Time Skip / Anime & Manga

Time Skip in Anime & Manga.

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• 5 Centimeters per Second has two time skips, one at each chapter break.
• 20th Century Boys does this three times. But much of the plot is in Anachronic Order so it's to be expected.
• Chapter 179 / Episode 47 of Assassination Classroom takes place seven years after graduation.
• Chapter 91 of Attack on Titan opens 4 years after the initial Titan attack; because of the loss of the Female and Colossal Titan powers, Marley's military was weakened considerably and their enemies seized this opportunity to wage war against them for the last four years.
• Berserk has many. Most take place during the Golden Age Arc, with Guts growing up in the care of his adoptive parents (skipping from the time of his birth to ages three, six, eight, eleven, and fifteen/sixteen respectively), then when Guts joins the Band of the Hawk which picks up three years later, and after Guts leaves the Hawks and Griffith gets imprisoned, which picks up one year later. The final time skip takes place after the Eclipse, when Guts sets out on his Roaring Rampage of Revenge which ends the Golden Age Arc. There is a two-year time skip after this, which proceeds to the Retribution Arc.
• Billy Bat suddenly starts doing this constantly at chapter 14, spending just two chapters in a time period before moving to a completely different one with no apparent rhyme or reason besides the appearance of the titular bat image.
• In Black Clover, there is a six month time skip after the Clover Kingdom allies themselves with the Heart Kingdom to prepare for war against the Spade Kingdom. This has the Magic Knights train to become stronger during this time period, with some going to the Heart Kingdom to learn the kingdom's unique rune arrays to strengthen their magic.
• Bleach: The first 423 chapters take place over a span of 6-9 months. Chapter 424^note The beginning of the Lost Agent arc takes place seventeen months after Chapter 423^note The end of the Arrancar Arc. Ichigo and his group age from 15 to 17, power levels jump, and the tone of the story starts becoming Darker and Edgier. The time-skip also creates a minor continuity issue. Initially, Ichigo's mother died 6 years before Chapter 1 and the Final Arc states she died 9 years before Chapter 1. The time-skip plus previous storyline covers 2 years, not 3 years. However, the time-span of the Lost Agent arc and between the Lost Agent and Final arcs isn't mentioned. Then the series skips ahead 10 years in its penultimate chapter.
• Blood+ had a one-year time skip between Riku's death, the destruction of Red Shield headquarters, and Saya and Haji deciding to take off and disappear for a year in episode 32, and their return in episode 33. During this year, both Kai and Saya became more badass, and David became a drunk.
• Blue Seed has a time skip of 2 years between the end of the original series and the 3-episode OAV Blue Seed Beyond.
• The fifth volume of Bunny Drop abruptly skips forward ten years, leaving Rin a teenager and Daikichi still single.
• Chainsaw Man: Part 2 begins several months after the end of Part 1, by that point Chainsaw Man is a well-established Celebrity Superhero.
• In CLANNAD, in the episode after Nagisa dies, it's stated that five years had passed since then.
• Claymore has a 7-year timeskip in the manga. The anime ended before it could reach that point.
• Code Geass features a one-year timeskip between the first and second seasons. Due to the way the first season ended, this is somewhat jarring.
  • Then in R2, a one-month time skip occurs, before Lelouch and Suzaku made themselves Emperor and Knight of Zero, respectively.
  • Another time skip comes in the final episode of R2, between Lelouch's ascension to world domination and his (presumable) death at the hands of Zero (actually, Suzaku).
• Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope's Peak High School: Six months pass at the beginning of Episode 5, exemplified by the changing seasons, another six months pass in Episode 6, as the seasons change around Chiaki waiting at the Reserve Course gate for Hajime.
• There's a year or two's worth of time between the two seasons of Darker than Black. However, a couple of important things have clearly happened during that time period, and there's an Interquel manga series.
• Death Note features a time skip after L dies. The post-time skip part of the series takes place six years later.
• Diamond Cut Diamond starts off with the show of Esper Shounen and the accident that led to it being cancelled, then jumps ahead seven years to start off the real plot of the old Esper 9 members being killed off.
