Discontinuity Nod

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
"This is starting to sound like a bad comic book plot!"
—Spider-man, "I Really, Really Hate Clones", Spider-Man the Animated Series

A Continuity Nod that is made towards something that has been written out of canon, people want to be written out of canon, or even an entire old Continuity that is no longer canon. May be a sign of Canon Discontinuity or may just be making a joke at the fanbase's widespread hatred. Who Writes This Crap?

Sub-trope of Mythology Gag. Contrast Continuity Nod.

See also Take That, Scrappy!

Examples of Discontinuity Nod include:

Anime and Manga

  • Digimon Tamers: The second of the movies, Runaway Digimon Express, was made without the input of the head writers. A Drama CD (Message in a Packet) released later depicts the Tamers a year after the events of the anime, without their partners, effectively RetConning the movie out of existence. However, in a remarkably respectful nod, Ruki is heard humming Promise of the Setting Sun, her song from the movie.

Comic Books

Torch: Or the time when Occulus stole Doc Ock's adamantium arms and became Doctor Occulus and then the two of us had to...
Spider-Man: That wasn't me.
Torch: What do you mean that wasn't...
Spider-Man: That was my clone.
Torch: Well what about the time when the power Skrull and the multi-colored symbiotes...
Spider-Man: Clone.
Torch: When Quasimodo rebuilt your Spider-armor...
Spider-Man: Clone.
Torch: When Demogoblin and Diablo...
Spider-Man: Clone.
Torch: Hmm. I guess it's probably for the best if we...
Spider-Man: Skip over that whole period? Couldn't agree with you more.

    • Deadpool has been known to remark that he'd "be crucified if there was a clone in this book".
    • Spidey is, however, willing to acknowledge the New Fantastic Four.
      • And another Nod was made to the New Fantastic Four in the recent Venom arc, Circle of Four, with spin off characters of those that made the New FF (Spidey, Wolverine, Hulk and Ghost Rider) forming the circle of four to sop earth from being swallowed by Hell; Namely, Venom, Red Hulk, X-23 and the second Ghost Rider.
    • In Paradise X, Officer Parker briefly considers the notion that the Guardians of the Galaxy have come to the past to clone something, but immediately backtracks with a "no, don't even say the word 'clone'".
  • The usual Take That approach is inverted in the Gargoyles comic book. A scene between Hudson and Jeffrey from the Canon Discontinuity Retool was incorporated into the comic because it was one of the few things the retool got right.
  • In The DCU, the original Bat-Girl, Betty Kane, was retconned Post-Crisis into always being called "Flamebird" aka Bette Kane, because writer Marv Wolfman hated that version of the character. But years later, in Young Justice, Flamebird meets the current Batgirl and immediately says, "Batgirl? Been there, done that."
  • Dr. X, an Utrom scientist in the Image Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Mirage comics, was written out of canon along with everything else in Vol. 3. An Utrom scientist with the same name has since appeared in the current Tales of the TMNT book.
  • When Gordon Rennie started writing a new series of Rogue Trooper, set in the same time period as Gerry Finley-Day's initial run, one panel showed a graffito reading "Thank God it's not Friday!"

Film

  • The unused ending of First Blood is shown in the fourth Rambo film in a nightmare Rambo has.

Literature

  • A Star Trek: The Next Generation Expanded Universe novel has an admiral opining to Picard that Kirk obviously had so much contempt for Starfleet Command that he would just invent stuff for his reports, "including that one ridiculous incident in which he claimed someone stole his first officer's brain." This is of course, a reference to the infamous TOS episode "Spock's Brain", universally considered one of the worst episodes of the original series.
  • In Final Watch, Anton meets Yegor, the boy from the first novel, who mentions a dream he had, which is, basically, the plot for the Night Watch film, which diverges from the novels. Specifically, the part about Yegor being Anton's son.
  • A Doctor Who Virgin New Adventures novel referenced the charity special "Dimensions in Time"... as being All Just a Dream.

