DC tried saying Batman’s entire history happened in the span of 5 years and they kept putting in retcons because they realized that definitive 5 year limit was stupid.
Batman AND Green Lantern. Which has a lot of issues when GL gets added in. Batman's history happening over 5 years is already ludicrous and bordering impossible, but at least most of Batman's major events are self contained to Batman and his family.
Green Lantern has MULTIPLE line wide events integral to the character and Geoff John's story for the corp. It means anything happening within that 5 years has to also include the rest of the DC Universe's connection to GL being compressed into that 5 years too.
And since this was primarily done for Grant Morrison that would mean that Final Crisis happened since Batman’s death is pivotal to his run.
So Barry Allen died, got replaced and came back but he also didn’t because Barry was the only Flash in existence with no legacy characters tied to him at that time.
He had Dickie alone as Robin longer than that. I just do what DC does and ignore the stuff I don't like and that tidbit is firmly in the "shit I pretend I did not see" category.
Green Lantern and Batman continuity was somewhat spared from New 52 because DC did not want to piss of Geoff Johns and Grant Morrison
Like imagine if two of the most popular writers at DC both close to ending their years long character defining superhero runs, just didn’t get to finish them because Flash hit the reset button in a completely unrelated book.
Totally was going to point that out.
The entire New 52 "5 year gap" thing caused all kinds of continuity issues.
The thing is, there has always been a dubious timetable for most comics universes and the only events that were actually hard locked to a specific time are tied to real world events and even then, depending on the event, they can slide the scale(i.e. The Punisher serving in whichever war or conflict made sense for him to be in his 40s at that particular time.
In fact with the confirmation of the movie, many people have discussed how old a batman must be that already has Damian as a Sidekick.
Ages can range from early 30's to mid 40's.
The movie Superman Returns has Lois Lane like 22 years of age, Pulitzer Prize-winning veteran journalist of the Daily Mail and has a 5 year old son. I know the movie went for younger actors because they expected the movie to be a start of a new franchise but they sabotaged this by also insisting that this also takes place as a sequel to the older Superman movies.
Yes, Lois is smart but she isn't meant to be some child prodigy who got a degree in journalism and worked for a newspaper when she was sixteen, and Superman did not have sex with a minor.
Mass Effect. Humans went from 'Oh boy I'd sure would like to meet an alien' to being so wide-spread they control a quarter of the known galaxy and multiple generations inhabit the slums on Omega in less than 30 years when dudes like Admiral Hackett were already middle-aged before they even heard of a Turian or Asari.
To be fair the game does lean into this by saying that a major reason for other races distrust of humans is how quickly we spread, but yeah it’s a stretch.
The Terminator timeline is a logistical nightmare when you really break it down.
So the first movie works on closed loop time travel logic; you can’t change the future because what you did in the past already happened and created the future you came back from. You can see this in John being Kyle’s son, the photo of Sarah Connor that Kyle brings back, John in the future knowing Kyle has to be the one to go back in time, all of that. This all works in the world of T1.
All of that goes out the window when judgement day is delayed.
Now, going back in time actively changes the future. This means that the timeline we are seeing in T1 is not the “prime timeline” by any means. This has to be at least 2-3 levels deep in time travel fuckery by this point. The picture of Sarah had to have been taken in the past, aged up to the future, then time traveled back with Kyle. This means that there has to be a version of the story in which the picture was originally taken, meaning there is a time in which Kyle goes back without the picture in the first place.
Further more, since the machines are going back in time to kill John at all, that means he had to have existed before time travel was ever used to try and kill him. This means that John exists in a timeline with no time travel happening at all, which means *by necessity* there is a version of John Connor in which his father is not Kyle Reese, but just Some Guy. This John Connor, without the foresight of time fuckery and survival training from his mother, STILL goes on to be the savior of humanity, so much so that the machines devise time travel as an option to eliminate him entirely.
Then, completely independent of all of this, John Connor learns about this machine time travel plan *somehow* and decides to send Kyle back in time, no Sarah Connor photo mind you, to go and save his mom in the past. They fall in love with no predestination guiding them, and this BRAND NEW JOHN CONNOR also happens to grow up to be the EXACT SAME PERSON IN THE FUTURE, regardless of their wildly different upbringings.
Terminator time travel seems pretty straight forward, but absolutely collapses once you have to examine the consequences.
The timeline can be explained including 3 and Salvation, the original bad movies. But you throw Gynysys and Dark Fate into the mix you cannot rationalise.
I think the fact that the very existence of John Connor is a time paradox is exactly *why* he's the savior of humanity. His nature is *inherently* unnatural.
I enjoyed keeping up with the series up to 4, at which point I think that awful FNAF world game came out and I would only catch the occasional mat pat video.
And then those books came out and I think there’s like over a dozen books by now? That was probably the definitive last straw.
See, if they just continued and didn’t acknowledge anything from the previous games besides a reference or two, we would’ve been fine, but no, let’s >!bring back the repressed murderous furry as an artificial intelligence,!< that makes sense.
Legend of Zelda is probably one of the more famous ones for having a straight up split timeline. What makes it great is that, for years, fans of the series tried to figure out how each of the games could work in a continuous timeline and came to the conclusion that it had to be split in half because of Ocarina of Time, wherein there's two separate timelines: Child (the original) and Adult (the bad future).
However, Nintendo later officially revealed that it's actually split into *three* timelines: one where Link, as a child, stops Ganon before he gets the Triforce, which then leads to Majora's Mask and Twilight Princess; one where Link, as an adult, stops Ganon before returning to the past, leaving the future bereft of a champion and leading to Wind Waker and its sequels; and one where Link straight up loses so the Seven Sages have to seal Ganon away in a big wa, which leads to a Link to the Past, the Oracle games, and the original Legend of Zelda and its sequel.
And that's not getting into how Skyward Sword and Minish Cap are actually at the start of the timeline (which means Vaati actually predates Ganon as the main villain, funnily enough), nor how Breath of the Wild has no established place in the timeline, it's just somewhere near the end and everything preceding it has faded into myth by its time. Which makes it especially whacky considering Breath of the Wild has a whole thing about a completely different war against Ganon 10,000 years before its events, and then there's also Age of Calamity which is *also* a new timeline due to time travel, if it's even canon considering it's a spin-off.
All around, it's fairly weird, but at least there's some official explanation for those who want it. And really, at the end of the day, the real question is if Link's Crossbow Training should count.
They actually confirmed it was split into 2 in interviews long before they revealed it was split into 3. The only thing people who hate the timeline have a point about is that the Downfall Timeline (the one that inexplicably follows from Link dying in the final battle of OOT) feels like an afterthought so they could just tuck a bunch of the older games away and not have to think about them too much. But then they started thinking about them more and put more games in that branch, so you know.
I'm always annoyed when people say the timeline is arbitrary or makes no sense or that "the games are just a series of retellings of the same story" (which is the fastest way to tell someone hasn't played the games in a long time), or "you're overthinking it! Nintendo never thought about this", referring to the same company that made multiple different translatable Hylian alphabets just so they could put relevant text on signs in the game world that nobody was going to read. That all being said, it's not as if there aren't a few retcons here and there, like in many franchises.
Yeah, I don't understand the people who say the games are supposed to be retellings. Like, not only does it not account for the fact that there are villains beyond Ganon, but plenty of the games explicitly follow after others in the series and have little connections to the preceding games.
