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Multiple-Choice Past
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Have you noticed that some characters have different origins when different people are writing the story? Sometimes this is done on purpose, to give an air of Unreliable Narrator. Sometimes it's caused by repeated retcons. Sometimes it's just because the writers got it wrong, sometimes the result of a deliberate retcon, rewrite or by creators Armed with Canon. This trope is particularly common in comic books, as a single character may be written by dozens of writers over their history. Sometimes, as evidenced in the Trope Namer, it is also done in order to depict the character giving their backstory as being too insane to give a true account of their past, believing every single account they gave about themselves; or to cultivate an air of personal mystery, a common play by a Consummate Liar. Having messed-up memories due to a case of Laser-Guided Amnesia that isn't so laser-guided, Trauma-Induced Amnesia, and/or implantation of Fake Memories also works just fine. Video Games occasionally invoke this as part of a starting conversation to decide what your basic character build will be like, which may be the first part of Story Branching. Other games make you play through one of several origin levels before the story proper begins — this is known as Multiple Game Openings. Along with multiple authors, this is a feature of the earliest recorded myths, making it Older Than Dirt. Compare Broad Strokes, Comic-Book Time, Continuity Snarl, Depending on the Writer, Expansion Pack Past, Negative Continuity, Schrödinger's Question, and Origins Episode. Sounds similar to but has nothing to do with Multiple-Choice Future. Examples subpages: Comic Books Video Games |
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In The Elements of Friendship, Discord tells a completely different story every time he explains his origin to someone. | |
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A running gag in The Penguins of Madagascar involves Manfredi and Johnson, two penguins that Skipper continually cites as examples of what could happen if someone doesn't follow his orders. Almost all of these wildly different stories imply their deaths, and the other penguins will corroborate them, so what actually happened is difficult to determine. The fact that they are seen alive (but not well) in the finale only raises further questions. | |
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In both versions of Funny Games, the dominant killer gives several accounts of the other's backstory, one after another. Ultimately, their origins are never resolved. They exist simply to be characters in the film. | |
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Mentioned in-universe in one episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, in which a sex offender's psychiatrist tells Benson and Stabler that the offender in question was constantly telling contradictory stories about his past, to the point where she had no idea what his real backstory was. | |
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An odd case is the main character of This Immortal by Roger Zelazny, who time and again tells some different story about himself. The novel opens with Conrad/Konstatin's new wife finding out he's not twenty-something like she is, he's around eighty. Then other characters wonder if he's somehow connected to other Greeks named Konstantin, each with one brown eye and one blue eye, who happen to be even older, one of whom was a world-famous terrorist. Then more characters come into the story, and they have their own stories about his past. He's hundreds of years old, has never physically aged past 23, and he was every one of these people. Either confusing pasts was a theme with Zelazny, or he just had trouble making up his mind when he was writing a story: the Chronicles of Amber involves dozens of "histories" for Corwin, and he spends much of the series trying to unravel which ones are true. (Adding to the confusion: Corwin is immortal, he can travel to as many worlds as he wants, there are "shadows" of him in a lot of those worlds, and he has about 15 siblings with similar powers who all lie and scheme and plot.) Zelazny's Lord of Light mentions a woman who was Sam's "mother or daughter or wife, or perhaps all three," which seems tricky even with reincarnation. However, this turns out to be foreshadowing of the fact that the same woman, in three different bodies, may have ended up being all three to Yama. As Durga, she was of the correct generation to be Yama's mother; as Kali, she was Yama's wife; and, at the end, as the mentally damaged Murga, she is his adopted daughter. |
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The Slender Man fic By the Fire's Light features an origin for the Slender Man that might only be retroactively true since people in-story believe it. Whether the Slender Man existed before this in its current form in-story is left up to debate. | |
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The origin of the band name Chumbawamba. Explanations that they gave involved it being a particularly coherent string found in the results of a Monkeys on a Typewriter experiment; that it was the mascot of a defunct football team, Walford Town; that it was derived from the chanting of African street musicians that two of the band members overheard while busking in Paris; or that one of the band members had a dream in which they needed to use the bathroom and weren't sure which one to enter because one bathroom was marked "chumba" and the other "wamba". Eventually they conceded that it doesn't mean anything and they just wanted something that would never become dated, and what better way to avoid tying yourself to a particular era than to name yourself utter gibberish? | |
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The TaleSpin episode "The Time Bandits" (itself a Recycled Script from DuckTales (1987)) says that Rebecca inherited Higher For Hire from her father, despite the Four-Episode Pilot having introduced her as buying Baloo's air cargo company after it was foreclosed upon. | |
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A Certain Magical Index: St. Germain is a chronic liar who gives a different origin story and motive every time. | |
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Warhammer: Age of Sigmar: Opinion is divided amongst the scholars of the Mortal Realms as to the origins of the Gargants. Some think they are the degenerate dependents of a race of titanic builders while others theorise that they are the offspring of the zodiac godbeast Behemat. There is even a theory that they are refugees from somewhere outside the Mortal Realms. As for the Gargants themselves, they generally view themselves as Behemat's heirs. | |
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In Wanda Nevada, the titular orphan tells Beau that her parents' identity is unknown and her "real" last name, McGinty, was selected by the orphanage. Later she tells Bitterstix that her parents were murdered in front of her when she was nine and Dorothy that her father died heroically in World War II. | |
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In Umineko: When They Cry, we're presented with two different versions of Beatrice's past, one fantastic and magical and one more mundane and rather tragic. It's all but stated that the latter is her true past. | |
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The Simpsons not only has a multiple choice past for pretty much every character, but even a multiple choice future. As the show exists in a floating timeline however, this is pretty much unavoidable. Heck, one of the show's flashback episodes was set throughout the 90s... the decade which started right along with the show itself. Talk about trippy. One of those multiple choice futures takes place... in 2010. Kind of weird to think about, since Maggie was now born in 2013. This trope was originally supposed to be played straight for the origins of Herman's (the fellow who runs Springfield's military surplus store Herman's Military Antiques) missing arm, but this idea was dropped after his first appearance (to this day, he's only told us that he lost his arm when he stuck it out the window of a moving school bus, though Abe says it was because he stuck it out on a street trying to hail a car and it got torn off by a passing dogcatcher truck driven by Chief Wiggum). The series had multiple explanations for why Homer lost his hair including having torn out his hair after finding out Marge was pregnant and as a side effect from an army experiment he participated in to avoid dinner with Marge's sisters. Similarly, the show has posited several explanations of Homer's stupidity. A short list includes a crayon lodged in his brain, genetics (the Simpson gene), and repeated cranial trauma. Bart's issues compared to Lisa are variously attributed to the aforementioned genetics, emotional trauma at the hands of his kindergarten teacher, alcohol intake during and after his conception, ADHD, Marge bottle-feeding Bart and breastfeeding Lisa, Bart's intelligence having been stunted by a kid's educational show while Lisa was distracted playing with the DVD packaging, and even Marge constantly listening to KISS while pregnant. note (The last is at least implied to be more of a worry on Marge's part than something the audience should take seriously, as Chief Wiggum reassures her that his wife dutifully listened to Mozart and Winston Churchhill speeches while pregnant and still got Ralph...who, on the other hand, appears to have suffered from Childhood Brain Damage after Wiggum dropped him.) According to "Boy Meets Curl", Lisa's signature pearl necklace was a gift from Marge to celebrate her learning to read at a twelfth-grade level, while in "How Lisa Got Her Marge Back", Marge gave it to her on her first day of school. Most episodes before and since then depict Lisa as having worn the necklace since she was a baby. Marge's red necklace is, according to "Homer the Vigilante", a "priceless Bouvier family heirloom" (as are all the identical ones in her drawer), while in "Adventures in Baby-Getting", Homer bought it for her using money he earned by donating sperm. Maggie's pacifier-sucking habit: "And Maggie Makes Three" shows her grabbing one off a table and popping it in her mouth moments after being born, while "Mr. Lisa's Opus" has her developing the addiction instantly upon a desperate Marge giving her one to deal with her early colic. The boat painting hanging over the family's TV is said to have been painted by Marge in "The Trouble with Trillions" and by Lisa in "Barthood" (though Lisa herself derides it as a "derivative amateur seascape" in the Couch Gag of "The Cad and the Hat"); other episodes, such as "Diatribe of a Mad Housewife", treat it as an outside purchase, with its value ranging anywhere from the family having a closet full of identical replacements ready to go ("Homer and Ned's Hail Mary Pass") to its destruction being seen as a loss and the family searching garage sales for an affordable substitute while implying that the original was more expensive ("The War of Art"). Two different episodes in the same season ("The Musk Who Fell to Earth" and "The Kids are All Fight") imply, respectively, that Bart and Homer named Maggie. Principal Skinner's had several different stories about how he became a POW during the Vietnam War and his time during his imprisonment. In addition, "The Principal and the Pauper" claims he was actually a street thug named Armin who got swapped with the real Seymour Skinner during the war, but this was retconned by a later episode showing Mrs. Skinner pregnant with him. Grandpa Simpson is a Scatterbrained Senior notorious for his nonsensical, historically impossible autobiographical stories, meaning he wouldn't be a credible source of information on his early life even if the series had actual continuity. He has had flashbacks showing him in the Army, Navy, and Air Force. When called on this, he said that this sort of confusion was common when he was in the Marines. In "Havana Wild Weekend", Marge describes him as "a veteran of every branch of the service". Mr. Burns has this in spades, primarily due to his Vague Age being drawn out to absurd lengths (it was once implied he was born in Pangaea); thus, his backstory has wavered quite a bit (i.e., sometimes he had poor parents, but other times he had rich parents; he's shown fighting in the US Army in World War II alongside Abe Simpson, but other episodes show he worked with the Nazis, etc.). |
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Unwanted Houseguest: "Victim Of Acquired Taste" provides several possible origins for the Houseguest. | |
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Captain Peacock from Are You Being Served? could never quite keep straight his stories of just what he did in World War II. The most likely story, however, is that he was in the Royal Army Service Corps — the logistics division (he says it when pressed about it, and wears the RASC tie throughout the series). Important work, but not front-line combat. Mr. Goldberg, however, offered a different story — he and 'Corporal Peacock' served together in a cushy job in the cookhouse for most of the war. Had Goldberg been fired, we might even have seen the photo to prove it. |
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An early examples comes from Two-Lane Blacktop: the unnamed driver in the GTO gives a number of conflicting stories about his past. It's clear that they're all lies because his last story conflicts with information we see in the film. | |
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Doctor Who Expanded Universe: In the Past Doctor Adventures novel The Infinity Doctors, the Doctor meets four Knights at the end of the universe, who don't remember their pasts but who each have a separate theory as to who they are: the last surviving Thals; a group of human/Gallifreyan hybrids; the only People of the Worldsphere who didn't Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence; or the High Evolutionaries. Since a couple of these theories involve Alternate Continuities to the BBC books, this may be interpreted to give the entire Whoniverse a Multiple Choice Past. In the Eighth Doctor Adventures novel Sometime Never one of the Council of Eight, a group of antagonistic beings who resemble the eight Doctors, absorbs the Doctor's personality and flees in a timeship with the Doctor's granddaughter Zezanne. If you take the view (popular at the time but thoroughly contradicted later) that Gallifrey was Ret-Gone thanks to the EDAs' Story Arc, this provides an alternate origin for the First Doctor and Susan. Unnatural History suggests that the Doctor's many contradictory origins — being loomed, having parents, being half-human, coming from the 49th century, etc. — could all be true. This caused considerable debate at the time. Irving Braxiatel is first implied to be the Doctor's brother in the post-Doctor Bernice Summerfield New Adventures novel Tears of the Oracle, representing yet another version of the Doctor's origins, as he's unaccounted for either in Lungbarrow or the novels' implied backstory about the Doctor's parents (derived from an unproduced pre-TV Movie film script). He can be reconciled with them, but as noted elsewhere, that's not really the point. |
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Gotham does this with The Joker, but with a twist. Since the series is set when Bruce Wayne had yet to become Batman or face any of his iconic adversaries, the Joker doesn't actually exist yet, but Word of God is that one of the apparent Canon Foreigners will eventually become him... but we don't know which one. Is it the nameless comedian at Fish Mooney's club? Fish's own bodyguard, Butch? The murderous circus kid who can't stop laughing? Or even just some random kid who put on a discarded red hood? In later seasons, there is an even more unique variation on this. Jerome Valeska (the laughing mad circus kid), goes full-on monster clown by the time he escapes from Arkham in Season 2, and is the Joker in all but name from Seasons 2 to 4. However, at the end of Season 4, it is revealed that he has an identical twin brother, Jeremiah, who appears to be his good counterpart until Jerome dies and drives his brother mad with laughing gas to get revenge on him, turning him into the show's true version of the Joker. |
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Multiple-Choice Past / int_2ae911a3 | comment |
There are two conflicting accounts of the Amazons' origins, both of which have issues. One, presented in White Dwarf 307, has it that they were favored servants of the Old Ones, created to be their undying servants and left behind to guard the sacred places when Chaos came and the Old Ones vanished. This version conflicts with the Lizardmen's claims to the same status, which are backed by their eldest members having personal memories of this origin. The other, also from White Dwarf as well as the Lizardmen 5th Edition codex, has them as a cadre of Norse warrior women who left Skeggi behind over an ideological conflict with the Norse men, who wanted them to Stay in the Kitchen, and settled the Amaxon river, where they took to using jungle drugs to extend their lifespans and armed themselves with stolen Lizardman artifacts. This fails to account for there being encounters with the Amazons recorded long before Skeggi existed. One possible solution claims that the Skeggi women were not the original Amazons, but were instead inducted into the preexisting Amazon culture to bolster its fading numbers. | |
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Multiple-Choice Past / int_2b70efd4 | comment |
There's also the Rasputin situation. Numerous historical characters were written into the Old World of Darkness. Two different writers used Rasputin as a character, not knowing about the other's use of him, and their versions had two different backstories. When this discrepancy was pointed out, the company decided to run with it. Several writers began using Rasputin as a character, giving him a different backstory each time. These multiple versions of Rasputin became one of the unsolved mysteries of the original World of Darkness, though Wraith: The Oblivion tried to reconcile them by saying that Rasputin is actually a body-hopping wraith who likes possessing various supernaturals, while Vampire: The Masquerade suggested the Rasputins know about their other versions, seeing themselves as "brothers", and that there's a terrible truth behind them. | |
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Multiple-Choice Past | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_2ba48a26 | comment |
Detective Kate Beckett of Castle has elements of this trope. Aside from conversational information for characterization, there are the things she teases Castle about that are never substantiated. | |
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Castle (2009) | hasFeature |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_2ba48a26 | |
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Multiple-Choice Past | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_2bb4ae0f | comment |
In Heroes Sylar's reason for being a killer was changed so often, he probably doesn't know himself anymore why he is one: inferiority complex, "hunger" as side effect of his ability, being manipulated by the Company and finally simply being a psychopath. This may be justified by the notion that he was lying (and possibly lying to himself) about his motives. | |
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Multiple-Choice Past | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_2c2a56e3 | comment |
