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{{examples}}
==
* ''[[Gundam]]''
** This happened with the [[Mobile Suit Gundam|original UC timeline]], which is one of the main reasons [[Alternate Universe]] series were made. It was also a major driving force behind the creation of ''[[Metal Armor Dragonar]]''; Bandai wanted to bring in fans who might have otherwise been stymied by the existing ''Gundam'' mythos and were ready to switch production to ''Dragonar'' if it outperformed ''[[Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ|Gundam ZZ]]''. It didn't, but remains a cult favorite.
** Somewhat remedied by the easy-to-follow-if-hard-to-grab-all-the-nuances ''[[Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn]]''.
* Parodied in an episode of ''[[Sayonara, Zetsubou-sensei
** It was also parodied in that they quickly grew tired of those longtime viewers who knew the show so well they saw all the jokes coming.▼
▲It was also parodied in that they quickly grew tired of those longtime viewers who knew the show so well they saw all the jokes coming.
* ''[[Fullmetal Alchemist (manga)|Fullmetal Alchemist]]''. Same goes for [[Fullmetal Alchemist (anime)|the 2003 anime adaptation]], especially if you're watching the [[OVA]] and didn't see the last few episodes.
* ''[[Naruto]]'' is susceptible to this during its arcs.
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* ''[[Pokémon Special]]'' has its instances of this, with current, important plot points coming from previous-generation chapters.
==
* This is particularly prevalent in comic book series, more so than television or film, because while most TV shows run for a maximum of a few hundred episodes (most of which are easily obtainable one way or another) some comic book series [[Long Runner|run for much longer]]. (Like [[Superman]]: Consistently in print since the ''1930s''). This, and the fact that comic books can be incredibly rare (with the auction prices this entails), ensures that most new readers are just going to either give up or ignore most of the last 70 years of continuity.
* This was the reason given for DC Comics' first [[Cosmic Retcon]], [[Crisis on Infinite Earths]], back in 1985: that things were getting too confusing for the fans (in actuality, it was getting too confusing *for the writers* but they didn't want to admit it.)
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* Kurt Busiek actually managed to avoid this with ''Untold Tales of Spider-Man''. Instead of being a retcon or anything similar, it was early stories set 'in-between' the very first Spider-Man stories. If you had read the original issues it made Untold Tales more enjoyable, but if you hadn't then it was still no biggie.
* The more recent{{when}} ''[[Harry Potter (film)|Harry Potter]]'' films have had this problem in an unusual way. Each individual movie has been more or less comprehensible without reading the books. However, when put into a movie continuity, things ''don't make sense''.▼
▲== Film ==
▲* The more recent ''[[Harry Potter (film)|Harry Potter]]'' films have had this problem in an unusual way. Each individual movie has been more or less comprehensible without reading the books. However, when put into a movie continuity, things ''don't make sense''.
** As an example, the plot and tension of ''Order of the Phoenix'' hinges on the fact that the only person who would admit to Voldemort's return is Harry Potter. The problem is that if you saw ''Goblet of Fire'' you know that isn't true. Because the Ministry of Magic ''clearly'' has someone in custody who could tell them (or they could magic it out of his head): Barty Crouch Jr, who was last seen alive and going to be taken into custody at the end of the film. Of course, the book of ''Goblet of Fire'' had him [[A Fate Worse Than Death|kinda-killed off]]. This was not done in the film, and thus you need to read the books in order for the continuous work of films to make sense.
** An earlier example would be the complete cutting out of Peeves, hence the cutting of the broken Vanishing Cabinet, which became an important [[Chekhov's Gun]] in
** Not only back story is cut, but some events are treated very badly by the filmmakers. In ''
** Speaking of the Crouches, the film changes Junior's back story from "believed to be dead" to "still imprisoned in Azkaban". Which may be very confusing for moviegoers who are now expected to believe he could have escaped with nobody noticing while the plot previous film revolved around another escape that was discovered instantly.
** Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot and Prongs. The movie never says who they are. Then, Harry calls Pettigrew "Wormtail" in the ''Goblet of Fire'' movie without explanation. And Sirius is called "Padfoot" in ''[[Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (film)|Order of the Phoenix]]''.
*** Plus, it also means that no explanation at all is given for how Lupin instantly recognizes the Marauder's Map for what it is.
** Nobody believes Voldemort is back in the ''
** In ''Order Of The Phoenix'' they left out the entire point of Snape's flashback during Occlumeny, which was {{spoiler|Lily - specifically him calling her mudblood. That was the entire point of it being Snape's Worse Memory, him ostracizing her.}} It was the massive turning point of his character up until then and they cut it out! They were apparently forced to cut it out, but still.
