers of the most recent edition (Paranoia XP from Mongoose Publishing) have declared the Fifth Edition an "un-product" (rather appropriate for a darkly humorous game about a dystopia).
- The Computer is also adamant in assuring all Citizens that it has never Crashed, and that all events surrounding the Crash are malignant rumors concocted by Commie Mutant Traitors. And paying any attention to rumors is, of course, treason.
- When White Wolf screwed up with the Old World of Darkness, they'd often try to correct the biggest disasters by destroying all involved and making sure they would not rise from the ashes. Examples:
- Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand for Vampire: The Masquerade, which "revealed" that most vampires were possessed by evil spirits, and featured a "liberated" group called the True Black Hand that fought against them. By the time Third Edition came up, said group was wiped out entirely after it was revealed that they'd gotten everything wrong.
- Samuel Haight started off as a villainous NPC for Werewolf: the Apocalypse, a disgruntled Kinfolk who ended up killing five werewolves so that he could become one in a blasphemous ritual. This was good. Then he got his hands on an artifact that let him use Awakened magic. This was bad. Then he became a ghoul and started learning vampiric Disciplines. This was worse. Finally, a book came out devoted entirely to killing him, and the minute his soul arrived in the afterlife, it was taken and forged into an ashtray.
- In first edition WOD, a vampire could make other vampires of both animals and werewolves. Second edition WOD plainly admits that the former ("vampire dogs") is stupid and the latter hybrid overpowered, so disallows both.
- It doesn't so much disallow the vampire-werewolf as making it certain death for the werewolf and, if it doesn't die immediately, then certain death for everyone around it including the vampire who embraced it first.
- GURPS Traveller disavows the Rebellion (from MegaTraveller) and the Virus (from Traveller: The New Era). Other recent Traveller products keep the Rebellion and ditch the Virus, or keep both. (Fans and players are similarly split; see Broken Base.)
- Well, it doesn't so much disavow the Rebellion as present a Traveller Elseworlds where it failed. An obscure mention in the GURPS Traveller core sourcebook reveals that Archduke Dulinor died in a 'shuttle crash' on his way down to Sylea's planetary surface, the day he was to have his fateful audience with the Emperor. It isn't explicitly said that the shuttle crashed because an Imperial black ops squad put several kilos of high explosive in the engine, but its kinda hinted. The accompanying sidebar explicitly says 'We're doing an alternate-universe Traveller, not the main one'.
- Writers for TSR went so far as to mention explicitly in a reboot continuity guide for the World of Greyhawk campaign setting for Dungeons And Dragons that Greyhawk Ruins was to be considered the official version of Castle Greyhawk and not the pretty dated and unfunny parody module Castle Greyhawk.
- Because no one's entirely sure if the Chaos God Malal from Warhammer and Warhammer40000 is owned by Games Workshop or the comic book author who introduced him to the franchise, GW dropped all mention of him from their gamebooks to be on the safe side.
- However, many fans hope that Malal will one day return.
- GW might not mention Malal by name, but he still gets a few references. For example there's a Chaos Space Marine warband called "Sons of Malice" that wears Malal's colours and the rulebook for the spinoff game Inquisitor includes a weapon very similar to the ones champions of Malal use in the list of daemon weapons.
- Speaking of Warhammer40000, The Squats have been stricken from all records due to a shift towards a "more serious" direction. This resulted in a fan gag where anyone who mentions them gets attacked by Games Workshop's assassi
- Current canon is that did exist, but only just long enough to be entirely eaten by Tyranids.
- Karona meeting Yawgmoth, apparently still alive, in the Scourge novel has been Retconned as having been an impostor.
Video Games
- The games following the original Crash Bandicoot ignored the ending you gain for 100% completion. Namely in regards to the fate of Doctor Cortex, who was said in the 100% ending to have never been heard from again after the events of the game.
- Inverted with the Gradius series; Gradius Galaxies reverse-retconned the 1981 arcade title Scramble by listing it as part of the series, despite Scramble bearing only mild similarities in gameplay to Gradius.
- Star Fox has Star Fox Command, the recent game of the series in Nintendo DS. Iwata declared that the true "current" state of the series is either after Assault or somewhere before Command.