Live-Action TV

  • Stargate SG-1 has several of these.
    • A couple of episodes parodied Carter's infamous "reproductive organs" speech from the pilot. (Carter: "God that's horrible! Who would ever say that? ")
    • 200 and Wormhole X-Treme are mainly based off this trope. For example, in Wormhole X-Treme, the cast and crew of the titular Show Within a Show mock plot elements of SG-1, including three shots of a zat gun vaporizing people and the fact that characters who are out of phase (thus insubstantial) can sit and walk without falling through the chair, desk, floor, etc. The former was actually written out of the show, while the latter was shamelessly reused years later.
    • There's also O'Neill's quip about his name. "O'Neill, with two 'Ls'. There's another Colonel O'Neil with one 'L' and he has No Sense of Humor," referencing the movie O'Neil who was much more angsty.
    • Then there's this gem from Heroes where Dr. Fraiser is going through Jack's medical files.

Dr. Fraiser: ...nanite technology, artificially aged him ... he had a shoulder punctured by an alien time capsule device. Erm ... three knee operations ... oh ... that's the whole Hathor incident which he's asked me never to discuss ...

  • Star Trek: Voyager:
    • In the episode "The Void": "Deuterium? You can get that anywhere!" in direct contradiction to several Voyager episodes where they try to find that isotope of hydrogen; they even scan planets to find deuterium ore and when they do, it's intelligent. In other words—it's intelligent heavy water!
    • The episode 'Threshold' has become Canon Discontinuity after even the writers admitted it was awful; Tom Paris later says "I've never been in transwarp before" just to reinforce how that episode ever happened.
  • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine:
    • The episode "Trials and Tribble-ations" has the reference to Klingon brow ridges being notably absent from the original series Klingons. At the time of the episode, there was no canon explanation, only several fanon theories, while it was finally given a canon one in Star Trek: Enterprise. This overlapped with Continuity Nod, in that by making the nod it superseded the previous retconning stance on Klingon ridges in TOS and made it canon that some Klingons didn't have ridges during that period (Roddenberry's stance had been that Klingons always had the ridges, TOS just didn't have the budget or the makeup to show it).
  • Doctor Who:

"That makes them...half-human?"
"Those words are blasphemy!"

    • There's another in "Journey's End" that's even more explicit: The Doctor's hand regenerates into a "Human" Doctor, who mentions that the particular combination (Human & Time Lord) has never happened before. The new human Doctor is visibly disgusted by the whole thing.
      • Even the Doctor Who Expanded Universe is playing along. In the Big Finish Doctor Who audio play An Earthly Child the Eighth Doctor (the one who made the statement) shows surprise to the idea of his grandaughter Susan having a child with the very human David Campbell.
      • Although some have used the above (and other examples) as evidence to support the claim the 1996 TV movie never happened, additional Expanded Universe entries have provided ways the events can be rationalized. In particular, the IDW comic book miniseries The Forgotten suggested the entire "half-human" thing was a ruse put on by the Doctor to mislead the Master (exactly how is never really explained) in case he attempted to escape his execution. Several novels have also had a go at it.
    • In "The Sontaran Stratagem", the Doctor pokes fun at the UNIT dating controversy (visible under that name at The Other Wiki) with a line about "when I worked with them back in the seventies... or was it the eighties?"
  • Married... with Children's Cousin Oliver Seven makes an appearance on a milk carton.
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer:

Giles: Magic is not an addiction!

    • When asked about Kennedy in her first season 8 appearance Willow says she's dead (in a nod to the fans that hated that ship), but quickly clarifies that it was a temporary magic death and she got better.
    • Also, Xander has a Meaningful Name referencing the original (but non-canonical) movie of Buffy the Vampire Slayer—Buffy's friend in the movie was named Pike. Zander (pronounced identically to "Xander") and pike are closely related species of fish.
  • In the first episode of Columbo filmed after the spin-off Mrs. Columbo ended, the writers considered having Columbo mention some nut pretending to be his wife; of course, the most this would disavow is her relationship to him: her existence, and therefore any events of the show that don't depend on their relationship, is avowed.
  • Happens in the Community episode "Epidemiology". After surviving a small Zombie Apocalypse and getting their minds wiped by The Men in Black, Troy and Abed are going to watch a movie, at first considering a horror film, but decide that they are "over zombies" and watch Marmaduke instead.
  • In Supernatural, when Sam and Dean meet the prophet Chuck, he initially thinks he's a god, and that he caused it all, rather than just writing it down. He apologizes for all the pain and suffering, as well as "that racist truck."
    • Doubles as Continuity Nod as well. In the final episode of Season 5, it's revealed that Chuck really *IS* God, when he finishes writing the last book, smiles knowingly, and vanishes.

