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"At this point, since we now have all of the possible reference contradicting themselves, this neutral researcher says "to hell with it" and closes the subject."
So if you were to say...grow up differently...under different circumstances...it would be all right. HA! Take that obsessive fanbase!
A Shared Universe can become a very confusing place, and the longer they exist, the more confusing they can become. As new creators come on board and take over, continuity eventually gets tangled, convoluted, and increasingly difficult to pick through.
It goes something like this: in the beginning, The Universe is created, and it's a blank slate. Everything's new; as such, the creators can do whatever they want to do, create whatever they want to create, throw everything in and have fun doing so. Whatever works, works and whatever doesn't, doesn't. So far, so good.
However, the whole idea of a shared universe is that different creative teams will eventually take over. People being people, those different creators will have their own ideas. They'll have different ideas about what the 'verse should be, about what has worked and what hasn't, what might work and what doesn't.
The new creative team will also want to make their distinct mark on the 'verse and their readership; as such, they'll have their own things that they want to add, things they disapprove of and what to remove or ignore.
Things that were previously essential may become irrelevant to the new team, and different character traits and events may be emphasized or ignored. They change things.
When another creative team comes along, they'll change things even more; they may even completely override the changes made by the previous team to include things that they want to see or to reassert a previous status quo.
The longer that this goes on and as more teams take over, the more chance there is of a Continuity Snarl. The more RetCons are made, reset buttons pressed, and the more the 'verse enters into Dis Continuity or a Dork Age.
There is also a bigger chance of certain things simply being forgotten and overlooked (and then possibly rediscovered and revived). As the process continues, more things become confused, convoluted and impenetrable. Weird inconsistencies and gratuitous retcons proliferate. Drastic changes opening up dozens of potentially fascinating story-lines are introduced... and then promptly forgotten about and left hanging (or immediately reverted) by another new team, which goes on to do something completely different.
And add to this the problems caused by Comic Book Time, it gets to the point that trying to keep things straight becomes a nightmare.
And that's just if there's only one main work in the Shared Universe to begin with — if you bring together many different characters and storylines set in the same universe and cross them over with each other, you have many different continuities going on at once. Trying to keep everything straight between them can be an exercise in complete madness, as the continuity between them is completely tangled up and near-impossible for anyone to unpick.
Unfortunate, if you have a fan-base which likes everything arranged in a neat, tidy little pattern and isn't shy about voicing their opinion when this isn't the case.
This is particularly a problem for comic books, especially in the DC Universe and the Marvel Universe, which have the long-running and tangled continuities of many a character to keep straight. Long-running TV franchises can also suffer from Continuity Snarls — the Doctor Who and Star Trek universes have gotten especially snarled over time (although the former can easily Hand Wave this away because it's about time travel).
A Continuity Snarl can result in Continuity Lock Out for readers, especially newcomers, as it becomes increasingly difficult to keep track of what's happening in the 'verse without a Masters Degree in Continuity Studies. Creators often resort to the Crisis Crossover to try and untangle the snarl they've made for themselves — unfortunately, this can just as easily become Continuity Porn, which more often than not just makes things worse. Can lead to a plain ol' Plot Hole.
When canon becomes too involved and self-contradictory, it starts denying new writers "room to move." When writers disagree strongly with what previous writers before them have added to the mix and are overly keen on using continuity to get rid of them (or attack the other writer), then the snarl may come from the writers being Armed With Canon. If worst comes to worst, the writers may simply perform a Continuity Reboot, discarding the old continuity completely and starting over from scratch.
Every once in a while, the writer may just give up trying to fix everything and say, "Okay, it happened but not in every detail." Continuity Drift is when a Ret Con sloooowly happens over a period of time.
Eric Burns of Websnark did a rant about it here .
See Armed With Canon, Comic Book Time, and Authors Saving Throw for common causes, may result in Continuity Lockout, Continuity Porn, and Summers Family Tree.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- Dragon Ball, due to the filler episodes that are contradicted later (like Goku's pod being destroyed by Piccolo, only to be used later by capsule corp.) and the Non Serial Movies that are still referenced later, but can't possibly fit into the show's timeline. (Gohan meets the dragon he rescues in Movie 3, but how could the Goku stop the Tree of Might from destroying earth when Goku's either dead, fighting Nappa and Vegeta, in a hospital recovering, or en route to Namek? And if this is Garlic Jr. from Movie 1 who's pouring the Black Water Mist, then why did no-one recognise Gohan near the beginning of Z?) This leads to some glaring problems, like a character who was dead being seen in a bar drinking, or Vegeta suddenly knowing about Frieza destroying his planet in a flashback, when he was shocked after being told that while on Namek.
- This snarl is pretty much exclusive to the anime. As a result, fans don't particularly consider the filler as canon.