*** Though it's not entirely obvious this was the worst bit about his memory {{spoiler|until book seven, where we realise he loved her and alienated her with that comment.}}
** Dobby and Kreacher are MIA in ''Half-Blood Prince''. Apparently Kreacher was to be excised from the ''
** Because the potion book subplot was so shortened in the sixth film, the reveal that {{spoiler|Snape is the Half-Blood Prince}} makes very little sense. It's clear that this is why the book let Harry be so good at Potions, but even that is minor.
** They also left out what may be the ''single most important'' minor detail in ''Half-Blood Prince.'' Specifically, {{spoiler|the old tiara}} Harry puts on the stone bust of an ugly wizard in the room of requirement. This {{spoiler|turns out to be the Diadem of Ravenclaw, and Voldemort's next-to-last proper Horcrux.}} It's not present at all in the movie, so Harry won't know where to look for the 6th {{spoiler|Horcrux.}} It's possible they might try a workaround with Ginny since she hides the potions book in the movie, but seeing as she's not in on Voldemort's secret in the first place, it's gonna be difficult.
*** No more difficult than leading Harry to the conclusion that {{spoiler|the Diadem of Ravenclaw is a Horcrux in the first place}} will be, considering that they left out the bits where he and Dumbledore {{spoiler|make a list of possible Horcruxes and glean the clues from Voldemort's past than enable them to predict his actions.}}
*** In the end, they just had Harry {{spoiler|see the Diadem on the vision from Voldemort, and ask the Gray Lady where it is.}} Did you really think [[Adaptation Decay|they were going to give Ginny some plot]]?
*** There is a deleted scene
** This trope is actually ''[[Inverted Trope|inverted]]'' between ''Half-Blood Prince'' and ''Deathly Hallows - Part 1'' - a
** ''Deathly Hallows - Part
*** Though it does do right by Bill Weasley, acknowledging that he and Harry have never met before in the films, and throwing in a reference to how he got his scars (a scene cut from the previous film).
*** All of this is mainly because they decided to make the last three films have the most consistent continuity. ''Deathly Hallows
* The ''[[Star Trek]]'' movies (to a large extent) avoided this, save for ''[[Star Trek: First Contact]]'' (which assumed the viewer had some knowledge of the "Best Of Both Worlds" two-parter and ''[[Star Trek: Deep Space Nine]]'' for Worf's location during the cube battle). Several other examples are peppered throughout the films:
** Data's emotion chip is an interesting example. ''[[Star Trek Generations]]'' and ''First Contact'' both have Data mulling over whether to use the chip or not. New viewers to these films won't understand much of what Data's talking about unless they've seen the earlier seasons of ''TNG'' (specifically the fourth- and fifth-season episodes regarding Data, Lore and Dr. Soong).
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** The film does have a (throw away) line about being the brother of Sub-Zero, and being that the first movie showed Scorpion removing his mask to show a ''fire-breathing skull'' him coming back to life isn't sharp leap. Watching the second movie and not the first, however, would still count as a lockout.
▲== Literature ==
* [[The Elder Scrolls Novels]] are based on the video game series, and if you don't know the continuity and lore then most of the events of the novel will sound like an [[Ass Pull]] when it actually does [[It Makes Sense in Context|Make Sense In Context]].
* In another example of a creator locking himself out of his own continuity, [[John Varley]], in an introduction to one of his ''Eight Worlds'' novels, admits that he's long since lost track of all the background details of the series, and has given up trying to make the later novels fully consistent with the early ones.
* [[The Wheel of Time]] series is a dense example of this. As the series progresses, and both the cast and pagecount swell, individual characters get less and less face time. It's sometimes several hundred pages between a character's appearances, even for ''main characters''. Two of the main characters, Mat and Perrin, have even been left out of an ENTIRE book at one point or another. Worse, the characters have often been active in that time, leaving the reader to infer what happened since they were last seen. Not that we're bitter.
** In fact, it is quite clear that till the 4th book or so, each book provided info from previous books, including character development history and some important pieces of lore. However, by the 5th book, no more "backward compatibility" is provided and the writer assumes that readers have read the previous books.
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* Various ''[[Star Wars Expanded Universe]]'' works assume the reader has at least basic [[Broad Strokes]] knowledge of important EU events and don't even attempt to make sense otherwise. Amazingly, other works still manage to remain accessible, though the knowledge of the movies is still pretty much required.
▲== [[Live Action TV]] ==
* The ''[[Stargate]]'' franchise has been accused of this. A newbie coming it at the eighth season of ''[[Stargate SG-1]],'' for instance, is going to need some help understanding who and what all those species are meant to be about. Some people almost gave up after sitting through the ''pilot episode''—without seeing the movie first. "Who are all these people?!" Somehow it did not occur to the writers that it carried over a whopping six characters from the movie without bothering to give them any proper introduction, ''in addition to'' introducing five new major characters in this episode alone. The fact that they moved through Abydos and Chulak in large crowds didn't help. Starting with "Emancipation," when it became obvious that they were focusing on a four-person team, things started to look more manageable.