- Epic has admitted that Unreal Tournament 2003 is not a complete game, first by refining the original game into Unreal Tournament 2004 with many of the previously missing features and offering a rebate to UT2003 owners who bought UT2004, then by numbering the sequels Unreal Tournament,
Unreal Tournament 2003, Unreal Tournament 2004, Unreal Tournament 3
- After Singletrac died, 989 Studios took over the Twisted Metal series and produced the third and fourth games. Once Incognito Entertainment (a studio consisting largely of Singletrac employees) regained the rights to the series, they made Twisted Metal Black, which was much Darker And Edgier than the original two games and set in its own continuity. The only PSP entry in the franchise so far, Head-On, is set after the second game and ignores the 989 entries. The post-989 entries were much better received, anyway.
- All the Castlevania games (barring the parody game Kid Dracula) were part of the canon in some form or another until Koji Igarashi (the director of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night) took over the series as producer during the development of Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance, removing the two Nintendo 64 installments, Legends, and Circle of the Moon from the official timeline. Igarashi clarified that the N64 games and Circle of the Moon were still canonical, but were demoted to "side-story" status. Castlevania Legends on the other hand, was officially retconned out of the series' continuity and is now regarded as an alternate universe story. This was likely due to the implication at the end that Alucard fathered Sonia Belmont's child, thereby making all future Belmonts into descendants of Dracula.
- Capcom has all but said that Devil May Cry 2 doesn't exist — for instance, Dante is a playable character in Viewtiful Joe for comedic reasons, and he outright says "I don't remember that" when Alastor references the events of Devil May Cry 2. And since it takes place some unspecified length of time after the first game, this editor just expects them to keep releasing sequels set "between" the most recent game and DMC2.
- To further illustrate how much Capcom denies DMC 2, the game after it, DMC 3, is a prequel to the series - About as far from the events of the second game that one could get from without acknowledging it.
- Interplay and Black Isle had also dismissed them soon after release, and the tattered remnants of the dev team contributing to the Fallout Bible continue to do so.
- And there's DLC planned to Ret Con Fallout 3's... unpopular ending.
- Chris Avellone, one of the head writers for Fallout 2, created a series of Fallout Bible posts which made a good portion of the game...particularly the overwhelming number of cheesy pop-culture references...non-canon. Nearly everything that happened in the town of Broken Hills is non-canon.
- Contra: The 32-bit installments, Contra: Legacy of War and C: The Contra Adventure, as well as the NES game Contra Force, are not mentioned in the official timeline of 2002's Contra: Shattered Soldier. Contra 4, however, does mention them... and flat-out states that they're not canon.
- There's an explanation for that. Up until Contra: Shattered Soldier, the American version of the series followed a different timeline from the Japanese one. In Japan, the games were always set in the future and with the exception of Hard Corps, the heroes were always Bill and Lance. In the original American timeline, the early games in the series (Contra, Super C, and Operation C) were set in the present. When the futuristic setting was kept for Contra III, Konami of America simply claimed that the heroes this time were Bill's and Lance's identical looking "descendants", Jimbo and Sully. With Shattered Soldier, Konami simply localized the Japanese timeline instead of adapting the game into the American timeline. Contra Force, Contra: Legacy of War, and C: The Contra Adventure are missing there because they were never released in Japan and thus, were never part of the Japanese canon in the first place.
- Oddly enough, "Neo City", the setting of Contra Force, which was established to be the setting of the first stage in Contra III in the manual for the American version (in the Japanese version, its a nameless city), is actually mentioned in-game in Contra 4 despite the supposed non-canon status of Contra Force. Go figure.
- Snake's Revenge was a sequel to Metal Gear for the Nintendo Entertainment System that was produced without the involvement of Hideo Kojima, the original game's designer. It did inspired Kojima to do his own sequel, Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake for the MSX2, which would be the sequel that all the later Metal Gear Solid installments followed. Snake's Revenge has been subject of a few digs thorough the series. In Metal Gear 2, a character gossips that Big Boss might actually be a cyborg (an allusion to the Not Even Human twist at the end of Snake's Revenge), whereas in Metal Gear Solid 2, Snake mentions that he's "not a big fan of blades" (a reference to the fact that Snake began his mission with a knife in Snake's Revenge).
- The Metal Gear series also had other non-canonical entries, namely Metal Gear: Ghost Babel for Game Boy Color and the Metal Gear Acid games for PSP, but unlike Snake's Revenge, these were never intended to be part of the MGS canon in the first place.
- Monolith Productions chose to ignore the two F.E.A.R. expansion packs (which were made by a different company) when they started development on the game's real sequel.