- Despite mostly having only one writer, the classic Astro Boy series turned into a first class continuity snarl towards the end. See, what happened was that in the final episode of the original anime, Astro died performing a Heroic Sacrifice to deliver a device into the center of the sun to stop it from dying. Shortly after the anime ended, Osamu Tezuka began a new Astro Boy story as a newspaper strip in the Sankei Newspaper, which featured Astro's melted carcass being recovered by time-traveling aliens and brought back to life before winding up trapped in the distant past (the readers' present). Because Astro had never died in the manga, however, when the collected edition came out Tezuka redid the first chapter that involved Astro, alive and well getting thrown back in time when the alien timeship crashes on Earth instead. Tezuka then produced three more different, contradictory stories of Astro's future in various publications: a pilot for a second Astro Boy series that never got off the ground which also takes place after the end of the anime where Astro is found by a completely different race of time traveling aliens, upgraded into a new body with time travel capabilities and sent back to Earth to find the era he came from; A one-shot nostalgia piece in a men's magazine, yet another followup to the anime where Astro is resurrected by Sufficiently Advanced Aliens and taken to a planet millions of lightyears from Earth from which he may never return, so Ochanomizu and the rest of the Ministry Of Science staff create a replacement, who turns out to be a lazy sex maniac because he was designed to be more "Human"; and finally, "The End Of Astroboy", which doesn't mention his death and simply has him in a display case in a robot museum due to being supplanted by more advanced robots and then freed by some human rebels to help them fight against said robots who have taken over the world.
- So you start reading Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle out of curiosity, but who is this witch Yuuko? Ok, guess we need to read xxxHolic too. Wait, what's with these Cardcaptor Sakura references? Guess we need to read that one too. And Legal Drug and X1999 and argh, X1999 is linked to Tokyo Babylon, and the translations seem to have problems and... what the hell is going on here?
- Pokemon has some of these, particularly concerning Jessie, James, and Meowth. This can overlap with Multiple Choice Past.
- The various works of Leiji Matsumoto, which often share characters and have at tendency to re-tell stories from different points of view, could be the trope namer for this. Examples include:
- Captain Harlock's ship, Arcadia, has two vastly different appearances throughout the shows in which it appears. Although this change was supposedly made due to a copyright conflict, no explanation is ever mentioned within the show. "Endless Odyssey" takes this to an extreme by showing one version in present times, and the other version in flashbacks.
- Tochiro, the man who build the Arcadia, dies three different times in three different ways.
- The film "My Youth in Arcadia explains how Harlock lost his eye and gives him a military career before he turned to piracy. However, some shows such as "Cosmo Warrior Zero" neglect to include his lost eye at all.
- In "Space Pirate Captain Harlock" And "Endless Oddysey," Queen Emeraldas and Tochiro have a child named Mayu, who is never mentioned in any other series.
- Some shows hint that Emeraldas and Maetal of Galaxy Express 999 may be sisters, even twins, despite the fact that in some of the shows the two are introduced for the first time.
- Even more oddly, some speculation links Captain Harlock and Mamoru Kodai/Alex Wildstar as the same person. According to who you ask, they are either literally the same person, or Kodai pretended to be Harlock for his conveniences. Or something.
- Similarly, most series have Torchiro and Harlock's friendship stretching back to their childhood, but "My Youth in Arcadia" shows them meeting for the first time while in the military.
- Mimay has a radically different appearance from series to series: In most she has blue skin, blue hair, yellow eyes, and no mouth, but in a few instances, she is a rather normal-looking woman with blond hair and pale skin.
- The series Captain Herlock: Endless Odyssey makes a valiant attempt to maintain continuity, and picks up with most of the main cast, including Harlock, Mimay, Kei, and most of the back-characters. Despite this, Tadashi Daiba's role manages to play out almost exactly as it did in previous series.
- There is a glaring canonical gap of about 800 years between these overlapping stories. The character's apparent immortality is never mentioned.
- This troper actually has generally treated it as a blend of a recycled cast of characters, implicit different continuities being treated as obviously different, and it being a pretty good idea to consider nobody dead in any of the series if the body has not been incinerated.
Comic Books
- Post Crisis, Hawkman is the poster child for this trope. Originally, the Hawkworld mini-series was supposed to retell the origins of the Silver Age Hawkman, but after it became a success, DC commissioned a Hawkworld regular series, taking place where the mini-series left off, resulting in a total reboot of Hawkman's continuity (a la the post-Crisis reboot of Wonder Woman), despite the fact that the Silver Age Hawkman was already established in post-Crisis continuity, and prior to the relaunch, briefly joined the Justice League International. This was followed up with several attempts at fixes, each of which simply made the problem worse. Hawkman's continuity was described, according to DC editor Mike Carlin, as "radioactive". In the wake of Zero Hour, the various incarnations collapsed into the "Hawkgod", who was essentially an Anthropomorphic Personification of the Hawk-Continuity Snarl. After this, DC editorial declared the character off-limits to the writers from 1996-2001.
- The cover to Hawkman (Vol. 3) #27, published in December 1995, shown above, pretty much describes Hawkman's continuity at the time.
- Carter Hall, the Golden Age Hawkman, was eventually pulled out of the snarl in the pages of JSA. The Silver Age version is still in limbo. Carter had a few of the Silver Age concepts (most notably a connection to Thanagar) attached to him during the process. He also includes a simplification of one aspect of the Hawkgod; the Hawkgod's previous avatars included several of DC's historical characters with vague connections to hawks, and these have been retconned into Carter's former incarnations.
- And now Jim Starlin, for reasons known only to himself, has written a Hawkman special in which a godlike-being points out to Hall that his Egyptian origin doesn't make sense, and insists on calling him by the Silver Age version's name. Just when you thought it was safe to go back in The DCU...
- They did one where they merged the "Thanagarian Police officer" Hawkman with the "Egyptian Warrior re-incarnated over time" Hawkman into one being. It seemed to work, for a time. The DCAU went with two Hawkmen, but subverted them in how the Thanagarian Police Officer is more of a Brown Shirt, and the reincarnated Egyptian Warrior is a clear Stalker With A Crush for Hawkgirl. It actually ended up making a lot more sense.