Similarly there were two conflicting origins for the design of the Battle Droids in the Prequels. Most supplementary material released around the time of The Phantom Menace claimed they were based on skeletons of the Neimoidians with the heads being specifically a result of their skulls changing shape after they die due to their Bizarre Alien Biology. However, Attack of the Clones clearly shows they actually based on their Geonosian builders. The Essential Guide To Warfare decided to Take a Third Option saying that they were modeled after the Geonosians, but the Neimoidian skull idea was also true and what they thought was the inspiration. | |
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Multiple-Choice Past | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_2c9df9c5 | comment |
Then you have characters like Unicron. Originally, he was a random planet-eating Transformer with no backstory (until the cartoon claimed he was made by an ancient space monkey). Then Simon Furman's run on the The Transformers (Marvel) turned him into a godlike Satanic archetype opposed by a being named Primus; this interpretation caught on more in later adaptations than the original Primacron story. However, Unicron (as well as a few other legendary figures) was once established as a "multiversal singularity", which basically means that every depiction of him across the franchise was the same individual... before the concept was done away with almost a decade later and every iteration of him became a different individual with a different past. Does your brain hurt yet? | |
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Transformers: The Movie | hasFeature |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_2c9df9c5 | |
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Multiple-Choice Past | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_2fdc5098 | comment |
Twitch streamer Grand Poo Bear does this as a Running Gag — whenever people ask him where his screen name comes from, he always comes up with a different, ludicrous story explaining its origins. (Answers include: it being a name passed down from generations, him coming from a circus family who wanted his act to be him fighting a bear despite being five years old, being called that by a voodoo woman, being a child actor who was called "bear" due to being cranky, but eventually softened and became "Poo Bear"...) | |
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Twitch (Website) | hasFeature |
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Multiple-Choice Past / int_2fe9c4b0 | type |
Multiple-Choice Past | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_2fe9c4b0 | comment |
The character of John Black from Days of Our Lives. Originally, he was introduced as a guy with Identity Amnesia who'd undergone Magic Plastic Surgery as the apparent captive of a Big Bad. He escaped and took the name John Black from a sign on a wall. It was eventually revealed he was the Not Quite Dead Roman Brady and that was the role the actor was billed as for many years and lived through his "wife's" "death". Then they decided to bring back he original Roman/Marlena super couple, so it was revealed that "Roman" wasn't the real deal after all and went back to calling himself John Black. In the years since, he's had it revealed that he'd been a cop, private investigator, and a priest in his past. There have been at least two separate revelations about who his birth parents are. The current origin puts him as a cousin of some sort to Roman Brady and also related to the Big Bad. In the meantime, Wayne Northrop, the original Roman left the show again after a short time. That role was recast in a case of The Other Darrin and now played by someone who'd previously played a different role on the show. Then Northrop came back again in a completely different role. | |
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Multiple-Choice Past | |
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Doctor Insano, enemy of Linkara and Spoony is this trope. He has so many multiple origins, including ones where he's Spoony from future, where he's Canadian science geek Wayne Schlumper, and where he was a woman before Linkara punched the fabric of The Multiverse, that when people tried to put it together in any continuity, Word of God said there's no continuity. There is only Insano. (So far he's been a failed clone of Spoony, from the future, a different person, the same person but not somehow (left unexplained), and an alternate personality that was given up "in the past". All of these origins are equally canonical.) In CR's overview of Insano, he theorizes that there's really three of them — one a time-travel duplicate generated by Time Compression who violently tries to kill Spoony, one a clone made by Linkara who lives with Spoony and is more friendly, and the alternate personality. He finishes by guessing that Original Spoony also had an Insano persona, and thus there could be a fourth, Black Lantern Insano as well. According to To Boldly Flee, Insano and Spoony have always been separate people, and Spoony's ability to transform into Insano in Kickassia was a temporal anomaly retroactively caused by the Plot Hole. Of course, this is just yet another alternate backstory. |
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Atop the Fourth Wall (Web Video) | hasFeature |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_309df9ea | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_31e24f1e | type |
Multiple-Choice Past | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_31e24f1e | comment |
The Joker again, this time from The Dark Knight, gives two totally different stories explaining "how I got these scars". The first story claims he got them from a from his abusive alcoholic father. Later he tells a second story that the scars were self-inflicted after a group of loan sharks gave similar scars to his wife (who left him because "she couldn't stand the sight of me."). The third time he tries this, while he has Batman pinned, Batman pulls a Shut Up, Hannibal! and shanks him in the face with his gauntlet blade-launcher. | |
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Multiple-Choice Past | |
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Vlad Taltos of the Dragaera novels tells each of his acquaintances a different story for how he lost one of his fingers, from a very heavy weight to a botched bare-handed parry to a run-in with a hungry dzur. As Vlad's adventures are published in Anachronic Order, readers had to wait a while to find out that he'd actually lost it while undergoing interrogation by Eastern torturers, which he never admits because he really doesn't want to remember the details. | |
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Multiple-Choice Past | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_34d050c6 | comment |
Darkwing Duck is given at least three mutually incompatible origin stories over the course of the series (one of which was something he rather obviously was making up as he was telling it). Word of God says this was a deliberate invocation of Rule of Funny — and if they'd had more episodes, they'd have written even more... | |
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Darkwing Duck | hasFeature |
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Multiple-Choice Past | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_36ee2abe | comment |
In Paranoia, what exactly was the nature of the catastrophe that destroyed human civilization and confined the remains to Alpha Complex? Whatever Friend Computer says it is this week! (It was probably Communists) Actually, what is known about the catastrophe, that is constant between all of the various distortions, half-truths, and outright fabrications, is above your security clearance, citizen. Have a nice daycycle! |
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Multiple-Choice Past | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_400469e | comment |
Calvin and Hobbes: In the first strip, Calvin catches Hobbes in a rope trap and this is treated like their first meeting, but the cartoonist later changed his mind and decided that it was now unknown when they met. Hobbes once claimed that Calvin spent most of his infancy burping and spitting up, hinting that they knew each other since Calvin was a baby. Seeing as Hobbes might be just an Imaginary Friend, it's possible that Calvin simply imagined Hobbes knowing about his infancy, though. Calvin's dad invokes this by telling conflicting lies about where Calvin came from. In one strip, he claims he and his wife bought him from Kmart, in another he says that Calvin was delivered by a pterodactyl, and in a third, he tells the truth (that Calvin grew in his mother's tummy). |
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Multiple-Choice Past | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_40c8681 | comment |
Forest Kingdom: In the Hawk & Fisher spinoff series, Hawk tells people all kinds of improbable stories for how he lost his eye, such as he pawned it or lost it in a card game. The truth (that he got clawed in the face by a demon) isn't revealed until his real identity as Prince Rupert of the Forest Kingdom comes out in Beyond the Blue Moon. | |
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Forest Kingdom | hasFeature |
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Multiple-Choice Past | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_42c05590 | comment |
Rocko's Modern Life: Rocko is stated in some episodes to have known Filburt as a kid, and in another, he says they met Heffer in high school. In other episodes, though, he apparently left Australia and came to O-Town as an adult. Word of God says that the latter is definitive and anything else is just the characters misremembering, though does suggest that Rocko may have briefly spent some time in the United States as a child, with said memories prompting his later immigration. | |
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Multiple-Choice Past / int_42ffb88e | type |
Multiple-Choice Past | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_42ffb88e | comment |
SCP Foundation: Dr. Clef has alternatively claimed to be a Reality Warper who accidentally destroyed Challenger, Biblical Adam, and Satan. The Foundation itself according to SCP-001 propositions. In fact, according to the article, it's possible that two or more of the different stories are true at the same time. Also, there are at least three different origins for the Chaos Insurgency. SCP-106 has three origin stories: "The Young Man" suggests he was once a Corporal in the British Army in World War One; "Once But Not Now" suggests he is the last survivor of a race of inter-dimensional predators who preyed on humans since prehistoric times, he is trapped in a confusing and terrifying prison and it is implied he will soon die and render his species extinct; "Until Death" suggests he is what Dr. Robert Scranton eventually turned into. SCP-682 gets a new origin practically every time it appears, being everything from a child of the Scarlet King to the Anthropomorphic Personification of a state between life and death to the mount of the Horseman of Death to a projection of a higher-dimensional being to a human rendered immortal by dark rituals to simply a very strange form of wildlife. And that's not even getting into the question of why it hates humanity so much. |
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SCP Foundation (Website) | hasFeature |
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Multiple-Choice Past | |
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On Homicide: Life on the Street Det. John Munch was a lifelong Baltimore native, well demonstrated as he was the only main character with a childhood flashback episode. This did not stop Law & Order: Special Victims Unit from making him a native New Yorker. | |
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Multiple-Choice Past | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_45c140ad | comment |
Meanwhile Mechagodzilla is either a robotic doppelganger built by a race of evil aliens in an attempt to Take Over the World, a robot built by Japan (and the US) to fight Godzilla using future tech recovered from Mecha-King Ghidorah, or a cyborg built to fight Godzilla using the skeleton of the original Godzilla as a frame, an abandoned prototype intended to fight Godzilla Earth that didn't activate and is assimilating the Earth from the titular city or an anti-Titan weapon housing the consciousness of Ghidorah. | |
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Multiple-Choice Past | |
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Married... with Children: Al and Peggy's marriage has a few different versions, but they all have alcohol and/or shotguns in common. | |
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Multiple-Choice Past | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_463672a8 | comment |
And Campbell in My Sister's Keeper tells us various different stories about why he has his service dog, until at the end it's revealed that The dog can detect when he's about to have a seizure. | |
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My Sister's Keeper | hasFeature |
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Multiple-Choice Past | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_46518682 | comment |
Sesame Street has one for Oscar the grouch in the same episode, namely the Christmas special. A woman claims that Oscar was nice and positive as a baby but became mean and grumpy as he grew older. However, Oscar claims that he's always been mean and grumpy. At least for the grumpiness, the idea that he was grumpy from birth is supported by his niece, Irvine, who's about one and a Bratty Half-Pint, which is said to be normal for grouch babies. | |
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Sesame Street | hasFeature |
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Multiple-Choice Past | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_471cc207 | comment |
Xavier of Xavier: Renegade Angel tends to give conflicting accounts of various events of his life. One flashback ends with his own death and noting in the present day that it would've been tragic if any of that had happened. | |
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Xavier: Renegade Angel | hasFeature |
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Multiple-Choice Past | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_49e34fa1 | comment |
In the Past Doctor Adventures novel The Infinity Doctors, the Doctor meets four Knights at the end of the universe, who don't remember their pasts but who each have a separate theory as to who they are: the last surviving Thals; a group of human/Gallifreyan hybrids; the only People of the Worldsphere who didn't Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence; or the High Evolutionaries. Since a couple of these theories involve Alternate Continuities to the BBC books, this may be interpreted to give the entire Whoniverse a Multiple Choice Past. | |
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Multiple-Choice Past | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_4bfae3e9 | comment |
In The Light Fantastic, the universe itself has a Multiple Choice Past; the Eight Great Spells of the Creator claim to remember the creation of the universe, but they all remember it differently. Fridge Brilliance when Eric reveals the Creator wasn't really involved in the creation of the universe, just of the Disc itself, so his spells wouldn't remember it directly. An additional universe-creation explanation was given in Soul Music. |
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In The Transformers, the Constructicons had no less than three wholly separate and contradictory origins in the cartoon alone. First, that they were built on Earth by Megatron in 1985. Then, that they were Autobots from Cybertron reprogrammed by Megatron millions of years ago. Then that they were Decepticons who built Megatron in the first place years before that. | |
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The Transformers | hasFeature |
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Multiple-Choice Past / int_4d2f3aff | type |
Multiple-Choice Past | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_4d2f3aff | comment |
For the tenth anniversary of Longbox of the Damned, some episodes would end with Linkara sitting around a campfire telling the many stories that have surrounded Moarte over the years. Just a few examples include a former comic artist who made a Deal with the Devil, a horror host who died an a fire, a demon of stories who wishes to elevate humanity to the same level as himself, and a monster who lures children in with stories to eat them. | |
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Blake's 7: "Solitary" gives us snippets of Vila's backstory, including a book-loving grandmother who read him Robin Hood, the fact that he used to sell amulets on the black market, and a childhood memory of Federation troops rounding up his schoolteachers and shooting them all. At the very end we learn that "Vila" is a gestalt being that absorbs identities, and all those memories are false. Or are they? | |
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Multiple-Choice Past | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_52e8fba | comment |
Land of Oz: Princess Ozma's backstory had retcons even within the books written by Baum himself. Originally the human daughter of Pastoria, she later claimed to be descended of the fairy lineage of Lurline. This creates confusion with her species. Is Ozma human, half-human/half-fairy, or fairy? Furthermore, The Marvelous Land of Oz claims that her father was the king of Oz, but was overthrown by the Wizard, who kidnapped baby Ozma and gave her to the witch Mombi. But after the Wizard's villainous deeds got negative backlash from readers, Baum retconned it in the next book, Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, so that Ozma's grandfather was kidnapped by Mombi, leaving Oz with no ruler until the Wizard arrived, and both her father and she were born and raised as Mombi's slaves. In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, when the Tin Woodman was human, his sweetheart was a servant to a lazy old woman, who bribed the Wicked Witch of the East to get rid of him for her. In The Tin Woodman of Oz, she was a servant to the Wicked Witch herself. |
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Multiple-Choice Past | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_546769dd | comment |
There is no single definitive version of The Slender Man Mythos. Even his appearance, though built around a basic template, varies from story to story. The central tenet is simply the Rule of Scary. This extends to Slendy's origin story. If it comes up it will completely contradict another story's idea of it. This is probably the reason most stories avoid giving Slender Man a definitive origin (that and to avoid a Voodoo Shark). Marble Hornets season two features the protagonist doing this (badly). Jay goes through three contradictory stories explaining his presence in the hotel to Jessica, much to her confusion, and, eventually, disbelief. The real answer, of course, is that he doesn't remember. And Jessica doesn't remember how she got there either. The Slender Man fic By the Fire's Light features an origin for the Slender Man that might only be retroactively true since people in-story believe it. Whether the Slender Man existed before this in its current form in-story is left up to debate. |
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Multiple-Choice Past | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_555a5b1c | comment |
His book I Am America (And So Can You!) starts with his "first memory" involving a babysitter. A few chapters later, he off-handedly mentions that that he made that up. | |
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Multiple-Choice Past | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_5678c240 | comment |
