Sorry just every time I see "DC stands for disregard canon" on a post about DC's timelines as a Flash fan I start breaking out in hives. No there very much is rhyme and reason to it that remains relevant to the overall narratives of DC, you just aren't seeing that because you're not reading the comics of the characters whose purpose it is to explain the cosmic level stuff.
If I had the ability I'd make a little comic with Barry cheerfully and exuberantly explaining the timelines and occasionally interjecting AND HOW THIS RELATES TO BATMAN in the tone of
while grabbing Bruce, who's been standing next to him unhappily and not saying anything the whole time.
I’m just glad Barry got to collate all the timeline data in New History of the DCU. Professor Waid explains via Professor Allen :)
Also yeahhhh why is it *always* Batfans who are always parroting “disregard canon”…? And I’m saying this as someone who genuinely LOVES Tim Drake and is fond of Robin I and the Big Bad Bat.
Obviously I'm also really fond of them (gestures at blog theme) but truthfully the fandom has a big problem with people treating the Bats as if they're all there is, and while they're very fun and good in their own niche, it just isn't their job to explain what's going on in the wider universe. And there's so much going on in the universe they inhabit! That people are sadly missing out on! It makes me so sad especially to see people telling new fans to not even try to understand things, as if the explanations just don't exist and the Bats live in an empty vacuum devoid of meaning.
Also to be frank (as someone with a fairly reasonable spread of understanding of the process of retcons and reboots across various sections of DC): the Bats are one of the least affected properties!
Earth-One while having its own quirks continues to be relevant to the present day (and while it contributes to the Helena Wayne retcon oddities, it’s still a specific timeline that turns up)
Pre-Crisis Earth-Two became Post-Crisis pretty smoothly. Aside from resetting Jason (and tbf most people use the latter version anyway) and concreting a modernised version of Bruce’s origin, the history and events are remarkably unchanged compared to other properties. There are, don’t get me wrong, changes, but mostly on the ‘reinterpretation of events’ level more than ‘we rewrote whole swathes of story and threw out huge chunks of existing canon’.
The scramble to attempt to retain essentially all of Bat canon in n52 actually created a bunch of the biggest pressures on that timeline. ‘Make Bat canon return to normal’ was basically the thrust of Tynion’s Tec run at the start of Rebirth, and other properties have consistently navigated around the Bats trying to fix stuff.
If you compare even the biggest ‘problems’ with Bat comics and timelines (a bunch of weirdness around Thomas Wayne generally, n52!Tim, Cass and Steph not existing for a bit, arguments over Jason’s personality as Robin) it is NOTHING compared to say “what is Hawkpeople lore, are they aliens, how do their rebirths work” or “does Donna Troy have a backstory? Which one? What memories are real?” or “what’s going on with the JSA, time travel, The Trinity, and how are half of them alive?” or “exactly what is Power Girl’s current name and backstory” etc
There ARE issues, but of the big ones people are pretty aware of the tension points and how to tug them into a reasonably coherent story, and most of the smaller ones are navigated by people just choosing not to look too closely.
I wish the sort of person who loves claiming it’s incoherent would actually say ‘I don’t really understand how eras or multiple worlds work’ or ‘my preferred reading/version of events is not the current explanation’. It’d be more honest.
