Who’d count the years… – Chapter 8, Act 3, Strip 64

Oh well, the incoherence of a floating timeline.

Technically, Mopey isn’t wrong. Since she was already in college (and possibly a post-graduate) when this strip started in 2005, she would have had to be born before the end of the Showa era in 1989.* She would also have to be in her forties by now, which she doesn’t appear to be…nor does Snuka seem to be any closer to adulthood than he was in 2005, even if that didn’t appear to be a terrible long time off at that point. In fact, he should have reached adulthood by now even if he had been a toddler in 2005.

And the pace of technical progress tends to make the issues with a floating timeline more and more obvious. For a Showa-era Mopey, smartphones would have been a new technology on introduction, and probably always feel ‘new’ to her to some degree, while a Mopey that is still roughly the same age in 2023 would have grown up with that technology and consider it normal and natural. For a writer, that means that the challenge to create a sufficient feeling of consistency with a floating timeline keeps growing…

…fortunately, a B-movie writer wouldn’t really worry about that, so I don’t have to, either. In this instance, I’ve come down on the side of the original timeline, but that doesn’t require me to do the same the next time the issue arises. =P

And there is no reason to be ashamed of being a Showa-era relic, anyway. Nor is there any shame of not having telepathic powers and being reduced to using a cellphone instead…it is kind of a shame, though, since it could be different easily enough in a B-movie or a webcomic…

More on Monday.

* Remember that this still is Japanada, that’s why Mopey measures time like that…