• Three years pass between the end of Digimon Adventure and the start of Digimon Adventure 02 (four in the English dub). This allows for a new generation of Chosen Children, since the old generation is now past the Competence Zone. The exception would be Takeru and Hikari, who are promoted from their previous statuses of Tagalong Kids.
• Dragon Ball:
  • Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z had a number of time skips during their run, usually happening after every second or third story arc, with a very rare one in the middle. The original manga ran for eleven years, with about three times that amount passing in-story thanks to no less than seven time skips lasting at least a year, but larger gaps like 3, 5 and 7 were more common. The most notable was the five-year gap between the end of the 23rd Tenkaichi Budoukai and the arrival of Raditz (which for the anime marked the end of the first Dragon Ball anime series and the beginning of Dragon Ball Z), and the seven-year skip after the Cell Arc that introduced Gohan as the new lead for the Buu Arc.
  • The follow-up anime series Dragon Ball GT is set a few years after the Distant Finale of Dragon Ball Z, itself ten years after the Buu arc. GT also gives the largest time skip in the franchise: 100 years to its own Distant Finale.
  • Dragon Ball Super sets itself in the ten-year gap between Majin Buu's destruction and Z's Distant Finale, being a couple of years after Buu's defeat. Similarly, the 2008 Jump Special was set two years after Buu's defeat.
• The Elusive Samurai: Tokiyuki's recapture of Kamakura lasts only one month before he is once again driven out by Takauji's forces in 1335. The story then jumps to a brief intermission arc about the events leading up to the formation of the Northern and Southern Courts in 1336 before skipping ahead to 1337 to resume Tokiyuki's story.
• Eureka Seven:
  • The final episode had a one-year timeskip, which disappointingly only shows Axel Thurston and the 3 kids, as well as a small glimpse of Dominic and Anemone. The fates of others, including the protagonists Renton and Eureka, are left ambiguous, though the blinking lights that symbolize them can be seen in a far-off forest.
  • The sequel Eureka Seven AO subverts this. The series suggests it takes place 20 years after the original series ended, but Ao's world turns out to be a trapar-free Alternate Universe that his parents dropped him off at to keep him safe.
• Fairy Tail got one after a particularly brutal Wham Arc. It jumped seven years and, unlike most time-skips, the characters were "asleep" and didn't age. When they got back, they promptly skipped three months due to the day-inside/year-outside nature of the Celestial Realm — NOT what they needed before a Tournament Arc!
  • Interestingly, the entire main cast, and the majority of the secondary characters were all the ones "asleep", and thus the time skip only really served to age the few minor characters that weren't affected, and show the changing political landscape, and the effects of the Fairy Tail guild having most of their critical members vanish for 7 years.
  • Another timeskip comes to set the story one year after the events of the Tartaros Arc and the disbanding of Fairy Tail. In that year Natsu got so strong he announced his return by melting the Colosseum where the Magic Games took place.
• Fist of the North Star skips an unspecified amount of years after the end of the Raoh saga. In the stories that followed (the portion covered by the second anime series), Kenshiro's former child companions, Bat and Lin, were now young adults.
• There is approximately a six-month timeskip over winter between chapters 83 and 84 of Fullmetal Alchemist (episodes 45 and 46 of Brotherhood), giving the heroes a chance to plot offscreen. Also, two years pass in the middle of chapter 108/episode 64, after Father is defeated and Hohenheim dies by Trisha's grave.
• There's a timeskip between each of the four arcs of the Getter Robo. Earth (and the universe) change significantly, and characters who were teenagers in the first arc are now aging men in the final.
• Gintama:
  • The series makes fun of this by featuring a Timeskip Arc (Two years for the manga, one year for the anime), where Gintoki and Kagura have obviously gotten stronger and appealing in their designs, while Shinpachi remains the same. Frequently, however, Gintoki points out that Gintama follows the "Sazae-san formula" (referring to the ongoing Sazae-san anime, which has spanned a couple of decades now but the characters show no sign of aging), rendering the timeskip impossible for now.
  • An actual two-year time skip happens during the last third of the final arc.
