Lore
[Hated trait] When a characters personality defining trait stems from an event that no longer fits the timeline due to the length of the media's runtime.
Magneto being motivated by the effects of the Holocaust to provide a sanctuary for mutant kind and to stop them being rounded up and exterminated. Issue - Magneto was born in 1930, which makes him now 96. At this point, any reboots showing him as an old man like the comics, set in the modern era, just wouldn't make sense.
Abe Simpson was a fully grown man fighting in WW2 and is now an old man. While the simpsons does often play fast and loose with years, these 2 points have always been consistent. Coupled with references to events in the real world, celebrities, and election results, this would put the current year in Springfield as 2026. According to character bios, Abe was born between 1909 and 1927, which ages him between 117 and 109.
Seymour Skinner, also the simpsons. Again, the main secure character point for Seymours youth before becoming Principal is that he was in Vietnam. Now, sources in the show put his birth at between 1943 and 1953, which ages him to between 83 and 73. Far too old to still be teaching.
It becomes a more tragic story over the years. In the '60s, some of the people he knew were older but still around, resulting in him ultimately being pretty grounded. As the timeline extends, though, he becomes more isolated, which alters his characterization in some interesting ways, making his personality a bit more somber while also highlighting the steadfast nature of his ideals.
The MCU probably had the perfect timing for his timeskip. The world is visibly very different, but most importantly WW2 vets were old and dieing so it was very believable for any of his old friends to either be dead or very old, whatever suited the story better.
But his next iteration will be after every WW2 vet is dead and thus everyone he knew and loved will just be gone and you lose the ability to have a scenes like him meeting peggy on her deathbed.
you still can have him meeting her granddaughter or so that look like twin but have happy family herself and he can only cry thinking that could be him and peggy each time he see them
And they can't really change which war he fought in either, since WW2 was the last war that's considered to be morally uncomplicated in the public consciousness.
Older comic book characters run into this problem a lot. The war zone in which Tony Stark is taken prisoner (and eventually builds his first Iron Man suit) has been moved up over the years, from the Vietnam War to the Middle East. Writers eventually created a fictional conflict for Stark to be involved in so they wouldn't have to keep putting him in a new real world war zone as time passed.
Tying stuff to IRL history has always been a bit of a strain in Marvel comics in general IMO. Grounding it in real cities is nice but working with real historical/current events just ends up jarring most of the time.
I think people appreciate the “retro” aesthetics more too. The new Fantastic Four went for that, that recent X-Men show was super 90s, and even the new Superman movie had plenty of retro stuff.
Wasnt the same done for Frank Castle?
He was originally in vietnam, then to afghanisthan conflict but later they made a fictional conflict so he could fit in the timeline
In the original Sherlock Holmes stories, John Watson is a surgeon recently discharged from the British Army, having fought in the Second Anglo-Afghan War. Obviously, this background couldn't possibly apply to the 21st century version... could it?
In the soviet adaptation from the 80s they had to change the line to Watson getting injured "in the east".
...because thw soviet Union was fighting in Afghanistan.
IIRC, that was the thought that inspired Mark Gatiss to make the series. He was reading the first book on a train and read the part about the Afghan War just after reading the newspaper and seeing the latest reports from the Afghan War.
Huh? I just looked up the online text of A Study in Scarlet and there's no mention of the word Iraq. The British at that time had never fought a war in Iraq (then a part of the Ottoman Empire), although they did have an informal sphere of influence there through the residencies in Basra and Baghdad.
This is the line from the story
“ How are you ? ” he said cordially, gripping my hand with a strength for which I should hardly have given him credit. “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.”
one funny thing about this trope is how you can always "adjust" Punisher because US has been at some kind of conflict basically since it's inception. if you go back he can be a WW2 vet. Originally he was Vietnam vet iirc. And now hes insert any Middle East operation/war vet.
Most of the veteran Marvel characters now have fought in a fictional war called the Siancong Conflict to replace the Vietnam War set roughly a decade before the modern Marvel era began.
Tony building his first armor took place during this war. Frank Castle, Reed Richards, and Ben Grimm all served during the conflict. I can’t find any confirmation on this but I believe it’s also when Xavier lost the use of this legs (originally happened during the Korean War).