Wind Waker is pretty explicit about this with how the Rito are stated to be descended from the Zora and the Koroks from the Kokiri, plus the legend in the opening showing what happened after the events of Ocarina of time, while Twilight Princess has a lot of fun little implied connections, like the Hero's Shade being the Hero of Time, the Skull Kid playing Saria's Song, or the giant tree that makes the game's Forest Temple being a long dead and hollowed out Deku Tree.
I've seen people say OOT is a retelling of ALTTP, even though OOT is clearly an origin story for Ganon and ALTTP starts with Ganon sealed away in the dark world by the 7 sages. It could not be more explicit.
I attribute most of it to people just not really paying much attention to the stories, maybe they played a few Zelda games when they were kids, and all they really remember is stuff like "you fight Ganon, and save Zelda".
A Link to the Past, Ocarina of Time, Twilight Princess, and a Link Between Worlds all involve Link traveling between a pretty normal world and a darker alternate world, so they're all clearly the same game. Ignore how one of them is a direct sequel, that part doesn't matter.
All the games except for FSA and the Oracles were given their current timeline placement years before nintendo made an easy to understand graph in 2011. in fact the split timelines were mentioned by Aonuma in interviews that go back to WW. They even straight up tell us that OoT has multiple endings in one of them.
There were debates between the linearists and the splitists in the early 2000s to know if the timeline actually split following the release of WW. The splitists won because of the Aonuma interviews and it was the commonly accepted point of view amongst theorists years before Hyrule Historia.
Aonuma's comment on BotW's placement was basically: "i can't tell you at the moment but it happens at the end of one of the timelines after every game" It was interpreted as "Aonuma doesn't give a fuck about the timeline" by detractors but given that we know that he immediatly started to work on TotK after BotW was done and that this game will focus on events that happened between the other games and BotW. The most likely explanation is that Aonuma doesn't want to give too much details about the events that happened before BotW because it is coming into play in TotK and if that game doesn't make it explicit enough, he will then give a placement (if we assume that TotK is the last game featuring this era of the timeline and that they aren't planning a third game with the same Link)
It's still been less than a year since Detective Conan started.
This isn't even an "Ash is still 10" situation. Even if you only count the manga as canon, there is a clear timeline of the amount of time that's supposed to have passed, and then there's like a million cases and decades of content in between that make that impossible.
Not only that, but the sliding timeline also makes technology make no sense. Not too long ago, there was a flashback case that took place 10 years ago. As part of the case, someone pulls out their smartphone and takes a picture. Meanwhile in the first episode, cell phones don't exist, Conan is using a payphone to contact people, and Professor Agasa invents crazy futuristic objects like a "wireless fax machine".
Logically, if an anime exceeds 365 episodes, it no longer makes sense that the characters have not aged even 1 year, even if each episode was a day after the previous one.
I mean, not really. HunterXHunter famously has like 10 or so episodes that take place in the span of minutes in universe, just because the amount of shit that happens in those minutes is insane. There's no rule that says that an episode needs to correlate to one day. But I do get what you're saying if all those 365 episodes imply they're a completely different day than the one before.
FFXIV's timeline really wants you to believe it's only been a year then simultaneously has in universe events that actively show the passing of time.
The second part of Stormblood, where you travel *across the planet* takes months before you even reach the continent. Because you have to go by boat as the land between you and them is completely occupied and can't be flown over.
Explicitly. Months.
I only know about Tekken from the friends' playthrough, and I still remember them freaking out about how the span of multiple games and King of Iron Fist tournaments take place in like a month
Kamen Rider is great because you have series that absolutely cannot take place in the same setting still crossover with each other like they're all part of the same world. And also the original five Kamen Riders just pop up sometimes for events.
Don't worry about it, just have fun!
With the exception of the Showa Era, I thought they explained the whole "it's all in different universes" with the Decade Wall Shroud.... At least until Neo Heisei bc somewhere before or after ExAid and Revice (because that's when I've seen it happened since), they show the next Rider near the end of the series. I don't think it happened in Zero One
I know Decade has a thing where every rider is connected (which some friends of mine describe as "Every crossover with Decade is just an episode of Decade"), but I'm pretty sure they've done the "future Kamen Rider shows up towards the end of the current Rider" thing since W, at least, where Eiji from OOO shows up in the movie.
Actually, Decade might've started that trend, now that I'm thinking about it? At the very least there's definitely a trend of the next Kamen Rider showing up in a movie or in an after credits thing as a sort of "passing the torch", which is always kind of fun because you can usually tell when they haven't fully figured out what the next rider is going to be like, since their character will be slightly off or they won't show up outside of the suit.
The only timeline that really matter is that the Big Bad is super strong, so strong that the show Rider can't beat, so cue the other shows Riders to get together for a crossover movie to beat and then Rider Kick the shit out of the Big Bad together.
when people try to put together a logical timeline of crossovers for rider and sentai i just go "their timeline is a flimsy house of cards on its best of days"
For Star Wars, the timeline for the Clone Wars was pretty well defined after Revenge of the Sith was released. Lots of things from the Expanded Universe relevant to the Clone Wars from older books and comics plus more recent material like video games and newer novels in thr Clone Wars Multi-Media Project were expressly given what months they took place over the course of the 3-year war. There were some hiccups and older ideas that were modified or completely ignored, but retcons were mostly consistent given the newer context of the prequels.
The Clone Wars CGI show that began in 2008 more or less ignored the existing timeline. It picked and chose what to reuse and reference, like Delta Squad from Republic Commando having a cameo, but one big difference was that in the old timeline, Anakin had tons of adventures before he was finally knighted 6 months before ROTS. With TCW, he was knighted give or take 4 weeks after AOTC. The EU hierarchy made TCW have the priority to acknowledge as canon first, so the retcon solution chosen was for all of Anakin's Padawan-relevant 2.5 years of missions, drama, and growth to he condensed within only 4 weeks. There were some fixes for other contradictions, some retcons working out better than others, but by the time the old EU was rebranded as Legends, a revised step-by-step Clone Wars timeline to try and fix all the new contradictions was never made, lost to people's own headcanons. Though TCW is still technically Legends up to season 6, plenty of fans of the material and lore released before the show outright ignore TCW when discussing lore, except when also picking and choosing what they think is cool or can fit with the old 2005 timeline.
Yeah, it’s easier to disregard TCW from Legends. But there is another problem, TCW content made between TCW and Disney’s Acquisition. If we disregard TCW from the Legends Timeline, then the TCW connected content is removed from Two Timelines. Including a story about a pure of heart clone, who thinks he has the Force.
Son of Dathomir is both Legends and Canon as it released just as the acquisition happened. In some territories it was publish with a Legends Ribbon.
Well at least for that clone, that can fall under the pick and choose category of what you think can still work in the Legends timeline. That story and other TCW-branded stories before Disney still made explicit Legends references, like that clone's adventure having ties to the Kotor comics, or Rex being bros with a young pre-Empire Pellaeon in a novel by the author of the Republic Comma do books. I think it's more fun to think about how to fit everything together with retcons and imagining TCW as actually a lower tier of canon, but it's undeniable that as-is a lot of glaring contradictions were never definitively resolved
I thought Disney has said multiple times the first five seasons of TCW is still canon and so is everything that appears in it. Like that's how Darth Bane is still canon because of his appearance, though other than the Clone Wars info about him we don't know much about canon Bane.
