Webcomic Time

Prophets have No Fourth Wall whatsoever.


"In conclusion I would recommend to not get hung up on birthdays or aging."
—Pete Abrams, author of Sluggy Freelance, on how much time has passed since the beginning of the story
"Here's hoping for a few more decades! I'll get these jerks into college yet."
—Dan Shive of El Goonish Shive on the comic's tenth anniversary

Related to Comic Book Time, Webcomic Time takes place when time taken by the story of a Web Comic (or other form of serial media) takes place over a shorter (in-universe) time than the (real-life) time it takes for the comic to actually be produced.

This is due to a couple different reasons. The first, and simplest, is that while inter-panel and inter-strip jumps allow them to take place over any length of time, three or four panels usually only represent a few minutes. With most strips updating three to five times a week, it's easy to spend a couple of weeks on a single conversation.

Secondly, of course, is that updates are often late or skipped for personal reasons, delaying the in-continuity time further.

Over time, this slippage can add up to years; topical references early on may become incredibly dated later, even if it was supposed to take place on the same day. This especially affects Two Gamers on a Couch series, since technological progress can quickly make references to new consoles and top-of-the-line gaming machines obsolete. If Exponential Plot Delay gets involved, things can get really bad.

There are several ways webcomic authors compensate for this:

  • Backdating comics to match up with the date they are supposed to have occurred.
  • Explicitly setting it in the time the comic started.
  • After each Story Arc, explicitly skipping forward over "boring" periods of time.
  • Implicitly skip forward, by mentioning dates every so often. This mostly applies to less-continuity-based comics.
  • Constantly use Lampshade Hanging on the idea, or outright parody it (sometimes with Medium Awareness).
  • Or, don't compensate, and just use a system similar to Comic Book Time.

This doesn't (necessarily) apply to comics that are set outside of the present day, except for cases where it does, such as if an in-universe character decides to hang a lampshade on the relation to real time.

Examples of Webcomic Time include:

Webcomics

  • As of December 2010, over 40% of the entire run of Dead Winter focused on the events of a single day.
  • Bittersweet Candy Bowl had an entire summer arc... that took over a year.
  • Something*Positive sets entire plot arcs on the day the arc is supposed to end. This is usually done for holidays (for example, an arc set on Valentine's Day will start early in February and hopefully end on the 14th).
  • Books Don't Work Here As of Page 60 where this is Lampshaded the whole comic has taken place in one day. that same page also mentions that there will be two flashbacks coming before the day is done.
  • Drowtales from Chapter 3, Page 14 to (as of writing this) Chapter 28 takes place over only a few months of comic time, from the end of the school year to the Moon's End Festival. Faen's fleeing was originally drawn in 2003, which means it took 7 years real time for Ariel to rescue Faen. Talk about "The Longest Wait"!
  • All of the posted comics of El Goonish Shive represent about a round calendar month. This includes two story arcs ('Painted Black' and 'Grace's Birthday Party') which both took over a year and a half to cover periods of roughly six to eight hours, while the week that lay between them took another eight months to tell. The closest to real-time the comic gets is March 2003, which took place over about a week. Meanwhile, between May 2007 and August 2009, we have seen two full days pass and some change.
    • As of Thursday, Jan 21, 2010 we wrapped up the day that began on Thursday, Mar 12, 2009. That's only about 10 months for a day.
      • For a complete timeline, check out the Wiki.
      • Even Dan seems to be getting slightly freaked out about it - although we've FINALLY moved on a couple of days (quite rapidly too), both the comic for 18th Aug 2010 and its commentary are part hanging a stadium-size lampshade, part flat out pointing out the time-warp. A scene took place noted as "Last October" (vs the then current in-strip date of "April 7th")... which apparently PRE-DATES - quite significantly - the comic's first storyline... published more than 8 1/2 years earlier. That's a ratio of about 15:1 on AVERAGE...
      • And 15:1 is still pretty tame compared to some more extreme examples below.
      • Webcomic Time is even lampshaded in this comic: "June 7th continues. Again. It will never end."
  • Similarly, five years of Megatokyo cover just over two months of plot (one day per chapter, plus 52 days for 'Chapter Zero', six weeks of which was skipped over entirely while a main character recovered from injuries).
    • It gets especially bizarre when you consider that, despite ostensibly taking place in 2000, characters will make references to whatever is going on whenever the strip they're in came out. For example, strips that supposedly occur only a few days apart reference Metal Gear Solid II and IV, which came out years apart. Perhaps the most extreme case is Ed (a Sony employee)'s shirt, which promotes the as of then unreleased Play Station 3. When the Play Station 3 finally was released, the logo on the shirt changed to PS4 (which due to Sony's "Ten year plan" wouldn't even be announced until 2016).
    • Parodied in Mac Hall, when Ian and JM are dressed up as Piro and Largo, respectively, for Halloween. "Largo" asks if "Piro" can get him a beer, and "Piro" responds that it'll take at least three months.
    • You've got to give credit to author Fred Gallagher for being aware of this, and keeping the continuity where possible (Yuki's iMac). This even gets lampshaded in Chapter 10 with Yuki's "very old cellphone."
  • Grey Is is released 6 pages a week, however it can sometimes take 60 pages just to get through to get through a single day
  • College Roomies From Hell!!! seems to progress at an overall rate of a month every two years, but some individual story arcs may take six months or more to cover a few hours.
    • Hilariously explained in this guest strip, nine months into a very, very long day that didn't actually end until the strip was Retooled, seventeen months later.
  • Lampshade Hanging on technology datedness in this cutewendy strip.
  • Comics like PvP and Unshelved avoid this by having all comics (save the rare Story Arc ones) set the day they are posted. Time moves naturally and each strip is a snip from their daily lives in our timeline, allowing the characters to instead inhabit Comic Book Time.
  • Although Ozy and Millie have celebrated Christmas every year for the past 11 years, the two main characters have only aged two years.
  • Amusingly averted with Ciem 1. It is set Twenty Minutes Into the Future (2019-2021 to be exact.) Possible future anachronisms like CRT monitors aside, the story took two years to make and takes place over the course of three years.
  • Freefall is set in the far future, in a distant starsystem with no stated earth-date, so staying synched to the calendar is no issue, but the story so closely follows its character's lives that one of the in-story days took 250 comics (over a year and a half) to tell. This got pointed out as one of the main characters hit her bed exhausted.
  • Likewise, though Dominic Deegan: Oracle For Hire doesn't have to be slaved to our calendar, taking place in a different, magical world, occasional jokes about how the characters' several-hour-long adventures "felt like months" crop up.
    • For example, two strips here and again here
  • It's Walky! (as well as its sibling comics Roomies! and Shortpacked!) took place more or less in real time. Occasionally, time would slide forward (for example, a storyline that took four months to cover the space of a couple hours ended, and the next storyline kicked in a few months later, synching back up more-or-less with the real world.)

We should gather and remember our favorite moments from Dumbing of Age past. Remember Sunday? And Monday? How about Tuesday? And can you believe Wednesday? Wow. And let’s not even get into Thursday. And, jeez, Friday is still going?


What a roller coaster ride. Those were some good times.


May we all live to see Saturday.