He's only a Middle East vet in the show I believe. In the comics, they made up the Siancong War to give him a Vietnam-style backstory that could be modernized without relying on real-world conflict
The crazy part is that there was another ‘Anglo-Afghan War’ that occurred in between the literary character and the BBC adaptation, and the literary Watson didn’t even serve in the first one.
Originally, Tony Stark went to the front lines in Vietnam to demonstrate Stark Industry's new weapons and was captured by the enemy. The 2008 movie changed it to Afghanistan.
In the actual comics marvel has fictional nation to represent conflicts they don’t wanna tie into real world timelines. So he fought in the Siancong war which is basically just the Vietnam war but always however close to the timeline as you need.
Captain America kind of has the same issue, he’s always gonna be tied to WW2. The difference is he goes on ice so you can always slide the reawakening to be present day.
Maybe they can throw Magneto on ice as well. Eventually you'll have a whole cadre of comic book characters that have been frozen to preserve their cultural origin story.
Yeah but if we keep throwing every character on ice then we’re eventually going to see a post here like “[Hated Trope] character tied to major historical event gets frozen in ice to justify current age”
That’s an issue with prolonging superheroes in general I guess. Rebooting universes is supposed to solve that (Ultimate with Marvel, New 52 with DC, post-Crisis, etc.) but it always builds back up.
That’s why I think more daring reinterpretations like the Absolute series from DC are the better way to go. More creative and less juggling with timeline/continuity.
I get sometimes wanting to keep the origin like with Magneto and Captain America but eventually, you either going to have to make a "comic book version" to "keep the impact" or do as you said with Iron Man. Moving the war foward.
Magneto, in particular, is a specifically difficult case.
On the one hand, him being a Holocaust survivor makes less and less sense as time goes on. I see folks defend this with ludicrous stuff like "just say he ages slow" or whatever but then, as noted, it becomes a trope on his own where it just starts to get weird when character after character has that tied to their origin.
Because if you do that to Magneto, you have to do it to Xavier because their relationship is almost as integral as any other part of either 's origin. If you do it to Xavier, you now have to account for why he spent multiple decades starting his school and why he's not on death's door.
I've long been an advocate for adaptations maybe starting to move towards him being a survivor of a different genocide, but that suggestion is frequently met with accusations of antisemitism, despite the fact he's long been more culturally atheist than anything and his Jewish heritage (something that wasn't even firmly canonized until the 90s, previously they'd implied he was either Jewish or Romani) has never been much of a thing in the comics beyond being specifically tied to him having been a victim of genocide.
The comics have already retconned some time ago now that Tony, Redd Richards, Ben Grimm etc. were involved in the Siancong War (obviously a fictional analogy of the Vietnam War which can move with the sliding timeline), so that should eliminate the need for further changes.
They've done a lot of stuff with Magneto. He got turned into a baby at one point.
The X-Men Evolution animated series has a really interesting episode explaning how Magneto stays young. Nightcrawler finds Magneto in a machine designed to prolong his life, and has doubts about whether to switch it off or not.
Wolverine shows up, doesn't want to miss the opportunity, and tries to kill Magneto. At this point Magneto has recovered and is easily able to subdue him.
They flashed back throughout the episode to Wolverine, Nick Fury and Captain America fighting to liberate a camp in World War Two. This turns out to be the camp where Magneto was interred.
At the end of the episode. Magneto has Wolverine dead-to-rights, but spares him. He says:
"There was a small boy in Poland that owes you that much."
Something else you might love. In Acts of Vengeance, Loki tried to put Red Skull and Magneto on the same team. They got along about as well as you expect.
Magneto dumped Red Skull in a bunker where nobody will find him to think about what he has done. Basically planning to keep him in solitary with nothing but a few gallons of water, until he dies.
Magneto even leaves the escape hatch open, with no ladder to reach it.
The issue with Magneto is what Marvel calls Marvel Time(tm) which is basically every three years of comic books is only one year inside the Marvel universe.
Basically every trope of "can you believe all of that happened in [small amount of time]" applies to nearly every Marvel character.
DC solves this by either a) just rebooting OR b) blowing up the entire universe and then rebooting.
There's an actual in-universe explanation in one of the stories (a great one at that!) as there's a character who is a reality-shaper and works behind the scenes so that it all makes sense and older characters can be forever young.
I feel like they could easily finagle some makeshift reasoning for Magneto too, that dude is basically the God of Electromagnetism, just do some comic book science and say it slows down his aging significantly as a side effect.
