so let's talk about ~continuity

[pocochina]

As I’ve mentioned once or twice, my personal fandom bête noire is when people cloak snotty one-upmanship in objective-sounding language which is in fact based in terrible logic. One of the big ways people do this is “continuity” pedantry, where people claim world-busting rends in the fabric of canon. This tactic is far more popular than true

Comments

[local_max]

BUT SPIKE SAID ANGEL WAS HIS SIRE IN SCHOOL HARD AND LATER IT TURNED OUT THAT IT WAS DRUSILLA WHAT THE NOUN "SIRE" IS TRANSITIVE YEAH RIGHT WORST SHOW EVER

(OTOH, Spike saying in "The Initiative" that he's "only 126" is funny because it implies that Spike just ballparks his own age. Or: the Initiative chip interfered with his ability to remember his age! I like that one actually, it's a "1. behaviour 2. ability to remember age correctly" modification chip. step 13 of Walsh's world domination plan was to implant chips in freshmen to make them think they were the wrong age so that they would eventually be caught underage drinking without realizing it, causing mass hysteria, especially if coupled with cave!person beer)

[pocochina]

BUT SPIKE SAID ANGEL WAS HIS SIRE IN SCHOOL HARD AND LATER IT TURNED OUT THAT IT WAS DRUSILLA WHAT THE NOUN "SIRE" IS TRANSITIVE YEAH RIGHT WORST SHOW EVER

THAT WAS A THING PEOPLE CRIED ABOUT, APPARENTLY??!? Like, all the fascinating stuff around Angel/Dru/Spike and people got hung up on whether "father" includes foster fathers.

Spike saying in "The Initiative" that he's "only 126" is funny because it implies that Spike just ballparks his own age. Or: the Initiative chip interfered with his ability to remember his age! I like that one actually, it's a "1. behaviour 2. ability to remember age correctly" modification chip

ahaha! I always kind of handwaved that to mean he started over at 1 the year he died, but yeah, "the experimental chip created to cause brain damage did, in fact, cause brain damage" is also acceptable.

step 13 of Walsh's world domination plan was to implant chips in freshmen to make them think they were the wrong age so that they would eventually be caught underage drinking without realizing it, causing mass

[local_max]

ahaha! I always kind of handwaved that to mean he started over at 1 the year he died, but yeah, "the experimental chip created to cause brain damage did, in fact, cause brain damage" is also acceptable.

Well, certainly they do that -- Angel's "240" or whatever age matches up with the date of the year of his siring -- but Spike's 126 is 7 years off from that (which is 119 since he was sired in 1880 and the ep aired in 1999). which, you know, brain damage! s'all good.

[pocochina]

lol, or maybe he likes to lie and throw people off!

[sunclouds33]

Cool post. I never caught the veto discontinuity- but I did pick up on the Mendoza and the 25th amendment and fanwanked it away. I think it's actually pretty easy to assume that Mendoza ultimately became a relatively centrist judge- compared to Lang or Ashland. Mendoza was a cop for a number of years. He was the choice that Bartlet lurched to once Harrison showed that he'd be a liberty-erasing disaster of epic proportions. Even Mendoza's more probable Catholicism, could make him more centrist than the Bartlet administration had expected.

I did read "fans" on different sites complaining about this "discrepancy".

From The Short List
JOSH
Leo, you're... Boston-Irish Catholic. Back there and back then, a drinking problem wasn't a problem.

Then from Bad Moon Rising
LEO

[pocochina]

IMO the veto thing being easy to miss shows how very pointless the vast majority of canon pedantry is. The only time it's even vaguely useful is in mysteries, where the details like that aren't likely to be mistakes.

Concerning Mendoza...I don't know, I think that if he was ever arguably a centrist, he would have been the first choice, you know? But if he was particularly anti-defendant or anti-choice, that would have come up before he even made the short list. Though I suspect my real problem is that the prospect of rightward judicial drift is the haunt-your-dreams kind of awful and I don't like to think about it.

tons of people in the world have childhood cities that are part of their heritage but then they move and "adopt" cities.With that, I could kind of see being irritated if it was something that changed Leo? Like, regardless of whether he was from Boston or Chicago, having risen through the ranks as that kind of old-school working class urban Irish Catholic was a subtle but consistent part of Leo that I wouldn't have wanted

[sunclouds33]

Concerning Mendoza...I don't know, I think that if he was ever arguably a centrist, he would have been the first choice, you know? But if he was particularly anti-defendant or anti-choice, that would have come up before he even made the short list. Though I suspect my real problem is that the prospect of rightward judicial drift is the haunt-your-dreams kind of awful and I don't like to think about it.Mendoza seemed to not be on the short list because he wasn't an Ivory Towered legal intellectual. He didn't attend an Ivy League law school- which is like, unheard of. He spent his life as a cop-DA-judge and I think he was a judge for a very short time period- no time as a law professor or US Attorney or DOJ big wig. IMO, Mendoza could have been on the Steven Breyer spectrum. Liberal, but not as liberal as Ginsberg, Sotamayor, or Kagan

[pocochina]

Mendoza seemed to not be on the short list because he wasn't an Ivory Towered legal intellectual. He didn't attend an Ivy League law school- which is like, unheard of.

You know, I got the idea that Josh was so enthusiastic about Harrison's resume (well, his transcript, really) precisely because he didn't actually have anything about Harrison to be excited about? Like, there had to be 1-2 dozen people around with Harrison's exact qualifications (HLR editor + extensive career afterward), and close to a hundred candidates when you expand the pool to equally well-respected institutions (Yale, Stanford, Columbia &c). I don't think it's precisely so important a qualification, so much as that network is how people get through the multiple nomination filters at the highest levels. Probably everyone on the short list but Mendoza was those things.

But maybe, he drifted to Kennedy-country which is pretty frightening and somewhat indicts the Bartlet administration for lurching from Harrison who doesn't recognize privacy rights to picking

[noybusiness]

This reminds me of that poster on Syfy forum who, after every Season 4.5 episode of Battlestar Galactica, would make a long-winded post starting with a copy of the exact same speech that went "What is continuity? Some might not care, but for many fans continuity is a show's lifeblood..." and then list a bunch of what he called 'plot holes', most of which would actually have been reconciled if he had listened properly to explanations given in the episode itself.

[pocochina]

How aggravating! I don't know if anything could have made me a fan of that last handful of episodes but that might have done the trick.