Yeah the core show is still in the current canon, and both TCW and lots of the new expanded material still reference or explicitly use old lore and characters. I'm taking about even before Disney, the show introduced a lot of contradictions with what came before that were difficult to or never adequately reconciled. Like Darth Bane'a depiction in the show, even if it more so matches George Lucas' ideas for him like I've heard, clashes with how he is depicted in his own book trilogy, but elements of those books can still be used and referenced in new stuff if people wanted to
Them deciding to un-close a pretty sensible closed-loop time travel story as the sequel hook for a franchise that swerved hard into NOT that afterwards is hilarious though
I always had this same criticism about this MMO's story line. You've had 10 years of content but somehow it's still the same year within the storyline. "Oh hey, welcome to our yearly Valentione's Event. I see that this is your 9th year attending this event." but Alphinaud is still 16.
I feel that it could have been handled better. Like it would have made more sense to me if they do mini-timeskip between each patch. So at least it makes sense whenever you start a new MSQ in the new patch, and the NPC is like "oh hey it's been 3 months, how you been?"
Destiny has something of the opposite problem due to launch dates. It’s more or less implied that a year in game time is a year in real life too. Fair enough. Most of the characters are functionally immortal so it’s not like they’re going to visibly age. But then each new expansion comes out typically around the same time each year (recent delays pushing expansions from the holiday shopping season to Q1 notwithstanding). So you wind up with every world shaking event happening within a month or two before Christmas (and always on a Tuesday.)
Guild Wars 2 also has roughly 1 real time year be 1 game year and we have things like a child character pretty much doubling in size over the years, another character shaves their head and their hair grows back over the next year and so on.
Expansions can come out on any day of the week, but other updates usually happen on tuesdays...
GW2 also maintains a detailed timeline, including putting years on story stages in-game. GW2 starts in 1325 AE and is currently in 1336 AE. They even attempted to sync content release dates with in-game time (both calendars in game and irl calendars have 4 seasons and 365 days), but had to abandon that due to irl delivery constraints.
It's kinda funny. Most MMO's I've seen don't really have a moving timeline, but canonically speaking tons of time has passed in GTA Online. GTAO starts off 6 months before GTA5 and has advanced to 2022. It's straight up stated that your character has been around for years doing crazy shenanigans and you sometimes interact with characters from the main story with new, older, character models.
Star Wars The Last Jedi starting right when The Force Awakens ends creates some problems
Like how The First Order immediately took control of the ENTIRE Galaxy right after they destroy the New Republic capital despite the loss of Starkiller Base. Guess everyone in the galaxy except for the Rebels 2.0 just gave up
iirc The excuse given for the Resistance even existing in the extended media for the first movie instead of just being part of the New Republic army, was that after the Clone Wars and Empire everyone was afraid to give the Republic any military power and even kept its political power much more limited, so it really doesn't make any sense for the galaxy to fold that easily.
I've talked to people about this with it being insane that the Republic failed so hard that they were the Rebellion again. Like you destroyed their multiple planet killer and yet you still are losing to some kind of secret army that had been hidden on a single planet for thirty years. Its insane to think that the galaxy just decided, well we lost without fucking trying only for the last film to basically be okay fine we can do this even though the scenario for victory is worse than it was before.
Like there's not going to be anyone willing to make _another_ New Republic, because the Republic just straight up _failed._
They got their asses blown out by some weird neo-nazis operating out of one planet with some child soldiers. That's the memory of the Republic now.
>The FIRST ORDER reigns. Having decimated the peaceful Republic, Supreme Leader Snoke now deploys his merciless legions to seize military control of the galaxy.
I'm pretty it's less "First Order immediately took over everything" and more "in lieu of the recently destroyed Republic, the First Order is starting to seize galactic control before anyone else can."
It's not like we actually see how the First Order's greater galactic efforts are actually going. The First Order probably EXPECTS everyone to roll over and accept them as their new overlords, but it's probably not actually panning out that way.
Meanwhile, Snoke and the core First Order leadership is hyper-focused on Leia's Resistance, assuming that since the Republic was low-military that Leia's personal militia is the ONLY military opposition they'd face.
If the fleet at the end of TROS is anything to go by, things didn't go to plan there.
Everything to do with Starkiller base (aside from the name) is stupid as hell. The fact that it could be created within the SAME SOLAR SYSTEM as the Republic capital and go unnoticed is bonkers.
On top of that, a simple comparison really drives home just how dumb their plan is: "Just because you blow up the White House and Congress doesn't mean the government just stops."
I don't think it's supposed to be in the same solar system, which makes it stupid that they show the death laser visible in the sky. Jar Jar Abrams wanted those cool shots in the movie and didn't think past that.
And yeah, a big doomsday weapon is better used for maintaining power, rather than gaining it. Palpatine's plan was more thought out.
They aren't in the same system. Starkiller Base is made out of the planet Ilum, which previously existed in the appropriately named Ilum system. When they converted it into a giant super weapon it was mobile, just like the Death Star was. They hid it in an unnamed star system in the Unknown Regions. The Republic Capital was on Hosnian Prime in the (again appropriately named) Hosnian System, which is located in the Core Region. They basically fired a shot that traveled half way across the galaxy before hitting its target.
Now as for why the protagonists could see the damn thing firing from another planet halfway across the galaxy in a completely different direction from Hosnian Prime? The answer is that JJ has zero sense of scale when it comes to space. Its also why Kylo Ren goes from being in the same system as Starkiller Base to suddenly landing on Takodana in just a few in-universe minutes. He did the same shit with Star Trek. To JJ, FTL travel is a magic teleporter that gets you there as fast as the plot needs you to, even if its inconsistent with other examples in the same movie. And that's not even getting into when he says "fuck it" and puts in *literal* magic teleport buttons because having a ship actual fly through space in your space movie is just too much hassle and he needs to get on to his next set piece! (See Star Trek: Into Darkness for that nonsense)
Not even a ship! ~~Khan~~ **John Harrison** has PERSONAL site-to-site transporter technology that can take him from Earth to the Klingon homeworld Kronos ***in a different quadrant of the galaxy.***
Comicbooks in general. DC had a few reboots to fix them with mixed results, and Marvel often has to retcon their characters' backstories because they don't want to age them. Like Black Widow and Captain America being active in the cold war is now explained by de-aging serums or being stuck in icebergs, characters like Tony and Reed no longer being involved in WW2/Cold War, or whatever the writers will come up for Magneto so he can still be attached to the Holocaust.
I believe they even said there was a slider-timeline going on. This was an explanation to explain how Punisher went from a Vietnam vet to a Gulf War vet.
Canonically the events of Fate Grand Order happen within 3 years: the incineration of humanity started in 2017 and had to be stopped before New Years 2018 then there was a year of restructuring and cleanup in 2018 for Epic of Remnant. On new Years 2019 the alien god bleached the earth clean and created the lostbelts and it’s been a little less than a year since.
The problem arises when there have been so far 7 annual summer events and 6 Christmas and Halloween events. There’s also all the non-calendar related events and now you have to wonder how they’re all happening within a three year span of time. You might just think that all the events are non-canon except all of the servants from events that happened before part 1’s finale show up for the final boss fight to help you so they all had to happen. And the third Christmas event is an epilogue of sorts for the 7th singularity so that’s canon too. It’s become a situation where everything outside of the main story is now Schrödinger’s canon.
My favorite thing about the FGO timeline is the time while humanity was incinerated still passed. So the day everything was restored, everyone just blinked, looked at their calendars and went "What the fuck happened to 2017?".
Makes me wonder how the masquerade is gonna hold up after they solve cosmos in the lostbelt. You can’t really explain away an alien invasion that alters the earth’s topography
I assume the masquerade is almost entirely shattered by this point. Remember Salem getting swallowed by fog for a while? And isn't Chaldea connected to the UN somehow?
I'm pretty sure there's a moment in Strange Fake where El-Melloi is watching servants fighting in the middle of the day on live tv and is just like "I give us like a year before everyone and their mom knows."
