Canon Discontinuity/Anime and Manga

Examples of Canon Discontinuity in Anime and Manga include:

• The last hundred or so pages of Battle Angel Alita are ignored by the renewed Battle Angel Alita: Last Order; originally intended as an adaptation of the last level of the game of the comic, it has spiraled into a second story longer than the original that is still ongoing. It should be noted that in this case, the original ending was an effort to avoid Author Existence Failure. After he got better instead, he decided to do it right.
• A earlier series by Gainax, Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, suffered from a 12-episode Filler arc shoehorned into the middle of the series after its early success earned it a sudden half-season extension. These episodes are not only animated poorly, but they also warp the characters' personalities with stories that are not only useless, but also incoherent. Some fans argue that these episodes provide Character Development, but other fans (and critics) suggest that skipping them altogether would benefit the series as a whole (a sentiment shared by director Hideaki Anno, who admitted that he would've saved only episodes 30 and 31, which contain genuine plot elements; in fact, Anno created a compilation of the series, called "The Nautilus Story", which deletes much of these unnecessary episodes). Similarly, when the series returns to its roots in Episode 35, it quickly forgets these episodes (save 30 and 31), further suggesting they were never supposed to happen in the first place.
• Dragon Ball Online ignores Dragon Ball GT and even certain elements (read: Filler) in the rest of the Dragon Ball anime. This is likely a result of Akira Toriyama having creative contribution to the series, as well as the fact that it's based on the original manga.
  • Dragon Ball Online itself suffers from this trope to some extent, including the Unfortunate Implications that Goku and Vegeta must have Really Got Around for so many humans being able to access Super Saiyan
    • OR... considering one becomes a Super Saiya-jin by making a wish on the Dragon Balls, they didn't have to.
• The animated version of Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle contains a discontinuity with the "Tokyo Revelations" OAVs ignoring the last filler arc from the broadcast series and picking up right after the escape from the Rekort library.
• Macross II has been officially been shunted off into its own private universe. Aspects of the original Macross TV series and the movie Do You Remember Love are taken in Broad Strokes in later Macross series.
  • A good portion of this stems from the fact that Macross II was not a Studio Nue production—Bandai wanted something for a tenth-anniversary celebration in 1992, and when it seemed that Shoji Kawamori's cooperation was not forthcoming, came up with the story themselves. Of the original production staff, only Haruhiko Mikimoto actually worked on Macross II.
• Nothing from the Sun Wukong arc of Shamo has been mentioned once in subsequent chapters. The arc that followed it was a flashback arc that followed a different character, and when the series finally came back to protagonist Ryo Narushima he had become a washed-up prize fighter, as opposed to the near demi-god he was at the end of the Sun Wukong arc.
• The second Digimon Tamers movie is mostly about a Digimon attacking on Ruki's birthday and mind-controlling her with a song she used to sing with her father. It also seemed to latch on to the idea planted in the final episode that the Tamers could use the portal Takato found in Guilmon's house to reunite with their partners. It was written and produced without the input of the head writers, however, and a CD drama released later reveals that the kids had yet to reunite with their partners even a year later, and revolved around them sending messages to the Digital World that their partners might stumble upon one day. (One of the writers speaks highly of the movie on his website, however, and the drama has a scene of Ruki humming the song from the movie.)
• While the writers of the Naruto Anime largely restricted themselves to creating new villages and countries for Filler arcs, leaving the major names alone for future Manga expansion, one blaring example of this emerged: Mission - Protect the Waterfall Village OVA. As portrayed in the OVA, Waterfall Village is so small that a dozen men can effectively seize control of the entire village and their leader is a spineless teenager. Yet a later anime arc implied the village was highly aggressive and prone to launching border attacks on larger countries. And if that wasn't enough, Word of God is that the village had the third-most powerful bijuu under their control.
• The Gundam franchise has Gaia Gear, a novel written by franchise creator Yoshiyuki Tomino, set 110 years after Chars Counterattack and focusing on a literal Char Clone. The later Mobile Suit Gundam F91 and Victory Gundam, also written by Tomino, push Gaia Gear into discontinuity by contradicting elements of its backstory. As far as Sunrise is concerned, any Gundam work not animated doesn't count, no matter how well it cleaves to canon - even so, that hasn't stopped them from animating the popular Gundam Unicorn novels, retroactively making them canon, despite being set before series that predate it by as much as 16 years.
• Not only was Episode 4 of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann cut out of the manga, but the Episode 5 Opening Narration even refrained from using clips from that episode!
• Excel Saga's director did this on purpose, intentionally making the "bonus" Episode 26 too outrageous (and long) to air. The anime series ended on a definitive note with Episode 25 instead of the ridiculous Bridge Drop of Hyatt's blood flooding the earth and drowning everyone.

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