I really thought the secret reports might say something about this, but I just got the last ones and they don’t, so I’m just going to continue to tinfoil-hat:
I’m convinced there’s some timeline fuckery going on between TWEWY and Neo:TWEWY.
Not just because TWEWY was so beautifully contemporary, set in its release year, and aside from sidestepping COVID so was Neo— and 2007->2021 is not the three years they claim it’s been in-universe— though that’s part of it. That was what first made me lift my head up and go “wait what”. But there’s a couple other things that feel like it’s been much longer.
First of all is Gatto Nero. Shiki and Eri were fifteen in the first game, and while it’s pretty unlikely IRL for a couple of eighteen-year-olds to head a successful brand with a store in freakin 104/9, it’s the kind of thing that happens in stories, so I was gonna let it slide… until we got to Shoka’s backstory.
She says when she got to Shibuya, she “wandered around” a bit, then discovered Gatto Nero, and her Mr Mew hoodie was the first thing she bought in Shibuya. The flashback to before she even came to Shibuya is the only one in which she’s not wearing the hoodie, so it seems really implausible that it was long after she got here before she found Gatto Nero. And the Shinjuku inversion was three years ago, just after the original game if the timeline’s straight.
Shiki and Eri are amazing, but a couple of fifteen year olds having a successful enough label to be selling stuff, right after the initial game when they were talking about it as a dream for the future, not something they already had rolling?
The other, more concrete thing is a comment Uzuki made. On W2D1 of the first game, Uzuki says she’s been a reaper for two years, objecting to Kariya calling her a ‘spring chicken’. In Neo, though, she tells Fret on W2D3 that “I’ve been watching over Shibuya since before you could write your own name, kid.” Fret is sixteen. If she’d only been a Reaper five years… that’s a hell of an exaggeration, lady!
So like… can this be explained away as story convenience and exaggeration? Sure it can. But it feels weird and I’d rather the timeline got a lil’ fucked up by Shinjuku’s inversion, scattered; some people experienced three years, some fourteen. Maybe I’m just a sucker, because I was the same age as the kids in TWEWY when it came out and wanted to see them all grown up, but I like the idea that as everything gets stitched back up they can settle into their thirties properly.