- The first "Hawkman" though, was not Ka'tar Hol nor Carter Hall, and can barely be considered Hawkman by any stretch besides Fan Nickname. The second, however, was a huge Continuity Nod to the DCU's real Hawkman, and a subversion all at once: this Hawkman is, by name, Carter Hall, who believes himself to be Ka'Tar Hol, a reincarnated Egyptian warrior, and Shi'ara Hol, a Thanagarian, to be his reinacarnated-on-another-world love; whether or not this is true is left relatively ambiguous in the episode, leaving the audience to interpret whether he was right or just plum crazy.
- Did you even watch the follow-up to that episode?? They revealed that his story WAS true. He was a reincarnated Thanagarian warrior, Hawkgirl was his reincarnated Thanagarian wife and further more John Stewart (aka the Green Lantern of the series) was revealed to have been a reincarnated Egyptian general that drove the two lovers apart. At the end of this revelation, Hawkman goes his own way.
- The whole deal with the X-Men comics. A lot of it is the Kudzu Plot started with Claremont, but a lot of it comes from the loads of Ret Cons and counter Ret Cons recently.
- One example is Jean. Until the late 1990s, it was (relatively) simple. Jean was Jean. Phoenix was (retconned into) a cosmic entity that took her identity, and Madelyne Pryor was her clone. Then those Running The Asylum couldn't get that straight, and turned it into this.
- And the trope naming Summers Family Tree got worse and worse from the 1990s onward.
- Wolverine's past.
- Or most characters' pasts.
- Stand forward, the Legion Of Super Heroes. The Websnark rant linked above goes into detail, but it's worth noting that there have been at least three separate reboots of the series, that there have also been a number of smaller Cosmic Retcons that involved things like long-standing characters being retroactively replaced with entirely different people, and that DC Comics is currently featuring at least two vastly different versions of the group. And as if that weren't bad enough, an upcoming Superman storyline will have all the currently existing versions of the Legion team up.
- It Got Worse, Legion Of Three Worlds anyone?
- Legion of Three Worlds wasn't that bad. It actually did a pretty good job explaining how the three Legions still could have existed. And the explanation given for Bart Allen and his cousin X-S being from the Reboot Legion while their grandfather Barry went to the future of the Original Legion was actually pretty simple.
- The Wonder Woman mythos has gotten increasingly confused due to Time Travel and Cosmic Retcons, but poor Donna Troy is a particularly notorious example. She was created due to a continuity error — the writer didn't realize that "Wonder Girl" was just Wonder Woman as a teenager and crossed her over with herself — and has since been the subject of at least five stories attempting to establish just what her ever-more-complicated origin is. The fact that, following the Crisis, Wonder Woman was retroactively declared not to have been active in the early years of current continuity, while Donna was still supposed to have been a Teen Titan alongside the original Robin and Kid Flash certainly didn't help.
- John Byrne introduced a fix, having WW's mother Time Travel back to the forties and become the "first" Wonder Woman, which helped... but he also introduced the "Dark Angel" concept, which retconned Donna as a sort of cosmic Chew Toy repeatedly reincarnated into horrible fates, and sent her straight into Continuity Limbo for a few years. This all has earned Donna the nickname "Identity Crisis Lass" in some circles. Also "The continuity error who walks like a woman!" It was finally declared in 52 that Donna Troy was a symptom of the chaos caused by having multiple realities interacting with each other. She now dwells outside universes, acting as a Continuity Cop.
- Post-Crisis Power Girl went through sooo much of this - she's a Kryptonian, she's an Atlantean - she's a weird metahuman - nobody knows. Finally, it was declared that she was a survivor of the pre-Crisis multiverse and her Continuity Snarl was the universe trying to "fit her in" and failing. Now she is considered to be the Supergirl analog of the original (pre-Crisis) Earth-Two.
- Yes, this means now there's a second Power Girl in current continuity Earth-Two. Writers just don't know what wasp nests to leave alone.
- Is Marvel Comics' Superman equivalent The Sentry a Silver Age hero who erased all knowledge of his existence so an evil being called The Void would not exist? Or is he a superhuman with mental problems who read a comic book and adopted the identity? Or is he the results of Super Serum experiments with The Void being actually a part of his fragmented mind? Who knows?
- It's quite possible even he doesn't know.
Folk Lore
- Who is King Arthur's greatest knight: Sir Gawain, Sir Lancelot, Sir Percival, Sir Galahad, or King Pellinore? Did you even know that in many of the earliest tales, it is Sir Gawain, without question? (And before that, it was Mordred as a good guy.) Thus making this one. . .
- And what about Sir Griflet? Originally one of Arthur's most loyal knights, he was pretty much supplanted by Sir Bedivere.
- And Lancelot, the one knight that everyone knows, isn't even part of the "original cast". He was originally the star of his own set of adventures and only got mixed in with the other knights along the way.
- According to Peter David, Lancelot was "the first Mary Sue." This certainly explains his (or rather his reincarnation's) treatment in Knight Life.
- And Morgan Le Fey went from being a benevolent sorceress who had saved Arthur's life on multiple occasions to a vindictive yandere bent on breaking up Arthur/Guinevere to the mother of the Big Bad to the Big Bad herself. And even after Mordred was retconed into being her son, he originally wasn't by Arthur. And then the whole Brother Sister Incest thing got added in.