• There's a 7-year gap between the events at the end of Gundam Build Fighters and the start of its sequel, Gundam Build Fighters Try.
• In Half & Half, the last few pages of the final chapter skip ahead a few years and show Yuuki having survived after Shinichi decided to be the one to die, so that their child has a chance at life. The child, Shinji, is seen drawing a picture of his father.
• The volleyball manga Haikyuu!! has several of those after Karasuno loses to Kamomedai in the quarter-finals of Nationals. It skips to the main character Hinata playing beach volleyball in Brazil for two years after graduating high school, then to him joining the first division professional volleyball team MSBY Black Jackals and having a match against Kageyama's team Schweiden Adlers, and finally to him and Kageyama participating in the 2021 Olympics. After that, there's another short skip to the year 2022 where he and Kageyama play in the Brazilian and Italian pro volleyball leagues respectively. Their second and third years of high school are summarized briefly.
• HeartCatch Pretty Cure! initiates a one-year-ish time skip halfway through its final episode. What's bad, though, is that before and after the time skip Erika mentions that they were still 14 years old (with the exception of 17-year-old Yuri).
• The final chapters of Hellsing have a thirty-year time skip between the aftermath of the Major's attack on London and the return of Alucard.
• Happens in Higurashi: When They Cry. One arc in the manga, and later sound novels, we meet an adult Mion, who is really Shion, in the world where Rena blows up the school (Atonement chapter). Similarly, in the anime, we see an adult Rena, in that same world. However, she is the only surviving person from Hinamizawa.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
  • The series has one of these between each story arc, as the focus changes from protagonist to protagonist.
  • Phantom Blood uses this trope normally. After the first couple chapters, we see Jonathan Joestar and Dio Brando turn from snotty young boys into adults. The first season of the anime, which animates Part 1 and Part 2 in 26 episodes, treats the transition from the 1st arc to the 2nd arc like a second time-skip.
  • The Big Bad of Golden Wind, Diavolo, weaponizes it with his Stand, King Crimson. He can give somebody the impression of time skipping by up to ten seconds by forcing them to re-enact what King Crimson predicts will happen in the future without them being aware.
• Kaguya-sama: Love Is War has a six month skip during the first chapter to show how Kaguya and Shirogane's Duel of Seduction is keeping them from making any romantic progress with each other. Iino and Ishigami's final chapter has a similar skip to reflect how they're in the exact same situation.
• Lupin III: Part II begins with the gang reuniting after five years apart, acknowledging the Green Jacket series that ended in 1972. Apparently the gang split up for those five years.
• Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha undergoes a ten-year^note 4 if you count the 6 from the Distant Finale timeskip between the second and third series. It undergoes another six-year timeskip for the fourth series. The initial announcement that Nanoha is now 25 years old was met with various Fan Art and Fan Web Comics of Nanoha lamenting that she's now an old woman.
• Magilumiere Co. Ltd.: There is a one year time skip between Act One and Act Two (chapter 77 and 78).
• Martian Successor Nadesico undergoes a timeskip between the series and The Movie. The gap is filled in with a video game, appropriately titled Martian Successor Nadesico: The Blank Of Three Years.
• Mekakucity Actors: The anime's version of Yuukei Yesterday is presented as such, showing a Good-Times Montage of Takane (reluctantly) realising her feelings for Haruka over the course of a year together, then picking up right where Haruka dies. It's also after this that the series' comedic Fanservice takes a distant back seat to the darker elements of the story.
• The anime Mnemosyne is completely composed of Time Skips between nearly every one of the six episodes. The length of the skips are: 1 year, 20 years, 14 years and 30 years. Only the last two episodes don't have a skip inbetween. The result is a change of the third protagonist three times, who all are the child of the previous one (the two other protagonists are immortal). And there's the change in technology.
• Mobile Suit Gundam 00 has a time skip at the exact middle of the show (episode 25/26) of 4 years.
• There was a two-year time skip between Mobile Suit Gundam SEED and Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny.
• Mobile Suit Gundam AGE, due to covering a 100-year war, time skips every 15 episodes or so. Strangely, the war ended around the 75th year... the series still ends on the 100th anniversary of the war starting, in a Distant Finale.