Professional Wrestling

Tabletop Games

  • White Wolf came out with a book on Gypsies for their Old World of Darkness line that portrayed Roma as embodiments of all the old Universal Studios horror movie stereotypes. Several years down the line, one of their books featured a sidebar that mentioned how inaccurate portrayals of Roma could be found in literature, movies, and "second-rate roleplaying game supplements."
    • And then there was the execrable supplement, Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand. It was so jarring, badly conceived, and generally unpopular that the company's subsequent edition made a habit of noting that everything in the book was an unreliable narrator claim by someone who was misinformed, insane, or just plain wrong. (Not to mention dropping a NUKE on the Black Hand's base.)
      • Popular rumour at the time was that DSotBH was created as a (not so) subtle Take That against certain White Wolf execs by a disgruntled writer.
    • Similarly, there was Samuel Haight, who ended up with the powers of a werewolf, a vampire, and a mage. When he died, his soul was instantly whisked away to be turned into a Deathlord's ashtray. In a novel detailing the endgame for Mage: The Ascension, a mage manages to gaze into the Umbra, and sees a powerful ghost extinguishing his cigar on a screaming ashtray.
    • White Wolf is pretty notorious for this; they practically breed long-simmering writer resentments. Later Exalted books have grown less and less subtle about the contempt the current crop of writers holds for the earlier writers in the line.
  • The Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 edition book Heroes of Battle, which deals with warfare and army life, allows use of the Bluff skill to inspire one's soldiers with false confidence. An example of a "hard to believe" bluff is "That dragon can only breathe fire once per day! Quick, let's get him while he's vulnerable!" This may be a reference to previous editions where dragons were limited to using their breath 3 times a day. 3.5 allows them to do so once every fifteen seconds.

Video Games

  • In Telltale's episodic Sam and Max Freelance Police games, there are a few references to Sam And Max: Freelance Police!!, the game that LucasArts cancelled:
    • In Sam and Max's office, there is a case file labeled "3/3/04", the date on which the game was canceled, to which Sam quips:

Sam: Ah, I remember that case. Particularly gruesome.

    • In episode 105, while examining a ballet poster:

Sam: "Ferret Lake".
Max: Ooh! Sequels to beloved classics are always better than the originals!
Sam: *with emphasis* Yes Max. Yes they are.

    • In episode 202, Sam finds on Easter Island among various missing items and people, "a fully playable beta of Sam and Max: Freelance Police!!"
    • In episode 205, Whizzer fires Satan as the ruler of hell, claiming that his termination was due to "current market place realities and underlying economic considerations", the exact reasons LucasArts gave for canceling Freelance Police!!
  • In Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, the character Ivan Raidenovich Raikov was put into the game specifically to make fun of a character from the previous game. At one point, Naked Snake must disguise himself as Raikov. With his uniform and mask on, his commander tells him he looks so much like Raikov that 'you're starting to irritate me already.' Upset, Snake responds, "But this look should make me more popular!"
    • Earlier still, the Updated Rerelease of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty contained a bunch of bonus non-canon stories, called the Snake Tales. Most of them are fairly serious in tone, but Snake Tale E, "External Gazer", is an insane parody of the original game, particularly towards the climax. At the absolute apex of the plot, Solidus attempts to stop Snake by releasing "the seal" on a unit known as "Them": "Their presence alone has the ability to destroy a world", he warns. "They are children of darkness on whom is focused the combined hate of the entire universe". "They", of course, are Raiden and Rose. Snake then experiences an extended Mind Screw sequence, leaving him in a bizarre dream world in which he is convinced he's Raiden. Every single element of the "dream", from Rose calling Jack up in the middle of a bloody war in order to complain about her love handles, to Rose's electrical equipment being possessed by lines of the Japanese syllabary and telling the couple how to clean toilets, make fun of most of the plot elements in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty.
    • One of the shorts on the expanded Subsistence version of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater involved Raiden going back in time to try and kill Naked Snake so he can become the main character. (Somehow, he keeps teleporting into precisely the wrong situations, and by the time he actually gets a shot at it, he's learned to respect Snake too much to kill him.) That doesn't stop his quest. He just respects Big Boss and still tries to kill Solid Snake.
    • A more bitter twist on this theme was in Metal Gear Solid 3, where Zero tells Snake about how in fairy tales, the youngest brother is always named Jack, and 'gets the shabbiest treatment, but is cleverer than his brothers and gets the happiest ending'. Raiden's name is Jack, he's the "youngest" protagonist (both Big Boss and Solid Snake were introduced in the late Eighties, but Raiden was introduced in 2001) and he got the shabbiest treatment from fans, but MGS2 was the cleverest game and the one Kojima was the most proud of.
    • Lots of people hated how Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty had a vampire in it. Big Boss, in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, really hates vampires, to the point that whenever someone mentions them to him he gets nightmares.
    • In Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty Substance, Snake has bonus VR Photography Missions, most of which are concerned with photographing posters of bikini models. Two of them are murder mysteries, and, in both, the victim is Raiden, who is found in a comically undignified position in his death. The first one has two solutions - an in-character one (Fatman, who murdered Raiden to steal his straw) and an out-of-character one. It's an MGS2 promo poster in a nearby room with Snake on it.
    • The "CHAIR RACE" trailer involves Snake sitting down in a Director's chair, to represent that Hideo Kojima would direct Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. He then takes off his mask and reveals that underneath, he's Raiden. Canned booing accompanies this. Raiden later fights Snake over a 'Main Character' chair—he foot-pops as their buttocks touch and then is thrown off the edge of the stage - Snake then sits down in the main character's chair, gets Mickey Mousing to emphasize his sexiness, and the audience cheers ecstatically. At the end of the trailer, Raiden crawls back up, humiliated and bruised.
    • Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker acts as a direct sequel to Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater: Snake Eater, treating the events of Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops, the previous PSP game in the series and another Snake Eater sequel itself, as if it never happened. The only real acknowledgment of Portable Ops is the following throwaway line said by Kazuhira Miller.