- Modern writers who try to keep things relatively sane while using many, many sources for Arthurian myth use this sequence: Gawain was one of Arthur's best friends, probably one of the first Knights of the Round Table, and by far the most Bad Ass knight in Arthur's court - but he had a severe problem with losing his temper, and would end up losing to lesser knights in duels because he would get angry and clumsy, so Arthur never chose him to be his Second in Command; Lancelot was the Champion Arthur had been looking for to sit at his left hand, because he was more level-headed than Gawain and nearly as skilled - problem is, the guy was a little too interested in Guinevere, and we all know where that led; Galahad, the son of Lancelot, became Arthur's second and final Champion, who was basically as skilled as Gawain, and as level-headed and cunning as his father, making him the greatest knight to ever live - his only downside was that he was more loyal to his faith than to his king, and once the Grail showed up he and several other knights packed up and left to find it, though he did return later. Percival is considered the most noble of knights, and lived the code of chivalry to a "t," so only both he and Galahad received the Grail, but wasn't as strong as any of the other three knights, so he was never a "Champion." Mordred was never a "Champion," either; rather, he was a genius both in leadership and in battle, making him Arthur's favorite to succeed him, and so earned the seat at Arthur's right hand at the round table - but Arthur caught wind of Mordred's evil ambitions, and through any number of events (based on the author at the time), a scism formed between them (probably from Arthur's exiling of Mordred), and Arthur chose Sir Constantine to be his successor right before/during/after the Battle of Camlann. Yes, it takes this much space just to clarify 5 peoples' places in modern Arthurian myth. Continuity Snarl indeed...
Literature
- JRR Tolkien managed to create a Continuity Snarl all by himself in the works left unpublished during his lifetime (which is probably why they were unpublished). His son Christopher edited many of them together into The Silmarillion, trying his best to come up with a version that didn't contradict itself.
- Oz suffered from continuity problems from L Frank Baum's hands. This included whether they used money; whether they could die; and where Ozma came from.
- HP Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos. Lovecraft himself was not always very consistent with various details between his stories, and several of the other authors who continued his work had various contradicting views of the mythos, leading to much confusion for anybody trying to fit all the stories into a single continuity.
- Part of the reason behind that is that, at the time, Lovecraft had a very "pulp fiction" attitude towards his stories - not only did he have very little intent to create a cohesive continuity framework into which all of his stories could be inserted (ultimate Lovecraft fanboy August Derleth's opinions notwithstanding), but he tended to see each story as somewhat self-sufficient and exclusive. Mentioning the same occult book in multiple stories or inserting a reference to a character from another story was more a method to create the feeling of artificial depth to the story at hand rather than trying to imply they all took place in a consistent universe. Lovecraft never really bothered to maintain continuity in his OWN stories, let alone all the stories written by his friends and associates that used shared references.
- Not only that, but having a defined, well-understood "universe" would have undermined the central theme of his work, which was the *unknown*.
- Furthermore, Lovecraft aimed to create the feel of ancient myths by adding in deliberate inconsistencies, depending on what source the characters of a particular story gain their information. There's at least three different species as candidates for the title of the Great Old Ones, for example, as well as the more famous interpretation which Derleth embraced that the name refers to unique creatures of immense power.
- Actually, only one group of beings has been called the Great Old Ones, namely the godlike extradimensional beings that ruled the world aeons ago and now wait till the starts are right once more. The confusion arises from the fact that the Elder Things are also referred as the Old Ones (which is not the same as the Great Old Ones), and Cthulhu himself being referred both as a Great Old One and a creature closely related to, but not the same as, the Great Old Ones.
- Confusion to the continuity of the Cthulhu Mythos is added when you count the references of Lovecraft's works by other authors. Lovecraft corresponded with many contemporary writers of his time, which means he's influenced quite a number of authors. Of note is Robert E. Howard, the creator of the "Conan the Barbarian" stories. One story is "The Tower of the Elephant," which has a bizarre ancient alien with an elephant head that flew through space for eons before landing on Earth with knowledge of weird science and black magic and being forced to teach it to an evil sorcerer. Such stories lead some fans of Lovecraft to believe that the Hyborian Age is part of the Cthulhu Mythos, further snarling the continuity for both franchises.
- The Star Wars Expanded Universe not only is so large almost no fans have read most of it, the lack of clarity on what is canon and what isn't doesn't help either.
- Discworld suffers somewhat from this, but it is explained in-universe as the results of Time shattering and having to be stitched back together by the History Monks. They only get away with it because of the extraordinary power of the human mind to deceive itself.
- In his later years, Kir Bulychyov admitted that he never reread any books in his Adventures of Alyssa (Приключения Алисы) cycle, which would explain the many, many continuity problems that emerged over the time. Krys, a recurring villain, had about three different (contradictory) origins and six different explanations of how his powers worked, his companion, Vesel'chak U, gained and lost powers, the chronology has been anything but consistent and don't even get this troper started on when half of the novels were supposed to take place relative to each other. The fact that Kir Bulychyov died a few years ago doesn't help at all.
Live Action TV
- Countless Doctor Who fans learnt to shudder when the topic of what exact decade(s) the UNIT stories were set in is raised, before the new series demonstrated how much worse it could get. Precisely when the UNIT stories were set may be unclear, but at least we know which order they took place in. With the new series and spin offs, we don't even know that. There are sound arguments that Revenge of the Slitheen happened after Smith and Jones, and equally sound arguments it happened first.
