This video is brought to you by me - and Aurora, the webcomic I’ve been making for about
two years now.
God.
Uh, more on that later!
There are basically no stories that show the audience a completely unbroken stretch of time.
Characters go to sleep and wake up several hours later, travel time is handled with a
montage instead of a fourteen-hour play-by-play of the entire trip, and the number one unspoken
rule of story pacing is no-one ever poops.
The official term for these time jumps is an “ellipsis”, and they technically break
continuity, but they make up for it by improving the pacing.
Continuity is very important because the more naturally the story flows, the better the
audience will understand it.
But pacing is equally important, because it’s what keeps the audience invested.
It might be better for continuity if we watch the entire process by which a character travels
from point A to point B, down to the in-flight snack and the luggage carousel, but it’d
kill the pacing to subject the audience to that kind of real-time drudgery.
To preserve balance, most stories feature small intervals of high continuity punctuated
by breaks that abruptly move the story from point A to point B, skipping over the boring
parts to preserve the pacing between continuous story beats.
A character will wake up, and the next time we see them they’ll be heading downstairs
for breakfast - we didn’t need to see them
drag themselves out of bed, pull on some sweatpants
and stare at the wall for a hot minute before heading out, because while it’d further
the continuity, it would drag down the pacing.
That said, some stories deliberately show us these slower moments to produce a feeling
of mundanity, domesticity, boredom or depression - but that’s a deliberate narrative choice
to produce a specific audience impact.
The point is, in stories, time is not linear - it’s broken up.
And that can be valuable, because small-scale time jumps are sometimes used in creative
ways, especially in mysteries, where they hide key story details that’d otherwise
make the mystery too obvious.
In the Agatha Christie novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which I am about to thoroughly
spoil, the narrator says “The letter had been brought in at twenty minutes to nine.
It was just on ten minutes to nine when I left him, the letter still unread.”
This innocuous ten-minute time jump obscures the fact that, in that time, the narrator
murdered Roger Ackroyd.
Small-scale time jumps can be used to hide big plot details while also hiding that anything
is being hidden.
We’re so used to time jumps preserving continuity that when the rule is broken it surprises us.
Now while small-scale time jumps are a fundamental building block to basically all storytelling,
they’re distinguished from the large-scale time skip, when a story actively skips ahead,
usually by several years, deliberately breaking the continuity in a way that the smaller-scale
jumps typically don’t.
Time skips are deliberately jarring in a way time jumps aren’t.
When a story gives us a time jump, it’s usually because the audience is assumed to
know what goes in the gap.
If the character wakes up and the next time we see them they’re eating breakfast, we
assume they probably put on pants and went into the kitchen for food.
It’s an easy inference to make and it’s not particularly interesting to look at, so
the story jumps over it and the audience doesn’t mind - or even notice.
And even when time jumps are used in mysteries to hide plot details from the audience, it’s
usually so subtle the audience doesn’t notice their perspective is being manipulated.
But when a story does a time skip, the audience deliberately doesn’t have that inferred
continuity to go on - there’s a lot more story being skipped over, and the status quo
can shift very dramatically.
While the time jump’s primary story function is imperceptibly disrupting the continuity
to preserve the story pacing, the time skip’s primary story function is purposefully breaking
continuity to establish a new status quo.
A typical timeskip pushes the story timeline ahead by several years, aging up the characters,
altering the setting somewhat, introducing a new set of characters and/or antagonists
to deal with and basically heralding the beginning of a new story arc.
This is the generic, stock time skip, but there’s lots of room for variation.
There are a few common reasons for a time
skip, and a few common changes that happen during one.
Time skips frequently bridge the gap between a show and its sequel series, if the sequel
isn’t a directly contiguous continuation of the original.
Time skips also sometimes get used to catch a show’s timeline up to the modern day - since
shows air at a much slower rate than the in-universe
story progresses, any show that starts off
set in the present will quickly slip months behind the curve as days or weeks pass in
a story universe that takes years to air in reality.
This can also be a problem in live-action
media where the actors, you know, age in real time.
Timeskips can help keep the fictional universe roughly aligned with
reality and the ages of the actual cast.
This is the time-jumpiest variety of timeskips because it’s not intended to disrupt the
continuity that much.
Time skips also frequently herald a shift in tone.
It’s pretty common for a story to timeskip into a new status quo that’s darker and
edgier - the characters are older, the threats are more serious, the universe is a darker
and colder place, etcetera etcetera.
That kind of tone shift can be hard to internally justify in continuity, so packaging it in
a timeskip can make it much more palatable for an audience - it might be hard to believe
that a universe collapses into a dystopia in the space of a long weekend, but if there’s
an implied year or more of background misery it’s a lot easier to buy.