Does the official canon legend of Zelda timeline count? Also overwatch and constantly shifting timelines around. Like it's crazy how the lore goes entirely in reverse with every new addition to the story being something that deals with a characters past to avoid moving the story forward. Cuz then you get bullshit like cowboy man being in reapers blackops team since he was like 16 since they met when he was a teenager. Then Ash shows up and is part of his old cowboy crew and it's like was he there when you were both 12? He was a cowboy pre reaper apparently so it's not like he took a break from the black ops team to be a train robber or whatever it is cowboys in the future do.
Cassidy was around 18 when he met Ashe in jail and they formed their gang with Ashe's family's money and stuff from their own heists. He joined Blackwatch in his 20s and he's now knocking on 40, just like Ashe.
The first time I saw an SMT timeline breakdown every blood vessel in my brain burst simultaneously and I was able to see eldritch beasts attached to buildings.
The connections are usually really faint, but they are there. For example, If and Persona exist in an alternate timeline where Japan does not get nuked in SMT1. Some games though, like Nocturne and V, have no real relation with the rest of the series.
Nah it's actually pretty easy, the key is that you have to keep in mind that the neutral ending of SMT 2 is a prequel to Jack Bros and then that game splits the timeline between Trauma Center and Stella Deus
GTA's timeline is so contradictory and inconsistent that it's a thing to split them into different universes for the 2D games, GTA 3 - GTA Vice City Stories and HD games because otherwise it would make no sense between games
Mobile Suit Gundam's One Year War is fucking **absurd** in terms of the number of mobile suit designs that were conceptualized and produced within a 12 month span, and the fact that original show's events take place within the last three months of the war.
This is made worse with all the sidestory OVAs and manga adding new design variants to the OYW, to the point that a different sidestory manga basically said "Zeon had really good simulation software, so they test designs virtually, then yeet them into production."
It's weird to think that Goten and Trunks are older than the Gohan that fought Cell, and yet they still look like little kids.
Or Bulma still looks young, despite being slightly younger than the Bulma who showed clear signs of aging at the end of Z.
This is a little late but funnily enough, both of them are explained in the super hero movie.
For Goten and Trunks, >!they just made an offhand mention that "saiyans grow really fast" one moment they're small and suddenly, growth spurts!<
And for Bulma, >!she just kept making wishes to the dragon to make herself look younger because "no one else are really using it" and she also ask, i kid you not, to make her butt bigger!<
Super Hero is when it gets weird I’d say, I just assumed Super was running on comic book time, but now we’re immediately before End of Z and Goku and Vegeta are still preparing to fight Frieza. That era of peace was like a week at most.
And Bulma was complaining that Goku lost contact with them, in the last 5 years.
Or Goku noticing that Bulma already shows signs of aging, even when in Super she looks even younger than in the Majin Buu saga. ( because of the art style, or because she took years off with the dragon balls)
Since I made a post semi-related to it recently, Touhou works on the Simpsons form of time progression, I.E. its constantly moving forward in real time to make mention of things as they happen in real life every now or then, or for a gag. But unlike the Simpsons, time _explicitly_ passes consistently in Touhou. There are incidents (aka arcs) where the seasons turning happen, and I believe the Occult Ball arc was the longest taking at least one, maybe two years worth of season changes, since it was tied into both a manga that ran for about that long and a couple games. But characters don't age, or if they do it's really just to say "Reimu can legally drink don't worry about it" and not much else. Which to a degree I prefer but it's weird how constantly moving and yet stagnant the timeline is.
And all of *that* is without getting into the dimensional timeline fuckery. Did you know that there are two Earths, and potentially more? Or how Gensokyo is weirdly disconnected from Earth's time, so you can have someone from the 2000's and someone from 22XX who are directly related be there at the same time and be similar ages?
Resident Evil videogames
They seem to want two things, first that each game takes place in the "present", and two that the characters do not age, that causes the original protagonists to look almost the same age, even when decades have passed since the beginning of the franchise, (In real life and in-universe)
Even when there is no reason for them to take place in the present, they could very well have made Resident Evil 8 take place shortly after 5, and it wouldn't have changed a thing, and Chris would be justified in looking so young.
I like the world building about the country history and relations to each other in Fire Emblem Three Houses, but the personal timelines of some characters just do not add up. The sequence of jobs and things people did for how long and in what order and how publicly should mean that it has to be obvious public knowledge that certain people are immortal, but the game acts like it’s a secret.
Red Dead Redemption 2 has this problem where you'll complete three story missions, four sidequests, and get run out of town, and then there'll be a timeskip and characters will say "boy that was a wild few days."
Futurama
\-Unlike the simpsons, Futurama is supposed to have a strong continuity.
Yet the characters never age or grow.
Which would be acceptable, if the series took place in 3000 or a little later, but the series tries to take place in the present +1000.
The Wolfenstein universe's sense of time is proportional to how hyped the characters are, but there's enough changes and content in the hub sections to imply we just see the condensed version of events and realistic amounts of time are in fact passing.
I feel like RE8's >!timeskip at the end!< is going to really complicate the series, and doesn't really make any sense.
Like how are they going to have games going forward where >!the whole RE crew is 16 years older? Doesn't that mean Chris is in like his late 40s, early 50s?!<
Any Transformers continuity where there was an active war that lasted for *millions* of years before the series started.
Fuck you, ***no it didn't***. Even taking into account the survivability of Transformers, and assuming the long war was on a much less intense level where those fighting might be involved in one battle per decade (which isn't usually what's implied), that's still *hundreds of thousands* of battles. We've seen bots get killed in basically every continuity that only covers a relatively short time period. None of those characters would have survived from the beginnings of a million year war, at a very basic statistical level.
Small example in Elden Ring. When Rogier tells you about Godwyn's death, he says it happened "during the Golden Age of the Erdtree, long before the shattering of the Elden Ring." He then ends his story two sentences later saying "Soon \[after Godwyn died\], the Elden Ring was smashed, and thus sprang forth the war known as the Shattering."
The hidden village era of Naruto has only been going on for like 80 years by the start of Boruto, from what I recall. Maybe not the worst timeline but it’s kinda ridiculous that these people went through wars that killed sizable portions of the relevant populations like four times during a stretch of time roughly equivalent to the span of the Cold War to now.
When new52 tried to say Bruce is 32 while on his fifth Robin, or something, I might be misremembering.
DC tried saying Batman’s entire history happened in the span of 5 years and they kept putting in retcons because they realized that definitive 5 year limit was stupid.
Batman AND Green Lantern. Which has a lot of issues when GL gets added in. Batman's history happening over 5 years is already ludicrous and bordering impossible, but at least most of Batman's major events are self contained to Batman and his family. Green Lantern has MULTIPLE line wide events integral to the character and Geoff John's story for the corp. It means anything happening within that 5 years has to also include the rest of the DC Universe's connection to GL being compressed into that 5 years too.
And since this was primarily done for Grant Morrison that would mean that Final Crisis happened since Batman’s death is pivotal to his run. So Barry Allen died, got replaced and came back but he also didn’t because Barry was the only Flash in existence with no legacy characters tied to him at that time.
He had Dickie alone as Robin longer than that. I just do what DC does and ignore the stuff I don't like and that tidbit is firmly in the "shit I pretend I did not see" category.
Green Lantern and Batman continuity was somewhat spared from New 52 because DC did not want to piss of Geoff Johns and Grant Morrison Like imagine if two of the most popular writers at DC both close to ending their years long character defining superhero runs, just didn’t get to finish them because Flash hit the reset button in a completely unrelated book.