- Unsnarled by Turn Left. Sarah Jane, Luke, Maria, and Clyde are specifically mentioned to have been killed during the events of Smith and Jones in DonnaWorld, and there is no reason to believe that they weren't together at that point in the main timeline.
- And the Eighth Doctor's continuity doesn't even try to make sense simultaneously. There's the Telemovie (which some people consider Discontinuity, for many and various reasons, although Your Mileage May Vary), and novels, audios, and comics.
- There are rumours that the decision to make the Cybermen in the new TV series alternate versions from a parallel universe was because of the Continuity Snarl created by the incompetent attempts to tie "Attack of the Cybermen" in with both "Tomb of the Cybermen" and "The Invasion". Although it might also have been because the Twenty Minutes Into The Future dates when some of the 1960s Cyberman stories had been explicitly set were dangerously close to the present, raising questions of why the Earth's lost twin planet didn't actually turn up in 1984.
- These are by no means the only fraught areas of Doctor Who continuity. In what order did the original series' Dalek stories happen? (In particular, when does "The Daleks" take place and why are the Daleks in that story so different from all others seen later?) How many Doctors have there been (watch "The Brain of Morbius")? What was Atlantis like, and how did it sink? And how many times did it sink (And yes, this question is more complicated than it first appears)? How do Time Lord family relationships - in particular, the Doctor's - work? What are the Laws of Time and for that matter, are they laws in the scientific or legal sense? And most of that list arises just from the TV series, I'm ignoring all the radio plays, all the novels except Lungbarrow, all the comics...
- As mentioned above, Star Trek also suffers from this, despite efforts from the writers to avoid this.
- A particularly embarrassing debate is the question of why Klingons look completely different from one series to the next. It was even Lampshaded in one episode, but never satisfactorily explained.
- That got explained in Enterprise. The Klingons seen in the original series are the descendants of several klingon colonies that got infected by a virus that caused a genetic mutation that made them look more human. Said virus was created by a Klingon scientist hoping to enhance Klingon soldiers using DNA from genetically engineered humans, after said genetically engineered humans 1) kicked their asses 2) stole one of their ships, and 3) flew circles around the Earth Starfleet's flagship.
Mythology
- If you look at the pantheon of any ancient civilization close enough you're bound to find these. Because of:
- A. Different versions of the same myth by different writers
- B. The Summers Family Tree involved in every single polytheistic myth system.
- C. Weird theological things like how Hinduism has thousands of gods, but actually only has a few, but actually only has three gods and their wives, but actually only has one god and his wife, but actually only has one omnipresent universal soul made up of every living thing and god in the universe.
- D. Syncretism, the practice of trying to fold other mythologies into your own. So the fertility goddess of the next island over is really your fertility goddess, or her aunt, or a despised rival that yours decapitated in a myth you just wrote for this purpose. Or the umpteen different theologies and practices lumped together in Hinduism.
- Case in point, Venus/Aphrodite’s origin story. Was she the daughter of Jupiter/Zeus? Or was she born from the sea foam from when Ouranos/Uranus's testicle fell into the sea?
- Depends on the writer.
- Plato (who was more than willing to twist religion into fitting his point) dealt with that exact same question in The Symposium, where one of the characters declares that there are two different love goddesses named Aphrodite, born according to the two different myths, and that they are goddesses of two different types of love.
Professional Wrestling
- The WWE's "Kane" character, whose official life story has him having been a hopelessly-insane burn victim in an asylum at the same time he was supposed to have been hanging out in college and going to parties with his sweetheart Katie. Further complicated by the storyline of his "brother", who had a whole angle where he Broke the Fourth Wall and "went out of character". The whole thing got so complicated that they had to have somebody write a book (titled Journey Into Darkness if one should want to look it up) in an attempt to explain it.
- The Undertaker himself tends to be mildly rebooted when he gets a gimmick change. Different personas don't often directly reference older ones, but this is a double-edged sword; most glaring is when the American Badass started out with the Undertaker doing a worked shoot to sell the idea that he wasn't supernatural in character as well as out, so he could come back as a leather-clad biker, only for Kane to kill him so he could be resurrected as undead.
- Occasionally a reference is made to their childhood home burning down, but which brother is responsible depends on who's Heel and who's Face at the time. If they're both Face, it was an accident.
Tabletop Games
Video Games
- While the individual Klonoa games have decent plotlines, the inter-game continuity gets rather ridiculous. In Door to Phantomile, Huepow is revealed to be the prince of the Moon Kingdom using the Ring Spirit form as a disguise, and is tragically separated from Klonoa at the end of the game, both of which are ignored when he reappears in later games. Not only does Joka have a different personality in every game he appears in, but he already knows Klonoa in half of them, and is killed in the other half. And Chipple, a random villager from Empire of Dreams, showed up in Dream Champ Tournament, where he had become Klonoa's close friend... and a kangaroo.
- Obvious explanation: the games are all Alternate Universes to each other.
- With the obvious exceptions of Door to Phantomile and Lunatea's Veil, which take place in the same universe.
- The Legend Of Zelda continuity is inherently contradictory, with several of the installments completely incompatible with each other. A ton of Fan Wank has come up trying to explain this away.