As a corollary, it’s also fairly common for the main characters to get more badass
during the timeskip.
They get older, stronger, better-trained, and overall better equipped to handle their
new dark and gritty surroundings.
In larger-scale timeskips, it’s not uncommon for some characters to have had kids, so now
there’s a new generation of characters running around - it’s also fairly common for former
kid protagonists to have grown up enough to get a major design change.
But those are predictable outcomes of a timeskip.
Time passed, so of course the characters got older and the world changed a bit.
That barely even disrupts the continuity at this point - it’s
more like an unusually long ellipsis than
a timeskip, especially if the events of the timeskip follow logically and predictably
from the pre-timeskip status quo.
For instance, Steven Universe featured a timeskip between the finale of the show and the movie,
but that timeskip was basically just the predictable
happily-ever-after implied by the ending of the show.
The bad guys weren’t bad guys anymore, the oppressive structure of Homeworld was being
dismantled into something better, Steven was doing all right, it was a fun time.
The inciting incident of the movie is the first time since the finale that anything
bad had happened to Steven, so the only change the timeskip really had was that Steven got
a minor design change and his voice actor didn’t need to keep his voice so high anymore.
But there are some wildcard timeskips that aren’t as predictable - and in fact, sometimes
they’re played like mysteries where the audience is dumped into this new, weird status
quo and we have to piece together how exactly this new situation happened.
For instance, sometimes after a timeskip the world has changed a lot.
This can tie in with the darker-and-grittier thing if the world has noticeably changed
for the worse, but it can also just be kind of unclear
how exactly this happened, especially if the
pre-timeskip story ended with some kind of heroic victory and implied happily-ever-after.
The existence of the post-skip dark and gritty timeline indicates that something happened
to mess that happy ending up, and an audience invested in that happy ending will naturally
want to know what it was.
It’s also fairly common for timeskips to
shake up the previously established character dynamics.
Characters who were close might seem distant, former strangers might’ve gotten to know
each other, stuff like that.
Sometimes timeskips break up romantic subplots that were well established pre-timeskip, and
the audience gradually learns why and how that happened - and maybe if it can be fixed.
Sometimes during a timeskip a character switches sides, a hero turning bad or a villain turning
good, and the audience is left wondering what made that happen and how legit it is.
Timeskips can also introduce and establish new characters that the rest of the cast develops
a dynamic with offscreen, leaving the audience playing catch-up after the fact.
Because a timeskip purposefully disorients the audience, it’s a solid opportunity for
a writer to throw in some confusion and mysteries about how status quo A became status quo B.
There is one exception to this general rule: sometimes timeskips are actually used to restore
the status quo.
It’s not uncommon for particularly bombastic series finales to involve characters getting
seriously injured and/or key locations getting trashed, so some stories will follow those
finales up with a brisk few-months-long timeskip to allow for a protracted hospital stay and
some infrastructure rebuilding to get the characters and settings back in fighting form.
These timeskips are still changing the status quo, but they’re basically changing it back
to how it was before the finale shook things up.
Now, how much the status quo changes during a timeskip depends on the scale of the timeskip.
A few-months-long timeskip probably won’t see much in the way of large-scale changes,
but a several-decade-long timeskip can leave the world almost unrecognizable.
Sometimes, a timeskip also comes with a pov character who's missed the timeskip somehow
- being stuck in some kind of stasis or coma is a common explanation for this.
They basically wake up post-timeskip and have to catch up with all the changes.
It gives the audience an in-universe character who’s just as lost as they are in the new
status quo, but it comes with a downside - which
is actually a pervasive downside with all timeskips.
By their nature, timeskips disconnect the audience from the characters.
If a story has a pov character who skipped the timeskip, they’ll also be disconnected
from the other characters.
Now, sometimes this disconnect is actually explored - and
hey, it’s been a while since I got to pull this one out, but ReBoot did this one really well.
A few episodes into the third season, everyone
experiences a timeskip of about one year-ish in-universe,
except for protagonists Enzo and AndrAIa, who skip something more like a decade thanks
to being stuck in a game environment where time moves faster than the outside world.
Enzo, now going by Matrix, is all grown up and much grittier than his goofy kid-version,
and spends a lot of the season very, very worried about what his friends and family
will think of him now that he’s become this objectively extremely cool dude.
Since these two are also the POV characters for the season, the timeskip naturally disconnects
the audience from them pretty significantly - they’re almost unrecognizable as the kids
we got to know over the first couple seasons - so the show goes out of its way to give
the audience several episodes to get used to and invested in their new characters before
it reunites them with the rest of the cast.