Pearlman also claimed JC Chasez had once worked for him as a personal assistant. The common narrative states Justin was the second member to be recruited, and then JC, followed by Joey Fatone. However, in the *N The Mix video, Justin also acknowledges JC and Chris having previously known one another through Chris's job at Universal Studios. | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_5678c240 | featureApplicability |
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Multiple-Choice Past / int_5678c240 | featureConfidence |
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JC Chasez (Music) | hasFeature |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_5678c240 | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_58808436 | type |
Multiple-Choice Past | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_58808436 | comment |
In some ways, this is the entire premise of Higurashi: When They Cry. Except all choices wind up being true. | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_58808436 | featureApplicability |
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Multiple-Choice Past / int_58808436 | featureConfidence |
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Higurashi: When They Cry (Visual Novel) | hasFeature |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_58808436 | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_58fc1f8c | type |
Multiple-Choice Past | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_58fc1f8c | comment |
Space☆Dandy from the show of the same name will happily give you the specifics of his past regardless of actual authenticity. As the show goes on, it's implied that Dandy is remembering past selves and versions of himself from alternate timelines. |
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Multiple-Choice Past / int_58fc1f8c | featureApplicability |
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Multiple-Choice Past / int_58fc1f8c | featureConfidence |
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Space☆Dandy | hasFeature |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_58fc1f8c | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_5bfe75e2 | type |
Multiple-Choice Past | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_5bfe75e2 | comment |
In Phone Booth, the sniper hints at his own past on at least two different occasions, then writes them off again (mocking Stu while he does it) inside of a minute. | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_5bfe75e2 | featureApplicability |
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Multiple-Choice Past / int_5bfe75e2 | featureConfidence |
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Phone Booth | hasFeature |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_5bfe75e2 | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_5cd98612 | type |
Multiple-Choice Past | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_5cd98612 | comment |
This applies to the entire reality in The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.: In order to achieve a change in the present, the time-traveling agents should change the majority of possible pasts that could lead to the current present. It can become rather complicated. | |
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Multiple-Choice Past / int_5cd98612 | featureConfidence |
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The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. | hasFeature |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_5cd98612 | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_5ce3fc86 | type |
Multiple-Choice Past | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_5ce3fc86 | comment |
Excalibur in Soul Eater has a habit of telling long and rambling stories about himself with details that change as he's telling them. "It was the same day as today, Tuesday, or was it Wednesday, no I'm sure it was Monday. Anyways it was a fine Sunday and..." | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_5ce3fc86 | featureApplicability |
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Multiple-Choice Past / int_5ce3fc86 | featureConfidence |
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Soul Eater (Manga) | hasFeature |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_5ce3fc86 | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_5fa33285 | type |
Multiple-Choice Past | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_5fa33285 | comment |
Jareth the Goblin King from Labyrinth: The music video to David Bowie's song, Underground, implies that Jareth was originally a human from modern day Earth. The Return To Labyrinth manga says he's been ruling the Labyrinth for 1,300 years. The Labyrinth's Narnia Time could handwave this coexisting with other origins. There's also an implication in the movie that he's a Reality Warper whose default form is that of an owl, and who hijacked Sarah's imagination and created everything based on the play Sarah was reading, including his status as Goblin King. David Bowie himself stated he believed Jareth was someone who "inherited" his position rather than being a born king and played him as such. The Labyrinth: Coronation comic says he was a human baby, kidnapped from 18th Century Venice by his predecessor, the Owl King. |
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Multiple-Choice Past / int_5fa33285 | featureApplicability |
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Multiple-Choice Past / int_5fa33285 | featureConfidence |
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Labyrinth | hasFeature |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_5fa33285 | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_6274e926 | type |
Multiple-Choice Past | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_6274e926 | comment |
Jem: Jerrica Benton (AKA: Jem) either inherited Starlight House from her father, or lived there with Kimber (her sister), Aja, and Shana all her life. In fact, it may have even been both. There is a possible Series Continuity Error, made noticeable by the fact the two episodes are from the same season. In "The Stingers Hit Town", Riot mentions that his father was stationed in Germany and that he went to high school with Rapture. In his limelight Villain Episode, "Riot's Hope", he is shown to having not met either of his bandmates until he was an adult stationed in the military. He saw Minx perform with her old band in Germany then joined himself and eventually met Rapture when the three of them later. |
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Multiple-Choice Past / int_6274e926 | featureConfidence |
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Jem | hasFeature |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_6274e926 | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_638624c8 | type |
Multiple-Choice Past | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_638624c8 | comment |
One episode of Slayers Next has a chef who tells four different stories about his motivation for wanting to prepare dragon cuisine, one for each of the main characters. It is then subverted at the end when all four back stories turn out to be true. | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_638624c8 | featureApplicability |
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Multiple-Choice Past / int_638624c8 | featureConfidence |
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Slayers | hasFeature |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_638624c8 | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_643d6708 | type |
Multiple-Choice Past | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_643d6708 | comment |
It is established in Abra-Catastrophe! that Timmy was stuck at home with his parents for the first eight years of his life. This is at odds with "The Good Old Days" showing in a flashback that the last time Timmy's parents let his grandfather Pappy look after him while they left the house rather than Vicky was when Timmy was an infant and the first part of Wishology having Timmy bring up that he's had a crush on Trixie since they were in kindergarten. | |
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Multiple-Choice Past / int_643d6708 | featureConfidence |
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Abra-Catastrophe! | hasFeature |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_643d6708 | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_67cdde7d | type |
Multiple-Choice Past | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_67cdde7d | comment |
An issue of Dragon had an "Illithid Bloodline" feat, but it stated that the bloodline didn't come from illithids themselves. Rather, it came from escaped slaves who were experimented upon by the illithids. A clever storyteller might decide the two possibilities aren't mutually exclusive... | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_67cdde7d | featureApplicability |
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Multiple-Choice Past / int_67cdde7d | featureConfidence |
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Dragon (Magazine) | hasFeature |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_67cdde7d | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_691be369 | type |
Multiple-Choice Past | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_691be369 | comment |
Writers on The X-Files generally did a good job to keep the back-stories consistent, regarding what Mulder and Scully did before they started working on the X-Files and their family background, except when the ambiguity was the point. However, there was one deliberate change that did not please fans. Dana Scully's gold cross necklace, a frequent Tragic Keepsake and the symbol of her faith, has two possible origins. In Season 2 episode "Ascension", Mrs Scully says she gave it to Dana on her fifteenth birthday, and Season 5 episode "Christmas Carol" shows in flashback that teenage Dana and her sister Melissa both get their crosses for Christmas. The writers said they had known about the change, but they simply couldn't resist to use it in their Christmas Episode. | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_691be369 | featureApplicability |
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Multiple-Choice Past / int_691be369 | featureConfidence |
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The X-Files | hasFeature |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_691be369 | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_6ac55ec7 | type |
Multiple-Choice Past | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_6ac55ec7 | comment |
Various examples throughout the history of Dungeons & Dragons: Done with the entire species of illithids (aka Mind Flayers). One of the earlier versions says that they're mutants outcast from a long-gone human society in the Astromundi crystal sphere (solar system). Another version puts them as emerging when parasites from "the Outside" entered the game's reality and began bonding with and mutating humanoids, and went on to rule an interstellar empire millennia ago which has since fallen. An old Dragon magazine article depicts them as invaders from an alternate Prime Material Plane, trying to reshape whatever world your characters are from in the image of their homeworld. A later version says they're from the future and traveled back in time to escape a nameless enemy that was destroying them, and to prepare better for that enemy while in the past. It's ultimately left up to the Game Master to decide which of these is the "truth," or if perhaps they're all successive layers of lies used to disguise the illithids' origins and that the latest retcon is just another lie. However, in the 4th Edition rules, Mind Flayers are once again from the Far Realm — beyond the borders of the universe. This certainty may be only because there haven't been enough years into the new edition to let their webs of deceit get fully developed yet, however. An interesting but ultimately unrelated note on the time-traveling origin: A person can still take "Heritage" feats, special character options that indicate one's bloodline co-mingles with that of the relevant race/species (Fey Heritage, Draconic Heritage, etc) for Illithids. For most heritage feats, this implies an ancestry speckled with Interspecies Romance. However, in this case Illithid Heritage actually means you're actually one of the ancestors of the Illithid bloodlines. An issue of Dragon had an "Illithid Bloodline" feat, but it stated that the bloodline didn't come from illithids themselves. Rather, it came from escaped slaves who were experimented upon by the illithids. A clever storyteller might decide the two possibilities aren't mutually exclusive... The game's 4th Edition default setting Nentir Vale does this with pretty much all of the deities. Fairly justified; they've been around for so long that the details of their origins are wrapped up in legends. And then there's the Raven Queen. Depending on what you look at, she's a True Neutral goddess of death as part of the life cycle, an evil former consort of Nerull who overthrew him to gain his title as God of the Dead and now plots to destroy the other Gods so she can gain that title that she believes is rightfully hers rather than her lesser title of Goddess of Death, or a selfish and power-hungry goddess that epitomizes the reason True Neutral is now Unaligned. Nobody truly knows where Gas Spores came from, though since they resemble Beholders to a startling degree, the prevailing theory is that they came from parasitic fungi that fed on the corpses of Beholders and were changed by the latent magic of the aberrations. However, other theories posit that they were created on purpose by beholder mages, illithids or even myconids. The origin story for Strahd von Zarovich, the Ravenloft setting's most iconic villain, has been recounted in two novels, four to six adventures (depending on whether or not updates count), and dozens of fragmentary anecdotes throughout the product line. Not only do they contradict one another in numerous details, but it's openly acknowledged that many such accounts are propaganda and that Strahd himself probably doesn't remember (or want to remember) the truth anymore. Plus, there's a completely separate and irreconcilable version of Strahd in Ravenloft II: The House on Gryphon Hill that even the publishers wrote off as a Riddle for the Ages. Some of Demonlords And Archdevils have so many different origin stories through various edition's retcons, that it became incorporated as a part of their appeal to make them more ambigious. Asmodeus has at least three origin stories, most of them being at least somewhat contradictory. He was a general in war against Demons, who begun taking more ruthless approach, eventually manipulating Gods into forming Pact Primodial and giving him his own realm, that became the Nine Hells, through a lot of Loophole Abuse. Or he was an angel tasked with guarding Tharizdun's prison, but he was corrupted by demon Pazuzu, slayed his own patron god and was cast out into Nine Hells for his treachery. Or Asmodeus we know is merely a projection of an entity at the very bottom of Nine Hells - Ahriman, colossal divine serpent who co-created the multiverse, before fighting his partner over control for it, and now seeks souls to regain his true power. All of those origins tie creations of Nine Hells as we know it to his origin, but there are also tales claiming they existed before he showed up and kicked out the previous ruler, who is sometimes said to be Satan, sometimes Lucifer and sometimes Zargon. Belial and Fierna. Are they rivals or working together as a team? Or is Fierna just a puppet ruler and Belial is true power behind the throne? Are they lovers? Siblings? Father and daughter? Do they actually share title of Archduke of Fourth, something that shouldn't be possible, or is one of them Archduke and other their consort? Or maybe they're just two forms of one shapeshifting entity? There is material to support all of these interpretations and more. Graz'zt, Demon Prince of Lust, is either a son of Pale Night or a former Archduke of Hell who lead an invasion into Abyss, got trapped there and eventually decided to rebel against Asmodeus and establish his own dominion. Or he is actually a double agent, secretly carrying Asmodeus' orders. Each of these theories exists separatelly to a question whenever or not Asmodeus is his father. |
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Multiple-Choice Past / int_6ac55ec7 | featureApplicability |
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Multiple-Choice Past / int_6ac55ec7 | featureConfidence |
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Dungeons & Dragons (Tabletop Game) | hasFeature |
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Multiple-Choice Past | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_6c9193a1 | comment |
The Venture Brothers gives several varying explanations for both the origin of Phantom Limb and how Billy Quizboy ended up with a robotic hand, with the Monarch's being the most plausiblenote they were roommates in college who developed an experimental muscle growth accelerator to heal PL's deformed limbs. Unfortunately the machine malfunctioned and "accelerated [PL's limbs] beyond the speed of light" giving him his powers while Billy lost his arm trying to turn the machine off. When Dr. Venture finally asks him about it, point blank, Billy merely replies "Excellent question. I have no idea." They later gave them both a definite past. The Monarch's version, while not complete, did get most of the facts rightnote Phantom Limb was Billy's professor, not roommate and the latter had already lost his arm to a rabid pitbull prior to the incident). The comment about him not knowing ended up becoming a Cerebus Retcon because of this. Turns out he doesn't remember because OSI wiped his memory. When Billy learns of the deception, he rather suitably flips the fuck out. |
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Multiple-Choice Past / int_6c9193a1 | featureApplicability |
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Multiple-Choice Past / int_6c9193a1 | featureConfidence |
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TheVentureBrothers | hasFeature |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_6c9193a1 | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_6cdb19f2 | type |
Multiple-Choice Past | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_6cdb19f2 | comment |
The Great Muppet Caper had Kermit and Fozzie portrayed as identical twin brothers working for a newspaper along with Gonzo and the three investigating the theft of jewels belonging to Lady Holiday. After the flight to England, Kermit meets Miss Piggy and is initially misled into thinking she is Lady Holiday, with the rest of the Muppet cast met at the Happiness Hotel. | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_6cdb19f2 | featureApplicability |
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Multiple-Choice Past / int_6cdb19f2 | featureConfidence |
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The Great Muppet Caper | hasFeature |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_6cdb19f2 | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_6f734712 | type |
Multiple-Choice Past | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_6f734712 | comment |
In Smallville, Moira Sullivan, mother of Chloe Sullivan, has a past which varies slightly every time in her few appearances, the difference usually including the time when she left Chloe. | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_6f734712 | featureApplicability |
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Multiple-Choice Past / int_6f734712 | featureConfidence |
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Smallville | hasFeature |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_6f734712 | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_705bb59a | type |