Totally was going to point that out. The entire New 52 "5 year gap" thing caused all kinds of continuity issues. The thing is, there has always been a dubious timetable for most comics universes and the only events that were actually hard locked to a specific time are tied to real world events and even then, depending on the event, they can slide the scale(i.e. The Punisher serving in whichever war or conflict made sense for him to be in his 40s at that particular time.
In fact with the confirmation of the movie, many people have discussed how old a batman must be that already has Damian as a Sidekick. Ages can range from early 30's to mid 40's.
The movie Superman Returns has Lois Lane like 22 years of age, Pulitzer Prize-winning veteran journalist of the Daily Mail and has a 5 year old son. I know the movie went for younger actors because they expected the movie to be a start of a new franchise but they sabotaged this by also insisting that this also takes place as a sequel to the older Superman movies. Yes, Lois is smart but she isn't meant to be some child prodigy who got a degree in journalism and worked for a newspaper when she was sixteen, and Superman did not have sex with a minor.
Mass Effect. Humans went from 'Oh boy I'd sure would like to meet an alien' to being so wide-spread they control a quarter of the known galaxy and multiple generations inhabit the slums on Omega in less than 30 years when dudes like Admiral Hackett were already middle-aged before they even heard of a Turian or Asari.
To be fair the game does lean into this by saying that a major reason for other races distrust of humans is how quickly we spread, but yeah it’s a stretch.
The Terminator timeline is a logistical nightmare when you really break it down. So the first movie works on closed loop time travel logic; you can’t change the future because what you did in the past already happened and created the future you came back from. You can see this in John being Kyle’s son, the photo of Sarah Connor that Kyle brings back, John in the future knowing Kyle has to be the one to go back in time, all of that. This all works in the world of T1. All of that goes out the window when judgement day is delayed. Now, going back in time actively changes the future. This means that the timeline we are seeing in T1 is not the “prime timeline” by any means. This has to be at least 2-3 levels deep in time travel fuckery by this point. The picture of Sarah had to have been taken in the past, aged up to the future, then time traveled back with Kyle. This means that there has to be a version of the story in which the picture was originally taken, meaning there is a time in which Kyle goes back without the picture in the first place. Further more, since the machines are going back in time to kill John at all, that means he had to have existed before time travel was ever used to try and kill him. This means that John exists in a timeline with no time travel happening at all, which means *by necessity* there is a version of John Connor in which his father is not Kyle Reese, but just Some Guy. This John Connor, without the foresight of time fuckery and survival training from his mother, STILL goes on to be the savior of humanity, so much so that the machines devise time travel as an option to eliminate him entirely. Then, completely independent of all of this, John Connor learns about this machine time travel plan *somehow* and decides to send Kyle back in time, no Sarah Connor photo mind you, to go and save his mom in the past. They fall in love with no predestination guiding them, and this BRAND NEW JOHN CONNOR also happens to grow up to be the EXACT SAME PERSON IN THE FUTURE, regardless of their wildly different upbringings. Terminator time travel seems pretty straight forward, but absolutely collapses once you have to examine the consequences.
The timeline can be explained including 3 and Salvation, the original bad movies. But you throw Gynysys and Dark Fate into the mix you cannot rationalise.
I think the fact that the very existence of John Connor is a time paradox is exactly *why* he's the savior of humanity. His nature is *inherently* unnatural.
Explains why John is played by a different actor every movie lol
I used to be a FNAF fan, this is not a question you want to ask me.
May I ask what the finals straw was for you?
General growing disinterest.
Fair
I enjoyed keeping up with the series up to 4, at which point I think that awful FNAF world game came out and I would only catch the occasional mat pat video. And then those books came out and I think there’s like over a dozen books by now? That was probably the definitive last straw.
That feeling when they somehow crawled back a good ending. Then decided to keep going anyways because fuck it.
See, if they just continued and didn’t acknowledge anything from the previous games besides a reference or two, we would’ve been fine, but no, let’s >!bring back the repressed murderous furry as an artificial intelligence,!< that makes sense.
And then ignore the repressed murderous furry artificial intelligence in Favor of the repressed murderous furry again, but with slightly more purple!
Legend of Zelda is probably one of the more famous ones for having a straight up split timeline. What makes it great is that, for years, fans of the series tried to figure out how each of the games could work in a continuous timeline and came to the conclusion that it had to be split in half because of Ocarina of Time, wherein there's two separate timelines: Child (the original) and Adult (the bad future). However, Nintendo later officially revealed that it's actually split into *three* timelines: one where Link, as a child, stops Ganon before he gets the Triforce, which then leads to Majora's Mask and Twilight Princess; one where Link, as an adult, stops Ganon before returning to the past, leaving the future bereft of a champion and leading to Wind Waker and its sequels; and one where Link straight up loses so the Seven Sages have to seal Ganon away in a big wa, which leads to a Link to the Past, the Oracle games, and the original Legend of Zelda and its sequel. And that's not getting into how Skyward Sword and Minish Cap are actually at the start of the timeline (which means Vaati actually predates Ganon as the main villain, funnily enough), nor how Breath of the Wild has no established place in the timeline, it's just somewhere near the end and everything preceding it has faded into myth by its time. Which makes it especially whacky considering Breath of the Wild has a whole thing about a completely different war against Ganon 10,000 years before its events, and then there's also Age of Calamity which is *also* a new timeline due to time travel, if it's even canon considering it's a spin-off. All around, it's fairly weird, but at least there's some official explanation for those who want it. And really, at the end of the day, the real question is if Link's Crossbow Training should count.
They actually confirmed it was split into 2 in interviews long before they revealed it was split into 3. The only thing people who hate the timeline have a point about is that the Downfall Timeline (the one that inexplicably follows from Link dying in the final battle of OOT) feels like an afterthought so they could just tuck a bunch of the older games away and not have to think about them too much. But then they started thinking about them more and put more games in that branch, so you know. I'm always annoyed when people say the timeline is arbitrary or makes no sense or that "the games are just a series of retellings of the same story" (which is the fastest way to tell someone hasn't played the games in a long time), or "you're overthinking it! Nintendo never thought about this", referring to the same company that made multiple different translatable Hylian alphabets just so they could put relevant text on signs in the game world that nobody was going to read. That all being said, it's not as if there aren't a few retcons here and there, like in many franchises.
Yeah, I don't understand the people who say the games are supposed to be retellings. Like, not only does it not account for the fact that there are villains beyond Ganon, but plenty of the games explicitly follow after others in the series and have little connections to the preceding games. Wind Waker is pretty explicit about this with how the Rito are stated to be descended from the Zora and the Koroks from the Kokiri, plus the legend in the opening showing what happened after the events of Ocarina of time, while Twilight Princess has a lot of fun little implied connections, like the Hero's Shade being the Hero of Time, the Skull Kid playing Saria's Song, or the giant tree that makes the game's Forest Temple being a long dead and hollowed out Deku Tree.
I've seen people say OOT is a retelling of ALTTP, even though OOT is clearly an origin story for Ganon and ALTTP starts with Ganon sealed away in the dark world by the 7 sages. It could not be more explicit. I attribute most of it to people just not really paying much attention to the stories, maybe they played a few Zelda games when they were kids, and all they really remember is stuff like "you fight Ganon, and save Zelda".
A Link to the Past, Ocarina of Time, Twilight Princess, and a Link Between Worlds all involve Link traveling between a pretty normal world and a darker alternate world, so they're all clearly the same game. Ignore how one of them is a direct sequel, that part doesn't matter.