And when they do handle the reunions, it’s very heartwarming - but it’s also
kind of gut-wrenching.
The audience has been following Matrix for the bulk of the season, so he’s the character
whose perspective we relate to most strongly at this point, but the other characters haven’t
changed as much because they’ve had a much shorter timeskip, so we still relate to them
pretty strongly from their earlier characterization.
So when they reunite, we understand both Matrix’s anxiety about how they might hate what he’s
become, and that the other characters are seeing him as a cherished loved one miraculously
returned alive, but very, very different from the naïve kid they remember.
This is a story that leverages that timeskip-induced
character disconnect for some really quality drama.
Unfortunately, not many stories pull that off so well.
Most timeskips dive right into the new plot with no time to adjust, so the audience is
disoriented and disconnected - which often means the audience ends up disengaged.
If the world and the characters are suddenly unrecognizable,
the story has to work to get the audience
invested again - in a sense,
it’s like they show is starting over.
The pov timeskip-misser character is an attempt to compensate for this by giving the audience
at least one point of familiarity, but it comes at the cost of wildly disrupting every
relationship that character had.
This is actually one of the problems I personally had
when I was watching Young Justice.
Cuz the first season was very character-driven - and very fun.
The dynamics between the main characters built up naturally over the course of the season,
and while it was a superhero show with superhero shenanigans, the part that really sold me
was the character arcs.
It included a couple romantic subplots that built up fairly well, and in the finale everything
worked out, good triumphed and the official couples all kissed and stuff.
Season two, however, starts after a five-year timeskip.
The cast has been greatly expanded, which is narratively
neutral - not automatically good or bad - but
the central cast, the original characters we’ve already gotten invested in, haven’t just
aged up - they’ve all been disrupted to varying degrees.
Robin is now Nightwing, which I think is the only unconditionally positive development,
but Superboy and Miss Martian - the primary romantic subplot from season one - have broken
up because of a breach of telepathic trust and aren’t on very good terms, and Aqualad,
Kid Flash and Artemis - a full half of the original team - are nowhere to be seen for
the first episode.
It’s later revealed that Aqualad is evil now, or at least undercover as a supervillain,
and Kid Flash and Artemis have retired from superheroing.
The original team is basically gone, and all the dynamics we spent the first season getting
invested in are nowhere to be seen through the second season.
They don’t even let the characters interact casually.
And throughout the season, the team dynamic isn’t really repaired.
Among other things, there’s an idiot plot
in the middle - which is officially defined as “any
plot that wouldn’t happen if all the characters involved weren’t idiots” - where some
of the gang decides to fake Artemis’s death at Aqualad’s hands without telling Miss
Martian - who is a telepath - that it’s a fake death and her bestie hasn’t really
been murdered by her other former bestie.
Miss Martian, who somehow does not figure this out at any point despite being psychic,
later telepathically destroys Aqualad in retribution,
only realizing her mistake when she’s mid-brain-smashing.
All of this does get fixed eventually, but it’s really
indicative of how the team dynamic has been
sacrificed for the timeskip.
There’s nothing wrong with a character dynamic changing over time, and I don’t even mind
that the friendships got broken up - much - but using a timeskip to skip it over entirely
felt like a waste of good character development.
Also they kill Kid Flash at the end of the
season, which at this point is just insult to injury.
Now this is personal preference.
I don't think there's really anything wrong with Young Justice
season 2, it just doesn’t really have any
of the stuff I liked about season 1, and it didn’t successfully reinvest me after trashing
all the stuff I’d gotten invested in from the first season.
This is always the danger with timeskips - when you break the continuity like that, your audience
disengages from the story, and if they don’t get re-engaged by the post-timeskip content,
the timeskip will lose them.
This is why some timeskips go out of their way to show the audience that some things
very explicitly haven’t changed.
For instance, Dragonball has a three-year timeskip after the King Piccolo arc where the
gang reunites for a tournament, and it’s revealed that, in that time, Goku has gone
through puberty and pokemon-evolved from Chibi Monkey to Large Man.
Nobody recognizes him, which he thinks is pretty funny, but it becomes very obvious
that, aside from being about four feet taller
and a good bit stronger, his character is entirely unchanged.
This is a pretty recurring theme, actually - Dragonball has its fair share of timeskips,
including a five-year one that covers the birth of Goku’s first son and bridges the
gap between original Dragonball and Dragonball Z, and while plenty of other things shift
around in the story, Goku is kind of a universal constant who never fundamentally changes except
in the power-level department.
As our focus character, this consistency helps keep the audience grounded across various
arcs, no matter how many discontinuities there are between them.