- Halo's continuity policy directly addresses this; new material automatically overrides old material in the event of a contradiction, while the games override the books, which in turn override promotional materials like the "Believe" ad campaign.
- Myst is a little more complicated, as it involves multiple Literary Agent Hypothesis. The first two books (Atrus, Catherine) do not mention the D'ni society as having slaves, just a caste system. Book of D'ni makes it explicit that slavery is repugnant to D'ni society. Then Uru came out, with the storyline's finale in Myst V... Again, it seems the author of the books "based" his writings on Catherine's journals, which dismiss the clear slavery of the Bahro, for never entirely cleared reasons. As for Book of D'ni, well, people long gave up making sense of it.
- Nintendo has outright stated that The Legend Of Zelda Cdi Games games never happened.
- A less well-known example of Canon Discontinuity comes in the form of the Valiant comic books, a short-lived comic series based on the two NES games in the Zelda canon. According to these comics, Link is not from Hyrule, but a foreign country called Calatia. Two storylines in the comics address this explicitly. This "fact" about the hero is not seen in any other game or merchandise for the Zelda series.
- Capcom's Strider 2 (aka Strider Hiryu 2) for the arcade and PS, is a direct sequel to the original arcade version of Strider, ignoring the sequel U.S. Gold produced with Tiertex for western computers and consoles titled Strider II (aka Journey from Darkness: Strider Returns), which Capcom had nothing to do with.
- A variation that didn't have anything to do with quality occurs in the God Of War franchise. In the first game, in an unlockable video the protagonist, Kratos, visits his mother and learns that Zeus was his father. He's not happy to learn this, and plans to take vengeance on Zeus somewhere along the line. Yet in the second game, as Kratos is holding a dying Athena, Athena reveals to him that he is Zeus' son, which Kratos is surprised to hear, but declares that he "has no father". The director of the game acknowledged this error in the extras, and states that he was disappointed that they revealed it in the first game, because he finds it more fitting for it to be dropped on Kratos after he is denied his vengeance. He openly said that he doesn't care about the error.
- The creators of the Star Control series have made it clear that Star Control 3, which was made without their input and was met with overwhelming fan backlash, never happened. So no, the Precursors are not cows.
- The events of Homeworld: Cataclysm, including the new political factions introduced like the Taiidan Republic and all of the technological progress are completely ignored in Homeworld 2, meaning either Cataclysm is non-canon or the Hiigarans regressed in the time between.
- Relic has said Cataclysm
never happened in some manner. To be fair, Cataclysm was made by another studio so it's hard to blame Barking Dog for an expansion that, while well made, had little to do with Homeworld.
- Not all the technology is non-existent. For instance, auto-repair bots, small ion beams, and fuel-less drives are included. And to be entirely fair, the technology in Homeworld 2 is inconsistent with the first Homeworld.
- Command And Conquer: Red Alert 3 seems to ignore Red Alert 2's Expansion Pack, Yuri's Revenge; The third game's starting cinematic starts with the Soviet Union defeated while both of YR's endings had them surviving (conquering the world in the Soviet one, teaming up with the allies to take down Yuri in the Allied one).
- It seems as if the events at the start of Red Alert 3 take place at the end of a victorious Allied campaign in Red Alert 2. Methinks alternate realities are at play.
- Red Alert 3 takes place in an alternate Red Alert setting. The very intro movie explains this. RA3 says that a time machine was used by the Soviets at the end of RA2, to destroy Albert Einstein and prevent the allies from developing several key technologies. Nevertheless, Future Tech creates very similar technologies anyway but because of the change in timelines, the Empire of the Rising Sun exists in RA3 when it wasn't supposed to exist at all in the previous timeline (this is in fact part of the last 4 missions in the Empire of the Rising Sun campaign).
- The first one was set up by Einstein going back in time to assassinate Hitler as a student and preventing WW 2, leading to the first Soviet-Allied war instead. What led to the RA3 version of the conflict was never explained.
- The entire Red Alert series, and indirectly the Tiberium series as well, depend on discontinuities. As stated above, the original game is a discontinuity of our history where Einstein erased Hitler. Red Alert 2 follows upon an allied victory in the first game, while the expansion pack retcons the game it expands. but most interesting is the Soviet victory ending of the original game where it's revealed that Stalin's aide, who this troper spent the entire game thinking "he looks like Kane!" actually IS Kane, when Nadia, the KNVD head who also advises Stalin, kill the big man, reveal the existence of Nod, and is promptly assassinated by Kane, who proclaims to the player "Comrade Chairman, I am the future." This all implies that the entire Tiberium series is a discontinuity of the Red Alert series, Nod being founded on the soviet empire!