  • Parodied in Tsunami Channel: Experimental Comic Kotone, in which a character causes a Temporal Paradox by buying an iPod Nano even though the story takes place in 2001.
  • Don't think too hard about this one: late in the course of Fans it's established that before Tim the Fanboy went to CosmoCon, he had abandoned his faith in Islam due to 9/11. The CosmoCon storyline itself was written in 1999. However, Fans! covers about two years of events over the course of six years of writing; in later times the writer slipped in a Retcon that the plot began about two years before the real-time end of the comic. This does, however, leave the 1999-era references in the early days, such as Newt Gingrich as a possible threat, hanging a bit loose.
  • In Questionable Content, the Not a Date between Dora and Marten was established as under a year after their first meeting, almost two years before in real time. The two years since have covered a matter of weeks. This is made stranger by the strip's up-to-the-minute indie music references.
    • QC is remarkable in that nearly every day of story time has a clear beginning and end, shown both by story (daytime vs evening activities) and by changes of t-shirts. As of October 2008 about 58 days have been shown, with gaps of unknown duration. The longest continuous sequence so far was 13 days (strips 396-750, 16 months in real time).
    • Emphasized in the News Post of the first comic of 2009, where the author notes that the comic will soon feature its first change of season in its run. Its five-and-a-half-year run.
    • The breakup between Dora and Martin as of November, 2010 illustrates the problems that occur around this trope; in Webcomic Time, it would count as an Autumn/Winter fling, though in real time they've been together for years. Everyone in the comic is treating it as if it were very much the latter, not the former.
  • In Between Failures 488 comics from to March 2007 to July 2009 covered around 1 1/2 days, with the 1st day taking 305 strips.
  • An infamous example was Avalon, which started in November with the beginning of 10th grade, and by the end of December, was synced up so that most days fell somewhere within the storyline showing them. It was meant to run until graduation (three years later in Canada), but during the last year of story time, the author's updates became more and more sporadic, and he began to backdate the comics. Two years past the expected finale, he threw the towel in and described the events that followed in an unusually involved Where Are They Now? Epilogue.
  • Something of a fourth wall-breaking plot point in Bob and George: During the Mega Man 3 parody storyline, George is tied up and hung from the ceiling of Dr. Wily's fortress. The events of the story take a few days at most, yet George complains that he was hanging from the ceiling for three months: long enough for him to go slightly crazy, then flip out and destroy Wily's fortress upon discovering that he could have gotten himself out at any point.
  • Subversion: In Achewood, Philippe is five years old. He will always be five years old. However, all the other characters are forecasted to eventually age and die.
  • Lampshaded in 1/0, especially near the end of the comic.
  • The first 14 chapters of Gunnerkrigg Court took about two years of real time, and covered Annie's first semester at the Court. Ironically, chapter 14 took the entire (real time) summer of 2007 to show the last day (webcomic time) before summer holiday. The author even noted this as such in Chapter 8 with "that night seemed to go on for months".
  • The Final Boss battle and ending in Adventurers!! might have taken about two to three hours of real time, at most, but covered the last two years of the comic's run.
  • Belatedly pseudo-averted in Least I Could Do, where there's a mini-arc in which the author and artist send a letter to the characters stating that they will no longer be "forever 24", and that they will begin to age like normal people do. It's not truly averted, since several minutes happen during days or even weeks, but the characters aging still counts.
    • It can be insinuated, though, that several days to weeks can occur in between story arcs, with the stand-alone gag-a-day comics being only a snippet of the daily lives of the characters. Then again, maybe this is just thinking a little too hard.
  • Loserz ran over six years (with breaks), but the characters are still in High School.
  • Avoided in a rather novel fashion by The Sins. Each outing can not only take several years of in-comic time, but are told in a non-linear fashion, with some outings taking centuries before or after the preceding arc. This allows the comic to have team members who have retired or died come back without altering continuity. Fans still hope we never see the time period with the new Envy again, though, as he is also the Anthropomorphic Personification of the Replacement Scrappy.
  • Sluggy Freelance is a classic example. One storyline titled "5 Minutes at a Party" took roughly a month. Lampshaded: "You've been gone for 4 weeks but it feels almost like a year! Implicit jump-forwards over boring bits allow keeping the stories' time roughly but explicitly parallel to the real-world date (and bonus stories to be inserted earlier in the continuity retrospectively).

In Sluggy Freelance we often signify the passing holidays, so actual years go by, but are the characters of the strip really a decade older? I have to admit the gang is getting older but maybe not THAT much older.