All the games except for FSA and the Oracles were given their current timeline placement years before nintendo made an easy to understand graph in 2011. in fact the split timelines were mentioned by Aonuma in interviews that go back to WW. They even straight up tell us that OoT has multiple endings in one of them. There were debates between the linearists and the splitists in the early 2000s to know if the timeline actually split following the release of WW. The splitists won because of the Aonuma interviews and it was the commonly accepted point of view amongst theorists years before Hyrule Historia. Aonuma's comment on BotW's placement was basically: "i can't tell you at the moment but it happens at the end of one of the timelines after every game" It was interpreted as "Aonuma doesn't give a fuck about the timeline" by detractors but given that we know that he immediatly started to work on TotK after BotW was done and that this game will focus on events that happened between the other games and BotW. The most likely explanation is that Aonuma doesn't want to give too much details about the events that happened before BotW because it is coming into play in TotK and if that game doesn't make it explicit enough, he will then give a placement (if we assume that TotK is the last game featuring this era of the timeline and that they aren't planning a third game with the same Link)
It's still been less than a year since Detective Conan started. This isn't even an "Ash is still 10" situation. Even if you only count the manga as canon, there is a clear timeline of the amount of time that's supposed to have passed, and then there's like a million cases and decades of content in between that make that impossible. Not only that, but the sliding timeline also makes technology make no sense. Not too long ago, there was a flashback case that took place 10 years ago. As part of the case, someone pulls out their smartphone and takes a picture. Meanwhile in the first episode, cell phones don't exist, Conan is using a payphone to contact people, and Professor Agasa invents crazy futuristic objects like a "wireless fax machine".
No wonder a Mouri's so well known. He's getting credit for solving like 4 cases a day.
Logically, if an anime exceeds 365 episodes, it no longer makes sense that the characters have not aged even 1 year, even if each episode was a day after the previous one.
I mean, not really. HunterXHunter famously has like 10 or so episodes that take place in the span of minutes in universe, just because the amount of shit that happens in those minutes is insane. There's no rule that says that an episode needs to correlate to one day. But I do get what you're saying if all those 365 episodes imply they're a completely different day than the one before.
I had to be more specific, if an episodic series exceeds 365 episodes, it no longer makes sense for it to take place in the same year.
Under that phrasing, yes, 100%.
I don't know if I'd go that far, but when there are multiple Christmas and New Year specials, you can be pretty sure they probably crossed that line.
FFXIV's timeline really wants you to believe it's only been a year then simultaneously has in universe events that actively show the passing of time. The second part of Stormblood, where you travel *across the planet* takes months before you even reach the continent. Because you have to go by boat as the land between you and them is completely occupied and can't be flown over. Explicitly. Months.
I only know about Tekken from the friends' playthrough, and I still remember them freaking out about how the span of multiple games and King of Iron Fist tournaments take place in like a month
I can't remember what season it was, but in the show "24" the main characters were getting across all of LA by car in under 15 minutes.
There is no way they managed to make the premise work within its bounds at all.
Do not asked what's the official timelines for Kamen Rider is. Just don't.
Kamen Rider is great because you have series that absolutely cannot take place in the same setting still crossover with each other like they're all part of the same world. And also the original five Kamen Riders just pop up sometimes for events. Don't worry about it, just have fun!
With the exception of the Showa Era, I thought they explained the whole "it's all in different universes" with the Decade Wall Shroud.... At least until Neo Heisei bc somewhere before or after ExAid and Revice (because that's when I've seen it happened since), they show the next Rider near the end of the series. I don't think it happened in Zero One
I know Decade has a thing where every rider is connected (which some friends of mine describe as "Every crossover with Decade is just an episode of Decade"), but I'm pretty sure they've done the "future Kamen Rider shows up towards the end of the current Rider" thing since W, at least, where Eiji from OOO shows up in the movie. Actually, Decade might've started that trend, now that I'm thinking about it? At the very least there's definitely a trend of the next Kamen Rider showing up in a movie or in an after credits thing as a sort of "passing the torch", which is always kind of fun because you can usually tell when they haven't fully figured out what the next rider is going to be like, since their character will be slightly off or they won't show up outside of the suit.
The only timeline that really matter is that the Big Bad is super strong, so strong that the show Rider can't beat, so cue the other shows Riders to get together for a crossover movie to beat and then Rider Kick the shit out of the Big Bad together.
when people try to put together a logical timeline of crossovers for rider and sentai i just go "their timeline is a flimsy house of cards on its best of days"
Is each series not in its own continuity?
It plays fast and loose with it with some series implying one way and others implying another
For Star Wars, the timeline for the Clone Wars was pretty well defined after Revenge of the Sith was released. Lots of things from the Expanded Universe relevant to the Clone Wars from older books and comics plus more recent material like video games and newer novels in thr Clone Wars Multi-Media Project were expressly given what months they took place over the course of the 3-year war. There were some hiccups and older ideas that were modified or completely ignored, but retcons were mostly consistent given the newer context of the prequels. The Clone Wars CGI show that began in 2008 more or less ignored the existing timeline. It picked and chose what to reuse and reference, like Delta Squad from Republic Commando having a cameo, but one big difference was that in the old timeline, Anakin had tons of adventures before he was finally knighted 6 months before ROTS. With TCW, he was knighted give or take 4 weeks after AOTC. The EU hierarchy made TCW have the priority to acknowledge as canon first, so the retcon solution chosen was for all of Anakin's Padawan-relevant 2.5 years of missions, drama, and growth to he condensed within only 4 weeks. There were some fixes for other contradictions, some retcons working out better than others, but by the time the old EU was rebranded as Legends, a revised step-by-step Clone Wars timeline to try and fix all the new contradictions was never made, lost to people's own headcanons. Though TCW is still technically Legends up to season 6, plenty of fans of the material and lore released before the show outright ignore TCW when discussing lore, except when also picking and choosing what they think is cool or can fit with the old 2005 timeline.
Yeah, it’s easier to disregard TCW from Legends. But there is another problem, TCW content made between TCW and Disney’s Acquisition. If we disregard TCW from the Legends Timeline, then the TCW connected content is removed from Two Timelines. Including a story about a pure of heart clone, who thinks he has the Force. Son of Dathomir is both Legends and Canon as it released just as the acquisition happened. In some territories it was publish with a Legends Ribbon.
Well at least for that clone, that can fall under the pick and choose category of what you think can still work in the Legends timeline. That story and other TCW-branded stories before Disney still made explicit Legends references, like that clone's adventure having ties to the Kotor comics, or Rex being bros with a young pre-Empire Pellaeon in a novel by the author of the Republic Comma do books. I think it's more fun to think about how to fit everything together with retcons and imagining TCW as actually a lower tier of canon, but it's undeniable that as-is a lot of glaring contradictions were never definitively resolved
I thought Disney has said multiple times the first five seasons of TCW is still canon and so is everything that appears in it. Like that's how Darth Bane is still canon because of his appearance, though other than the Clone Wars info about him we don't know much about canon Bane.
Yeah the core show is still in the current canon, and both TCW and lots of the new expanded material still reference or explicitly use old lore and characters. I'm taking about even before Disney, the show introduced a lot of contradictions with what came before that were difficult to or never adequately reconciled. Like Darth Bane'a depiction in the show, even if it more so matches George Lucas' ideas for him like I've heard, clashes with how he is depicted in his own book trilogy, but elements of those books can still be used and referenced in new stuff if people wanted to
Jak and Daxter series has a pretty crazy timeline, and the end of the third game implies it is even crazier than what was already established.
