In this week's episode, we take a look at the Continuity Lockout Syndrome that can sometimes happen with long series like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and how to avoid it.

This coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Shield of Deception, Book #4 in The Shield War series, (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store:

HALLOWEEN2025

The coupon code is valid through November 3, 2025. So if you need a new audiobook this fall, we've got you covered!

TRANSCRIPT

00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates

Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 274 of the Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is October 24th, 2025, and today we are talking about continuity lockout in long series and how to avoid that. Before we get to our main topic, we will start with Coupon of the Week and a progress update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects.

First up is Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code we'll get you 50% off the audiobook of Shield of Deception, Book #4 in The Shield War series (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store. And that coupon code is HALLOWEEN2025. As always, the coupon code and the link to my Payhip store will be available in the show notes and this coupon code is valid through November 3, 2025. So if you need new audiobook for this fall, we've got you covered.

Now for an update on my current writing and publishing projects. I'm pleased to report that as of this recording, Cloak of World, the 13th book in my Cloak Mage series, is now available and you can get it at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, Smashwords, and my own Payhip Store. It's already selling quite well and I've gotten several nice comments about it, so thank you everyone for that.

Now that Cloak of Worlds is out, my next main project will be Blade of Shadows, the second book in my Blades of Ruin epic fantasy series, and I am 18,000 words into that and I think probably on Monday, I will start full speed ahead with that. My secondary project will be the fifth Rivah book, which I am working on the outline today and tomorrow. Originally it was going to be called Elven-Assassin, but I think I'm going to change the title as I write the outline to Wizard-Assassin. If all goes well, Blade of Shadow should be out in November and Wizard-Assassin will be out in December for the final book of 2025.

In audiobook news, Brad Wills is currently recording Blade of Flames, which will be the first audiobook in that series and hopefully we'll have more news for that for you soon. And Hollis McCarthy, who you might remember we interviewed last week, is working on Cloak of Embers and that should hopefully be out before the end of the year, so that's what we're working on for audiobooks right now.

00:02:18 Avoiding Continuity Lockout in a Long Series: Lessons from the Marvel Cinematic Universe

Now onto our main topic this week: Avoiding Continuity Lockout in a Long Series: Lessons from The Marvel Cinematic Universe, as that is the most famous example of I think of continuity lockout available in the public eye right now.

Mild spoiler warning: although there aren't going to be any specific spoilers for movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I will talk broadly about the series and some of the major themes and trends in it. If you're extremely sensitive to spoilers or haven't seen Avengers Endgame yet, proceed with extreme caution.

Now over the course of a long series, there's a tendency for readership or viewership to drop off. Not everyone who starts a series will finish it. One of the reasons for that is called continuity lockout. What is continuity lockout? Continuity lockout describes when a series has reached a point where new readers or viewers can't understand what is happening, especially when the amount of older material in a series that's essential for understanding new plots becomes too much of a burden. It can also describe when casual fans of series begin to drop off and turn to other kinds of entertainment.

A good example of that from my own life is earlier this year the Marvel movie Thunderbolts came out and I thought that was a pretty good movie and I gave it an A in my movie roundup for the summer. Some relatives of mine went to see Thunderbolts and their reaction was, well, we didn't know who any of these people were, so we weren't sure what was happening, but it was a hot day and the air conditioning was nice. So while I'm glad they enjoyed the nice air conditioning, you can see the problem we are demonstrating because the main characters of Thunderbolts were Bucky Barnes-the Winter Soldier, Yelena, Red Guardian, the former Captain America (what was his name…John Walker?), Taskmaster, and Ghost. All of these people are introduced in previous Marvel projects, and if you didn't know who they were, it would be hard to connect with these characters.

Now, some series like Doctor Who and James Bond are designed to have new entry points every few years and don't take a lot of pains to keep consistent canon across the decades. For example, you think about how many different actors have played James Bond and all of Bond's various supporting characters like M and Q and Moneypenny. There tends to be a consistent canon within each iteration of James Bond, but then they start over with a new Bond. Now that Amazon is having Denis Villeneuve do the new Bond, no doubt we will have a completely new Bond continuity for the 21st century. And although a series like James Bond will have a lot of recurring characters, like as I said, M, Q, and Moneypenny, knowing their entire history beyond what's happening in the current production usually is not important for following the plot or a brief Google search will quickly explain what's needed.

Other series like Star Trek or Star Wars rely heavily on decades of established canon, even when starting a new series, making them intimidating to begin with. Another good example of this is when the Star Wars TV show Ahsoka came out in 2023, the creators were at pains to explain that, no, you don't need to see anything else to watch this and you just jump right in. In practice, however, a lot of news sites ran articles like "34 Essential Episodes of Star Wars Rebels To Watch Before You Watch Ahsoka", which kind of belies the point.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe (which we will refer to as MCU in this episode to save time) is certainly one of those series that relies heavily on older content to drive its plots. Like the many comic series it draws from, the MCU requires a great deal of prior knowledge from its viewers that in the later installments can start to feel like homework.

Now, how did continuity lockout happen in the Marvel Cinematic Universe? The people who initially enjoyed the first Ironman and Avengers movies will most likely find themselves very confused if they try to watch the latest Marvel movies without catching up first. The full MCU canon to date would take well over a week to watch at this point, assuming you did nothing else that week. The MCU is over 16 years old now and still producing new content at a fairly brisk pace, though it has slowed down a bit after the end of the peak streaming era when Disney was pushing them to make as many shows and movies as possible to draw subscribers to their Disney Plus streaming service. The multiverse arc of the last few years (with multiple alternate realities for the characters) has only added to viewer confusion. As longtime listeners might know, I am not a big fan of the multiverse as a storytelling concept.

There's also a debate about what content is official MCU since there are older shows from ABC and Netflix and movies filmed before Ironman, which increases that confusion. A good example of continuity lockout in the MCU was the 2023 movie The Marvels, which I thought was an enjoyable (if perfectly straightforward) science fiction flick that felt like it was something from the '70s (in a good way). But to fully know who all the characters are and to understand their abilities, the viewer would need at the minimum, to watch Captain Marvel, Avengers Endgame, the Ms. Marvel series, and the WandaVision series, and that is over 10 hours of content to watch as homework before watching a movie with characters that are fairly new to the MCU and a plot that is a one-off that doesn't tie into subsequent films. In the age of Disney Plus, access to the prior films and TV shows is easier than it would've been in the pre-streaming era, but it's still a major time commitment, especially for a film like The Marvels that did not have strong enough reviews to motivate viewers to make the trip to the theater. Additionally, streaming itself is getting more and more expensive, which in these troubled economic times can get to be something of a pinch.

I've found in my own writing career that people tend to be completionist and want to read everything in a series before they move on to the next one. And many people feel they have to rewatch movies or catch up on Disney Plus before they go see a Marvel movie in theaters, which makes the impulse to wait until the newest movie hits the streaming service instead of seeing it in theaters all the stronger.

Anecdotally, I know of many people who fell off watching the MCU movies after Endgame and never watched any of the Disney Plus series. I mean, logically that makes sense because if you saw Endgame, it felt like a very epic and cinematic end to the saga and the story's over, why tell more? The reasons they gave were because they didn't have Disney Plus, as I mentioned, because of cost. They didn't have time to rewatch the older movies before watching the new ones, or they found the newer movies confusing. The drop in viewership in