Kaz: Finally, we can leave all that crap in San Hieronymo behind...

  • Model A in Mega Man ZX Advent turns out not to be a biometal based on Axl but on the big bad, Albert. Some fans consider the scene which reveals this to be a giant Take That at Axl and his creators (regardless, Model A is clearly based on Axl visually and gameplay-wise).
    • A subtler one comes earlier in the game.

"Model A: I don't even know why I was created."

  • One of Chun-Li's win quotes in Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike is "Leave me alone! I'm a fighter, not a news reporter!" This is a reference to the live action Street Fighter movie, in which Chun-Li's occupation was changed from Interpol agent to news reporter.
    • Ironically, Mega Man 9 includes a reporter who looks suspiciously like her during the opening movie.
  • One of the endings in Star FOX Command refers to Papetoon, a planet from the comic that ran in Nintendo Power (more specifically, it was the home base of the team). Said comic was based on the first game, which became Canon Discontinuity when Star Fox 64 came out.
    • The gameplay of the Star Fox 64 level Sector Z is based on a level in the scrapped Star Fox 2. In both of them, your objective was to shoot down missiles directed at the Grea t Fox.
  • In Crisis Core, there's a small scene where Zack finds a Shinra army helmet lying on the floor of the slums. It causes him to briefly consider the presence of a Shinra army living underneath Midgar, which he soon dismisses as a 'stupid idea'. Dirge of Cerberus involved an underground Shinra army and is widely considered the worst thing to come out of the whole Compilation, which is saying something.
  • In The King of Fighters XI Kyo has a special winquote if he's in a Mirror Match: "Another clone? There's enough of me to start a baseball team!" This is a nod to the much-maligned NESTS storyline in The King of Fighters '99, 2000, and 2001, which had clones of Kyo as a plot point.
  • Dawn of War 2 has several veterans of the campaigns from the original game and its expansions. The campaigns on Tartarus and Kronus are remembered as great victories for the Blood Ravens Space Marine chapter. Kaurava was "a mistake, and it shouldn't be mentioned ever again" in the words of Cyrus, the Scout Marine Sergeant and one of the few survivors of that campaign. Guess which one of the three was in the outsourced, disliked addon.[1]
    • Also, Kaurava is mentioned as having seriously depleted the chapter's manpower, which is why they're so desperate to hold on to the Aurelia subsector, which is one of their few recruitment pools. And that campaign ends up being Cyrus' reason to turn to Chaos if he ends up as the traitor in Chaos Rising.
  • In Mortal Kombat: Deception, one of the unlockable items in Konquest Mode is earned by decking the Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance hidden character Mokap, who is walking around one area in a particularly dopey manner, for no reason. Didn't stop Mokap from reappearing in Mortal Kombat Armageddon, though. (He had a good reason to return: they had to bring back EVERYONE for Armageddon, scrappies included. Which was actually good for characters like Stryker.)
  • The GBA port of the original Final Fight, titled Final Fight One, features the Street Fighter Alpha renditions of Cody and Guy as playable characters. The storyline for both characters have them reliving the events of Final Fight in a dream. (At least, they think it's just a dream.) When Alpha!Cody confronts Rolento, he claims that he is unable to remember actually fighting him, since he Took a Shortcut after defeating Edi E. and went straight to the Bayside stage. This is a reference to the earlier SNES port of the game, which removed the entire Industrial Area stage, and by proxy Rolento, due to limited cartridge space.
  • In Viewtiful Joe, Dante from Devil May Cry is a playable character. He is confronted by Alastor (the spirit of a demonic sword he used in the first Devil May Cry), who chews Dante out for leaving him behind during the events of Devil May Cry 2. Dante protests, "I don't remember that!"
  • In Ghostbusters the Video Game, if you look closely enough at a computer's screen in the Ghostbusters' headquarters, you can see the end screen from the maligned Ghostbusters NES game!
  • In Kingdom Hearts II, Setzer from Final Fantasy VI made a cameo, in which he bribes Roxas to lose a tournament to him - an act which is, at best, completely Out of Character for a compulsive gambler. In Dissidia Final Fantasy, this conversation is had in a Tutorial (the Dissidia tutorials are delivered by previous Final Fantasy characters) -