  • Only a few months have passed so far in Venus Envy, despite the fact that the comic has been running for nearly seven years. In fact, the cast has been working on a school production of Romeo & Juliet since November 2002.
  • Misfile began in March 2004, and is just getting to Winter 2004 in Winter 2011. Word of God states that the whole comic is slated to end sometime around summer 2005 which should give us at least another year-and-a-half of strips.
  • A particularly epic example: Elf Life's "The Wedding" storyline, chronicling the events of a single day, ran for about two years! It did, however, contain several extended flashbacks.
  • Sabrina Online has been running since 1996, yet the story has progressed (at the most) about two and and half years. This is marked mostly by the growth of Timothy Wolfe; born early on in the strip, he is now approximately 18 months old.
    • Sabrina suddenly announces at one point that she has a college degree, explaining that she studied in the dead time between strips, which is why no-one knew
      • Amy's pregnancy leapt forward in one episode where she woke up, stared at her stomach and asked "how LONG between strips, anyway?"
  • Wigu explicitly covered seven days between January 2002 and April 2005.
  • The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob Lampshades the fact that ten years passed between the end of its run as a print strip in a club newsletter and its revival as a webcomic by having all its characters get in a fight about the events of the last printed strip.
    • TIAOB recently announced that it will be introducing seasons, that particular strip involving a giant robot knocking over a pile of freshly-raked autumn leaves. It's also notable that Molly the artificial monster is still anticipating her first birthday, despite having been running around in the strip since 2006 (or since 1995, if you count the print comics version). Most of the strip's story arcs (the longest of which lasted a year) appear to take about a day or two.
  • And Shine Heaven Now used to be a "nobody ever grows" strip, until a time-travel storyline published in 2006 retconned the previous strips and set the date definitively at 1997. By the end of 2008, in-strip continuity has reached 1998.
  • YU+ME: dream Part 1 went on for about four and a half years, but the entire story was only about six months long. However, it's got a good excuse, as all of Part 1 was All Just a Dream
  • Tweep spent about 10 months on a single evening where two characters went on a date and three others went to a club. That's not counting the rest of the day before that, which took nearly 6 months.
  • Although not as significant as some of the other examples, it's still very real in Slice of Life comic Gender Swapped. It was even Lampshaded on page 34. That's right, not even 50 pages in and the author was cracking Meta.
  • As pointed out by the author, Freak Angels spent the first year of its run (at 6 pages per week!) covering a period of less than 24 hours.
  • Khaos Komix has some odd timeline problems, but according to Word of God, it's intentional, and the timeline isn't set, it's all just happening "right now". Even the flashbacks, and revisiting previous events.
  • On at two separate occasions this has been Lampshaded in SSDD when Kingston notices that he doesn't recall anything that happened during a timeskip after a lengthy story arc. The other characters usually attribute it to his massive drug use.
  • In a more egregious example, Agatha Heterodyne, hero of Girl Genius, entered Castle Heterodyne in the spring of 2008. As of early 2011, we haven't even reached the next day.
    • The entire webcomic can be considered an example of this, given that it started in 2002 and only covers 2 months and an unspecified number of days.
    • An unrelated instance is lampshaded in this strip.
    • Lampshaded again here, five months (of real time) after the aforementioned strip.
  • Emergency Exit plays this one straight; the author has in fact placed reminders to explain when things are taking place.
  • The cast of Sugar Bits have been fighting for well over a year.
  • Beyond Reality suffered a long delay in early 2009, and posted this on its five-year anniversary.
  • The Mansion of E has been updating every day since the summer of 2003... and has finished about twenty-four hours of strip time.
  • The entire Battle of Azure City of Order of the Stick takes place in one day, but took 66 comics (and most of 2007) to get from sunrise in #418 to the crescent moon in #484.
    • Then spoofed in the panel at the top of the page, where the all-seeing Oracle knows the difference between Real Time and Webcomic Time, and makes sure the readers do, too.
    • Another sequence where we're given the exact time is the whole "Darth Vaarsuuvius" sequence, from strip 634 to 653. According to this, it took just over 20 minutes. Included was several weeks during which Durkon cast the 10-minute Resurrection spell.
    • And as of strip #842, we've learned that the time between Vaarsuuvius casting Familicide (#639) and the characters reaching Girard's hideout (#839) was about two weeks.
  • Averted in Multiplex, which progresses in real-time. Characters have even celebrated their birthdays in-comic on the appropriate days.