Multiple-Choice Past | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_705bb59a | comment |
Similarly with Vampire: The Masquerade, which isn't surprising, given the Kindred raise Unreliable Narrator to an artform. The primary account of vampire origins is the story of Caine, and it's the one that's treated as essentially true by the setting. But there's no consistent account of what happened after Caine became a vampire, how many of the Second and Third Generations there actually were, or how each of the clans came to be — not to mention that some clans, like the Ravnos and Setites, have versions of their origins that say they arose independently of Caine. | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_705bb59a | featureApplicability |
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Multiple-Choice Past / int_705bb59a | featureConfidence |
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Vampire: The Masquerade (Tabletop Game) | hasFeature |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_705bb59a | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_70814599 | type |
Multiple-Choice Past | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_70814599 | comment |
In Stargate SG-1, Jack O'Neill's backstory throughout most of the series was that he was ex-Special Ops, and O'Neill wore a master parachutist's badge and later a space and missile operations badge on his dress uniform but never pilot's wings, but in an episode of Season 8, Samantha Carter pointed out that he used to be a test pilot. This is likely an ass-pull by the writers, but given that he did pilot some experimental aircraft and that this backstory was never mentioned again, and that the only occasion when the viewers find out anything about O'Neill's background is when someone else mentions it, it's possible that Carter herself was mistaken. Also, Vala's past. She was brought up on a nice planet with a conventional life (and fiancé) until she was chosen by Qetesh, OR she was sold to a weapons dealer and killed him to earn her freedom, OR she was brought up by her bitchy stepmother and conman father, and also how many times was she married? Vala is a habitual liar and loves to tell fanciful stories (especially in her earlier appearances, before her character development). The only things we know for sure is that she really was host to Qetesh at some point in her past, and she really does have a conman father. Beyond that, we may never know. |
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Stargate SG-1 | hasFeature |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_70814599 | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_71c01786 | type |
Multiple-Choice Past | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_71c01786 | comment |
The Odd Couple (1970) had multiple episodes depicting how Felix and Oscar first met. | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_71c01786 | featureApplicability |
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Multiple-Choice Past / int_71c01786 | featureConfidence |
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The Odd Couple (1970) | hasFeature |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_71c01786 | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_7385bc4d | type |
Multiple-Choice Past | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_7385bc4d | comment |
Doraemon: Doraemon's backstory is constantly inconsistent in all of his appearances, however his backstory always involves his ears being bitten off by a mouse, causing him to turn blue as a result (he was originally colored yellow until his bitten off). | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_7385bc4d | featureApplicability |
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Multiple-Choice Past / int_7385bc4d | featureConfidence |
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Doraemon (Manga) | hasFeature |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_7385bc4d | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_73d7930f | type |
Multiple-Choice Past | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_73d7930f | comment |
Doctor Bashir on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine had about four different stories explaining how he first realized he wanted to be a doctor as a child (either he was inspired to become one after repairing his childhood teddy bearnote The bear at least was real and he still keeps it in his quarters, he became a doctor to get over his fear of doctors, he was pressured to go to med school by his parents, or he went to med school after becoming a professional athlete didn't work out). This was later explained as a result of him trying to hide his actual origin story — he received illegal genetic enhancements as a child. | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_73d7930f | featureApplicability |
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Multiple-Choice Past / int_73d7930f | featureConfidence |
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Star Trek: Deep Space Nine | hasFeature |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_73d7930f | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_7460586f | type |
Multiple-Choice Past | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_7460586f | comment |
Archer's origins are left deliberately vague. In "Double Deuce", Archer is stated to have been born in Morocco while Malory was running from Nazi spies (around 1938), one of his possible fathers was an Italian executed by an Operation Gladio operative for speaking out against fascism and was about six or seven when World War II ended. He's also shown listening to Woodhouse read a telegram from Malory about Operation Ajax in 1953, which would make him 15, but he looks younger than that, and "Once Bitten" states he was six when Malory was involved in the CIA-backed Guatamalan coup d'état, which took place in 1954, which would place Archer's birthdate in 1948. One possible explaination is an Alternate History. | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_7460586f | featureApplicability |
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Multiple-Choice Past / int_7460586f | featureConfidence |
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Archer | hasFeature |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_7460586f | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_746814ae | type |
Multiple-Choice Past | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_746814ae | comment |
It's implied in an Arthur episode where Buster "saves" a cat on a tree, called "Buster Baxter, Cat Saver", that Buster invokes this trope when he lets heroism get to his head. Buster is seen bragging to some reporters about how he got the cat down, Francine mentions that she's starting to get bored with Buster's heroism stories, and then Binky arrives and says that he's not bored of his stories, as they're "always different." | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_746814ae | featureApplicability |
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Multiple-Choice Past / int_746814ae | featureConfidence |
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Arthur | hasFeature |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_746814ae | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_7558ef22 | type |
Multiple-Choice Past | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_7558ef22 | comment |
In the Cars Toons series, Mater, the resident Cloud Cuckoolander, always boasts about his past where he was involved in something big such as being a famous racer, a spy, a firefighter, or an elite detective. Lightning never believes his claims, but the end of each episode always proves that every single one of Mater's narratives is a true story. | |
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Multiple-Choice Past / int_7558ef22 | featureConfidence |
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Cars (Franchise) | hasFeature |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_7558ef22 | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_77e22425 | type |
Multiple-Choice Past | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_77e22425 | comment |
Pinky and the Brain had four different episodes with flashbacks to the duo's childhood and when they were first genetically altered. They all contradict each other. | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_77e22425 | featureApplicability |
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Multiple-Choice Past / int_77e22425 | featureConfidence |
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Pinky and the Brain | hasFeature |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_77e22425 | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_78fe4d55 | type |
Multiple-Choice Past | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_78fe4d55 | comment |
Was the first Frankenstein created by Victor Frankenstein, as in the original novel, or was he created by Mary Shelley and John Polidori from the remains of the last of the previous choler-aspected Lineage, the Amirani? Dark Eras Companion explicitly brings up this trope in a sidebar, declaring it's up to the Storyteller to decide the circumstances around the Frankensteins' creation. | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_78fe4d55 | featureApplicability |
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Multiple-Choice Past / int_78fe4d55 | featureConfidence |
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Promethean: The Created (Tabletop Game) | hasFeature |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_78fe4d55 | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_79d9b538 | type |
Multiple-Choice Past | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_79d9b538 | comment |
The Palaververse: The notes on Old Equestria says that Discord didn't stick to an origin story: | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_79d9b538 | featureApplicability |
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Multiple-Choice Past / int_79d9b538 | featureConfidence |
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The Palaververse / Fan Fic | hasFeature |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_79d9b538 | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_7badf2b2 | type |
Multiple-Choice Past | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_7badf2b2 | comment |
Benny Rose, the Cannibal King: The exact origins of Benny Rose are never given, with it, being left unclear if he was a Serial Killer before or after a fire that burned down the hospital he worked at. It's left deliberately unclear whether he always hunted and ate children or only started it to save himself from dying in the basement of the hospital after the fire but then gained a taste for it which he now continues. The novel does lean in the direction at the end that he was a normal person before the fire at the hospital, but it's still left up to the reader to decide which, if any, is the real origin. | |
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Multiple-Choice Past / int_7badf2b2 | featureConfidence |
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Benny Rose, the Cannibal King | hasFeature |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_7badf2b2 | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_7cc65757 | type |
Multiple-Choice Past | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_7cc65757 | comment |
Princess Ozma's backstory had retcons even within the books written by Baum himself. Originally the human daughter of Pastoria, she later claimed to be descended of the fairy lineage of Lurline. This creates confusion with her species. Is Ozma human, half-human/half-fairy, or fairy? Furthermore, The Marvelous Land of Oz claims that her father was the king of Oz, but was overthrown by the Wizard, who kidnapped baby Ozma and gave her to the witch Mombi. But after the Wizard's villainous deeds got negative backlash from readers, Baum retconned it in the next book, Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, so that Ozma's grandfather was kidnapped by Mombi, leaving Oz with no ruler until the Wizard arrived, and both her father and she were born and raised as Mombi's slaves. | |
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Multiple-Choice Past / int_7cc65757 | featureConfidence |
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The Marvelous Land of Oz | hasFeature |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_7cc65757 | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_7db679b4 | type |
Multiple-Choice Past | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_7db679b4 | comment |
In the second season of The Aquabats! Super Show!, each episode has one of the Aquabats telling a story about how the group came together. Naturally, all of these stories contradict each other, and none is treated as being any less valid than the others (with the possible exception of Crash's). | |
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Multiple-Choice Past / int_7db679b4 | featureConfidence |
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The Aquabats! Super Show! | hasFeature |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_7db679b4 | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_7e4a902f | type |
Multiple-Choice Past | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_7e4a902f | comment |
13th Age has a supplement called the Book of Ages, detailing a total of 14 previous ages, from which the GM is encouraged to mix and match from to keep the players guessing. | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_7e4a902f | featureApplicability |
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Multiple-Choice Past / int_7e4a902f | featureConfidence |
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13th Age (Tabletop Game) | hasFeature |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_7e4a902f | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_7ec0cdab | type |
Multiple-Choice Past | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_7ec0cdab | comment |
In The Mighty Boosh, Howard and Vince frequently flash back to their shared past - but without any continuity about what this shared past has been. At one point they insist they are the same age, at another that Howard is ten years older than Vince. Vince may have been raised in the jungle by Brian Ferry or he may have gone to school with Howard. It comes down to Rule of Funny, of course. | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_7ec0cdab | featureApplicability |
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Multiple-Choice Past / int_7ec0cdab | featureConfidence |
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The Mighty Boosh | hasFeature |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_7ec0cdab | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_7fc78282 | type |
Multiple-Choice Past | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_7fc78282 | comment |
Celebrimbor was established as the grandson of Fëanor in The Lord of the Rings, but Tolkien apparently forgot this and came up with two new backstories in his later writings where he was either a Telerin silversmith who accompanied Celeborn from Aman or a Sindar descendant of Daeron. | |
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Multiple-Choice Past | |
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In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, when the Tin Woodman was human, his sweetheart was a servant to a lazy old woman, who bribed the Wicked Witch of the East to get rid of him for her. In The Tin Woodman of Oz, she was a servant to the Wicked Witch herself. | |
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Star Trek: The Borg are described by Guinan in their debut episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation as having been expanding and assimilating for countless centuries, but she doesn't give anything more specific than this. Star Trek: Voyager says that the Borg's own memory of their beginning is fuzzy as well. The Star Trek Expanded Universe has produced many mutually contradictory origin stories for them: The Star Trek Encyclopedia and Star Trek: Legacy say that they were spawned by V'ger, while Star Trek: The Manga and the Star Trek: Destiny novel trilogy each tell of different alien species accidentally creating them as a means of survival. Doctor Bashir on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine had about four different stories explaining how he first realized he wanted to be a doctor as a child (either he was inspired to become one after repairing his childhood teddy bearnote The bear at least was real and he still keeps it in his quarters, he became a doctor to get over his fear of doctors, he was pressured to go to med school by his parents, or he went to med school after becoming a professional athlete didn't work out). This was later explained as a result of him trying to hide his actual origin story — he received illegal genetic enhancements as a child. Garak also had a Multiple Choice Past. The second-season episode "The Wire" had him confess to three different, contradictory stories about why he's on the station, all of which are proven to be false (it's also not the only time he "explains" why he was exiled, and none of those stories hold water either). At the end of the episode, Bashir confronts him about it, only to have Garak declare that they were all true. The only thing in the series that is confirmed to be true about Garak's past is that he is the illegitimate son of Enabran Tain, former head of the Obsidian Order. The non-canon book A Stitch in Time has Garak remember his childhood and the real reason he was exiled, while walking through the ruins of Cardassia. He killed a high-level official, who caught Garak with his wife (all three went to school together). Interestingly, his boss and father Enabran Tain actually ordered the assassination, but it was the semi-public way Garak did it that got him kicked out of the Obsidian Order. |
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Peter Pan in the original Peter Pan book by J.M. Barrie. He tells Wendy of how after being adopted into Neverland, he tried to return home to his parents only to find the window locked and another little boy in his room, and he uses this as his justification for disliking adults. The narration of the book says something along the lines of "this may or may not be what happened; but it's how Peter remembered it at the time and thus he wholeheartedly believed it." There are also a few inconsistencies between his origin story in Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens and that in Peter and Wendy. | |
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Kaeloo: Subverted. Mr. Cat's life before coming to live in Smileyland, and why he went there. For example, in one episode he explains that he was raised by a salmon after being tied in a sack and thrown in a river, but another one says he ran away from home because of his abusive family. Though all of the backstories he's given are sad enough to give him a Freudian Excuse, and a reason for being as psychologically messed up as he is. However, the fifth season explains that his true backstory is the one about running away from his abusive family, and the other ones are lies that he made up on purpose to avoid having to talk to his friends about the abuse he faced. | |
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In one Legion of Net.Heroes story, a Cosmic Entity decides to rewrite a mortally-wounded Squid Boy to both save his life and make him easier to use as a character. (The LNH has never had much use for the fourth wall.) As part of the process, Squid Boy (now Squidman) is asked to describe his origin story. Since Squid Boy dated from the very early days of the LNH when the whole thing was a joke, he'd never actually had an origin story, and suggested several possibilities before finally settling on one, which locked it into continuity as his actual origin. | |