• Mr. Right Turned Out to Be a Younger Woman!? does this twice. Chapter 4 takes place a month after Shiina and Takagai went on a business trip to the sake brewery together, which ended with them agreeing to go out with each other. The final scene takes place a fair amount of time after the previous scene, since Takagai and Shiina are attending a coworker's wedding and Shiina has recovered from the injuries she suffered in the accident.
• Season 2 of The Mysterious Cities of Gold takes place six months after the end of season 1.
• Naruto:
  • The series has undergone a two-and-a-half year timeskip during which most of the main cast got a whole lot stronger. Notably, the former rookies are taking major roles in the battles against the Big Bads, whereas in the previous volumes/series they mostly fought each other and left the major fighting to the adults. The post-timeskip chapters in the manga are simply called "Naruto: Part II", but their respective anime adaptation is technically a different series titled Naruto: Shippuden.
  • The Last: Naruto the Movie takes place two years after the end of the Fourth Shinobi World War and shows how Naruto and Hinata fell in love and became the main Official Couple. Kishimoto stated that he wanted another timeskip for the movie because he wanted Naruto to be at least 18 (he's actually 19 in the movie) before he and Hinata became a couple.
  • The final chapter of the manga takes place around ten years after The Last.
  • Boruto: Naruto the Movie takes place around fifteen years after its prequel, The Last.
  • Boruto: Two Blue Vortex takes place three years after Boruto.
• Negima! Magister Negi Magi's Sequel Series, UQ Holder!, takes place in the 2080s around 80 years after Negima!. Chapter 45 gives the date clearly as 2086.
• One Piece:
  • The conclusion of the first manga chapter is a time skip, focusing on when Luffy was seven and jumping ten years later at the very end. In the anime, this was changed to a flashback, with the first episode being the second chapter.
  • The plot also started up again after a two-year timeskip before the crew reunited, which in real time was about how long it had been since they were split apart in the first place. Notably, that's more than twice the length of time that passed in the main plot which was told over the course of 13 years. After this Skip, almost every character - heroic and villainous - has become stronger and better trained than before, either through regular training or adjustment to Devil Fruit power.
• One Room: The Hanasaka Yui segments begin during her senior year of high school while the last segment and episode take place after her graduation from college. The after-credits scene skips forward another four or five years to show her and her daughter (but still not the girl’s father, the protagonist).
• Phantom ~Requiem for the Phantom does after the WhamEpisodes. Skips six months in which Reiji takes a level in badass.
• There is a time skip between every arc of Pokémon Adventures, which can range anywhere between a few months and a few years. As Comic-Book Time is not in effect in this world, everyone ages accordingly. The first gen heroes started out as eleven, and in the HeartGold/SoulSilver arc they are now nineteen.
• The Promised Neverland: After Emma's investigation of Cuvitidala, the series cuts ahead a year and seven months to them finally hitting pay dirt.
• Purple Eyes in the Dark ends its first half with the final fight between Sonehara and Rinko, with Shinya officially raising Rinko's daughter, Mai, and proceeds to jump 15 years later, with Mai taking over as the protagonist.
• The third film in the Rebuild of Evangelion series takes place 14 years after the events of the previous installment. Namely, after Third Impact wipes out most of humanity.
• Robotech undergoes many timeskips due to the Macekre of fitting three unrelated series together, but also the more direct timeskip between the Macross section of the series and the attempted Sentinels series. The post-New Generations Shadow Chronicles also serves as a timeskip for a number of characters. There's also the two-year timeskip within Macross itself, immediately following the climactic battle of Space War 1.
• Sonic X:
  • The anime had a six-month time skip halfway through the first season.
  • The Recycled In Space third season took place after the second season's Distant Finale, but each universe skipped a different length of time, providing a Plot Relevant Age Down.
• Soul Eater appears to have gone through a timeskip, although it's not outright stated. Black☆Star is almost as tall as Tsubaki now, and both Soul and Maka look a bit more mature. This could partly be Art Evolution, but considering Soul's a DeathScythe now, it means him and Maka had to go out and gather 99 more souls. It's likely maybe a year went by during that time.
