Originally Posted by
Revolutionary_Jack
Bruce Timm's DCAU has that in his Batman-Superman-JL-Batman Beyond cartoons. Like Lex Luthor starts out as a corporate shark, then goes to jail and slowly ends up becoming the Luthor of the Silver Age as a way for him to get his real mojo, along the way it does stopovers at stuff like POTUS Lex and so on. But in the comics you don't have that in general.
To me continuity is about emotion more than literal jottings of events in a wikipedia page or a timeline that moderators have to maintain. The latter predominates our conception of continuity more than the former, for better and worse.
When you read a 616 Spider-Man story, you are reading the version of the character that originated in Amazing Fantasy #15, graduated high school, went to college, romanced Gwen Stacy, Felicia Hardy, Mary Jane Watson, before he got married to the latter. Stories like Master-Planner Saga, The Night Gwen Stacy Died, The Kid Who Collects Spider-Man, Nothing Can Stop the Juggernaut, Secret Wars, Kraven's Last Hunt are all part of his aggregate experiences. It matters to me more that the character I read has had these experiences of growth and change, far more than technical elements like how did the fight scene or use of powers in one story and the other happened or didn't happen. Which is why I don't care for Marvel stunts like OMD and OMIT which subtracts this aggregation and by doing so distorts and unravels the character we got and the stories we have.
In the case of DC, continuity isn't a straight forward lineage. Like none of the characters are consistent or descended from their first appearances the way Marvel 616 characters are. That can be a blessing and a curse. You argued very well about the curse. The blessing is that you can with each reboot take some wild swings and reinventions. Luthor originated as a dumb mad scientist in the middle-age, then the Silver Age made him some kid who got angry that Superboy (Superman's Teenage Version) made him bald and so he became a lifelong archnemesis. Then Post-Crisis invented him as an evil businessman. The catch is that these wild swings tend to contradict each other somewhat, and are hard to integrate into a whole. With a continuity that's constantly reshuffled, the result is that nothing is at stake, and yet to quote Neil Gaiman's THE SANDMAN, "everything has changed, and yet nothing is truly lost". What that means is that stuff that happens in DC doesn't upset or irritate me to the same extent. Like Superman and Lois aren't a ship in New 52, doesn't matter...the Silver Age Superman got a happy ending, as did the Golden Age, the Post-Crisis got married, and the New 52 isn't any more a truer Superman than other versions that came before. IT doesn't overwrite those stories.
That's why I found it ridiculous when Tom King chickened out of the Batman/Catwoman wedding. There's one version where the two married and had a daughter, the Chris Nolan movie ended with them together, so what exactly was at stake with Rebirth-era Batman (basically one Batman among many others) getting married or getting ditched at the altar. It's not like this is the one true Batman dating back to Bill Finger? It has no legitimacy compared to the other takes we have. Whereas when Spider-Man and Mary Jane got married that was a huge, huge deal, it was the version that spun out of Ditko and Lee's conception and it happened on the character's 25th year anniversary.