** Hence why ''[[Stargate Universe]]'' features a new cast in a new setting with few links back to the other series (really only cameos) and a different style: to capture new audiences.
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* "[[Mad Men]]" suffers from this in spades. The episodes are generally not self-contained, and most of the subtext is built upon episodes from previous seasons. The problem is that this series built on subtext. Viewers must watch from the absolute, [[S 1 E 1]] beginning. The [["Previously On..."]] segments absolutely do not help.
▲== Newspaper Comics ==
* Nearly every Newspaper Comic in existence is written under the belief that not everyone gets the newspaper every day, so most of them are of a Gag-a-Day format to avoid this. However...
** Both Floyd Gottfredson's Mickey Mouse daily strips and Ward Greene's [[Scamp]] daily strips began as essentially one continuous story, but both eventually shifted to gag a day formats.
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* [[Doonesbury]] is a victim of this. 40 years of strips with close to 100 characters, around 30 or so who appear on a regular basis.
* Usually avoided in pro wrestling, since most of the characters (at least if the fall between the two extremes of "irrelevant" and "universally popular") will switch from [[Heel]] to [[Face]] and back again (or vice versa) quite a few times over the course of their part in an overall story arc, with other characters all but forgetting about the bad deeds they committed as Heels or the good deeds they committed as Faces (unless, of course, a character is [[Remember When You Blew Up a Sun?|explicitly confronted with his/her past]]). However, since [[World Wrestling Entertainment]] has a video archive going back to the ''1960s'' and everything (or almost everything) that occurred within those 40-plus years is regarded as canon, it often becomes helpful to play vintage video clips in the montages in order to bring everyone up to speed.▼
==
* [[Bionicle]] has definitely became an example of this trope, especially after the introduction of the on-line serials. The main story arcs tended to avoid this, but when former main characters that had been cast aside for years got back on stage, even that went messy. The whole storyline basically balanced on a thin line between trying to please the older fans and bring in fresh blood. Probably one of the main reasons [[LEGO]] decided to cancel the line and bring in [[Hero Factory]], which is much lighter on the story.
▲== Professional Wrestling ==
▲* Usually avoided in pro wrestling, since most of the characters (at least if the fall between the two extremes of "irrelevant" and "universally popular") will switch from [[Heel]] to [[Face]] and back again (or vice versa) quite a few times over the course of their part in an overall story arc, with other characters all but forgetting about the bad deeds they committed as Heels or the good deeds they committed as Faces (unless, of course, a character is [[Remember When You Blew Up a Sun?|explicitly confronted with his/her past]]). However, since [[World Wrestling Entertainment]] has a video archive going back to the ''1960s'' and everything (or almost everything) that occurred within those 40-plus years is regarded as canon, it often becomes helpful to play vintage video clips in the montages in order to bring everyone up to speed.
▲== Video Games ==
* ''[[Metal Gear]]'' slowly rose from humble origins, into the self-sequels ''[[Metal Gear Solid]]'' and ''[[Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty]]'', had a brief blip for the stand-alone ''[[Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater]]'', and then gunned the canon whole-heartedly into the massive continuity snarl-ups of ''[[Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops]]'' and ''[[Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots]]'', both of which only a very serious and dedicated fan would be able to [[Continuity Porn|understand totally]].
** As a sort of alternative, the ''[[Metal Gear Acid|Ac!d]]'' games happened in an alternate universe, but they still expected a familiarity with the main phase series with its [[spoiler]]rific character cards. In the first game's story, a lot of hints about Snake's identity and motivations require some knowledge of his main phase [[Canon]] [[Backstory]], such as his sterility.
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** To give you an idea, this plot point came from an obscure manga that was never released outside of Japan, where Samus has already feared Ridley since he [[You Killed My Father|killed her mother]] and lead a massacre of [[Doomed Hometown|her home planet K2L.]] About the only indication people get is a [[Makes Just as Much Sense in Context|nonsensical shot of Samus turning into her child self]], rather than actually showing the ravaging of K2L for context.
▲== Web Animation ==
* ''[[Homestar Runner]]''. It's not a very continuity-heavy site really. But there is large reliance on in-jokes and running gags. The toons are sorted in to different categories so you're not even sure where to start. However, it has a wiki that is so helpful and comprehensive... it's a little scary.
** [http://hrwiki.org/wiki/All_Toons This] is basically the only place you'll find a chronological list of the toons and games.
