Three Month Rule - Television Tropes & Idioms

In professional wrestling, anything that happened more than three months ago is no longer true canon.

Professional Wrestling's version of Negative Continuity and Retcon.

The unwritten rule states that any events that took place more than three months ago do not need to be considered canon. This creates interesting situations where two wrestlers who were recently at each other's throats are now the best of friends. It also provides a means for the writers to not have to explain radical changes in a character's gimmick (went from a millionaire playboy to a voodoo priest and back again? No problem!).

Note that this is different from the Seven Year Rule; after three months, the aftereffects of a storyline can be forgotten, but after seven years, the storyline itself can be recycled wholesale.

Examples:

Professional Wrestling

An early storyline involving Kane established him as being a deeply disturbed, physically scarred, mute, masked monster. Throughout the years, Kane evolved from being mute, to requiring an electrolarynx to speak, to being able to speak normally. When he was eventually unmasked, his face was completely unscarred. Surprise!
- And in Kane's recent feud with The Undertaker, he claimed that Undertaker removed his mask. They then showed footage of the time Undertaker did remove Kane's mask (but he put it back on the next day, it was two years before his actual unmasking). WWE probably wants people to forget about the Special Effects Failure of Kane's real unmasking.
Christian and Edge were initially referred to as being on-screen kayfabe brothers when they were together as a tag team. When they semi-reunited a few years after their breakup, they were only said to be best friends.
Eddie Fatu started in WWE as a street thug named Jamal, and was a few years later revamped as Umaga, a Wild Samoan. It apparently runs in the family, as Solofa Fatu started out as a Wild Samoan (as half of The Headshrinkers), then became a reformed gang member trying to "make a difference", and eventually became Rikishi, the hip-hop dancing, thong-clad sumo wrestler.
This rule did lead to a Crowning Moment of Funny when Triple H (then a good guy) got confronted by all the crap that he pulled on his team-mates when he was a bad guy.
Triple H: "... my bad, sorry."
John Hennigan was one of the contestants on WWE Tough Enough 3, and ended up winning the competition and a WWE contract. He made a couple of appearances on Monday Night Raw under his real name before adopting a series of stage names, eventually settling on Johnny Nitro. Fast forward to July 2007, when Nitro announced that he was dropping the "Johnny Nitro" name and would now go by his given name — John Morrison.
- ...which was later changed, around the time he turned babyface, to be a deliberate homage to Jim Morrison.
Also, the three months does have some leeway if there's a contract dispute, a severe injury, or a star has scheduled major surgery. In these cases, storylines simply disappear and aren't even mentioned during shows. Nowadays, the promotion will usually put up a press release on their website explaining what happened, but the in-show announcers will completely ignore it.
- An injury or surgery can also often completely change how the crowd is to react to the wrestler in question. A main-eventer can be the dirtiest most unlikable cheater in the entire federation, get injured and be out for a while then come back as the biggest babyface around.
  - Inverted with Randy Orton, who became a heel through his infamous "Randy News Network" promos during his injury downtime.
One of the major positives of small independent ROH is that it does not use this rule. A lot of fans were pleased when Kevin Steen & El Generico continued to despise the Briscoe Brothers a year after their rivalry, even though both teams were now Faces.
- ROH is not exempt though. Just one year after an extended, gruesomely violent feud that included a few cases of attempted murder (one incident including the use of Drano gel), Homicide and Colt Cabana became tag team partners to take on the partnership of Adam Pearce and Brent Albright.
Spike Dudley gets a random WWE title "shot" (obvious he was going to lose; the main event with current holder Kurt Angle was already being publicized). This causes the other Dudleys to turn on him out of jealousy as they had never been given a title shot, a pretty mediocre reason to break up a group, especially since Bubba had been given an equally-random title shot just months earlier.
When Vince McMahon revealed himself as the Higher Power, his wife Linda and daughter Stephanie gave their share of power in the company to Stone Cold Steve Austin in revenge (the Higher Power had organized Stephanie's kidnapping by The Undertaker.) At the 1999 King of the Ring, Austin lost his power in a ladder match against Vince and Shane McMahon who then held all the power over the company. Months later, Vince and Shane underwent a face turn and were feuding with Triple H. Stephanie then turned on Vince and married Triple H, forcing Vince and Shane into exile. Triple H then took over the WWF, citing Stephanie's share of the stocks in the company... which she technically didn't have anymore.
Kane's 2010 rivalry with The Undertaker, which ended with Undertaker being buried alive (itself a good example of the Fleeting Demographic Rule) was brushed under the rug and forgotten when Undertaker returned around four months later. Maybe he was going to try and avenge himself, but before Undertaker could say anything Triple H waltzed in from out of nowhere and challenged him at Wrestlemania, so the whole storyline was forgotten. Though Undertaker's new theme song "There Ain't No Grave Can Hold My Body Down" seemed to refer to it.
- Not to mention that WWE went entirely out of its way not to acknowledge that Undertaker had already fought Triple H at Wrestlemania before (at Wrestlemania 17). In fact they made it seem like Undertaker and Triple H had never wrestled each other at all period.

Live-Action TV

Degrassi: The Next Generation flip flops on this at times. Large Wham Episode events carry over to later seasons easier than minor interactions. The largest event to get glossed over was Craig and Manny's aborted pregnancy. However the most obvious are friendships that reappear without any word when the two had a very vocal break-up (platonic or otherwise). The more recent seasons haven't been as bad about this. There are still moments (Clare and Jenna in All Falls Down, is a minor recent example).
Similarly, Boy Meets World had the unofficial rule of "If it was more than a season ago (or prior to the most recent Re Tool), it didn't happen". Pretty much the entire first season was ignored except in a one-shot Call Back in the fifth season finale, and several storylines in later seasons were ripped off from earlier ones. Two major Season 5 arcs (Cory and Topanga break up, Shawn gets his first serious girlfriend) had already been done in Season 3, but were treated as if they were unprecedented.

Tabletop RPG

In the Veluna region of Living Greyhawk there was a well-loved NPC named The Traveler who frequently (twice a year) needed rescuing from the PCs due to the dangerous places she traveled to. In Year Four of the campaign, it was ret-conned to claim that she had been evil all along. Her class, level, and spell selection changed; as did her personality. Only the name remained the same, although the Word Of God insisted that it was the same NPC.

Theatrics Of Pain

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