- Not quite correct on that last part. The Tiberium series does follow on from RA1, but from the canonical Allies victory rather than the Soviets. The whole concept of the Global Defense Initative is born many years later from the Allied Powers uniting to stop the Soviets. Nod however may indeed have been founded from the remains of the Soviet empire, as some Magnificent Bastard would have had to fill the void when Stalin died.
- The Tales Series doesn't even have continuity, but after the release of Tales Of Innocence, Namco Bandai decided they didn't want to talk about Tales of the Tempest anymore. The solution: redistribute the core Tales titles into "Mothership Titles" and "Escort Titles", with Tempest being currently the sole member of the Escort group. Damn, Namco Bandai.
- World Of Warcraft ignores most of what is said in the Warcraft tabletop game. Especially considering Whitewolf and Blizzard Entertainment broke off ties.
- A rather odd case in Banpresto's "Original Generation" sub-series of their Super Robot Wars franchise. Original Generation (OG1) lets players choose between Ryusei Date and Kyosuke Nanbu, whose stories co-exist with one another for the first half of the game. It's only until the second half events unfold differently for either character. Come Original Generation 2 (OG2), events state only Ryusei's second half of OG1 happened, while Kyosuke's second half is never mentioned at all. While this drops loads of foreshadowing from Kyosuke's second half of OG1, fans were quick enough to deduce Banpresto did this to show that OG1 was never meant to be in favour for Kyosuke, but OG2 was, since the game was primarly focused on his story from Super Robot Wars Impact.
- Strangely Kai seems to know the other members of the cast very well even though he was only a permenant character in the Kyosuke route. Also ironically the GBA version of OGS is itself Canon Discontinuity having been replaced by the PS 2 version which includes the cast of SRW R and changes the personality of Axel.
- Oddest case ever: Leisure Suit Larry 4. It doesn't exist. It's not just non-canon, it was never made. Yes, Al Lowe jumped from 3 straight to 5.
- This works itself into the plot of Larry 5 interestingly: Because the 4th game was never released, both player characters have no recollection of what happened after Larry 3. The actual in-game explaination is that the Big Bad, Julius Bigg, stole the master floppies for himself before release. Patti is the first to realize this after he catches Julius humming the love theme from Larry 4, which she wrote herself, knowing that he must have stolen the floppies if he knows the melody.
- After a whiny princess kissed a hedgehog back to lifein Sonic The Hedgehog 2006 the entire game erased itself from continuity. After firing the writers, SEGA wisely decided to pretend it never happened.
- Leaf◊, the female protagonist of Pokemon Firered and Leafgreen. She was originally supposed to be a female counterpart for Red in Red and Green, but due to space problems wasn't put into the game. She reappeared in the remakes, but has apparently been forgotten by Game Freak. They could have retconned her existence, like they did with Gold and Kris(Kotone), but they apparently retconned her out of existence.
Web Comics
Web Original
- In the first episode of Chad Vader, clearly meant as a one-off parody, Chad has Darth's ability to choke people by pointing at them, and doesn't hesitate to use it. In later episodes, Chad is repeatedly humiliated by his nemesis Clint and feels ashamed because there's nothing he can do about it. The choking trick has apparently been retconned out of existence in order make Chad less powerful and more sympathetic.
- Actually, he does still have it. He just doesn't use it too often.
Western Animation
- In one episode of Kim Possible, Ron remarks that were it not for the Flippies' "Part on the Potty," he would still be in diapers. Kim remarked that the DVD came out only two years ago, and Ron concurred with said date, heavily implying that Ron not only wore diapers until until midway through high school, he even lacked the motivation to be toilet trained. (Wouldn't his classmates made fun of him? Could he hide the smell? And given that his best friend will go to great lengths to get him a haircut if she thought he needed it...) Later, when asked about it, one of the episode's writers remarked that, no, Ron was potty trained long before high school, despite the joke's implications to the contrary.
- Sounds like an in character joke.
- As there is video evidence of Ron's being potty-trained as a toddler(the episode "Commodore Puddles"), this troper can safely declare this a joke.
- According to Word Of God the Ben 10 episodes set in the future are not canon, as they portray Kevin as an unrepentant villain, but in Alien Force, he is a redeemed good guy.
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