Broad Strokes is a concept regarding Canon where the writers pick and choose what elements of an older story they want to accept into a more recent story. It could be that the overall story is intact but the specific details are changed, or that the story is ignored but the details introduced within are still being worked with. This is most often used when parts of the official canon or even basic continuity cannot be reconciled as they stand.
Long-Runners whose Universe Bible has a progressive, "under-construction" aspect usually apply this. It assumes that viewers understand that there are mistakes in basic Canon, at least early on when the canon was still being defined. The exact degree to which this is used can vary: Sometimes it just ignores single lines that contradict later canon. Other times entire stories are declared Canon Discontinuity but still certain elements that influence the new story. This can even happen with a Continuity Reboot, usually because the base story is kept intact.
Usually, this is so people can ignore things. Maybe everything sucked for a while, a Story Arc would have been alright if it wasn't for that one incident, a character gets a bit ridiculous, etc.
At other times it is implied without being explicit. The TV show has a whole different cast from The Movie... yeah, we know they look different but just accept that they are the same people in The Movie. An Expanded Universe story hasn't ever been mentioned but it still could have happened. The adaptation doesn't explicitly contradict the primary Canon. The sequel game contains elements from many of the mutually-exclusive paths of its predecessor. Expect some guessing about how some of these things can possibly be reconciled.
Funnily enough, due to the way fandoms think and how some similar works leave things open ended, there are times when two shows that were never meant to be connected are glued together by the fans. The most extreme version of this can be assuming a character is a Time Lord.
Similar strategies are used involving straight adaptations in relation to the source material. Convoluted backstories usually don't amount to much with the needs of a standalone project, so ideas and characters are jettisoned or combined to make a more cohesive narrative that follows the original in spirit. Other times following the source too closely will just fall into the Continuity Snarl that already exists in the original, thus utilizing Broad Strokes is an element of a Pragmatic Adaptation.
On a more fundamental level, the use of this trope is important for the sake of maximum creative freedom. It is surprisingly easy to limit yourself when you never expect to go beyond a pilot episode or a standalone movie. Then when fleshing out a character you find that giving them a powerful story arc requires contradicting earlier backstory or behavior to make it work. See also Continuity Drift for more examples of early details getting modified later on.
Compare Fanon, which is about unofficial Canon or Alternative Character Interpretations, Loose Canon, which is about storylines that fit in the canon for all intents and purposes, but aren't explicitly stated to be so as they're meant to be experienced separatedly from the main story, and Schrödinger's Canon, for supposedly canonical adaptations and spinoffs that keep clashing with the primary work. See also Alternate Continuity (where an iteration of a given franchise is demonstrably set in a different continuity), Negative Continuity (where a series lacks a consistent canon to the extent that one installment contradicts what happened in another), Filler (inconsequential episodes of a series that otherwise follows arc-based storytelling), Comic-Book Time (where a series keeps its characters the same age in spite of lasting long enough that the characters would logically be much older than they are now), Depending on the Writer (where multiple writers contributing to the same series leads to discrepancies regarding a character's personality and interests in spite of the series installments being intended to take place in the same continuity), Literary Agent Hypothesis (speculation that a work is an interpretation of what really happened), Half-Remembered Homage (where a work is based on something, but the creator deliberately avoids revisiting their inspiration to ensure their own work remains distinguishable), Sequel Reset (where a sequel backpedals on the original story's ending), Soft Reboot (a series installment that looks like a new continuity, but is still a continuation of the original continuity), and The Stations of the Canon (where a work revisits iconic canon events). Fan Wank (where audiences try to think of explanations for the inconsistencies) is a common result of continuities with this attitude.
Example subpages:
Other examples:
- Supergirl: The Fastest Women Alive, a 2017 promotional Snickers comic, cannot fit into either the New Earth (1986-2011) or Prime Earth (2011-?) continuity, as Supergirl wears her 2016 outfit but still acts as a naivë newcomer, whereas Jesse -who hadn't yet been introduced to Prime Earth continuity- acts as her New Earth self, but is involved with A.R.G.U.S., who didn't exist on New Earth. Jesse was eventually restored in Doomsday Clock (2017) as part of JSA -instead of the JLA- under her Liberty Belle identity.
- Robot Trains: It's somewhat implied that at least parts of Season One happened as far as Season Two's continuity goes, when Kay explains in the premiere that he knew Duke and had bad past interactions with him. But considering that Duke's final interaction with Kay during Season One was helping him build the Intercontinental Railway that theoretically would've led from Train World to Rail World, and that his second-to-final interaction on screen was risking his life to give Kay a chance to absorb the Alpha Train's energy to defeat the virus once and for all, you'd think Kay and Duke would've parted on excellent terms if they parted at all. Unless something else happened after that offscreen that led to a falling-out between them, it doesn't quite make sense.
- Classical Mythology: A lot of stories accepted as true up into The Renaissance, with various heroes, kings and wars considered historical fact. Said heroes could no longer be the children of gods, and in general supernatural elements had to be dropped or recontextualized (for example, the pagan gods were really demons in disguise).