• Stitch! was revealed as an approximate two-decade jump ahead from Leroy & Stitch After Lilo left for college, Stitch left Hawaii and after years of space mischief and a return to form on Okinawa, reunites with Lilo again who is now a mother of a child with a Strong Family Resemblance.
• Subaru: The first few chapters take place when Subaru is a child, then skips 9 years to when she's a 15-year-old teenager after Kazuma's funeral.
• Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann had a seven-year time skip after the end of the first arc. The Distant Finale takes place twenty years later.
• Tiger & Bunny has two: ten months between the end of episode 13 and the beginning of ep. 14, and a year between the events of episode 25 and the Grand Finale of the series.
• Tokyo Ghoul skips forward six months, following the conclusion of the Aogiri Arc. The sequel, Tokyo Ghoul: Re skips forward roughly 2-3 years after the finale.
• Subverted in an early issue of the Tona-Gura! manga, when what we think is the finally-together Yuuji/Kazuki away at college living together is actually a fiction written by Onee-Chan Hatsune. Kazuki is less than thrilled.
• Toward the Terra had at least 3 time skips in its 26 episodes. The first of which occurs very early, accounts for roughly 4 years, and isn't obvious until it's specifically mentioned 3-4 episodes after it happened.
• About ten years pass between the final episode of Transformers: Armada and the first of Transformers: Energon. The main human characters from Armada return Older and Wiser.
• In the Trigun manga, they have a six month or so skip while nothing exciting is happening. Unless you're one of the civilians who dies.
• Undead Unluck: Not uncommon in the series, as there's usually some reason for a skip between a quest being completed and Apocalypse handing out the rewards and penalties, but two particular time skips stand out.
  • First there's the beginning of the 101st loop in chapter 132, where the audience returns to the story in 1972, after Fuuko's already spent 170-odd years there since arriving around 1800.
  • Then there's chapter 138, where it's revealed this is one of Apocalypse's powers, which he uses as a penalty if the Roundtable passes on all of his quests by skipping the outside world a year into the future. This is exactly what Fuuko wants, however, as there's an almost 30-year gap between the earliest Negators she knows (Gina, Nico, and Ichico) and the next generation (Billy, Rip, etc.), and she doesn't want to risk losing anyone on a quest in the meantime.
• ×××HOLiC:
  • There is a four-year time skip after Watanuki inherits the shop.
  • Later on in the manga there is another time skip, this time for six years.
  • And then 100 years for the last story.
• The anime adaptation of Yo-kai Watch has a timeskip to set its fourth movie, Yo-kai Watch: Shadowside - The Return of the Oni King, with the tone of said movie being Darker and Edgier. The plot takes 30 years after Nate's adventures, after he lost the Yo-kai Watch upon becoming an adult as his duties had finished, and now three new human characters, among them Nate's daughter, have to wield new watches and stop a massive threat to the human world. Now Yo-kai sport less cartoonish looks, one being the new regular Lightside form and the other being the fiercer-looking apt-for-combat Shadowside form. Likewise, a new anime series serving as a sequel aired in the previous series' time-slot. In addition, a new line of toys tying with Shadowside^note The Yo-kai Watch Elder and the Yo-kai Arks, as well as the Youseiken (as well as those released by the time of the movie ^note The Yami Enma Agito, the Yo-kai Watch Ogre, and the Fudou Raimeiken) were regularly released, and the fourth game features characters from the film and the new anime.
• Not occurring in the middle of the series, but also not just for the finale, time begins skipping between some chapters late in Yokohama Shopping Trip. Particularly jarring since time had previously passed at around the same rate as real-time.
• Yu-Gi-Oh!:
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds has a six month timeskip after the end of the Dark Signer Arc.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! The Dark Side of Dimensions is set 6 months after the original manga. The English dub changes this to being set 1 year after the anime adaptation, which incidentally introduces some Dub Induced Plot Holes.
• Sakura Wars the Animation has one year time skip after the events of Sakura Wars (2019).

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