- Word Of God has confirmed that several of the Zelda installments are from different timelines, and there are several different incarnations of the hero, Link. This comes from the split in time made between Adult and Child Link's respective timelines in Ocarina of Time. On one hand, the evil king took over but got booted out (The Wind Waker, Phantom Hourglass, Spirit Tracks) as Adult Link. As Child Link, Ganondorf tried and failed (Majora's Mask, Twilight Princess) yet several others, particularly the first four, don't fit neatly into these. Where, for example, do the Oracle games fit in? Possibly around the time of A Link to the Past when you consider the bonus Ganon revival... which is sort of vague in itself. Messy, messy, messy. Let's not forget Four Swords and Minish Cap, which don't even allude to Ganon.
- Oracles really is confusing when you consider that, due to how those two games work, Ages happens before Seasons yet Seasons happens before Ages, depending on which order you played them in. Then, you have the Master Sword issue, which some fans are apt to declare Dis Continuity because of the contradictions it has with the other Master Swords.
- Let's just say The Legend Of Zelda is what happens if you take a history book that covers, like, a million years and rip out some random, almost unrelated pages. Then try to bring them into a logical order without being able to read the rest of the book. Except because of the Split Timeline, there's two. In one pile. Short of a federal grant and a team of crack historians, it is not for mere mortals such as us to fathom the History of Hyrule.
- As of Spirit Tracks, that's two timelines and two Hyrules. Wrap your brain around that one.
- Then there's the Imprisoning War storyline from A Link To The Past. While initially confirmed to have been retold in Ocarina Of Time, even that game contradicted it in some ways, and it has sequels that completely ignore the fact that Ocarina was supposed to lead into A Link to the Past in the first place. Fans who still argue that Ocarina retells the Imprisoning War have insanely convoluted explanations for it, such as the argument that it involved not one, but two Ganondorfs and was told over the course of three games. Most people have just thrown their hands in the air and said it doesn't matter anymore.
- A large part of the problem has also been that Word Of God has been contradictory. It's not so much a problem of Flip Flop Of God (though that has happened) but that the franchise is being maintained by a pair of top level Gods. On the one hand, franchise creator Shigeru Miyamoto is not all that concerned about the timeline and seems to endorse a "soft" version of literary agent hypothesis, in that the various games may be corrupted retellings of each other. On the other hand, series director and producer Eiji Aonuma seems to prefer that there actually be a worked out timeline, and is responsible for embracing the Split Timeline perspective and working elements in more recent games, (especially Twilight Princess and Spirit Tracks) that are more blatant continuity nods and hints for those trying to sort out the timeline.
- It should be noted that since Majora's Mask, Aonuma is the one who's been placed in charge of the series, while Miyamoto is more of a producer role.
- Mortal Kombat. Mortal Kombat. Holy Mother of God Mortal Kombat. There is no official ending for Deception or Armageddon due to the lack of a living and sentient Liu Kang.
- There is official word on most of the ending of Deception, though only on Armageddon's website. Basically, Shujinko and Nightwolf's endings worked together to end Onaga.
- There are more straight examples of snarls in the actual story, mostly the result of the lead writer shift after MK4 . The two which stand out the most are Scorpion's oath to protect Sub-Zero (started in his MK2 ending, supported in the official comic and UMK3 ending, then ignored completely in MK4, with following games being ambiguous about the whole ordeal, or portraying him as an Axe Crazy revenge-seeker), and Kintaro's fate after MK2 (with 3 different sources, all of debatable canonicity, stating different and contradicting fates for the Shokan).
- Myst created an interesting continuity snarl when it RetConned the prison books of Myst I and Riven into actual ages. That is, the books themselves were not intrinsically special or different from other linking books. Myst IV goes into great detail as to what the Red and Blue ages (named Spire and Haven) are like. While this works for Myst I, it violates the events as they unfold in Riven. To beat Riven, you have to trap Ghen in a prison book. This book was presented as a special "one man prison" book, which is a very important plot point. Ghen's no fool; he isn't going to go into any random book some guy brings him. To ensure it's safe, he asks you to go through the book first. This works out in the end because it is a one man prison; when he comes through the book after you, you are freed and he is trapped. If that book were a regular linking book, you'd be trapped with a very pissed-off Ghen... who had the sense to bring a gun.
- This can best be resolved if Atrus made the Red and Blue Trap books out of Linking Books to Spire and Haven, altering their text to trap users in the conduit between worlds. At the end of Myst, he could've simply repaired those alterations, shunting his sons onward into their respective Ages for safekeeping. The book that traps Gehn could've been a similar device, with its window adjusted so it wouldn't show the Stranger in the conduit, as the Red and Blue books had shown the brothers. Apart from minor references in the Spire and Haven journals, which could be attributed to deception or simple error by two stir-crazy captives, this resolves everything about the Trap Book/Prison Age quandry.
- The official version is that that the "real" Stranger talked his (or her) way out of it, which the player can't really do.
- Mega Man X was supposed to end after X5, but didn't, leaving a complicated mess of the continuity of its series. Maybe it's just because some of those games don't exist for some people.
- Each installment of The Elder Scrolls is made by a different team, and each has a very large amount of information in each game. Later teams have been known to completely overwrite what was established by earlier teams. Every single installment has a portion of the fanbase that declares "They Changed It Now It Sucks".
- Even the first one?
- In terms of in-universe continuity, yes, even the first one. The spinoff game Redguard takes place before the first released game, Arena, and naturally contains some information that contradicts one or more of the main games (although it also provides a lot of interesting background lore).