- Dino Attack RPG: This is how it treats the canon of various LEGO Themes, along with fan works such as Alpha Team: Mission Deep Freeze RPG, LEGO Island 3, and LMS. This is even how, in its later years, it treats its own early canon.
- JoJo's OC Tournament: Authors participating in an edition of JoJo's OC Tournament determine their characters' and teams' backstories and, with the organizers' approval, what happens between Matches and Rounds, whilst the hosts write out the overall setting and lore, the introduction and the intermissions of each Edition, as well as the lead-ups and conclusions of Matches. However, when it comes to what actually happens during the Matches isn't elaborated on beyond the implications of the aforementioned conclusions. As each author is judged on their character's strategy, with votes expressed over them determining a Match's winner, everyone acts like Matches play out following a combination of the contents of each strategy most compatible with the result, unless specifically stated otherwise.
- Mahou MUSH takes this approach to adapting canon plotlines to the game, the setting of which is an amalgamation of a number of magical girl shows incorporated into a single setting. The general concept of the story arcs as they are depicted in their source material is retained, but the specifics of how they occur in-game are likely to be quite different, particularly when members of other casts start getting involved.
- This applied to the first season of The Massive Multi-Fandom RPG in the subsequent installments, in part because it was sillier than the other ones (to the point where some players and GM's were embarrassed by it), in part because it got deleted. As a result, while its events did happen canonically (more or less), the exact details are made quite vague. For instance, even if a character had participated in Season 1, you could join one of the later seasons with this character while pretending they had never appeared before.
- Dungeons & Dragons likes to introduce things with their own distinct lore and concepts, and then treat them in a fashion of "if you want this to exist in Your Campaign Setting, then sure, it can exist." Due to the multiple generations of Fanon Discontinuity and Canon Discontinuity, this often leads to oddities. For instance, one book will introduce a new system, race, class, or figure, and treat it as if it's been a core part and common knowledge in the unnamed setting for a long time, and then every other book will ignore that thing, but occasionally you'll sight a reference that suggests the older book is at least partway canon. Some characters or creatures have wildly different backstories between their different takes, which can be given the handwave of one or more backstories being an in-universe legend. Published adventures are typically assumed to have taken place, except when they didn't, and their events tend to involve an anonymous "group of heroes" who aren't further elaborated on. This especially applies to just about anything from 4th Edition, which changed or ignored so much established lore in irreconcilable ways that the only way to allow for a lot of it is to just shrug and declare that some of it probably happened.
- As a game with a 25 year running history of lore and stories handled by multiple creative teams, and a propensity for guest writers, Magic: The Gathering uses broad strokes for many older stories. The most observable examples are the limited run of Planeswalker-focused novels, Agents of Artifice, the Purifying Fire and Test of Metal. The first two are broadly canon, with many details and plot points ignored or dropped, but the third seems to be almost entirely non-canon, with only really the characterization of the main character Tezzeret being carried forward, and all the events of the book and the bits of lore it tried to invent being left behind.
- The events of Agents of Artifice seemed to have roughly happened, as stories set afterwards acknowledge Jace running a much smaller cell of the Infinite Consortium and Tezzeret being a puppet of Nicol Bolas, but all the specifics seem to be alternately ignored or handwaved. Things like Jace's unexplained identical twin and the body-swapping shenanigans are roundly ignored, but the big ones are Jace's backstory (and how much he actually remembers) and the guild-less version of Ravnica presented in the book. When it came time for the main card game to re-visit the world, the book was roundly ignored in that last aspect.
- The version of Regatha and Keral Keep presented the Purifying Fire seem consistent with the canon presented later on in the broad strokes, but differ in the details. The main bone of contention is Chandra's backstory, which was revised in Magic Origins and her short story Fire Logic; it's broadly the same course of events she recounts to Gideon, but a lot of the details have been changed. Lampshaded in a later story when Gideon, upon visiting Chandra's home of Kaladesh, says she told him "a version of the truth." Ironically, Gideon himself was subject to the same thing, as his backstory was revised in the same expansion in much the same way.
- A peculiar example of this trope is Warhammer 40,000, a game whose Canon gets revised and adjusted pretty much every time a new source book is released, some of which also take inspiration from other media like novels or the Video Game series Dawn of War. Depending on the Writer, things that were known may stay the same, get fixed a little or are completely retconned, with the most basic example being "This particular piece of technology has been used by [faction] for thousands of years, don't worry about it never showing up before at all." The biggest example is the background of the Necrons, which used to be one big Shout-Out to Terminator, but has since changed more towards "Undead Egyptian Space Robots with feuding dynasties". Also many things that were part of the game in earlier times have been quietly dropped completely. The official explanation for all this is "Everything is Canon, nothing is absolutely true". Another huge example is that until the mid 2000's, there was only very broad strokes canon regarding the "Horus Heresy", the big background event set 10,000 years before the current time line of the game that established the current settings for the most part. There are changes big and small and not all of them continue to be used or referenced.
- Dragon Ball Multiverse treats the events of several of the various films as canon, despite the fact that most of them don't fit into the timeline of the anime or manga. The comic gets around this by doing "special chapters" that show alternate versions of the events of the films, tweaked to fit into the comic's altered timeline: for instance, Dragon Ball Z: Cooler's Revenge showed Vegeta active on Earth, Gohan at his proper age, and Goku going Super Saiyan right off the bat, fixing most of the continuity errors that film presents.