  • Skin Horse had a ten-month-long arc that took place in three days of webcomic time. Two nights also, since werewolves were involved.
  • In Penny and Aggie, the "Dinner for Six" arc took place mainly over two days, with most of the story covering a couple of hours, but ran for five and a half months. "The Popsicle War," which covered about six weeks in-comic, ran for a year. "Missing Person," which covered less than twenty-four hours, ran for three and a half months.
    • The comic began in 2004 real-world time towards the end of the main characters' first year of high school. The comic ended in 2011 with a storyline depicting their final summer vacation of high school before their senior years started. Writer T Campbell confirmed on the forum that the comic is meant to take place in the current real-world year, though throughout the strip the characters continuously make references to pop culture and real-world events that have happened in the intervening real-world years.
  • Alice and her friends are implied to be in in 6th and 7th grade from 1999-2005 in the webcomic of the same name. During that time, they celebrated numerous Christmas and Halloween events as well as Dot's mother having a fifth child.
  • Averted with the Webcomic version of Diary of a Wimpy Kid, which takes place in real-time.
  • The Class Menagerie apparently took place over two years, although the summer internship arc took place over a couple weeks.
  • In Flying Man and Friends, the characters begin a journey (with an elephant pulling their house) in this strip, and don't actually seem to go anywhere until nearly a month later.
  • The "VilAnon" chapter of Everyday Heroes had Jane telling her life story over the course of one evening, but took 15 months of real time to complete.
  • Homestuck: The majority of the plot so far took place on April 13, 2009. (Due to time travel and alternate universes, almost all of the plot asides from flashbacks has occurred on five or so distinct days in separate universes, which, from the characters' points of view, all occur at the same time.) Naturally this leads confusion when Real Life holidays start cropping up. So much sweet loot. You'd almost think it was simultaneously your birthday, AND Christmas or something. Of course you know that is ridiculous and could never conceivably happen.
    • Similarly given an epic lampshade here, and here, the latter being posted on Christmas, 2010.
    • Homestuck has to be the best example. Although there is a lot of time travel, in the actual timeline, less than one day has passed. It is still his birthday, one year later. In fact, if you went on an Archive Binge, the time taken to read through the archives might well be greater than the time depicted onscreen. At the end of Act 5, it finally is no longer his 13th birthday.
    • The entirety of Act Five Act Two takes place over the course of more or less exactly 24 hours. It ran for more than a year from 9/19/10 to 10/25/11.
    • Act Six is a bit strange because while it takes place on November 11th, 2011, it's set in an Alternate Universe.
  • An angry mob in Instant Classic shows up in a comic dated September 2007, but doesn't actually do anything until June 2009. "... How long have we been standing out here...?"
  • The entirety of Two Weeks Notice is supposed to take place over a singular period of two weeks but has been running for over a year, even though the author has talked about ending it for more than half of that.
  • In Eight Bit Theater the Light Warriors are given 24 hours to prepare to fight Chaos, which in real life took from October to February of the next year. However, it's then played with when they realize (too late) that it only became night once one of them slept at an inn.
  • Although Scary Go Round was not immune to this trope, it has always managed to even out comic time vs. real time in the end. It remains to be seen to what extent its Spin-Off Bad Machinery will stick to this, considering that the story there starts three years later than the end of SGR, ergo in 2012.
  • It's hard to tell, but it seems like only at most two months have passed in the last seven years of Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures.
  • Lampshaded in this Ménage à 3 strip.
  • Due to its very sporadic updates, an arc in Sexy Losers, set during a single day, started in 2004 and ended in 2011.
  • A given Story Arc in Rumors of War takes about three months of real time to cover a couple days worth of in-world events. Then it skips ahead a couple months to the events of the next Story Arc. Recently, there was a Whole-Episode Flashback to events that followed the end of the very first story arc.
  • Between Failures: running for 4 years and counting, its 700 or so strips cover a grand total of three days.
  • In General Protection Fault, most of the action in the To Thine Own Self arc, which lasted over a year of real time (With some delays), took place over the course of a day, and the climax took place over a few minutes.
  • In The Cartoon Chronicles of Conroy Cat, Doggy is about to get hit by a giant snowball rolling down a hill, and between the days the comic doesn't update, builds a ramp to send the snowball back to where it came.
  • Enjuhneer has lampshaded this as the result of "putting Pocky in a time machine."
  • Think Before You Think, in this comic.

