>>40249
>>has to backpedal & retcon backstories to a later era to make up for it
The smart thing to do is just not acknowledge it and let the audience just roll with it. If I watch The Simpsons and I see that Bart was a baby when the finale of MASH was airing, I can understand that Bart is ten years old and the episode took place (with its framing device) in 1993, so when they flashed back to ten years ago it was 1983. An episode from a year later takes place in 1994, and I can accept that characters haven't aged a year just because a year has passed for me. This isn't hard to grasp, and it takes a very particular form of autism to be autistic enough to be bothered by it but not autistic enough to not be able to figure it out.
Also, I find it funny that people bring it up in reference to The Simpsons. I get it, because The Simpsons is popular, but it's also a show where the story doesn't matter very much. You don't have to worry about the fact that Grampa fought in WWI, then WWII, then WWII but he was only a baby who lied about his age, because it's just occasional jokes now and then. It would be a lot worse if it was a show that expected you to follow continuity. Like they did the episode in like 2009 where they flash back to the '90s, before Bart was born, and yes it's silly, but I don't see why people had to get up in arms about it. Good episode? No. But it's not hard to wrap your head around what they were doing.
On the other hand, you have comics where characters have backstories intricately tied with WWII, and they do expect you to actually appreciate that and think about it a lot. I appreciate that by the '90s they did actually start killing off a lot of the Justice Society and All-Star Squadron guys (really this started in the '70s and '80s), even if mostly the less popular ones. But then they tried to pull magic sci-fi shit to keep the popular ones alive. Then they had Alan Scott come out of the closet when he was literally 100 years old, in-universe. So yeah, would have been better to let him die back with Madame Fatale or whatever. Also it's even more fucked since they wanted others like Superman and Batman to still be young, but then that's a whole thing particular to DC being retarded.
>>40270
>>Simpsons has gone on for so long that Homer has been retconned into being born at the time Bart would have been when the series first aired.
If Bart was 10 when the first Simpsons short aired in 1987, then he'd be born in 1977. Homer's age has actually increased over time, he has technically aged, but he's always been in his 30s. Let's say he's 40 now (I haven't watched in over ten years, so maybe he's aged more, not that I want to count the new episodes). That would mean he was born in 1984. Current Homer was born at least 7 years after original Bart.
>>40295
Nobody does that because it's too autistic. You think it's simpler, but it's not. The simplest thing is to just not acknowledge it, or if you do ever acknowledge it, only rarely and jokingly. When you're dealing with a sitcom, especially a cartoon one that rarely relies on continuity, that makes sense. Drawing attention to small details, even in attempts to fix them, can often make things worse than just ignoring them.
To go back to my Justice Society example, what's really simpler? Alan Scott being de-aged by his magic ring, and by being trapped in alternate dimensions for millennia, and by fighting time travellers like Per Degaton, all to try to keep it "making sense" that he fought in WWII, or is it simpler just to have Superman, who started fighting crime "about 15 years ago" relative to whenever the current story takes place? Drawing attention to it makes it a lot more confusing in most cases.
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