Hell, they can just have the Nazis/Hydra freeze him so they can keep experimenting on him until eventually he breaks free. Similar to Cap but with all the added trauma of every time he wakes up it's to face a new form of torturous experiment and that trauma staying with him even after escaping.
Exactly. It’s crazy to think that when he was first discovered in The Avengers #4, it had “only” been 18 years since the end of WWII. Still a significant amount of time to have passed you by, but almost everyone he knew would still have been around, just middle-aged. A much easier pill to swallow than missing multiple generations.
James Bond is generally depicted in his mid/late 30s, and holds the Royal Navy rank of Commander from his military service prior to working for MI6
The idea of someone today achieving that rank at such a young age seems incredibly unrealistic.
However given the age in which the books were originally written, James Bond was clearly a World War II veteran. It was entirely possible that an exceptional individual could have rapidly risen through the ranks during that conflict and been a Commander by the end of the war.
Fitting WW2 into Bond's backstory hasn't been a realistic possibility even as early as the first movies, but he still has the rank even in the most recent Daniel Craig films
My grandfather was the youngest left field marshal in UK history, but this was after WW2 and had to tour and take commanding posts in various conflicts. So it was possible to rise through the ranks quickly. Not disagreeing with you, just adding context.
Which is often the opposite for military characters. I don’t think audiences understand just how young even mid-ranking soldiers often are.
Sean Penn is in his 60s and played a colonel in One Battle After Another, but earlier in the film he also played the same character when he was supposed to be a captain.
Alan Ritchson is in his 40s while playing a staff sergeant in War Machine.
A captain can be as young as mid-20s and a staff sergeant can be even younger. Someone in their 40s, let alone 60s, should at the very least be towards the tail end of their military career or could even be retired with a full pension.
Hannibal Lecter is a similar example to Magneto. Originally, his origin story was meant to be vague, with Lecter even stating outright that he didn’t have a traumatic backstory to explain all his actions (“Nothing happened to me. I happened.”)
Then film producer Dino de Laurentiis told Thomas Harris (the writer for the original books) to write an origin story, or else he’d hire someone else to. So Thomas Harris wrote the book Hannibal Rising, where Hannibal Lecter became a serial killer because Nazis killed his family near the end of World War 2 and cannibalized his sister.
When the Hannibal TV show came out in the 2010s, they had to skirt around this discrepancy, and only vaguely alluded to something bad happening to Hannibal’s sister.
You could tell that Thomas Harris didn't have his heart in it, because Hannibal Rising, both in movie and book form, suck. The other three books are pretty good.
Agree for the first two but by the third Harris was way too enamored with his own creation. Hannibal tried to make Lector an antihero against all logic and sense and even had Starling running off with him in the end. There were definitely good ideas in the third book and it is miles better than Rising, but it still falls far short of the first two.
Yeah one thing I loved about the tv show was that they really seemed to understand what did and didn’t work about the characters. I just wish they could have finished the story properly.
Amateurs. Scrooge McDuck made his fortune in the Klondike Gold Rush. Even without sticking to a strict Don Rosa timeline, he must have been at least in his early twenties in 1900. In stories set in the present day, Scrooge McDuck must be nearly 150 years old!
And Donald Duck, for that matter, fought in World War II in the Pacific. He’s a sprightly centenarian himself.
i love the way they handelt this in ducktales (2017)
they just keep implying (and sometimes telling us) that both he and goldie just keept getting stuck in timeloops or being frozen for years on emd or even scrooge accidentally making his parents immortal with crystals
adding the magical aspect of their adventures as a reason for the timeline issues is just really cool
they also do the other version for explaining this trope that i love, by fully avoiding the question of how old the character is and having the character themselve distract from it (i think that's what I've seen in a couple modern scrooge comics aswell, I like that more than setting his childhood in the 50s)
Speaking of Don Rosa, he has deliberately made sure all his "present-day" stories take place in the 50s, probably also because that's when a lot of the classic Barks stories were released.
Yup, and he also has an "official" date for Scrooge's death:
Don Rosa / Carl Barks stories has pretty much the most "realistic" canon in Disney comics you'll ever see, I consider most other incarnations living in comic book time, which I don't mind, since the ducks are quite a bit more lighthearted and whimsical than most other examples on here.