Julia: It's like every day is several weeks long.

  • A Loonatics Tale solves the problem by ignoring it. The comic is set more-or-less in the modern day, but in a completely different world, using a calendar that puts the events of the comic somewhere around the year 3000 (by which I mean, they're not using the Gregorian calendar). As of this writing, it's the beginning of summer, but the current story arc is taking place sometime in autumn (except for the bit at the very beginning, which is a flashback to the beginning of summer about twenty years ago).
  • Schlock Mercenary typically maintains a 12:1 ratio of time, so 1 month in the webcomic is about a year in real life. However, this is by no means standard, and there have been a few books that pick up weeks, or even months after the previous one left off.
    • Book 12, the current arc, has taken almost 11 months, and only a few hours have passed in the comic.
  • Inverted in this Goblin Hollow strip.
  • Lampshaded in Dragon Ball Multiverse, when an annoyed U18 Vegeta mentions that it felt like two years since his fight in the tournament, when only a couple of hours have passed in the comic.
  • The infamous bathroom break from Pawn. The act therein, and the conversation between Baalah and Ayanah occurs in what looks like, the span of a few minutes. The actual progress of the comics release, meant it lasted for almost a year.
  • Red String already had a reasonably slower pace, as it started in 2003 when Miharu and her friends were 10th graders and they've yet to finish their final year of high school. However, it hit a slow point even for that when Miharu's final summer vacation started in the summer of 2009. And even then, the break up arc is still recent in story time, despite having started in the summer of 2008. As of the start of 2012, the end of their summer break is finally in sight. Some of this is related to the author's pregnancy in 2011, which slowed updates to two pages a week for most of the year. Some of this is also due to a broader focus on the supporting cast, which led to many of the summer break stories taking place concurrently, necessitating a slower progression of in-universe time.
  • The Whiteboard: Lampshaded at least several times:
    • Comes up here first.
    • Later, it comes up again in this strip. For those at the paintball field it's been only a few minutes, but for Pirta it feels like it's been two weeks.
  • Inverted in Better Days where although the story arcs happens in Webcomic Time, there are large timeskips in between some arcs that result in the comic progressing faster than normal time.


Anime and Manga

  • In this page of the Yu Yu Hakusho manga, at the end of the Chapter Black Saga, Yusuke remarks that he feels "like he's been fighting for a year". It's also used at the end of the Dark Tournament Saga, a series that takes place over the course of a week and lasts for over a year's worth of manga chapters.
  • In Bleach, the back-to-back Hueco Mundo and Fake Karakura arcs took over three years in real time, but in-story happened over the course of less than 24 hours.
    • Before that the Soul Society Arc took place over two years and covered around three weeks of in-world time, mostly focused on the last few days.
  • Dragon Ball's sagas are sometimes (the Saiyan saga, and some of the Tournament Arcs are notable exceptions) set over the course of no more than a month. Major events which take a year or more in real-time to draw or animate last maybe one to three days in-story. In an inversion, the Time Skips catch up to the present and then some—35 years pass over 10–11 years real time.
  • Late in the Rurouni Kenshin manga, a subtle Fourth Wall gag slips in as Sanosuke tries (not too hard) to remember a pair of villains from the beginning of the series.