Them deciding to un-close a pretty sensible closed-loop time travel story as the sequel hook for a franchise that swerved hard into NOT that afterwards is hilarious though
I always had this same criticism about this MMO's story line. You've had 10 years of content but somehow it's still the same year within the storyline. "Oh hey, welcome to our yearly Valentione's Event. I see that this is your 9th year attending this event." but Alphinaud is still 16. I feel that it could have been handled better. Like it would have made more sense to me if they do mini-timeskip between each patch. So at least it makes sense whenever you start a new MSQ in the new patch, and the NPC is like "oh hey it's been 3 months, how you been?"
Destiny has something of the opposite problem due to launch dates. It’s more or less implied that a year in game time is a year in real life too. Fair enough. Most of the characters are functionally immortal so it’s not like they’re going to visibly age. But then each new expansion comes out typically around the same time each year (recent delays pushing expansions from the holiday shopping season to Q1 notwithstanding). So you wind up with every world shaking event happening within a month or two before Christmas (and always on a Tuesday.)
Guild Wars 2 also has roughly 1 real time year be 1 game year and we have things like a child character pretty much doubling in size over the years, another character shaves their head and their hair grows back over the next year and so on. Expansions can come out on any day of the week, but other updates usually happen on tuesdays...
GW2 also maintains a detailed timeline, including putting years on story stages in-game. GW2 starts in 1325 AE and is currently in 1336 AE. They even attempted to sync content release dates with in-game time (both calendars in game and irl calendars have 4 seasons and 365 days), but had to abandon that due to irl delivery constraints.
At that point do what Dr. Who did, and have characters going "alright, what the fuck is it gonna be this year" every November.
It's kinda funny. Most MMO's I've seen don't really have a moving timeline, but canonically speaking tons of time has passed in GTA Online. GTAO starts off 6 months before GTA5 and has advanced to 2022. It's straight up stated that your character has been around for years doing crazy shenanigans and you sometimes interact with characters from the main story with new, older, character models.
A funny example is Dragon Ball Online, since all the events take place in the year 1000, even when the character goes from being a child to an adult.
Star Wars The Last Jedi starting right when The Force Awakens ends creates some problems Like how The First Order immediately took control of the ENTIRE Galaxy right after they destroy the New Republic capital despite the loss of Starkiller Base. Guess everyone in the galaxy except for the Rebels 2.0 just gave up
iirc The excuse given for the Resistance even existing in the extended media for the first movie instead of just being part of the New Republic army, was that after the Clone Wars and Empire everyone was afraid to give the Republic any military power and even kept its political power much more limited, so it really doesn't make any sense for the galaxy to fold that easily.
I've talked to people about this with it being insane that the Republic failed so hard that they were the Rebellion again. Like you destroyed their multiple planet killer and yet you still are losing to some kind of secret army that had been hidden on a single planet for thirty years. Its insane to think that the galaxy just decided, well we lost without fucking trying only for the last film to basically be okay fine we can do this even though the scenario for victory is worse than it was before.
Like there's not going to be anyone willing to make _another_ New Republic, because the Republic just straight up _failed._ They got their asses blown out by some weird neo-nazis operating out of one planet with some child soldiers. That's the memory of the Republic now.
>The FIRST ORDER reigns. Having decimated the peaceful Republic, Supreme Leader Snoke now deploys his merciless legions to seize military control of the galaxy. I'm pretty it's less "First Order immediately took over everything" and more "in lieu of the recently destroyed Republic, the First Order is starting to seize galactic control before anyone else can." It's not like we actually see how the First Order's greater galactic efforts are actually going. The First Order probably EXPECTS everyone to roll over and accept them as their new overlords, but it's probably not actually panning out that way. Meanwhile, Snoke and the core First Order leadership is hyper-focused on Leia's Resistance, assuming that since the Republic was low-military that Leia's personal militia is the ONLY military opposition they'd face. If the fleet at the end of TROS is anything to go by, things didn't go to plan there.
Fair enough, that’s on me for misremembering the opening crawl
There’s also the dissonance of Rey seemingly spending days at Luke’s place while the Rebels are having the slowest chase in sci-fi history.
Everything to do with Starkiller base (aside from the name) is stupid as hell. The fact that it could be created within the SAME SOLAR SYSTEM as the Republic capital and go unnoticed is bonkers. On top of that, a simple comparison really drives home just how dumb their plan is: "Just because you blow up the White House and Congress doesn't mean the government just stops."
I don't think it's supposed to be in the same solar system, which makes it stupid that they show the death laser visible in the sky. Jar Jar Abrams wanted those cool shots in the movie and didn't think past that. And yeah, a big doomsday weapon is better used for maintaining power, rather than gaining it. Palpatine's plan was more thought out.
They aren't in the same system. Starkiller Base is made out of the planet Ilum, which previously existed in the appropriately named Ilum system. When they converted it into a giant super weapon it was mobile, just like the Death Star was. They hid it in an unnamed star system in the Unknown Regions. The Republic Capital was on Hosnian Prime in the (again appropriately named) Hosnian System, which is located in the Core Region. They basically fired a shot that traveled half way across the galaxy before hitting its target. Now as for why the protagonists could see the damn thing firing from another planet halfway across the galaxy in a completely different direction from Hosnian Prime? The answer is that JJ has zero sense of scale when it comes to space. Its also why Kylo Ren goes from being in the same system as Starkiller Base to suddenly landing on Takodana in just a few in-universe minutes. He did the same shit with Star Trek. To JJ, FTL travel is a magic teleporter that gets you there as fast as the plot needs you to, even if its inconsistent with other examples in the same movie. And that's not even getting into when he says "fuck it" and puts in *literal* magic teleport buttons because having a ship actual fly through space in your space movie is just too much hassle and he needs to get on to his next set piece! (See Star Trek: Into Darkness for that nonsense)
Not even a ship! ~~Khan~~ **John Harrison** has PERSONAL site-to-site transporter technology that can take him from Earth to the Klingon homeworld Kronos ***in a different quadrant of the galaxy.***
Comicbooks in general. DC had a few reboots to fix them with mixed results, and Marvel often has to retcon their characters' backstories because they don't want to age them. Like Black Widow and Captain America being active in the cold war is now explained by de-aging serums or being stuck in icebergs, characters like Tony and Reed no longer being involved in WW2/Cold War, or whatever the writers will come up for Magneto so he can still be attached to the Holocaust.
For example Marvel replaced vietnam with the fictional “Siancong War”
Still kills me Marvel didn’t reboot the timeline after secret wars
I believe they even said there was a slider-timeline going on. This was an explanation to explain how Punisher went from a Vietnam vet to a Gulf War vet.
Canonically the events of Fate Grand Order happen within 3 years: the incineration of humanity started in 2017 and had to be stopped before New Years 2018 then there was a year of restructuring and cleanup in 2018 for Epic of Remnant. On new Years 2019 the alien god bleached the earth clean and created the lostbelts and it’s been a little less than a year since. The problem arises when there have been so far 7 annual summer events and 6 Christmas and Halloween events. There’s also all the non-calendar related events and now you have to wonder how they’re all happening within a three year span of time. You might just think that all the events are non-canon except all of the servants from events that happened before part 1’s finale show up for the final boss fight to help you so they all had to happen. And the third Christmas event is an epilogue of sorts for the 7th singularity so that’s canon too. It’s become a situation where everything outside of the main story is now Schrödinger’s canon.
It only started becoming problem wth part 2s shitty pacing and blatant rewrites honestly.
My favorite thing about the FGO timeline is the time while humanity was incinerated still passed. So the day everything was restored, everyone just blinked, looked at their calendars and went "What the fuck happened to 2017?".