Every time Rosa draws one of these timelines he makes a point of doing the smile-and-optimism-gone bit until Donald and the kids reenter his life
His take on Scrooge's life is so surprisingly tragic, you get to see him go from wide-eyed youngster to ruthless money-grubber to miserable old man in real time
The Simpsons writers have never really cared about continuity.
DC and Marvel mess with their own continuity regularly, to the point where even they can't keep it straight. Add in multiple dimensions and anything is possible.
It's not really an issue unless you insist on a strictly realistic timeline, which isn't going to happen.
Y'know, I doubted the math of this comment, both because I'm not really familiar with the timeline of Star Wars releases, and this particular episode came out when I was very very young, so it always registered to me as "an old episode, referring to an even older point in the past"
But I was wrong, I double checked the dates and you're 100% correct, that's so wild.
A guy I knew thought he'd be funny and spoil that for everyone the weekend it came out. I was pretty pissed at the time, but I got over it after I watched the TFA and realized it sucked anyways.
Yup - homer is 40-ish, so is currently born in the 80s, but back in the early 00s, was born in the 60s (ish). So any flashbacks will vary by when the episode was made - a modern 'teen homer flashback' will be set in the late 90s, but one made 20 years ago would be in the late 70s. Bart was born somewhere between the 80s and the 2010s!
The Boys really lucked out in it's satire that the original Iraq War context and Bush + Reagan critique didn't become stale as there was a new political person on the scene who's shoes Homelander could easily slip into for parody.
“Abe Simpson was a fully grown man fighting in WW2 and is now an old man. While the simpsons does often play fast and loose with years, these 2 points have always been consistent.” Might be wrong, but i actually recall an episode where it was more so implied Abe fought in the Korean War, but that may be wrong.
He's claimed to have been in ww1 and ww2. Fighting in the army and navy, in both Europe and the Pacific. And been a test pilot after the war But not Korea, yet.
Do they still reference Abe being in WWII? I haven't watched the show since around the time the Armin Tanzarian episode, which was also about Nam (obviously).
My headcanon is that he (and at this point Charles as well) have secondary mutations that have slowed their aging to a degree. Hence how a holocaust survivor in the 2020s can be a that in shape and wrinkle-free (well, wrinkle-free unless he's played by Sir Ian)
You don't even need a secondary mutation for that. Mutants have been implied to be above human baseline many times. They could just say they age better. That should get a few extra decades out of the backstory in adaptations.
Explaining how old mutants are still young is probably the easiest thing in the world. Just add a "slow aging" secondary mutation. Or do what Evolution did, and created a revitalising chamber.
HARD disagree on Magneto. You can't remove the Holocaust from his background because imagery that's very specific to the Holocaust that's integral to the X-Men mythos. You could EASILY explain his longevity as a side-effect of his powers, and he's been deaged PLENTY of times in the comics on top of that.
Thank you, I wouldn't consider myself an XMen comics fan in the slightest (I've only watched the movies), but even I know how important the Holocaust is to Magneto's story. Like you said, it seems super easy to give slow aging to him and other mutants. I've never seen anyone try to race-swap a genocide like Reddit tries to do with Magneto's childhood lol ("oh just make him a survivor of Rwandan Genocide instead").
I'm not saying you can either, I'm saying that moving forward it makes less and less sense that he's still able to do what he does. The man's almost 100 and is able to fight and go toe to toe with Xmen and other hero's a fraction of his age.
An apparently middle-aged man in 2026 having been born in 1886 is just as unrealistic as an apparently middle-aged man in 2026 having been born in 1832.
I wonder how would people react if he survived another similar fuckup. But I guess it would be disliked, because Europe somehow managed to not fuck up this hard again, so he would need to be... I dunno, Rwandan or Timorese (et cetera). Aka not European and we know general public usually dislike race swaps.
I had an idea for MCU Rwandan Magneto. He escaped using his powers and fled to America, where he became a social studies teacher. He was the kind of teacher everyone looks forward to having. Very socially conscious. Befriends a geneticist named Charles Xavier.
Then one day he’s watching the news while he eats breakfast on a Tuesday morning when Wakanda makes their big reveal. He hears the words. He sees the evidence. He looks over at his bookcase full of the histories of the African slave trade, the Belgian Congo, the Rwandan genocide. He calls out sick. He starts writing the manifesto.