Sanosuke: Yeah, I guess I remember that... four years and a half ago, wasn't it?
Brothers: Half a year!

  • The climax of the Fullmetal Alchemist manga, covering almost two years worth of chapters, takes place over a single day.
  • Similarly, in Hellsing, the Millennium invasion of London and the following battle between Hellsing, Iscariot, and Millennium lasts from chapter 35 until the deaths of the Major and the Doktor in chapter 94 -and it all takes place during a single night.
  • Not long before the Time Skip, One Piece spent over a year of real world time depicting a period of approximately 33 hours. Approximately 20 hours of which were mostly skipped while Luffy recovered from Magellan's poison effectively making it a 13 hour period that was actually covered.
  • The first 76 comics of The Word Weary take place over the course of one day even though they took six months to update.
  • The World God Only Knows took six months of chapters to cover three days.
  • Wandering Son's been going on for nine years at the time of this writing, but has only taken place over the span of about six years. The series tries to stay contemporary for the best of its abilities though. A calender in volume 11 clearly states "2010", though earlier chapters seem very early 2000s. We've seen the PlayStation 2 several times within the manga but it's been a popular console throughout the new-millennium so it doesn't date the series to any year.


Web Original

  • Tales of MU has been running since June of '07. In story, it is currently 35 days after Chapter 1. Word of God is that the author is deliberately following this trope.
  • Over ten years of The Saga of Tuck have produced one calendar year of plot where it is still canonically 1997.
  • The Whateley Universe handled this by starting out way back in 2004 with a school year supposed to be starting in fall of 2006. Six years later, they've gotten all the way to January 2007 in the stories.
  • The Nostalgia Chick's Dark Nella saga was released over two and a half months but seems to only take place over one or two days at most, if that.


Live Action Television

  • Lost has explicitly covered 108 days (not counting flashbacks and flashforwards) in four seasons. Michael and his son Walt were Put on a Bus in season two because the actor playing Walt was growing conspicuously (this is lampshaded at one point in season four when Walt, "but taller," appears to Locke in a vision).
    • An even better indication of this trope: Aaron was played by 57 different infants between the character's birth and leaving the island, because of how quickly the babies grew out of the part.
      • After the three year Time Skip between the fourth and fifth seasons, the remainder of the series consists of a couple of weeks which is a little over a year real-time.
  • Each season of Twenty Four, true to its name, takes place over a single 24-hour period, while being aired over a span of about 4 months. The series as a whole avoids this trope by having time passing in between seasons be longer than in reality.
  • Every episode of True Blood takes place over about twenty-four hours with each episode picking up the minute the previous episode ends (With the exception of a two-week time skip in Season 1) The first two seasons take place over 43 days.
  • Breaking Bad: The show has run for 5 seasons since 2008, but has only (at least through season 3) covered a period of a few months.


Video Games

  • In Dwarf Fortress, dwarves only need to eat, drink, and sleep about once or twice per calendar season, and they can spend multiple days just traveling the fortress or fighting a goblin. Scale in general runs more on Rule of Fun than realism, though.
    • Subverted with werebeasts which only transform for a couple of days around full moon, on larger maps this means they will change back before they even reach the entrance of the fortress and flee in their human/goblin/elf/dwarf form again from the map without any damage done.
    • And also averted in Adventure Mode in which you have actually day and night cycle, and while it was done to fight a cyclops for over a week, you need to stack up quite a bit of food and drink and also longer breaks to not fall unconscious form overexert between smacking the cyclops with his own feet...
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