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World of Darkness gamelines tend to play with this. In Werewolf: The Apocalypse, pretty much everything regarding the how and why of the War of Rage, the creation story of the Triat, and the birth of the were-races are told from the point of view of a member of whichever race the book you're reading is about, and so every version is from an Unreliable Narrator. Similarly with Vampire: The Masquerade, which isn't surprising, given the Kindred raise Unreliable Narrator to an artform. The primary account of vampire origins is the story of Caine, and it's the one that's treated as essentially true by the setting. But there's no consistent account of what happened after Caine became a vampire, how many of the Second and Third Generations there actually were, or how each of the clans came to be — not to mention that some clans, like the Ravnos and Setites, have versions of their origins that say they arose independently of Caine. Beckett's Jyhad Diary throws in what the Laibon, the African vampires, have to say on the subject, holding that vampires have been around as long as humans, and that Caine, though historically significant, was not the first vampire. One Laibon NPC says he cursed himself with vampirism, rather than being Embraced by another. There's also the Rasputin situation. Numerous historical characters were written into the Old World of Darkness. Two different writers used Rasputin as a character, not knowing about the other's use of him, and their versions had two different backstories. When this discrepancy was pointed out, the company decided to run with it. Several writers began using Rasputin as a character, giving him a different backstory each time. These multiple versions of Rasputin became one of the unsolved mysteries of the original World of Darkness, though Wraith: The Oblivion tried to reconcile them by saying that Rasputin is actually a body-hopping wraith who likes possessing various supernaturals, while Vampire: The Masquerade suggested the Rasputins know about their other versions, seeing themselves as "brothers", and that there's a terrible truth behind them. |
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Multiple-Choice Past | |
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A single-author example is Golgo 13; Taiko Saito prefers to keep his past a mystery, so there are several different histories for him. | |
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Most 30 Rock characters, due to the fact that most of the facts about their pasts are just throwaway punchlines ("My mother tried to send me to Vietnam to make a man out of me. I was 12.", "I definitely would have gone to my reunion, but the boat I was educated on sank.", etc.). If you try to compile them all together, they form a weird, somewhat contradictory, and definitely horrific image. The inconsistencies about Kenneth's past were turned into a Running Gag about him secretly being a long-lived immortal. Lampshaded in Pete's case: |
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The childhoods of The Undertaker and Kane (who are half-brothers) have come to be subject to this. The original story was that The Undertaker was an arsonist who burned down his parents' funeral parlor, killing both parents and leaving Kane horrifically disfigured. Other versions, however, pointed to Kane as being responsible for the fire. | |
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On a more minor note is the Death Star or more specifically who created it. Was it Raith Sinear? Was it Tarkin? Was it the Geonosians? Or was it Bevel Lemelisk? Eventually the novel Death Star was released to sort things out. Short Answer, the creator was all of the above. Long Answer, the Death Star was a merger of two different concepts. The first was for a mobile planetoid (with a superlaser) made by Sinear that Tarkin presented to Palpatine as his own concept. The second was for an ultimate weapon developed by the Geonosians for Count Dooku. The Geos brought Lemelisk to fix some design problems and he would go on help built the final product. | |
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A New Hope | hasFeature |
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Multiple-Choice Past | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_8ce66152 | comment |
The Emperor's Soul: Shai's Essence Marks allow her to give herself various alternate pasts, each with useful skills and knowledge. For example, one Mark causes her to have spent ten years learning martial arts from a Proud Warrior Race, another causes her to have studied politics and sciences rather than art and Forgery, and so on. | |
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Multiple-Choice Past | |
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Mad Max Rockatansky, to an observant viewer. While he constantly seems to be a former cop who somehow survived the apocalypse, all the other details seem to shift from appearance to appearance. Did he have a wife and son who survived at first but were later killed, or a wife and daughter who he didn't see after the end? Why does his prized Pursuit Special get stolen and destroyed once in almost every story? The given explanation is that these stories we see are actually wasteland legends told by various narrators, not accurate descriptions of what occured. | |
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The Lion King: Scar has two Start of Darkness stories officially: His original story, as revealed in the licensed books A Tale Of Two Brothers, is that he was originally named "Taka". Taka resented the fact his father Ahadi chose his older brother to be the future king and not him. Mufasa was deemed the better choice because he understood the responsibilities needed while Taka was selfish and had too large of a temper. Taka tried to get his brother in trouble by getting a buffalo to attack him. One of the buffalos in the herd instead attacked Taka, giving him a permanent scar. His second origin story comes from The Lion Guard animated series. He was the previous owner of an incredibly powerful, magical roar ability and was the leader of the Lion Guard. The power went to his head and he ended up killing the other members of The Lion Guard. Due to this his powers were taken away, however he kept his hunger for power. Timon's and Pumbaa's pasts are different between The Lion King 1 ½ and Timon & Pumbaa. The former is likely the canon interpretation as it is more in-line with the films compared to the Denser and Wackier series. |
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When did Shaggy get Scooby? In A Pup Named Scooby-Doo, it was apparently when the former was about ten or eleven, though one episode showed Shaggy as a baby with a similar-looking dog (though that possibly wasn't Scooby). In the movie, he was still a teen when he adopted Scooby, but in What's New, Scooby-Doo?, Scooby is shown when Velma was five (and so Shaggy would've been about seven). | |
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Multiple-Choice Past | |
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A minor one in The Loud House regarding when Luna got into rock. We know that it was during a Mick Swagger concert, but in "For Bros About to Rock", she claims to have been a seventh-grader (so about thirteen), but in the official podcast, she says she was nine. | |
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Multiple-Choice Past | |
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In the film adaptation of A Prairie Home Companion, Garrison Keillor tells the story of how he got into radio. | |
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On Goof Troop Max and PJ met at age 11 (shown in "Everything's Coming Up Goofy" and "Good Neighbor Goof" and mentioned in "Goodbye Mr. Goofy" and "Pistolgeist"). Except that "Wrecks, Lies, and Videotape", "Tee for Two", "Goof Troop Christmas", and "Tub Be or Not Tub Be" all suggest that Max and PJ have always known each other. The backstory is irrelevant to most things except for the nature of Max and PJ's relationship—namely, the first backstory provides an explanation for PJ's Undying Loyalty towards Max; the second does not. This can be a little jarring considering "Tub Be or Not Tub Be" supports the second backstory and features an undyingly loyal PJ and a relatively unsympathetic Max. | |
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Multiple-Choice Past | |
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In Shrek, Princess Fiona says that a witch cursed her to turn into an ogress at night and locked her in a tower, while Shrek 2 says that she always turned into an ogress (though it's still possible that the curse happened the day she was born) and her parents locked her up. | |
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Multiple-Choice Past | |
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Bananaman: Why does eating a banana turn Eric Twinge into Bananaman? Maybe it's because he was sent to Earth from the Moon as a baby, and the crescent Moon is shaped like a banana. Maybe it's because General Blight concealed stolen Saturnium in a banana that was accidentally eaten by baby Eric. The second one makes more sense, but doesn't explain Bananagirl. | |
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Bananaman (Comic Strip) | hasFeature |
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Multiple-Choice Past | |
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Plot Hole (yes, that's his real name) from Acrobat, during a story that was supposed to tell his secret origin, told multiple stories, ripping off the origins of Superman, Batman and partly Spider-Man, making Plot Twist a villain in every single one - they don't match with each other, or Plot Twist's origin, and hint that Plot Hole doesn't even know what his Arch-Enemy really looks like. The only thing he's sure is that he was somehow created by Plot Twist, but even that cannot be found as absolute truth, because he's obviously obsessed with him. | |
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Spacegodzilla was either created by Godzilla's DNA from Biollante being sucked into a black hole after she (Biollante, not Godzilla) went into spore-form and drifted into outer space, OR when Godzilla's cells that somehow got onto Mothra were carried into outer space by said giant moth and were pulled into a black hole. And, depending on if you count the toys, the DNA may or may not have fused with a crystalline alien creature after falling through the black hole. Baragon (a monster that's relatively obscure in the US but rather popular in Japan) is either the last survivor of a species of ancient reptile or some sort of demigod depending on if you watch either Frankenstein Conquers the World or Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack!. King Ghidorah and Mechagodzilla tend to have different origins due to the various continuities. Ghidorah is either an Ax-Crazy space dragon who wipes out entire planets including either Venus or Mars (depending on if you are watching the dub or original) For the Evulz, a trio of genetically-engineered pets planted on the island where Godzilla was mutated by a group of time traveling aliens, a space dragon that wiped out all life on Earth 130 million years ago and had a relative that killed the dinosaurs, an immature Yamato no Orochi, a monster trapped in a meteor that Godzilla stopped from destroying the Earth, an extra-dimensional Planet Eater or The Anti-God of all Titans Meanwhile Mechagodzilla is either a robotic doppelganger built by a race of evil aliens in an attempt to Take Over the World, a robot built by Japan (and the US) to fight Godzilla using future tech recovered from Mecha-King Ghidorah, or a cyborg built to fight Godzilla using the skeleton of the original Godzilla as a frame, an abandoned prototype intended to fight Godzilla Earth that didn't activate and is assimilating the Earth from the titular city or an anti-Titan weapon housing the consciousness of Ghidorah. Godzilla himself is subject to this due to many a Continuity Reboot. So far he has been a dinosaur of unknown species that was mutated by an American nuclear test in the Pacific in the 50s, a fictional species of dinosaur mutated by a nuclear test before time travel led to him being mutated by a crashed Russian submarine in the Bering Sea, the original Godzilla who was never killed, the original Godzilla's body possessed by the souls of the people killed during the Pacific Theater of WWII, a Marine Iguana mutated by nuclear testing in French Polynesia, note until Toho made it a separate monster at least a prehistoric reptile from a time period when Earth was covered in radiation re-awakened by US nuclear testing in the 50s which then changed their focus to try to kill him, a sea monster mutated by nuclear waste dumped into the ocean in the 50s, a plant-animal hybrid with metal skin and a Shinto god of destruction awakened by World War II — with three separate potential origins. Similarly, there's Godzilla's Alternate Company Equivalent Gamera. Is he an ordinary turtle mutated by pollution? A cyborg planetary defense weapon created by a lost civilization? A prehistoric reptile that inspired Xuanwu the turtle god from Chinese Mythology? An actual turtle god? Even in the films where Gamera's backstory about being an Atlantean cyborg is consistent, his Arch-Enemy Gyaos, whom the Atlanteans created Gamera to fight, gets it even worse. He's either another Atlantean creation that turned against them, or part of a race of aliens that plan to devour the Earth. Or both. |
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Multiple-Choice Past | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_9819631f | comment |
That's just for the G1 incarnations of the group. The Beast Machines toyline had the Dinobots as a group of Maximals reformatted by The Oracle with their Dinosaur modes coming from the fact The Oracle used Dinobot's spark. Transformers: Animated had them as Dinosaur animatronics turned into attack drones by Megatron then accidentally becoming self-aware thanks to the Allspark Key. Transformers: Fall of Cybertron had them be Autobots who were captured and given their Dinosaur modes by Shockwave based on his observations of prehistoric Earth. Transformers: Age of Extinction had them being the ancestors of modern Cybertronians who based their Alternative Modes on Earth's Dinosaurs. Transformers: Robots in Disguise (2015) had them being a subspecies of Tranformers who had the modes naturally similar to the Insecticons of Transformers: Prime. | |
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Beast Machines | hasFeature |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_9819631f | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_981b4162 | type |
Multiple-Choice Past | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_981b4162 | comment |
Irving Braxiatel is first implied to be the Doctor's brother in the post-Doctor Bernice Summerfield New Adventures novel Tears of the Oracle, representing yet another version of the Doctor's origins, as he's unaccounted for either in Lungbarrow or the novels' implied backstory about the Doctor's parents (derived from an unproduced pre-TV Movie film script). He can be reconciled with them, but as noted elsewhere, that's not really the point. | |
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Scooby also has a multiple choice past regarding his name. In SCOOB!, Shaggy named him after Scooby Snacks, but The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo claims he was named after the noise he made when he was a puppy. | |
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SCOOB! | hasFeature |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_995d37c6 | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_9a492449 | type |
Multiple-Choice Past | |
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Baragon (a monster that's relatively obscure in the US but rather popular in Japan) is either the last survivor of a species of ancient reptile or some sort of demigod depending on if you watch either Frankenstein Conquers the World or Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack!. | |
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Joe Kucan became Kane from a scratch off lotto ticket. He won a special election. He won a carnival game. He found the prize in a crackerjack box. He was in the right place, at the right time. He was the Dramatic Director on a project with almost no funding. Using employees was cheaper than hiring actors. | |
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Pony POV Series: Loneliness, the first Big Bad of the series. Is she a figment of Trixie's imagination? A Split Personality? A Draconequus? A piece of Discord's magic from his Discording? Something like Fluttercruel? A parasitic mental entity? An evil spirit? An Eldritch Abomination? A Spirit of Dark Magic? No one in universe knows and Word of God has no intention of ever revealing which if any is true. Makarov. It's partly because he has the power to alter reality, allowing him to change the past, partly because he's constantly lying and exaggerating about himself. It completely gets on the Interviewers' nerves. |
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Pony POV Series / Fan Fic | hasFeature |
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Multiple-Choice Past | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_9d47a2a2 | comment |
A Song of Ice and Fire has a lot of this thanks to that world's history mostly being based on legends. In-universe Sam made a game attempt to figure out the true history of the Night Watch, only to find out the organization had hit Legend Fades to Myth status centuries before anyone bothered to invent writing. It doesn't help that many myths have been updated with anachronisms, such as knights running around in the legendary era before the Andals invaded and made knights a thing in Westeros. The Heroic Bastard Jon Snow's origin is the subject of conflicting theories in-universe, with his father Lord Ned Stark telling King Robert that his mother's name was Wylla (a wetnurse in service to House Dayne), yet Ned's wife Catelyn heard a rumor that Jon's mother was Lady Ashara Dayne, which Ned reacted to violently, and Queen Cersei believes this to be the case. Later, Ser Davos Seaworth is told a completely different tale by a Northern lord, in which Jon's mother was a fisherman's daughter who smuggled Ned to safety during Robert's Rebellion. Out-of-universe, many readers suspect that this is all misdirection and Jon is the son of Ned's late sister Lady Lyanna and the late Prince Rhaegar (who either abducted or eloped with her, depending on which character you listen to), which is confirmed as the truth in the TV adaptation Game of Thrones. The books proper claim that House Lannister are descendants of Lann the Clever who is from the Age of Heroes. The appendices claim that they are Andals. |
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The burning cabin on Tom Sawyer Island was originally due to an Indian attack. As The Savage Indian fell out of favor, the backstory was changed several times before it became a regular cabin. | |
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Rugrats: In "Moving Away", it's stated Tommy met Angelica and the other babies that year, but "A Step at a Time" has Chuckie claim he met Tommy a year ago. Perhaps the Pickleses moved away the previous year and then moved back, and Tommy, due to his young age, couldn't remember the others. | |
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Big City Greens: There isn’t a definitive answer as to how Alice lost her leg. One time, she claimed that she danced it off, while another time, she claimed that a doctor “took it� from her. | |