* ''[[Sluggy Freelance]]''. Trying to understand the significance of things without going through an [[Archive Binge]]... just doesn't work. ''Sluggy Freelance'' may be the only
** To its credit, it does have a lot of humorously-framed recap strips in which characters rant about important past events while other characters [[Lampshade]] the exposition. Eventually however, the continuity [[Long Runners|became so long and tangled]] that in-comic narration wouldn't cut it anymore (and in ''Sluggy Freelance'', an [[Archive Binge]] — or even an [[Archive Trawl]] — will [[Archive Panic|take weeks unless you read for several hours a day]].)▼
▲* ''[[Sluggy Freelance]]''. Trying to understand the significance of things without going through an [[Archive Binge]]... just doesn't work. ''Sluggy Freelance'' may be the only webcomic where the creator forgot his keys and locked himself out of his own continuity. In his defense, the writer has become aware of this trope and provides relevant links at the bottom of the strip for anyone who hasn't gone through the eight plus years of continuity.
▲** To its credit, it does have a lot of humorously-framed recap strips in which characters rant about important past events while other characters [[Lampshade]] the exposition. Eventually however, the continuity [[Long Runners|became so long and tangled]] that in-comic narration wouldn't cut it anymore (and in Sluggy Freelance, an [[Archive Binge]] — or even an [[Archive Trawl]] — will [[Archive Panic|take weeks unless you read for several hours a day]].)
* ''[[Megatokyo]]''. If you haven't read it from the beginning, you can forget about understanding the story. This is largely due to its character driven nature. If you haven't witnessed every second of Piro and Kimiko's courtship, or taken notes on each tiny nuance of the Piro/Miho dynamic, you aren't going to have any clue what's going on. Even then you might still have trouble, but that's [[Kudzu Plot|another]] [[Cerebus Syndrome|trope]] [[Webcomic Time|entirely]]
* ''[[Dominic Deegan]]'', making the sheer dedication of the [[Hatedom]] all the more puzzling.
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* Occasionally there are ''[[Arthur, King of Time and Space]]'' strips that don't make sense unless you [http://www.arthurkingoftimeandspace.com/1338.htm know the running gags] and continuity points. As with many meta-concepts in ''AKOTAS'', [[Lampshaded]] via [http://www.arthurkingoftimeandspace.com/0985.htm Arthur's webcomic].
== [[Web Original]] ==
▲== Web Original ==
* Given the vagueness of the plot and the fact that all the episodes are online, ''[[Lonelygirl15]]'' would probably not be an example of this, if it wasn't for the [[Call Back|tendency]] of seemingly irrelevant, blink-and-you'll-miss-it background details to become crucial [[Chekhov's Gun]]s several hundred episodes later.
* Happens in ''[[Survival of the Fittest]]'' a great deal. Sometimes, even starting at the beginning of the ''current'' version/season isn't enough - references will be made to scenes or characters in previous versions. It's often very bewildering for people seeing the RP for the first time.
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* The [[Slender Man Mythos]] is slowly becoming this, particularly [[Everyman HYBRID]] with its [[Alternate Reality Game]] elements and the miscellaneous Core Theory blogs. Aggravated by the occasional [[Dead Link]].
▲== Western Animation ==
* One of the many complaints people had about ''[[Beast Wars]]'' is that when it aired, it had the strongest continuity ever seen in a cartoon on American or Canadian TV. As a result, a new viewer jumping in partway through is going to be quite perplexed by what's all going on. Then its sequel ''[[Beast Machines]]'' one-upped it.
** Ironic with [[Beast Machines]], since they were originally trying to ''avert'' this trope by ignoring most of ''[[Beast Wars]]'', only to end up with a stronger version of the trope in its own series.
* Later episodes of ''[[The Simpsons (animation)|The Simpsons]]'' suffer from a mild case of this condition at times (though it's understandable for a {{age|1989|12|17}}-year-old series
{{quote|'''Homer''': {{spoiler|What, I'm not allowed to get one right?}}}}
** Many of ''The Simpsons''{{'}} minor characters are completely bizarre without context, yet the show basically takes it for granted that the audience can recognize and appreciate most of them without any sort of perfunctory introduction or explanation. Examples would include Bumblebee Man, Sideshow Mel, Duff Man, the Sea Captain, or Disco Stu, or even Krusty, all of whom are basically long-running continuations of one-off gags from many, many years past.
*** This is Lampshaded when Marge gets amnesia one episode. She finds all the side characters confusing and creepy and is incredibly disturbed when Homer says they're his and Marge's close friends.
* ''[[Phineas and Ferb]]'' might have a bit of this, given how much of its humor relies on [[Continuity Nod]]s and [[Playing with a Trope|playing with]] their [[Strictly Formula|usual formula]]. Still, this affects plot less than gags.
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{{reflist}}
[[Category:Audience Reactions]]
▲[[Category:Continuity Lock Out]]
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