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 the MCU over the course of its 16 year run can teach us writers some valuable lessons. So now we will go into five lessons from the MCU you can apply to your book series, especially if like me, you tend to write longer book series.
#1: Tell a complete story. Although it's nice to believe that all your readers are exactly following your intended order (believe me, as I know from many reader emails, that's not always what happens), someone will start mid-series if given the book as a gift or pick up a later book in the series if it goes on sale. They might not even realize they're not starting with the first book when they pick up a book.
Although you don't have to explain everything that happened in previous books in your current one, it does have to stand on its own. A book ultimately needs to tell a complete story, even if it is part of a series. It needs to have a clear beginning, middle, and end that belong entirely to that book. Ending or starting on a cliffhanger is one example of something that upsets readers and viewers. Some people who went to the Infinity War movie in theaters were not aware that the movie was a part one and were confused when the movie ended abruptly, which amusingly ties into one of my rules with cliffhangers is that I'll only really do a proper cliffhanger in the second to last book in a series. Ghost in the Pact was definitely a cliffhanger because that was right before the final Ghost in the Winds. In Cloak Games, Sky Hammer ended on cliffhanger because that was right before the final book of Cloak Games, Mage Fall. So cliffhangers are generally best avoided and you should tell a complete story whenever possible.
#2: Don't run forward too fast. Post Endgame, the MCU lost some of its core characters and the next set of films largely focused on new characters who sometimes only appeared once and didn't connect together. Although introducing new characters is important, it needs to be done in a deliberate way and they need to connect well into your established world and its characters. An example of this in the MCU is the character Shang-Chi. Although his standalone movie was popular and I thought it was pretty good, he has not appeared in the MCU for four years. Any momentum or interest in that character has dissipated in that near half decade. Many, many, many new characters were introduced in the MCU after Shang-Chi and have suffered a similar fate.
Those new characters all are going to be crammed into the next Avengers movie where most of them will meet for the first time, and that movie has to also fit in characters from previous phases of the MCU who also largely don't know the new characters. This upcoming movie, Avengers: Doomsday, will carry the burden of all these non-interlocking continuities and unrelated characters. Prior phases of the MCU did some of that work ahead of the big team up movies and made the movies feel purposeful and easier to understand like they were bigger events. Although new characters breathe life into a series, they need to be introduced slowly and meaningfully and need to connect well into what you have already established in your series. Having an anchor character from prior parts of the series goes a long way to help the readers gain a connection to the new one.
#3: Focus on key themes. There is a temptation with worldbuilding in a series to feature every possible aspect of that world and use everything you have developed when working on the series. A good series knows that you can't possibly feature it all. Instead, it focuses on what serves the plot and your key themes in a story. For example, in the first phase of the MCU, viewers didn't know the complete history of every character or have full access to every aspect of something like the SHIELD Organization. The MCU writers chose to focus on what built up the central plot of bringing the group together to fight evil and to confront aspects of their characters that made them reluctant to do that. It was extremely effective and made the first group of movies feel cohesive and like they were leading up to something important.
Having key themes front and center of the story helps readers feel connected to the story as it spreads across many books. This also helps characters from straying from their core values and goals as the series continues, which is something that greatly annoys readers and can make them stop this series. For myself, I found that I generally do just enough worldbuilding as I need and too little world building is bad, but getting too lost in the weeds with the worldbuilding is a bad idea and it's generally best to focus on what you need for that particular story.
#4: Help your readers remember. There is a brisk market on YouTube for recap or explanation videos to help people catch up on MCU content, which Disney at one point attempted to recreate on their service as shorts called Marvel Studio Legends, but has since apparently given up on that as streaming content budgets have been trimmed. The more you can help your readers with continuity like recaps, guides, or even short form video about previous books, the more likely they are to be willing to start or restart a series.
People are busy and some people have better memories than others. Giving readers this content outside of the text also prevents awkward infodumps about past books that could stop the plot dead in its tracks. Above all, keep your readers from feeling confused or frustrated.
#5: Know when to retire a character (or at least rest them). Although it's tempting to continue with a popular character forever, there comes a point when that character's arc has logically concluded, and they have matured and achieved all their goals. Continuing with that character might force them to act in ways that don't make sense for the character, plots that don't feel right for the character, or plots that feel repetitive.
The MCU retired several popular characters during the movie Endgame. The way they did it showed that they thought carefully about the character's emotional journeys and what their goals were. It wasn't done for shock value or the sole purpose of hiring new, cheaper actors (though, to be honest, that was probably part of the motivation). A satisfying ending for a character is a crucial part of any series, even if the series continues on without them.
It's good to know when to stop. I mean, to be fair, I've written a lot of Ridmark books and a lot of Caina books, but there also comes a time when you need to try something new, which is why I'm writing the Rivah Half-Elven series and why I started the Blades of Ruin series. Eventually, as I said with the previous lesson, there comes a time when you need to do something new, when the previous characters' arcs and stories have reached their logical end.
Sherlock Holmes has a great quote about this in the story of The Adventure of the Norwood Builder, where he's almost defeated by the villain, but the villain has made a perfect trap but wants to improve it just a little bit, and that blows up in his face.
The quote goes like this: "It was a masterpiece of villainy, and he carried it out like a master. The idea of the will, which would give an obvious motive for the crime, the secret visit unknown to his own parents, the retention of the stick, the blood and the animal remains and buttons in the wood pile, all were admirable. It was a net from which that seemed to me a few hours ago, there was no possible escape, but he had not that supreme gift of the artist, the knowledge of when to stop. He wished to improve that which was already perfect to draw the rope tighter yet around the neck of his unfortunate victim, and so he ruined all."
Now, I think I read that particular Sherlock Holmes story for the first time over 25 years ago, but that quote has remained with me ever since about how the supreme gift of the artist is the knowledge of when to stop. I think that might be true of a long series as well. I mean, the temptation is if you have a series that is selling well is to keep writing books in it forever and ever, but eventually you do have to take the risk and try something new.
In conclusion, it's important to be deliberate about how a series evolves, whether it's a multi-billion dollar movie franchise or a book series that you're just starting to write. Looking at the ups and downs of the MCU post Endgame shows the importance of plotting a series well, not overcomplicating it, staying close to what makes fans enjoy it, and maybe avoiding plots to do with the multiverse concept.
So that's it for this week. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes at https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.