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In Futurama, the circumstances of Bender's "birth" change every time the event is brought up. Additionally, he either went to "bending college," where he majored in bending and belonged to a robot fraternity, or had his knowledge programmed directly into him by a "bending school" on the assembly line that produced him (he's also mentioned attending high school). What does remain consistent is that he was only four-years-old at the start of the series, so the experiences he had must have unfolded quickly. | |
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The non-canon book A Stitch in Time has Garak remember his childhood and the real reason he was exiled, while walking through the ruins of Cardassia. He killed a high-level official, who caught Garak with his wife (all three went to school together). Interestingly, his boss and father Enabran Tain actually ordered the assassination, but it was the semi-public way Garak did it that got him kicked out of the Obsidian Order. | |
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To keep the revelations nice and fresh the manga and video game adaptations of Code Geass seem to have this, especially in regards to CC and Marianne. Nunnally hints in one manga that they're all multiple timelines or realities by explaining how she saw the events of the original series happen in one of them. | |
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Multiple-Choice Past / int_a663d58a | comment |
The prologue of Ice Age: Continental Drift shows Australia being formed three times after Scrat accidentally breaks up Pangaea due to him scurrying around the Earth's core trying to get his acorn back. When Australia itself is first formed, it forms from land located right in the middle of Pangaea. But when Africa is first formed, it forms from land broken up from the southeastern part of Pangaea, just like how Australia formed in real life, and finally, when North and South America are first formed, it forms from land broken off the southwestern part of Pangaea! | |
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Multiple origins have been given for Slimer from Ghostbusters: Dan Aykroyd said he was a "vapor — a kind of confluence of stored up psychic energy, an accumulation of spirits that haunt the hotel who doesn't want to leave". Ivan Reitman said that the cast and crew dubbed him the ghost of John Belushi. The Marvel UK comics based on The Real Ghostbusters said he was the ghost of a human king called "Remils". The tabletop game said he's on Earth as a result of cult rituals. The 1992 annual said he was the ghost of an obese man who remembers nothing about his life except the desire to eat. In the 2017 annual, the Ghostbusters suggest multiple theories, some of which are references to the above: a chef at the hotel who suffered a fatal heart attack on the job, a vagrant, an Anthropomorphic Personification of gluttony summoned by the Gozerian cult, and Venkman's gag suggestion he was a king. |
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The Fairly OddParents! has several instances of characters having multiple backstories that contradict each other. Timmy's mom and dad have several different versions of how they met. When it was first shown in "Father Time", it was stated that they began dating as kids and became a couple when Mr. Turner gave her a trophy he won. "The Secret Origin of Denzel Crocker" instead established that Mrs. Turner dated Dinkleberg until college, when Mr. Turner got her on the rebound. Other episodes say they met through a "threatmantic" letter ("Information Stupor Highway") or that Mrs. Turner met Mr. Turner in the sporting goods department (which she tells Timmy in "Who's Your Daddy?") It is established in Abra-Catastrophe! that Timmy was stuck at home with his parents for the first eight years of his life. This is at odds with "The Good Old Days" showing in a flashback that the last time Timmy's parents let his grandfather Pappy look after him while they left the house rather than Vicky was when Timmy was an infant and the first part of Wishology having Timmy bring up that he's had a crush on Trixie since they were in kindergarten. Mr. Crocker's origin as revealed in the appropriately titled "The Secret Origin of Denzel Crocker" is that he used to have Timmy's fairy godparents Cosmo and Wanda as his fairy godparents when he was a kid, but lost them and therefore grew up to become the insane and ill-tempered adult we know him as because his fairy godparents' existence was inadvertently revealed to the public by Cosmo (as well as a time-traveling Timmy). This is contradicted by "Birthday Bashed" showing young Crocker with a different set of fairy godparents who left him when he became too old to have fairies and "Let Sleeper Dogs Lie" once again depicting him with Cosmo and Wanda as his godparents (in addition to having Sparky when he was a puppy), losing them this time because they had to leave him on his 11th birthday. In-universe, comic book hero The Crimson Chin has two origin stories. One, described in the show, is that he was a talk show host bitten on the chin by a radioactive actor. Then, in a Nickelodeon Magazine comic involving Timmy following the Crimson Chin's Rogues Gallery through different incarnations of the comic, they eventually go to an origin story where he was an alien sent to Earth as a baby. Cosmo expresses confusion at this, bringing up the radioactive actor origin, which Timmy says is a Retcon that they had to come up with invoked"after the lawsuit". |
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Exterminatus Now: Lothar Hex has given multiple explanations for his creation as a cloned echidna and for his cybernetics, though after his adopted father appears in the comic he gives the truth Lothar stepped on a land mine. | |
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Tolkien's Legendarium: J. R. R. Tolkien never managed to come up with a satisfactory backstory for the Orcs; he had created them so his bad guys had some Always Chaotic Evil mooks, but this clashed with his Catholic beliefs that no free willed being could be pure evil. Origins for the Orcs include: corrupted Elves (featured in the published Silmarillion), corrupted Men (although this doesn't fit the timeline), intelligent animals (Contradictory to The Cirith Ungol chapter of Return of the King) or simply primitive tribes. Also true of Galadriel and Celeborn — Unfinished Tales gives multiple drafts of their history that Tolkien wrote, with no clear chronology to tell us which version is the latest (and presumably most authoritative, though some versions cause other continuity problems) and with more notes that suggest Tolkien was planning on revising it again before the publication of The Silmarillion. We don't even know whether Celeborn was a Sindarin or Telerin elf, or whether Galadriel was actually part of Fëanor's rebellion or just went along because she wanted to carve out her own kingdom in Middle-Earth. And those are some pretty major differences. Tolkien seems to have gone back and forth a few times on the issue of whether the Eagles and Huan were lesser Maiar, or regular animals uplifted by the influence of the Valar. Gil-Galad is an infamous version of this regards to his parentage. He was at various times, a descendant of Fëanor, the son of Finrod Felagund, the son of Fingon (the version the published Silmarillion went with), or a son of Orodeth. Christopher Tolkien has admited that given the tangle he should have left his parentage ambiguous. Celebrimbor was established as the grandson of Fëanor in The Lord of the Rings, but Tolkien apparently forgot this and came up with two new backstories in his later writings where he was either a Telerin silversmith who accompanied Celeborn from Aman or a Sindar descendant of Daeron. Often repeated is some variant of: "Of this matter two things are said, the truth of which is known only to the Wise Ones who are gone . . . ." |
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The origin story for Strahd von Zarovich, the Ravenloft setting's most iconic villain, has been recounted in two novels, four to six adventures (depending on whether or not updates count), and dozens of fragmentary anecdotes throughout the product line. Not only do they contradict one another in numerous details, but it's openly acknowledged that many such accounts are propaganda and that Strahd himself probably doesn't remember (or want to remember) the truth anymore. Plus, there's a completely separate and irreconcilable version of Strahd in Ravenloft II: The House on Gryphon Hill that even the publishers wrote off as a Riddle for the Ages. | |
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Timon's and Pumbaa's pasts are different between The Lion King 1 ½ and Timon & Pumbaa. The former is likely the canon interpretation as it is more in-line with the films compared to the Denser and Wackier series. | |
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And the Uratha have so many tales of lost Pangaea it's not worth sorting here. | |
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Multiple-Choice Past | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_b24d189d | comment |
Zelazny's Lord of Light mentions a woman who was Sam's "mother or daughter or wife, or perhaps all three," which seems tricky even with reincarnation. However, this turns out to be foreshadowing of the fact that the same woman, in three different bodies, may have ended up being all three to Yama. As Durga, she was of the correct generation to be Yama's mother; as Kali, she was Yama's wife; and, at the end, as the mentally damaged Murga, she is his adopted daughter. | |
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On Invader Zim, Ms. Bitters gives multiple back stories, such as imploding in a spaceship when she was a child and being a fairy princess in a magical forest (before running into a bug zapper). According to Word of God, however, she's always been in the same place she is now; the "skool" was actually built around her. | |
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Scooby-Doo: When did Shaggy get Scooby? In A Pup Named Scooby-Doo, it was apparently when the former was about ten or eleven, though one episode showed Shaggy as a baby with a similar-looking dog (though that possibly wasn't Scooby). In the movie, he was still a teen when he adopted Scooby, but in What's New, Scooby-Doo?, Scooby is shown when Velma was five (and so Shaggy would've been about seven). Scooby also has a multiple choice past regarding his name. In SCOOB!, Shaggy named him after Scooby Snacks, but The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo claims he was named after the noise he made when he was a puppy. |
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The Muppets Take Manhattan establishes that Kermit, Fozzie, Miss Piggy, Rowlf, Gonzo, Camilla, Scooter, Dr. Teeth, Floyd, Zoot, Animal and Janice went to the same college and aspired to put on a Broadway show shortly after they graduated. | |
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Multiple-Choice Past / int_b712435c | comment |
Parker from Leverage has had several flashbacks to her past, which appear to all be true, but are somewhat contradictory: the first episode shows Parker, age 9 or so, running away from home after blowing up her foster parents after they yelled at her for stealing, another episode indicates that she was raised as an orphan, and another revealed she had a younger brother who was killed in an accident when she was twelve. All of these can be rationalized by her having one or more foster families, but it's still confusing. | |
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SpongeBob SquarePants mostly has Negative Continuity with the occasional character return or Continuity Nod, so unsurprisingly it runs into this. Details such as the origin of the Krusty Krab, Patrick's family background, and how Sandy came to Bikini Bottom will vary from episode to episode. The most notable example is the relationship between Mr. Krabs and Plankton. Though earlier episodes had implied that they met as adults and were rivals from the onset, "Friend or Foe" later Retconned this to having met as kids and been friends until an argument over the formula split them apart. This version of events then became one of the few things set in stone whenever the topic came up in future episodes. There are also many versions on how Mr. Krabs got the Krabby Patty Secret Formula: one has him tell it was an old Krabs family recipe, the other as passed to him from his grandmother, an entire episode showing that his then-friend-now-enemy accidentally made it, and so on and so forth... |
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Warhammer 40,000: The God-Emperor has had a number of official backstories over the years. Originally he was created by a group of incredibly powerful shamans in the year 8,000 BC. Newer versions keep the 8,000 BC date but drop the shamans. Then there's the possibility that the Emperor was actually born in the Age of Strife (26,000 AD or so). The current backstory, and Horus Heresy series of novels, mention all of the above (with the second being what he told Horus), but have him intentionally obscuring the issue even before ten thousand years of conflicting dogma. Primarch Alpharius as befitting to a character that thrives on secrecy and mind-games has five different origin stories. All of them are lies, but all have a grain of truth... Or so we are told. He also has three stories of his death, and no one knows which (if any) of them is true. It's made more complicated by the fact that he has a Backup Twin, whose fate is similarly mysterious, and thousands of body doubles. As a means of explaining some of the changes that the C'tan have gone through over the course of the various editions of the game, the 8th Edition Codex: Necrons mentions that the in-universe knowledge of the C'tan is often fragmentary and contradictory, with even the records held by the Aeldari in the Black Library, on Ulthwé and on Alaitoc being unable to agree on hard facts. Nobody knows where the Legion of the Damned comes from, but in-universe, the prevailing theory is that they are the remains of the Fire Hawks Chapter, who were declared lost in the Warp in 983.M41, with the Bell of Lost Souls being rung a thousand times for them. Sightings of the Legion stretch back to before the Fire Hawks vanished, but since time does not necessarily flow in a linear fashion in the Warp, this is not proof against the Legion being the Fire Hawks. |
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Every story about Gruad Greyface in Illuminatus! agrees that he was a significant figure in ancient Atlantis, but very few agree about what he did there. Depending on who's telling the story, he could have been a high priest who invented human sacrifice or the first bureaucrat to invent tyranny. Less sinister portrayals state he was a great scientist who tried to spread the light of knowledge. He also may have founded the Illuminati, may have personally caused the destruction of Atlantis, and may either have been friends with the more-sympathetically remembered Lilith Velkor or ordered her execution. The Dealy Lama, who asserts he is Gruad surviving to the modern day, says he created most of these stories himself and the truth is fairly mundane, but taking anyone's claims at face value in this book is unwise. | |
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Warhammer: The origins of Voland, the leader of a notorious mercenary company, are the subject of wild theorizing, due in large part to him keeping a tight lid on the subject. The more sedate speculations assume him to be a disgraced noble from the Empire, some believe him to be the Emperor's bastard son, and the wilder theories include one where he's the child of the Fay Enchantress of Bretonnia and a one-pig named Eric. There are two conflicting accounts of the Amazons' origins, both of which have issues. One, presented in White Dwarf 307, has it that they were favored servants of the Old Ones, created to be their undying servants and left behind to guard the sacred places when Chaos came and the Old Ones vanished. This version conflicts with the Lizardmen's claims to the same status, which are backed by their eldest members having personal memories of this origin. The other, also from White Dwarf as well as the Lizardmen 5th Edition codex, has them as a cadre of Norse warrior women who left Skeggi behind over an ideological conflict with the Norse men, who wanted them to Stay in the Kitchen, and settled the Amaxon river, where they took to using jungle drugs to extend their lifespans and armed themselves with stolen Lizardman artifacts. This fails to account for there being encounters with the Amazons recorded long before Skeggi existed. One possible solution claims that the Skeggi women were not the original Amazons, but were instead inducted into the preexisting Amazon culture to bolster its fading numbers. |
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Rotted Capes, probably unintentionally, has some of this in its backstory. It's generally consistent that the turning point in the zombie apocalypse was when the setting's main hero team, the Protectors, were overrun by the entire audience of hundreds of newly-turned undead at an outbreak in a music hall. In the story text at the beginning of the book, they were defeated because of a surprise attack from the Titan, basically the setting's equivalent to Superman, because he'd become an evil zombie. Other tellings in the same book, including the version on Titan's own character sheet, say it was the other way around, where the Protectors being zombified was what led to Titan's own transformation to the undead, because before then there weren't zombies powerful enough to hurt Titan and make him vulnerable to the bite-transmitted virus. | |
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In Sonic X, Maria's death changes every time. In episode 36 Maria is shot while running in the halls and survives to give Shadow a speech but episode 38 shows Maria lying on the floor already shot and then delivering the speech. Episode 37 has a completely different flashback, from the POV of Maria's killer, that shows Maria was shot right as she sent Shadow down to Earth (and with no dramatic speech either). The room also differs in each flashback. This is all chalked down to Shadow's memory being tampered with and his memory just being unclear after 50 years in stasis. | |
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Sonic X | hasFeature |
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Multiple-Choice Past / int_c1d0f909 | comment |
Suicide Squad's confused chronology, caused by the film's extensive re-edits, leads to Harley having multiple origins to her madness. She has a scene where the Joker (consensually) fries her brain with electroshock machinery, a scene where Harley murders a man to prove her love to the Joker, and a highly symbolic scene where the Joker 'baptises' her in a vat of acid, bleaching her hair. All of these are presented with the camera emphasis associated with a Start of Darkness. | |
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Suicide Squad (2016) | hasFeature |
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Multiple-Choice Past / int_c43df4d8 | comment |