- Well, the first one was originally going to be a game where you manage a team of four gladiators during a tourney... People who would have liked such a game could be upset that the end product was nothing like that.
- The Elder Scrolls series even has an in-universe continuity snarl: the Warp in the West. Somehow, all of the contradictory endings of Daggerfall are true.
- Touhou Project: Did the first five games happen, or are they a separate continuity altogether? Are the PC-98 versions of Reimu and Marisa the same characters as the Windows versions? What exactly is Alice's backstory? And where in the world is Mima?
- At this point, trying to piece together a coherent timeline of Sonic the Hedgehog's innumerable adventures is virtually impossible, never mind the issue of trying to fit them into a sufficiently small span of time that Tails isn't in diapers/the womb in Sonic 2. Most Fan Fic writers don't even try anymore.
- Then there is Blaze the Cat. In Sonic Rush she is from an alternate dimension. In Sonic '06 she is from the future (and seems out of character).
- Adding in all of the adaptations makes it even worse. It's an admitted fact that SatAM, Adventures, and Underground are three separate continuities, and that Sonic The Comic constitutes a fourth. The problem is fitting everything else in. The Archie Comics are definitely in the same continuity as SatAM, and therefore the same multiverse as Sonic Universe and Sonic X. It would therefore seem that the SatAM continuity is the one that's canonical with the games, as the anime Sonic X had plots that were directly taken from the Adventure series. However, the inclusion of Mean Bean Machine among the compilations and the presence of chili dogs in Sonic And The Black Knight would suggest that Adventures is meant to be canon, and the fact that that series didn't introduce any characters that have never been in a video game supports this. Alternatively, one could theorize that the opening to Sonic X (the anime, not the comics) is non-canon, and the games set on Mobius are a separate continuity from the ones set on Earth, with the Storybook Series somehow fitting in with the Mobius group despite the presence of characters introduced in Adventure or later. Or something like that.
- All the cartoon adaptations are in separate continuities. Please people, we'll all sleep better at night this way.
- The Nintendo DS Updated Rerelease of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney featured an extra, fifth case which takes place in between Ace Attorney and Justice For All as evidenced by Maya still being away at Kurain Villiage training wherein Phoenix and Edgeworth work together to assist Ema and Lana Skye in their legal case. However, when Edgeworth reappears in Justice For All's fourth and final case, Phoenix claims not to have seen him since the fourth case of Ace Attorney where Miles was accused of murder and Edgeworth supports this by claiming to have left the country right after said events; neither of them seeming to remember their work together on the Skye trial. This could simply be explained away as a case of Canon Discontinuity by stating that the fifth case of Ace Attorney never really happened in the series proper, due to it being an addition for the remake. But, Ema is integrated with the official continuity in the Apollo Justice arc by having her appear and explain Wright's involvement with her sister's case, thus making Phoenix's and Edgeworth's reactions to each other in Justice for All seem odd in retrospect.
- It's quite easy to make it fit in canon if you ignore the one part where Phoenix says he has not seen him since Miles' trial. All is revealed within spoiler brackets: The case that made Milesy give up prosecuting was not Ace Attorney's case 4. It was case 5. Recall Damon's little "We're not so different" speech at the end of that case. It really dug into Miles' soul, and after a little consideration, he leaves a certain note in his office and disappears. This problem was basically made due to bad porting. If they changed the background in Phoenix's little "Haven't seen him since" monologue, this whole problem would have never existed.
- Ironically, Super Robot Wars is pretty successful at averting this. In fact, Banpresto does the exact opposite of snarling continuity up and instead snarls it together. At the point, the original games, Alpha, and Original Generation have several common ties, thanks be to several characters who can time or dimension travel (Shu, Ingram, and Gilliam head the list).
- Odder still when you realize that each was originally in its own canon, and these characters were only giving out Continuity Nods. Original Generation is in the position currently of tying the original games/Alpha/MX/The Great Battle/Hero Senki/etc into one interlocking whole courtesy of characters who in canon reference their own appearances in those canons.
- The creators of World of Warcraft, after admitting they had forgotten a key fact about the eredar that was established in Warcraft III, went on to say that they didn't care about continuity as much as making a good game and brushed off complaints about the changes made to the draenei. Eventually, fans learned to ignore this and some other minor retcons.
- The draenei retcon was fairly minor in terms of effects to storyline (the draenei didn't have much involvement in it before), although it did retcon the background of Sargeras somewhat (to make matters confusing there are actually two new explanations for his corruption, one being the same as the old one but with the eredar replaced with demons in general, and the other being that he just came to perceive the universe as flawed, with no mention of demonic corruption. Nobody is quite sure which is canon, although the evidence would lean towards the latter one).
- The eredar were never the only demons involved in Sargeras's corruption. Dreadlords have been in the picture since the beginning. (As for fans ignoring it...since when?)
- The real Snarl (which was thankfully sorted out) was the origin of Garona, a half-orc and a fairly important figure in lore. She originally had orc and human parentage, and was born before the orcs launched their first major invasion (originally there was qute a bit of time between the opening of the Dark Portal and the First War, during which the orcs mainly did small raids on the human settlements nearby the Portal). However when the First War was retconned to have happened almost immediately after the opening of the Portal, there was no way for her to be half-human. Her parentage went unexplained for years and for some time it seemed that she was simply going to be erased from continuity, but she was finally given a new origin, making her a product of the warlock Gul'dan's experiments that involved breeding draenei prisoners with orcs, and then making them grow rapidly into maturity with magic.