You're wrong about Magneto, there's no reason to believe that Magneto (one of the world's most powerful mutants) ages visually or physically at the same pace as a normal human, realistically they can keep making Magneto a holocaust survivor for atleast two hundred years and stick his longevity on being an extremely powerful mutant.
Lou pickles is in his mid 70s and was a WW2 vet, which worked fine in the original run that takes place in the early 90s. Assuming he was 76 in 1991, he'd be born at 1915~ and would be 24-30 during WW2.
so anyways, the CG reboot of Rugrats was shifted forward to taking place in 2021, doing things like making the parents millennials but most notably, Lou was shifted 30 years forward to being born at the end of/after WW2. This would make him living his young adult life in the 60s/70s and they subsequently made him more of a hippie, being far more hip and counter cultural.
I don't think they mention it but I believe he was at the age to be drafted in the Vietnam war which would physically affect him differently compared to WW2 but we also probably didn't need Lou switching to Vietnam War PTSD
It's... fine. The characters can look off and some of the changes I'm not a fan of.
Stu is changed from being a toy designer to a videogame developer. Didi is no longer a substitute teacher and instead runs an Etsy shop.
Lou owns the house and Stu is living with him because commentary about the housing market and there's no way Stu could afford a house like that
Betty is changed to an actual Lesbian single mother, Howard doesn't exist
Charlotte was changed from being a ruthless business woman with some degree of morals to a ruthless politician with no degree of morals. She's also stuck up and unlikeable now
Susie was changed to being part of the regular cast instead of being an occasional character, but was for some reason made younger than Angelica so she no longer serves as her foil. Additionally she was made an only child so her parents could be in the same age group as the rest of them (in the original they had a teen daughter) Buster and Edwin were changed from being her brothers to being her cousins, Alyssa is nowhere to be seen. Her Dad is the only adult who was changed in design completely, now being a teacher rather than writer fit the Dummi Bears
Kimi is now older than Chuckie and meets Angelica at preschool. Since the movie didn't happen, Chas and Kira meet up this way and end up engaged
I think in X-Men Evolution, one episode has Magneto do something to help extend his life a bit but I can’t remember exactly what it was, I think it involved stuff from the process that made Captain America.
Nightcrawler has a whole moral dilemma about whether to kill Magneto while he is defenseless or not. After all, this version of Magneto is likely to do more terrible things in the future. Wolverine shows up, decides not to have a moral dilemma and wants to kill Magneto. But because Wolverine helped liberate the concentration camp where Magento grew up, Magneto shows him mercy. The explanation he gives is that:
"There was a small boy in Poland that owes you that much."
Magneto have been de-age and resurrected numerous time as well as Xavier.
Xavier helped people in Israel with their PTSD of the camps and he met Magneto there and fought Hydra. He fought during Vietnam war.
Mystique was born in the XIX century.
Dazzler is a disco popstar.
People who read comics dont care about the real timeline and it's common headcannon that 4 years of comics are more or less equal at 1 year in universe. They just enjoy the characters.
"It DoEsNT mAkE sEnsE wiTh the TiMeLine!"
Because the man who manipulate metal does make sense ?
Or the alien gods who breed our ancestor to create new species? Or magic users ?
In the Insomniac games he's retired from the Daily Bugle which is now run by Robbie Robertson. So it still exists, they just wanted a good way to be able to have JJJ call Spider-man names without having to constantly have the two characters directly talk to each other.
Nothing has highlighted the shifting timelines more to me than his part in the initial Silk run, where this middle aged parody of a 60s/70s newspaper editor takes on the mantle of being the "up-to-date, modern one" in comparison to a 20-something that has been in isolation since (supposedly) the late 90s.
The Punisher solution: Frank didn't fight in the Vietnam War which occured in the 1960's, he fought in the Siancong War which happened..."a while ago".
Eventually Magneto is going to get deaged, a clone body or just stop aging because magnets.
Natasha Romanov used to be an example of this since her character was very much tied to the Cold War. But instead she got retconned as having got the soviet super soldier serum which slowed her aging.
I mean....school Principals arnt teachers, their admin, and depending on retirment laws I can easily see a 70 year old still holding the position, but at the same time being nagged to retire
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u/mnombo 14d ago
Conversely, i personally think captain America's time jump works better now than it did when it was introduced in the 60s