Doctor Who: The Doctor has multiple conflicting backstories, due in part to the evolving nature of the show. They might be from the 49th century ("An Unearthly Child" pilot), they might be a child born into privilege ("The Deadly Assassin") or from apparent poverty ("Listen"), they might have learned spiritual lessons from Time Lord hermits on the hill where they lived ("The Time Monster") or have been raised in the metropolis of the Capitol ("Invasion of Time"), have been woven as a young adult on a genetic loom, incorporating the biodata of the Other, an enigmatic Gallifreyan founding figure ("Lungbarrow") or been born half-human (the TV Movie), they might have had multiple incarnations before the First Doctor ("The Brain of Morbius", "Cold Fusion"), might have abandoned their family ("An Unearthly Child") or have some sort of relationship with their mother ("The End of Time"), might have built the TARDIS themself ("The Chase") or stolen it ("The War Games"), and their madness might originate from a childhood visit from Clara ("Listen"), staring into the Time Vortex as a child ("Utopia") or political issues forcing them to escape, with the time travel itself causing their madness along the way (audio drama "The Beginning" and the Gallifrey series). They could also be an adopted being possibly from another universe known as "The Timeless Child" who was used as the source of the early Gallifreyans' ability to regenerate, enabling them to become the Time Lords, and may have lived enough lives for all of these backstories to be true without them even knowing it entirely. ("The Timeless Children"). Sometimes they even have a Multiple Choice Future where they enounter what might be later regenerations (besides the ones that actually are), further evidenced with the Shrouded in Myth bi-generation process allowing more than one present version of them to co-exist in separate bodies ("The Giggle"). Some of these are reconcilable, others aren't, and overall the show doesn't care about nailing the character down like that, as it's not really the point. Then there are the ones from the Sixties when the Doctor being a Time Lord hadn't been established yet, and which suggest rather different takes on their people - they might be something disguised as an Earth creature ("The Daleks' Master Plan"), they might be more than human due to too much time travel ("The Evil of the Daleks"), their regeneration might be a property of the TARDIS rather than an innate ability ("The Power of the Daleks"), etc. There's also the "all of the above" option: "Unnatural History" proposes that the Doctor has multiple pasts in-universe as their timeline changes behind them, observing that trying to establish a single consistent origin isn't really what matters about them, they're not something to be contained like that, indeed perhaps they enjoy that they can't be easily figured out. For a short time in the Eighth Doctor Adventures there were two versions of the Third Doctor's regeneration into the Fourth (the Reset Button eventually got hit, restoring the original regeneration). Susan, the Doctor's granddaughter, receives this to a lesser extent, primarily as a result of expanded universe stories desexualising Gallifrey/the Doctor — if she isn't the Doctor's granddaughter, then she might be the Other's granddaughter, and thus the Doctor's via reincarnation ("Lungbarrow"), an orphaned descendant of Rassilon ("Birth of a Renegade"), the daughter of a Time Lord President ("A Brief History of Time Lords"), or perhaps the Doctor's granddaughter from a previous regeneration cycle ("Cold Fusion"). Doctor Who has explained away the creation of the Daleks in four different ways. Once in their debut story "The Daleks" (which didn't actually show it), a second time in a spin-off comic The Dalek Chronicles (which didn't contradict the first origin story), a third time in the short story We Are The Daleks! written by Terry Nation (which claimed that the Daleks were a future offshoot of humanity brought into existence early by Ancient Astronauts who transplanted them to another planet… yeah, everybody ignores that one) and finally in "Genesis of the Daleks".Terry Nation wrote a book in the late '80s that reconciled "The Daleks" with "Genesis of the Daleks." Basically, the Daleks in "The Daleks" were a prototype Davros made before "Genesis of the Daleks." Their city was an experiment to see if Daleks could function autonomously. After he left them alone and got buried in rubble in the Kaled/Thal genocide, those Daleks wrote Davros out of their official history, preferring to ignore the fact that an "inferior" being had created them. The series explained in "The Three Doctors" that Omega created the Time Lords by creating a black hole artificially. "The Deadly Assassin" says Rassilon did it. Later stories have reconciled the two explanations (Rassilon and Omega were partners; Omega did the actual testing and got sucked into the black hole, Rassilon brought home the results). Averted in New Who with the Cybermen: an alternative origin story, in which the Cybermen are invented on Earth by a wealthy human attempting to prevent his own death, is set in an alternate universe. The Mondas Cybermen don't show up until 2010 (not counting the museum piece in "Dalek"). In the 2017 series finale, the Doctor claims the various origins of the Cybermen across the show's media are actually a case of "parallel evolution". They're all true, as the Cybermen will come into being wherever the right technology exists. The Expanded Universe proposes two Mondasian origins for the Cybermen: Alan Barnes's Doctor Who Magazine backup strip "The Cybermen" has them beginning as cyber-augmented ape servants of Mondas's native Silurians, while Marc Platt's Big Finish Doctor Who audio "Spare Parts" has Mondas's native humans transform themselves into Cybermen in order to survive. In author commentary, Barnes has suggested it's possible that Cyber-civilisation has risen and fallen on Mondas multiple times, including "The Cybermen", "Spare Parts", and a scenario resembling Gerry Davis's unmade TV proposal "Genesis of the Cybermen". Amy Pond complains to the Doctor in the short "Good Night" that she can remember two different pasts, one in which she was raised by her aunt and had "never had parents," and another in which she'd "always had parents" who raised her. Unusually, the Doctor points out, and Amy agrees, that it's all fine, that there's no problem caused by having two incompatible pasts — although Amy feels like there should be. She is, in fact, remembering an alternate timeline that actually happened, but then the entire universe got rebooted. |
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In Changeling: The Lost, for example, there are several possible reasons for why the Gentry may kidnap humans and how the True Fae come to be: Their existence in Arcadia was actually totally devoid of emotion or nuance until they experienced the Glamour from human proximity, Or they're actually constructs of wild magic and chaotic emotions, and exposure to humans gave them sentience, OR they're actually what remains of the mages who climbed the Celestial Ladder and entered the Supernal Realm, but their imperfect human desires ran amok and destroyed their humanity. Or they're latecomers to Arcadia of unknown origin, and will one day leave. Even if one (or more) of the above are true, it didn't explain how there could be so many of the True Fae until you read the supplement book that says that Changelings who reach Wyrd 10 and Clarity 0 are likely to become True Fae themselves. |
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Multiple-Choice Past / int_c51cb60a | |
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Multiple-Choice Past | |
Multiple-Choice Past / int_c5eaa1a9 | comment |
The Beetlejuice animated series hasn't been consistent on whether Beetlejuice used to live as a human and ended up an inhabitant of the Neitherworld after dying or was born undead and lived his whole life there. | |
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Various authors have taken up the stories of Conan the Cimmerian since Robert E. Howard died. ("Barbarian" is a movie thing.) Some, such as Robert Jordan, have tried to remain consistent to the relatively vague timeline; others... not so much. | |
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Multiple-Choice Past / int_c7912cea | comment |
On Jimmy Two-Shoes, Lucius VII froze his father, Lucius VI, making him a psuedo Self-Made Orphan. Exactly how always varies. At first it was because they had a heated argument, then because Lucius VI lost a bet, then because Lucius VII's talking bird told him to. | |
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There are various versions of *NSYNC's origin story. Chris Kirkpatrick being the founding member and Lance Bass being the last to join is indisputable, but stories as to how Chris first came into contact with Pearlman or how Chris and Justin Timberlake knew each other vary. According to Lance's memoir and Backstreet Boys member Howie Dorough, Chris met Pearlman through Dorough, who attended college with Kirkpatrick. There have also been stories of Chris forming NSYNC after not making the Backstreet lineup, which Chris has refuted. The "official" story as told in VH1's Driven series is that Pearlman approached Chris after seeing him perform with The Hollywood Hi-Tones. Pearlman also claimed JC Chasez had once worked for him as a personal assistant. The common narrative states Justin was the second member to be recruited, and then JC, followed by Joey Fatone. However, in the *N The Mix video, Justin also acknowledges JC and Chris having previously known one another through Chris's job at Universal Studios. |
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Dragon Ball: The backstory of the Saiyan race was uncertain and contradictory for some time. Were they native to Planet Plant (later renamed Vegeta) or did they travel there from somewhere else? Did they coexist with the Tuffles for a long time or did war break out between the two races immediately? What provoked said war: King Vegeta's ambitions to rule the planet, or Tuffles treating Saiyans as lesser beings? Some of these questions would be answered in time; for example, it's now known that the Saiyans were originally from a planet called Sadala, but its destruction in a civil war forced the survivors to seek a new homeworld. The explanation for the destruction of Planet Vegeta also fell into this. Raditz told Goku that it was destroyed by an asteroid, while in the anime, King Kai claimed that another Guardian summoned a storm of space debris to destroy it as punishment for the Saiyans' warmongering ways. It's later revealed that neither of these claims are correct; in reality, Frieza blew it up out of fear that the Saiyans would eventually produce a fighter powerful enough to challenge him and made up the "asteroid" story to prevent the surviving Saiyans from turning against him, and it's implied that King Kai was lying to Goku to keep him from seeking a confrontation with Frieza. |
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For a short time in the Eighth Doctor Adventures there were two versions of the Third Doctor's regeneration into the Fourth (the Reset Button eventually got hit, restoring the original regeneration). | |
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In I'm Not Rappaport, Nat Moyer has told Midge Carter various stories regarding his past, including that he is an escaped Cuban terrorist named Hernando and that this claim is actually a cover story for his real job, which may or may not be espionage. | |
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In Nomine: Alaemon, the Prince of Secrets, has gone through a great deal of work in obscuring his past, which is a subject of guesswork and confusion in-universe and out. Superiors: Rogues to Riches presents three possible and mutually exclusive origin stories for him — a Fallen Mercurian once in Litheroy's service, who now seeks to undo the work of the Archangel of Revelation; a former Balseraph of the Game sent to capture the real Alaemon, who has been pretending to be his mark to hide the fact that he let him get killed; and an extremely deep-cover agent for Heaven — each of which would explain why his life is ruled by secrets and paranoia. Even his Superior when he was a common demon isn't certain — he likely worked for Asmodeus, but it might just as well have been Malphas or Kronos. | |
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Multiple-Choice Past / int_d3c800ed | comment |
In Sonic X: Dark Chaos, when Chris asks where Eric the Hedgehog comes from, Knuckles shrugs and says that Eric has a different (and "crazier") story every single time he's asked the question, so Sonic and friends gave up trying. Turns out every single one of them is true - not that Eric knows it, since he's pretty much insane. | |
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Multiple-Choice Past / int_d4efb984 | comment |
The Golden Girls tended to have extended families that varied over the years. Blanche seemed especially vulnerable to this. She was the middle of three sisters, then a gay brother appeared. She had three sons and a daughter, but two different daughters were named during the show's run. It is also unclear whether or not she was faithful to her husband George — one episode says yes, another says no. And don't anyone ask her age. Sophia also liked to make up preposterous stories about her past ("Picture it..."). These were played for laughs, usually inserting herself into trysts and feuds with famous people, and were (mostly?) made up. | |
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In Codename: Kids Next Door, Father's original backstory (an Ancient Conspiracy that Numbuh One had figured out and told his class (to their disbelief) instead of a report on the Declaration of Independence) had him as Mr. Wigglestein, the first adult — adults being the creation of kids themselves — to employ discipline (by spanking a kid who refused to stop demanding him to play "Giddyup"/"Horsie"), leading to the exile of the adults to Cleveland. Operation: Z.E.R.O. retconned this, instead making him the cowardly, disgruntled brother of the eponymous legendary operative. He's also revealed to be Numbuh One's Evil Uncle (and by proxy, this makes Sector Z/The Delight Children from Down the Lane his adoptive cousins and Grandfather his actual grandfather), as Numbuh Zero is Numbuh One's Bumbling Dad after a case of Laser-Guided Amnesia. | |
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The Infinite Loops makes this trope kind of enforced: a part of the way the Loops work is that anything that wasn't explicitly stated in Baseline (i.e., a series' canon) is "Loop Variable", meaning it changes from one loop to the next; consequently, characters with a Mysterious Past will find that past being completely altered every Loop, which can be extremely disorienting for Awake Loopers. Cinder Fall was driven temporarily insane by having her past and motivations constantly changing, since her canon backstory wasn't revealed until eight-years into the show's run. Her fellow Remnant Loopers Ozpin, Torchwick, and Neo all suffered from this as well before their pasts "firmed up", but she was hit the hardest. | |
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The Infinite Loops / Fan Fic | hasFeature |
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In Warrior Cats, Rock's backstory/significance. Is he the Guardian of the Tunnels from the Ancients, the first Stoneteller, an immortal cursed to be unable to save the Clans from their fate, a ghost, the Keeper of the Prophecies, the Creator of The Three, or some combination of these things? Not even Word of God can decide. | |
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An additional universe-creation explanation was given in Soul Music. | |
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Soul Music | hasFeature |
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Subverted in Tsukihime: with each separate route, the minute-but-important details of Shiki's childhood appear to change or even be downright inconsistent with the other routes. Only after finishing all the routes can the actual backstory be inferred, by piecing together the revelations and details from each route (like a convoluted puzzle). | |
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In the League of Intergalactic Cosmic Champions, Tacoman had several different backstories, Mr. Absurd had two. | |
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Winslow in Prickly City rips off The Bible, Spider-Man, and The Godfather in telling Carmen his past. | |
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In The Thirteenth Tale, one of the main characters is an author who tells a different life story every time she's interviewed. It's implied that she has difficulty breaking this habit, even when she starts out with the intention of telling the truth. | |
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The game's 4th Edition default setting Nentir Vale does this with pretty much all of the deities. Fairly justified; they've been around for so long that the details of their origins are wrapped up in legends. And then there's the Raven Queen. Depending on what you look at, she's a True Neutral goddess of death as part of the life cycle, an evil former consort of Nerull who overthrew him to gain his title as God of the Dead and now plots to destroy the other Gods so she can gain that title that she believes is rightfully hers rather than her lesser title of Goddess of Death, or a selfish and power-hungry goddess that epitomizes the reason True Neutral is now Unaligned. |
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According to To Boldly Flee, Insano and Spoony have always been separate people, and Spoony's ability to transform into Insano in Kickassia was a temporal anomaly retroactively caused by the Plot Hole. Of course, this is just yet another alternate backstory. | |
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Star Wars Legends has two separate origins for General Grevious. The original origin was that he was Kaleesh warlord who was rebuilt as a cyborg by the Separatist after a shuttle crash and agreed to lead the Separatist droid army in exchange for his homeworld's protection against attacks by the Kaleesh Arch-Enemy the Huk and hated the Jedi due to Separatist brain tampering and their refusal to help his people. However, George Lucas instead viewed Grevious as a Jedi-wannabe who wasn't force-sensitive and gradually added cybernetic components to improve himself. Having respect for the Expanded Universe, Dave Filoni had the Star Wars: The Clone Wars episode "Lair Of Grevious" only hint at the latter origin keeping things ambiguous. This technique was also done in The Essential Guide To Warfare where the author had two in-universe historians arguing over the two origins. The Offical Star Wars Fact File would later make a reference to Grevious surviving an assassination attempt indicating the original origin is the canon one again. On a more minor note is the Death Star or more specifically who created it. Was it Raith Sinear? Was it Tarkin? Was it the Geonosians? Or was it Bevel Lemelisk? Eventually the novel Death Star was released to sort things out. Short Answer, the creator was all of the above. Long Answer, the Death Star was a merger of two different concepts. The first was for a mobile planetoid (with a superlaser) made by Sinear that Tarkin presented to Palpatine as his own concept. The second was for an ultimate weapon developed by the Geonosians for Count Dooku. The Geos brought Lemelisk to fix some design problems and he would go on help built the final product. Similarly there were two conflicting origins for the design of the Battle Droids in the Prequels. Most supplementary material released around the time of The Phantom Menace claimed they were based on skeletons of the Neimoidians with the heads being specifically a result of their skulls changing shape after they die due to their Bizarre Alien Biology. However, Attack of the Clones clearly shows they actually based on their Geonosian builders. The Essential Guide To Warfare decided to Take a Third Option saying that they were modeled after the Geonosians, but the Neimoidian skull idea was also true and what they thought was the inspiration. |