Makes me wonder how the masquerade is gonna hold up after they solve cosmos in the lostbelt. You can’t really explain away an alien invasion that alters the earth’s topography
I assume the masquerade is almost entirely shattered by this point. Remember Salem getting swallowed by fog for a while? And isn't Chaldea connected to the UN somehow? I'm pretty sure there's a moment in Strange Fake where El-Melloi is watching servants fighting in the middle of the day on live tv and is just like "I give us like a year before everyone and their mom knows."
Does the official canon legend of Zelda timeline count? Also overwatch and constantly shifting timelines around. Like it's crazy how the lore goes entirely in reverse with every new addition to the story being something that deals with a characters past to avoid moving the story forward. Cuz then you get bullshit like cowboy man being in reapers blackops team since he was like 16 since they met when he was a teenager. Then Ash shows up and is part of his old cowboy crew and it's like was he there when you were both 12? He was a cowboy pre reaper apparently so it's not like he took a break from the black ops team to be a train robber or whatever it is cowboys in the future do.
Cassidy was around 18 when he met Ashe in jail and they formed their gang with Ashe's family's money and stuff from their own heists. He joined Blackwatch in his 20s and he's now knocking on 40, just like Ashe.
The first time I saw an SMT timeline breakdown every blood vessel in my brain burst simultaneously and I was able to see eldritch beasts attached to buildings.
Isn't the series an anthology though?
Not all of it.
The connections are usually really faint, but they are there. For example, If and Persona exist in an alternate timeline where Japan does not get nuked in SMT1. Some games though, like Nocturne and V, have no real relation with the rest of the series.
3 and 5 are the only ones I played
Nah it's actually pretty easy, the key is that you have to keep in mind that the neutral ending of SMT 2 is a prequel to Jack Bros and then that game splits the timeline between Trauma Center and Stella Deus
I legitimately don't know if you're joking or not, and that scares me. I've *seen* the extended Ace Combat [timeline](https://ugsf-series.com).
GTA's timeline is so contradictory and inconsistent that it's a thing to split them into different universes for the 2D games, GTA 3 - GTA Vice City Stories and HD games because otherwise it would make no sense between games
Mobile Suit Gundam's One Year War is fucking **absurd** in terms of the number of mobile suit designs that were conceptualized and produced within a 12 month span, and the fact that original show's events take place within the last three months of the war. This is made worse with all the sidestory OVAs and manga adding new design variants to the OYW, to the point that a different sidestory manga basically said "Zeon had really good simulation software, so they test designs virtually, then yeet them into production."
Dragonball, it's understandable enough in Z if a bit dumb, but becomes stupid nonsense in Super.
It's weird to think that Goten and Trunks are older than the Gohan that fought Cell, and yet they still look like little kids. Or Bulma still looks young, despite being slightly younger than the Bulma who showed clear signs of aging at the end of Z.
This is a little late but funnily enough, both of them are explained in the super hero movie. For Goten and Trunks, >!they just made an offhand mention that "saiyans grow really fast" one moment they're small and suddenly, growth spurts!< And for Bulma, >!she just kept making wishes to the dragon to make herself look younger because "no one else are really using it" and she also ask, i kid you not, to make her butt bigger!<
Super Hero is when it gets weird I’d say, I just assumed Super was running on comic book time, but now we’re immediately before End of Z and Goku and Vegeta are still preparing to fight Frieza. That era of peace was like a week at most.
And Bulma was complaining that Goku lost contact with them, in the last 5 years. Or Goku noticing that Bulma already shows signs of aging, even when in Super she looks even younger than in the Majin Buu saga. ( because of the art style, or because she took years off with the dragon balls)
Technically there's like a full year to 5 years of aging when they get sent to the shadow realm, but that's only mentally.
The fallout timeline makes zero sense. Gets even muddier when you include fallout 76
What do you mean we forgot how to make buildings after having them in 1 and 2?
Since I made a post semi-related to it recently, Touhou works on the Simpsons form of time progression, I.E. its constantly moving forward in real time to make mention of things as they happen in real life every now or then, or for a gag. But unlike the Simpsons, time _explicitly_ passes consistently in Touhou. There are incidents (aka arcs) where the seasons turning happen, and I believe the Occult Ball arc was the longest taking at least one, maybe two years worth of season changes, since it was tied into both a manga that ran for about that long and a couple games. But characters don't age, or if they do it's really just to say "Reimu can legally drink don't worry about it" and not much else. Which to a degree I prefer but it's weird how constantly moving and yet stagnant the timeline is. And all of *that* is without getting into the dimensional timeline fuckery. Did you know that there are two Earths, and potentially more? Or how Gensokyo is weirdly disconnected from Earth's time, so you can have someone from the 2000's and someone from 22XX who are directly related be there at the same time and be similar ages?
Resident Evil videogames They seem to want two things, first that each game takes place in the "present", and two that the characters do not age, that causes the original protagonists to look almost the same age, even when decades have passed since the beginning of the franchise, (In real life and in-universe) Even when there is no reason for them to take place in the present, they could very well have made Resident Evil 8 take place shortly after 5, and it wouldn't have changed a thing, and Chris would be justified in looking so young.
I like the world building about the country history and relations to each other in Fire Emblem Three Houses, but the personal timelines of some characters just do not add up. The sequence of jobs and things people did for how long and in what order and how publicly should mean that it has to be obvious public knowledge that certain people are immortal, but the game acts like it’s a secret.
Red Dead Redemption 2 has this problem where you'll complete three story missions, four sidequests, and get run out of town, and then there'll be a timeskip and characters will say "boy that was a wild few days."
Futurama \-Unlike the simpsons, Futurama is supposed to have a strong continuity. Yet the characters never age or grow. Which would be acceptable, if the series took place in 3000 or a little later, but the series tries to take place in the present +1000.
Time paradox cithria
Wolfenstein: The New Order has characters get from London to Berlin in what seems to be less than five minutes.
The Wolfenstein universe's sense of time is proportional to how hyped the characters are, but there's enough changes and content in the hub sections to imply we just see the condensed version of events and realistic amounts of time are in fact passing.
I feel like RE8's >!timeskip at the end!< is going to really complicate the series, and doesn't really make any sense. Like how are they going to have games going forward where >!the whole RE crew is 16 years older? Doesn't that mean Chris is in like his late 40s, early 50s?!<
More if we take into account that Resident Evil 8 takes place in the "present". So most of the leads should be in >!their late 50's or 60's.!<
Any Transformers continuity where there was an active war that lasted for *millions* of years before the series started. Fuck you, ***no it didn't***. Even taking into account the survivability of Transformers, and assuming the long war was on a much less intense level where those fighting might be involved in one battle per decade (which isn't usually what's implied), that's still *hundreds of thousands* of battles. We've seen bots get killed in basically every continuity that only covers a relatively short time period. None of those characters would have survived from the beginnings of a million year war, at a very basic statistical level.
Small example in Elden Ring. When Rogier tells you about Godwyn's death, he says it happened "during the Golden Age of the Erdtree, long before the shattering of the Elden Ring." He then ends his story two sentences later saying "Soon \[after Godwyn died\], the Elden Ring was smashed, and thus sprang forth the war known as the Shattering."
Marvel. DC. Pretty much any long-running comic.
The hidden village era of Naruto has only been going on for like 80 years by the start of Boruto, from what I recall. Maybe not the worst timeline but it’s kinda ridiculous that these people went through wars that killed sizable portions of the relevant populations like four times during a stretch of time roughly equivalent to the span of the Cold War to now.