Continuity Snarl: Difference between revisions

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** The problems began when novelist [[Brad Meltzer]] wrote a [[Green Arrow]] story called ''The Archer's Quest'' centering upon Oliver Queen going on a road trip with former sidekick Roy Harper to retrieve items that could be used to discover his secret identity. The problem with that is that Oliver Queen hadn't had a secret identity in years! In fact, in the ''Quiver'' storyline written by [[Kevin Smith (Creator)|Kevin Smith]] (which came out less than a year before Meltzer's story) the main piece of evidence Batman used to convince a resurrected and amnesiac Oliver Queen that he HAD been dead was newspaper articles which used his real name while discussing his death.

** Another problem was the revelation that the whole ''Archer's Quest'' was a ruse and that Ollie had really been trying to recover a photograph which proved that he had been present on the day his illegitimate son Connor Hawke was born and that Ollie, ipso facto, was a dead beat dad. The problem is that this scenario is completely implausible given the circumstances under which Ollie originally found out that Connor (who he had been traveling with for a while before his death) was his son - he had been told by the truth by his best buddy Hal Jordan, who was (at the time) nigh-omnipotent with the power of all The Guardians Of The Univers Minus One. For Meltzer's scenario to make sense, we have to believe that Hal Jordan is capable of being able to see the DNA of a person by looking at them but is unable to tell when his best friend is lying about having no idea he had an illegitimate son.

*** What makes this truly awful is this scene was meant to bookend the excellent ''Green Arrow: Year One'' mini-series by Andy Diggle. Suffice it to say that [[Green Arrow]] fans who have read that book find it hard to believe that the man Oliver is at the end of the story would ever abandon a child in need, much less his own son.

*** The flashback also changes Sandra Hawke, who had always been portrayed as a half-African/half-Korean woman who favored her Korean mother into a pouty-lipped African woman with dreadlocks.

* Chris Roberson aims for this by intention--as a kid, he loved reading comic books and seeing all the ways they interconnected. Pretty much everything he writes that isn't a tie-in to ''[[Warhammer 40 K]]'' is in a single setting, but he explicitly uses the "many worlds" model of quantum mechanics, and [[For Want of a Nail|slight deviations lead to massive differences over a relatively short period of time]]. Attempting to fit his works into a single continuity would be arguably meaningless, and it's uncertain whether even he knows what he's doing half the time.

* An entire cottage industry has sprung up around trying to wrestle the Sherlock Holmes stories into continuity -- not only with each other, but with actual history.

* The ''[[Sonic the Hedgehog]]'' mini-novels made by Michael Teitelbaum and Ron Zalme; the novels clearly take place in the [[Sonic the Hedgehog (TV)|SatAM]] universe, yet the Robotnik used in it is the one from ''[[Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog]]''. How ''that'' fits into continuity is anyone's guess.

* About halfway through the first ''[[Bionicle]]'' book, ''Tale of the Toa'', the writer starts mentioning the tools of the Toa Nuva, and how the Toa use them. Yet they only turn into Toa Nuva at the end of the second novel. The confusion came about because the author, who wasn't well versed in the story and its characters to begin with, had to churn out the books real fast, all in 2003, which meant that besides that year's story, those of '01 and '02 also had to be written down. She thus accidentally mixed up the original Toa and their tools from the first year with their advanced Nuva forms from the second.

* Trying to keep track of everything that happened after the death of [[Alexander the Great|Alexander of Macedon (aka the Great)]] is almost impossible for anyone, even those with higher degrees in Classical History. The scale of the political maneuvering between his putative successors is too large to summarize. Suffice to say that one Classical Historian has described the carnage and politics between Macedon, Persia, the Ptolomaic Empire, and all the others, as a 'Macedonian Soap Opera'.

* Similarly, the Mexican Revolution. Once the United States got involved, it gets even more confusing because the [[William Howard Taft|Taft]] and [[Woodrow Wilson|Wilson]] administrations supported opposite sides of the conflict. And this is leaving out historilogical debates over the whole mess.

** As a result of a [[Gambit Pileup]] that's been going on for centuries.

* Any time a city has [[Name's the Same|two teams with the same name]] at different times, it can lead to this. A good example in the [[National Hockey League]]: from 1971 to 1996 there was a team called Winnipeg Jets, who has since moved to Arizona as the Phoenix Coyotes. In 2012, the Atlanta Thrashers moved to Canada, where they were rechristened... Winnipeg Jets!