- The continuity of Persona titles can in fact be taken as all games being in the same universe, despite great differences between the first 3 games(actually 2, but one is a two-parter) and the newer 2. This is because both games in the aformentioned two-parter, Persona 2, end with a massive in-story Ret Con, the second of which may have reset everything from the first game as well. The third also tries to end itself by retconning out it's own existence, but this time, the protagonists see through it(though it is still a Downer Ending). This is made even more confusing by the fact that the later games make several Shout Outs to the earlier games in the forms of former playable characters being mentioned on TV or by other characters. In addition, the nature of the enemies and of the Personas which the game is named for do not remain consistent, with the first two games featuring demons from the main series, while the latter two feature shadows born of the human psyche, which is what Personas from the first two games were. Even the portrayal of shadows is inconsistent in the newer games, which definitely share the same universe, as P3 has artificially made shadows, where as P4 has more "natural" shadows.
- Actually, the Shadow discrepancy isn't that complicated. Shadows are natural in 3, but the Dark Hour is not, having been created by the experiment gone wrong ten years prior. The Shadows in 3 that fuse together to create Death are, arguably, the same as the Shadows of humans in 4. Technically they didn't summon Nyx, but fused together into Erebus, who in turn summoned Nyx. It's never confirmed where the shadows that were experimented on in 3 came from, though.
- The Halo universe can't make up its mind on whether there was a single "class" of Spartan-IIs or more. Summed up at this Wikia Wikianswers page. This relates to the question of how many Spartans there were.
Webcomics
- Drowtales' rolling Ret Con causes chaos for many fans' understanding of the comic's backstory, and there are ongoing debates on the forums as to what formerly canon information is current canon and what isn't.
- Order Of The Stick has an actual entity called The Snarl; created when multiple Gods tried to create the universe and had disagreements about how things worked.
Weboriginal
- Whateley Universe: Does the magic department offer introductory classes for people with no previous magical ability? In one story, a magically inclined member of the school board (who, presumably, would know) explicitly says no. And yet, Ayla will be studying magic for the first time in the spring.
Western Animation
- For all that's said about the inconsistencies between the Unicron Trilogy of the Transformers franchise (Armada, Energon, and Cybertron), the main, original, Transformers time-line◊ is even worse. There starts out with two distinct main branches, the original comic and animated series, but then along comes Beast Wars and Beast Machines that uses elements from both series simultaneously. Add that to the splintering off done by the Dreamwave ongoing series, and you just have to wonder how all of these things could possibly co-exist together.
- The aforementioned series? In Japan, Cybertron is Galaxy Force, and it appears it's unrelated to its Japanese predecessors, Micron Legend and Superlink. The US version tries to tie the two together, but there are still some problems, so a comic was produced that chalked all of this up to a big warp in time and space... even though some minor retcons and a few lines of explanation saying where the older characters might have gone to would have sufficed. Yeah, it wouldn't have been perfect, but come on, was it really necessary... especially since they've already let the original timeline rage out of control?
- Worse, the show itself mentions none of this, and we're left with plot holes big enough for Unicron to fly through. The biggest example is this: when Optimus and Leobreaker first combine, everyone is in total and absolute shock at the impossible - robots combining - happening. Guess what the main gimmick of both Armada and Energon was? (Hint: In Japan, Energon was called Super Link.
- Oh, it gets worse: Takara has now decided that Galaxy Force is in continuity with Micron Legend and Superlink, just as Cybertron is in continuity with Armada and Energon. (It should be noted, however, that many characters in Galaxy Force do not share names with anyone in Micron Legend and Super Link, whereas Cybertron, in a manner similar to Robots in Disguise, named many characters after familiar ones. This makes the Japanese Continuity Snarl and the American one different - sharing The Verse doesn't make single characters out of the Micron Legend and Super Link characters and whoever in Galaxy Force they most resemble.
- What makes it worse is that it suffers from Xorneto syndrome (see X-Men example) in that the right hand seems to not know what the left hand is doing. All of the Unicron Trilogy's continuity problems could be solved with the "black hole's effect on the multiverse makes Cybertron the Post Crisis version of The Verse" statement... but that didn't stop everyone with the ability to create official material from explaining their own pet peeve a different way, explaining some things that didn't need explaining, and making the bigger problems all the more glaring.
- The Japanese G1 time-line◊ also considers the 2007 film and seemingly unconnected series Car Robots (aka Robots in Disguise) as part of the original continuity. Try to make sense of THAT, fanboys.
- The true big problem with Transformers is: the fans themselves tried to make it all fit into one continuity, that being G1, instead of say, just enjoying each series for what it is. And for some bizarre reason, the writers bowed to this desire and tried to do the same thing. So this is an actual case of reverse Executive Meddling.
- Transformers is Serious Business. Except when it's not. The fans themselves are generally well aware of how messed up things are. And if fact, the official stance is that everything is canon to some continuity. It's just as much, if not more so, the actual companies' (Takara and Hasbro) fault for not differentiating as the fans for obssessing/ridiculing/whatever about the classification of materials' canonicity. In fact, some of the more recent comics have started a system for classifying (by source, time, etc.) different universes in the actual series by an interdimensional hub 'verse.
- More a mixture of Pandering To The Base and Fan Dumb.
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