Canon Discontinuity/Real Life

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Examples of Canon Discontinuity in Real Life include:

  • This is essentially what a marriage annulment amounts to. In a divorce, a marriage is officially declared to be over; when a marriage is annulled, however, it is considered never to have been a valid marriage in the first place. In times when divorces were significantly harder to get, many people would find a reason for an annulment.
    • The annulment/divorce distinction is a specific manifestation of a greater issue in contract law: some contracts can be declared void, i.e., considered to have never been formed, for reasons such as misrepresentation, one party being a minor who did not get adult consent, among other things, while other contracts are "voidable"—they were valid contracts up to a point where one party's behavior rendered them void.
  • Coca-Cola's official history at its website doesn't mention New Coke at all. Nor does its corporate museum.
  • When former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky was arrested on charges of sexually molesting teenage boys, students at Penn State painted him out of a mural showing all the present and past coaches of the football team, replacing him with a blue ribbon.
  • Neither Benedict Arnold's name nor his face appear on memorials to him at the site of the Battle of Saratoga or on the formal roll of past commandants of West Point at the U.S. Military Academy (only the date, 1780, appears where his name would be), since despite real military accomplishments that twice saved the Continental Army's bacon during the American Revolutionary War, he is remembered today primarily for selling out to the British (if you're American) or being sufficiently mercenary to make what he saw to be the best of a bad situation (if you aren't).

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