Shadow: Don't even try dirty tactics like bribing opponents to lose...
Setzer: What's this all about? I would never stoop to that! Well, Shadow may have spoiled the mood, but...

Web Comics

  • Drowtales has been radically remade twice, so a few of these have come in to the new chapters. In chapter 1 Ariel has a plushie of Syphile wearing her original all-red and black costume, and in chapter 13 Ariel wonders aloud if she should try to shape change into a drider, causing Kyo'nne to comment on all the "icky legs" at which point Ariel dismisses the idea. In the very early version of the story she turned into a drider a few times, but now it's explicitly stated that she doesn't have enough mass to pull that off.
  • Jacob's necromantic golem in Dominic Deegan was unnamed early on, but received the fan name "Patches"... a name he ultimately rejected on his Heel Face Turn on the grounds that it sounded like a name for a dog. (He's now called "Quilt".)
  • The "Second Eaton" story arc in Shortpacked was utterly loathed by the readers for a multitude of reasons, and was not referenced for years... until recently: "Hey, everyone agreed to never mention that "Second Eaton" crap ever again."

Web Original

  • In November 2010, The Nostalgia Chick released a video in which her supporting cast was giving each other lessons on the various recurring themes of the show. When Brian (the recurring character whose shtick involves dark humor about sexual predators) mentions the much-hated 'rap about rape' (a video skit that received a Dude, Not Funny reaction from many people, and was taken down shortly afterward), Nella punches him and shouts "Rule Number One of Team Nchick! We do not talk about the rape rap!" Interestingly enough, before this, Brian was practically apologizing for it.
  • Homestar Runner has made a few jokes over the years about rejected characters like Homeschool Winner (a tall, skinny Homestar Runner look-alike). In the 2010 holiday cartoon "A Decemberween Mackrel", a bunch of these rejected characters show up in silhouette form in a line at Bubs' Concession Stand.

Western Animation

Actor!Aang: Look! It's the Great Divide! The biggest canyon in the Earth Kingdom!
(pause)
Actor!Sokka: Ehh... Let's keep flying.

  • The Jonny Quest TV movie Jonny's Golden Quest introduced Race Bannon's daughter Jessie, which he had with his on-and-off lover Jezebel Jade. In the second season of the follow-up series, Jonny Quest the Real Adventures, the identity of Jessie's mother was revised to Race's previously unseen ex-wife Estella Velasquez, since the head writer of the series felt that Jade was not the kind of woman to give up her life as an adventurer to raise a child. When Jessie meets Jezebel in one episode and finds out she was romantically involved with her father, she finds the idea that Jade could have been her mother absurd.
  1. ↑ A: Soulstorm
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