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Winnie the Pooh: The intro claims that the reason Edward Bear is nicknamed "Winnie-the-Pooh" is because he was (nick)named after a bear named Winnie and a swan named Pooh, which was the true explanation of how Christopher Robin Milne's teddy bear got his name But the story "Winnie the Pooh and Some Bees" claims that he was called Pooh due to the noise he made when he blew flies off his nose. Then, in My Friends Tigger & Pooh, Rabbit claims that "pooh bears" are a species of bear, which Pooh himself also hints at when he sings "...and I'm a pooh bear" in The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. | |
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Winnie the Pooh | hasFeature |
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In Mobile Suit Gundam, there's an episode where Amuro returns to his hometown and reunites with his mother. According to a supplementary book, said hometown is located in the San'in Region of Japan. However, when the compilation movies changed the course of the White Base, it was moved to Prince Rupert, Canada instead. In the Alternate Continuity manga Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin, the course of White Base was changed yet again, putting Amuro's hometown in Rosarito, Mexico. To add to the confusion, the manga's author Yoshizaku Yasuhiko stated in an interview that Amuro was actually born in Tottori Prefecture, Japan. |
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Several of the Mighty Mouse theatrical shorts involved giving him an origin of some sort, and these varied greatly. | |
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Mighty Mouse | hasFeature |
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And then there's Atlantis. Atlantis could have been a real ancient city ruled by mages, or it could be an allegory made real by the minds of Awakened souls, or it could be a far-future event whose collapse was felt eons in the past. The sourcebook mentions that some members of the Free Council believe Atlantis is a lie that the other factions made up to justify their dominance. | |
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The explanation for the destruction of Planet Vegeta also fell into this. Raditz told Goku that it was destroyed by an asteroid, while in the anime, King Kai claimed that another Guardian summoned a storm of space debris to destroy it as punishment for the Saiyans' warmongering ways. It's later revealed that neither of these claims are correct; in reality, Frieza blew it up out of fear that the Saiyans would eventually produce a fighter powerful enough to challenge him and made up the "asteroid" story to prevent the surviving Saiyans from turning against him, and it's implied that King Kai was lying to Goku to keep him from seeking a confrontation with Frieza. | |
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Multiple-Choice Past | |
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Marble Hornets season two features the protagonist doing this (badly). Jay goes through three contradictory stories explaining his presence in the hotel to Jessica, much to her confusion, and, eventually, disbelief. The real answer, of course, is that he doesn't remember. And Jessica doesn't remember how she got there either. | |
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An in-show version in the Sanctuary episode "Hero" — a comics-loving ordinary citizen discovers a suit which gives him superpowers. When Magnus' crew capture him, he feeds Will a made-up origin that's a hodge-podge of The Juggernaut, The Phantom and Green Arrow. Will buys it, until his comic-book loving friend Henry tells him. | |
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New World of Darkness: Multiple explanations are given for several aspects of the game world so that the Storyteller may pick and choose which ones she likes. In Changeling: The Lost, for example, there are several possible reasons for why the Gentry may kidnap humans and how the True Fae come to be: Their existence in Arcadia was actually totally devoid of emotion or nuance until they experienced the Glamour from human proximity, Or they're actually constructs of wild magic and chaotic emotions, and exposure to humans gave them sentience, OR they're actually what remains of the mages who climbed the Celestial Ladder and entered the Supernal Realm, but their imperfect human desires ran amok and destroyed their humanity. Or they're latecomers to Arcadia of unknown origin, and will one day leave. Even if one (or more) of the above are true, it didn't explain how there could be so many of the True Fae until you read the supplement book that says that Changelings who reach Wyrd 10 and Clarity 0 are likely to become True Fae themselves. So far, we have two separate explanations for The Tunguska Event: a Promethean tried to summon an arch-qashmal, or one of the Knights of St. George tried to summon a Faceless Angel. Or that those are actually two versions of the same story... And then there's Atlantis. Atlantis could have been a real ancient city ruled by mages, or it could be an allegory made real by the minds of Awakened souls, or it could be a far-future event whose collapse was felt eons in the past. The sourcebook mentions that some members of the Free Council believe Atlantis is a lie that the other factions made up to justify their dominance. And the Uratha have so many tales of lost Pangaea it's not worth sorting here. Also, in contrast with the Old World of Darkness, where they had a defined and known origin, vampires in the New World of Darkness have long forgotten exactly how they came to be, meaning each faction has its own ideas of their origin. (Indeed, there's a fair case to be made that vampires have multiple origins.) Was the first Frankenstein created by Victor Frankenstein, as in the original novel, or was he created by Mary Shelley and John Polidori from the remains of the last of the previous choler-aspected Lineage, the Amirani? Dark Eras Companion explicitly brings up this trope in a sidebar, declaring it's up to the Storyteller to decide the circumstances around the Frankensteins' creation. On a similar note, did the first Zeka start being created in 1945, beginning with the Trinity bomb test, or did they originate before that? |
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This was done intentionally on Green Acres. Each season featured an episode in which Oliver and/or Lisa tell the story of how they met, but it's always a different story. | |
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MacGyver presented two completely different versions of the title character's original meeting with Pete Thornton: a first-season version told in passing to give the characters' relationship a quick backstory and sense of long-term depth, and a full-blown (and totally incompatible) second-season version, told in flashbacks, that formed the focus of an entire episode (Partners). The underlying reason was that the show had a new producer, the concept had been overhauled and Mac's backstory was rewritten to eliminate his association with the military. The retcon also added a retroactive Arch-Nemesis, Murdoc. | |
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The Muppet Movie establishes that Kermit went on a journey to Hollywood in dreams of becoming a star, meeting Fozzie and the others along the way. | |
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The Batman version of Killer Croc, who is either a former carnival freak, government experiment, or the result of voodoo. When D.A.V.E. is asked what his villainous backstory is, he begins rattling out a bunch of mutually exclusive backstories taken from various supervillains. He soon realizes that he's a computer program only a couple days old. |
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Inverted at the end of Really? Really! with Asa's hair length. Kaede asks whether Rin prefers Asa's hair short or long and allows you to choose which one you prefer. A few in-game minutes later, Asa appears with the hair length that was chosen, despite being nowhere near Rin and Kaede when the answer was chosen. | |
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On one episode of I Love Lucy, Lucy casually mentions that she met Ricky on a blind date. Later, the first episode of The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour gives an extended depiction of how they first met, and it's a totally different story. | |
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I Love Lucy | hasFeature |
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Multiple-Choice Past / int_f3818d0a | comment |
Invoked by Moomin Papa in The Moomins. He was found in a newspaper basket, but was embarrassed about it in his youth and so lied to his friends that he was found in a basket of leaves or a bowl of flowers. | |
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Hiruma from Eyeshield 21 is seen pulling this during a flashback chapter. Is his father a shogi player, a doctor, or a white-collar criminal? Apparently, it depends on what he feels like today. Eventually it is revealed he was an amateur chess champion. | |
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Chef Horst in Ratatouille has served a prison sentence, but nobody knows why because every time someone asks, he gives a different explanation ("I defrauded a major corporation." / "I robbed the second-largest bank in France using only a ballpoint pen."), none exactly plausible ("I created a hole in the ozone over Avignon.") and probably none true either ("I killed a man. With this thumb"). The thumb story comes back when he scares off former-Chef Skinner with it... with Skinner somehow being thrown out of the kitchen. There might be some truth in that one. | |
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Friends: Done very subtly with Chandler. You get the basics of childhood (his mother was an erotic novelist, his father was a gay drag queen, they divorced when he was nine and sent him to boarding school) but what's confusing is their treatment of him. On one hand he talks about how his dad was too enthusiastic coming to all his swim meets, and you see his mom saying on national television that she loves him. Yet he also recounts how they preferred his imaginary friend to him, abandoned him on his first parents' day and were callous enough to announce their break up during Thanksgiving dinner. It's not clear if they were just Amazingly Embarrassing Parents who made poor decisions or uninterested and put him through Parental Neglect or full out emotionally Abusive Parents. | |
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In the 2017 annual, the Ghostbusters suggest multiple theories, some of which are references to the above: a chef at the hotel who suffered a fatal heart attack on the job, a vagrant, an Anthropomorphic Personification of gluttony summoned by the Gozerian cult, and Venkman's gag suggestion he was a king. | |
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The MLP Loops: As a result of the botched nature of her self-awakening, Lyra gets several sets of contradictory Loop memories every time she Loops in. She eventually solves this by creating split personalities to handle her seperate backstories. | |
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The MLP Loops / Fan Fic | hasFeature |
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In CR's overview of Insano, he theorizes that there's really three of them — one a time-travel duplicate generated by Time Compression who violently tries to kill Spoony, one a clone made by Linkara who lives with Spoony and is more friendly, and the alternate personality. He finishes by guessing that Original Spoony also had an Insano persona, and thus there could be a fourth, Black Lantern Insano as well. | |
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On Justified: City Primeval, Clement Mansell and Sandy Stanton have identified the Albanian Skender Lulgjuraj as a potential mark to steal money from. In "Backstabbers," Clement tells Skender that if his mother hadn't been carried away by a tornado, they'd be having this meeting in Lawton, Oklahoma. When Sandy asks how he's never told him this, he says it was a day like any other in which his mother was slaving away, hanging wash on the line, a pot on the stove inside. Then the wind picked up and the sky turned dark and ugly. They next thing they knew, she was above the fruited plain, teams of hounds out searching for her, but never found a trace. Later on in the season, in "The Smoking Gun," he tells his attorney Carolyn Wilder the same story, except in this version, he says his mother was indisposed because this is what people do, they let you down. He waited for the man in her bed to leave, not "the first asshole from Glenn Pool to be in her bed, but he was the last." After his car disappeared down the dirt road, he took his .22 and shot his mother in the throat because the last thing he wanted her to see before he told her to close her eyes tight and pulled the trigger was her son's face. He then tells Carolyn that maybe this story is just bull and that a tornado carried her away. Given everything else seen of him in the series, though, he probably did actually kill her. | |
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Transformers: Given that continuity in Transformers is, well, pretty tangled, Multiple Choice Canon is more of a rule rather than an exception, meaning aspects like the origins of the Transformer race differ between franchises and even series within said franchises (e.g. the G1 cartoon claims the Quintessons made the Transformers, while the concurrent Marvel comic established the godlike Primus as their creator). Then you have characters like Unicron. Originally, he was a random planet-eating Transformer with no backstory (until the cartoon claimed he was made by an ancient space monkey). Then Simon Furman's run on the The Transformers (Marvel) turned him into a godlike Satanic archetype opposed by a being named Primus; this interpretation caught on more in later adaptations than the original Primacron story. However, Unicron (as well as a few other legendary figures) was once established as a "multiversal singularity", which basically means that every depiction of him across the franchise was the same individual... before the concept was done away with almost a decade later and every iteration of him became a different individual with a different past. Does your brain hurt yet? The Dinobots are also known for various origins on if they where pre-existing Autobots or not and how they got their namesake Dinosaur modes. The original cartoon explained they were built by Wheeljack and Ratchet based on fossils found in the Autobot base. The Marvel Comics said they were an existing subgroup of Autobots who were on the Ark and were given their Dinosaur modes by the ship's computer to fight Shockwave in the Savage Land note Yes, that Savage Land - Marvel Comics was known to perform Canon Welding with their licensed works at the time. with the dinosaurs inspiring their beast modes. GI Joe Vs The Transformers Marvel has the Dinobots being Autobots being sent back in time and given their Dinosaur modes to fit into the past. Spotlight: Shockwave reveals the Dynobots were Autobots with a personal grudge against the titular Decepticon scientist who tracked him down to prehistoric Earth and adopted Dinosaur modes to protect from the Energon Radiation. That's just for the G1 incarnations of the group. The Beast Machines toyline had the Dinobots as a group of Maximals reformatted by The Oracle with their Dinosaur modes coming from the fact The Oracle used Dinobot's spark. Transformers: Animated had them as Dinosaur animatronics turned into attack drones by Megatron then accidentally becoming self-aware thanks to the Allspark Key. Transformers: Fall of Cybertron had them be Autobots who were captured and given their Dinosaur modes by Shockwave based on his observations of prehistoric Earth. Transformers: Age of Extinction had them being the ancestors of modern Cybertronians who based their Alternative Modes on Earth's Dinosaurs. Transformers: Robots in Disguise (2015) had them being a subspecies of Tranformers who had the modes naturally similar to the Insecticons of Transformers: Prime. |
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The first three Muppet films gave completely irreconcilable versions of how the Muppets came together and became stars. (The first one has a Framing Story that calls it "approximately how it happened", and both it and the sequel reminds us all the way through that this is just a movie). The Muppet Movie establishes that Kermit went on a journey to Hollywood in dreams of becoming a star, meeting Fozzie and the others along the way. The Great Muppet Caper had Kermit and Fozzie portrayed as identical twin brothers working for a newspaper along with Gonzo and the three investigating the theft of jewels belonging to Lady Holiday. After the flight to England, Kermit meets Miss Piggy and is initially misled into thinking she is Lady Holiday, with the rest of the Muppet cast met at the Happiness Hotel. The Muppets Take Manhattan establishes that Kermit, Fozzie, Miss Piggy, Rowlf, Gonzo, Camilla, Scooter, Dr. Teeth, Floyd, Zoot, Animal and Janice went to the same college and aspired to put on a Broadway show shortly after they graduated. |
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The Doctor has multiple conflicting backstories, due in part to the evolving nature of the show. They might be from the 49th century ("An Unearthly Child" pilot), they might be a child born into privilege ("The Deadly Assassin") or from apparent poverty ("Listen"), they might have learned spiritual lessons from Time Lord hermits on the hill where they lived ("The Time Monster") or have been raised in the metropolis of the Capitol ("Invasion of Time"), have been woven as a young adult on a genetic loom, incorporating the biodata of the Other, an enigmatic Gallifreyan founding figure ("Lungbarrow") or been born half-human (the TV Movie), they might have had multiple incarnations before the First Doctor ("The Brain of Morbius", "Cold Fusion"), might have abandoned their family ("An Unearthly Child") or have some sort of relationship with their mother ("The End of Time"), might have built the TARDIS themself ("The Chase") or stolen it ("The War Games"), and their madness might originate from a childhood visit from Clara ("Listen"), staring into the Time Vortex as a child ("Utopia") or political issues forcing them to escape, with the time travel itself causing their madness along the way (audio drama "The Beginning" and the Gallifrey series). They could also be an adopted being possibly from another universe known as "The Timeless Child" who was used as the source of the early Gallifreyans' ability to regenerate, enabling them to become the Time Lords, and may have lived enough lives for all of these backstories to be true without them even knowing it entirely. ("The Timeless Children"). Sometimes they even have a Multiple Choice Future where they enounter what might be later regenerations (besides the ones that actually are), further evidenced with the Shrouded in Myth bi-generation process allowing more than one present version of them to co-exist in separate bodies ("The Giggle"). Some of these are reconcilable, others aren't, and overall the show doesn't care about nailing the character down like that, as it's not really the point. | |
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The Borg are described by Guinan in their debut episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation as having been expanding and assimilating for countless centuries, but she doesn't give anything more specific than this. Star Trek: Voyager says that the Borg's own memory of their beginning is fuzzy as well. The Star Trek Expanded Universe has produced many mutually contradictory origin stories for them: The Star Trek Encyclopedia and Star Trek: Legacy say that they were spawned by V'ger, while Star Trek: The Manga and the Star Trek: Destiny novel trilogy each tell of different alien species accidentally creating them as a means of survival. | |
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