Lots of anime follows this example, where the story will skip over a year or two of
training and the character will come back stronger but otherwise basically the same.
The only mystery there is exactly how strong the character is, which is usually revealed
during the post-timeskip readjustment period
where they get a token fight scene or two to show off.
I asked twitter about some favorite and least-favorite
timeskips and there was a pretty much universal
consensus that One Piece handled its two-year timeskip really well because the characters
did change, but it was largely for the better and not enough to be unrecognizable - and they
all got way more badass, which was neat.
Unfortunately I can’t really weigh in on this because I haven’t watched or read One
Piece, because it’s… you know, incredibly long, and I have other stuff going on.
But this bumps up against another potential problem - some timeskips come across as basically
pointless if they don’t really change the status quo that much.
A major status quo shift can be disorienting and risk losing the audience, but on the flip
side, if your time skip doesn’t really change
anything, the audience might question why it happened at all.
If the characters don’t really change, and the world doesn’t really change, then all
the timeskip accomplishes is disorienting the audience and making them feel disconnected
from the story with basically no payoff.
Now, some stories have what amounts to “soft timeskips” where things fast forward a year
or two relatively uneventfully, because the characters were just… living relatively
happy and uneventful lives for that interval, and that’s not very disorienting - it’s
basically just “okay they got their implied happily ever after, now let’s do something
else”, and I find it hard to be upset by those.
Dragonball does this a few times between arcs, and honestly it's pretty refreshing.
Like, lots of stories are kind of nonstop
in the pacing, and it’s honestly just good to give the
characters a goddamn break once in a while, even if it mostly happens offscreen.
But some timeskips promise largescale changes and then don’t pay it off.
Maybe the heroes skip the timeskip and fast forward a few years into a world that’s
utterly changed, except then they do, like,
one token mini-arc to fix it and things basically go back to normal.
Or, like, "oh no! One of the good guys is EVIL now! How did THAT happen?!"
and then it turns out how that happened is they're faking it and
they're actually fine and they go back to normal immediately.
Like, a timeskip is a big thing.
A lot can change in even a short timeskip - so it feels kind of disingenuous if the
only real changes are cosmetic or easily-reversible
or fundamentally just very shallow.
I think that a timeskip shouldn’t just reshuffle the character dynamics and darken the tone
- if they’re trying to shake up the status quo, they should probably be moving it forward.
If a timeskip changes the status quo, the post-timeskip character goal probably shouldn’t be
“put things back the way they were”, because that basically makes the timeskip feel like
an obstruction to the plot instead of an advancement.
It makes it seem like the goal is undoing everything the timeskip did.
If the timeskip breaks up a relationship we care about or spoils a satisfying ending or
otherwise undoes something good, the audience will want to see that fixed, which means the
timeskip will feel like a problem rather than a development.
Timeskips are all about moving forward, so it’s never a good feeling when a timeskip
instead sets the story back.
Timeskips with the premise “the world got all messed up while you weren’t looking,
quick, fix it back to the status quo” are frustrating for similar reasons - the desired
end state isn’t better than the way things were, it’s just a return to the original norm.
Timeskips already have to do a lot of work to get the audience invested in the new status
quo - I feel like they should at least be worth that narrative cost.
So… yeah!
Thanks for watching!
And, like I said earlier, this episode is pulling double-duty as the official announcement for
my comic, Aurora!
It’s a full-color full-page fantasy webcomic with an ensemble cast of heroes, a couple
dastardly villains rattling around and a bunch of miscellaneous weirdos who keep showing
up at their own pace.
We’ve got dragons!
Gods!
Magic!
Cotton candy elves!
Angsty feral catboys!
Protracted arguments over which of these characters
is my secret self-insert!!
It’s a pretty good time, honestly.
About 80% of my motivation for making this comic was how sick and tired I was of my beloved
fantasy genre going all dark and realistic like it was embarrassed to basically be Superhero
Medieval Times, so I was aiming for colorful, fantastical character driven action - you
get to decide if I hit the mark on that one.
Now you might be asking, why NOW?
Didn’t you say this has been going for two years?
Way to be late to your own party!
I know, but like, when I started this comic, there WASN’T that much comic.
But now we’re two years deep, there’s nearly four hundred pages in the archive,
and I actually feel kinda good about having people look at it.
And it’d be wildly hypocritical of me of all people to not expect you guys to critically
analyze my work, but I wanted to make sure there was actually enough work to analyze first!
The comic updates every Monday, Wednesday and Friday and I haven’t missed a day yet,
so if you’re interested, check out comicaurora.com for fantasy shenanigans and a look at what
happens when I try to draw people with actual noses.
Link’s in the description, hope you like it, and have a great day!