- In Dumbing of Age, a Continuity Reboot of the whole Walkyverse, it's generally assumed that characters have already had arcs similar to what they did through the Walkyverse — e.g. Ethan came out during Shortpacked!, Ethan of Dumbing of Age came out in high school. This is so readers who already know the characters don't have to go through the same story again.
- This is the strategy the creators of Drowtales have taken to some of the older, pre-Retcon information, specifically the contents of some sidestories. As far as anyone can tell the sidestories "Spiderborn" and "Rebirth" still happened and are still the canonical backstories of two characters, but some oudated worldsetting info (for instance, references to "Yatherines" aka drow priestesses) is no longer canon.
- Lewis Lovhaug's audio play A Voice from the Dark reveals that not only did the events of the Channel Awesome anniversary specials happen, but (presumably) so did a lot of the behind-the-scenes abuses that occurred during the filming of said movies.
- Frequently discussed by Movie Timelines. When sequel has some consistency with previous entries the franchise, but enough snarls to prevent things from lining up properly, Spiegel will often state that it makes the most sense for the sequel to take place in an Alternate Timeline in which the same events took place but some of the details were different.
- Dragon Ball Z Abridged: Spin-Off HFIL more or less confirms Team Four Star took this approach with regard to incorporating the movies into the timeline, as there are numerous continuity issues in the movies (particularly in KaiserNeko's Berserk Button, Dragon Ball Z: The Return of Cooler) that keep it from being a seamless incorporation. It's also somewhat implied that the abridged adaptations of the movies may actually exist in universe as part of the Skygina series Krillin produced under the pseudonym Juan Sanchez.
- The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power can be easily confused for Broad Strokes and being part of the same canon as The Lord of the Rings Film Trilogy because of the similar shooting methods, the Shout Outs, and incorporating most of the crew that worked with Peter Jackson for the movies. Rings of Power is closer to a pastiche, being its own canon set in an Alternate Continuity.
- Spider-Man Unlimited premiered a few months after the end of Spider-Man: The Animated Series, with a somewhat similar art style (Unlimited was more comic-book like with yellow boxes used for location titling) and Unlimited began In Medias Res and a snippet of the TAS theme, which fans took as implying the events of TAS is in the past. That was never the intention and there are no specific story pieces that connect the two beyond Spider-Man himself. Even still, the first episode introduced elements that would be familiar to fans of the previous show but still irreconcilable from those events, such as Venom and Carnage being on Earth and working together. The misconception led to the Spider-Verse writer incorrectly treating the Spideys from TAS and Unlimited as being the same one, going from interviews.
- Teen Titans (2003):
- The show aired alongside Justice League and was just similar enough in animation style and didn't share any characters that a lot of people believed they were meant to be in the same continuity. It was never the intention, and despite similarities in art style, Titans uses cartoony visuals and Face Faults, being far more comical at its core. It really didn't help in the Static Shock crossover with Batman: The Animated Series that Batman made reference to Robin being with the Titans, which otherwise had no other mention in the DCAU. Furthermore, this was in reference to the Tim Drake Robin, while the Teen Titans Robin was eventually confirmed as being Dick Grayson.
- It also didn't help when JLU had a Mythology Gag guest spot by an older version of Mike Erwin's Speedy (complete with his Teen Titans costume), and then Titans had a similar guest by Michael Rosenbaum's (Kid) Flash. At that point it became obvious that Titans was set in the past of the DC Animated Universe. But still wrong.
- Naturally, Glen Murakami has been asked to give Word of God on it, and his response has been a Shrug of God. It seems the intention was never "it's totally connected to Batman: The Animated Series, taking place between seasons X and Y" or "they're different continuities, dammit, so get over it," but "We're just going to make our show, and we'll leave where/if it fits with some other to you." The rule with most fans on most boards these days seems to be that a show is considered to be not DCAU unless it's said to be, though, which leaves TT out.
- In more recent years, it is more commonly theorized that Teen Titans is set in the same universe as The Batman, (which was also airing at the same time as Teen Titans and Justice League Unlimited) and takes place some time after that show. The Robins in both shows look and sound quite similar to each other (not to mention they both use retractable bo-staffs and bird-like throwing weapons) and when Batman appeared in one of the Teen Titans Go comics, he looked a lot like The Batman's incarnation of the character. One contradiction revolves around Killer Moth, who appears in both shows and are somewhat different, though many just handwave it as a Legacy Character.
- There was some confusion with regards to the Yu-Gi-Oh! series commonly referred to as "Season 0". It was a lower-budget show that covered an earlier portion of the original manga but wildly eclipsed by the bigger-budget Duel Monsters-centric version released later. In Japan, the confusion was never there as they are completely separate adaptations, but with the inherent mistakes with passing that kind of information across cultural barriers, many believed it was a prequel series and that somehow they fit together. The fact that it covers the early parts of the manga that the second anime either skimmed over or skipped entirely may also play a part in this.