Restricted Expanded Universe

Following

• Mobile Suit Gundam:
  • The multiverse suffers this in spades. Since the events of the anime are set in stone (and have been that way for up to thirty years), manga and video game expansions almost always deal with an entirely new cast of characters, set off to the side of the anime's events and never directly interfering (though, on some rare occasions, having a degree of crossover).
  • However, the manga series Gundam the Origin completely and utterly ignores this (it helps that it's being written and illustrated by the original character designer and apparently has Tomino's blessing) and introduces a chain of events that while similar, are significantly changed and make a whole hell of a lot more sense in some respects. It's from here that a lot of the backstory for the mainline universe can be gleaned (though distortedly). Tomino is not a stickler for continuity; his novelisations and Compilation Movies often change plots around.
  • Mobile Suit Gundam SEED: A slight exception is the popular spinoff Gundam SEED Astray, which was intended from the beginning to tie into the anime, occasionally patching up plot holes, and just barely misses being included in the anime itself.

• Adventure Time: Zig-Zagged with this Comic-Book Adaptation. Initially, the comic's writers tried to keep it in line with the show's mythos. As the show's writers were constantly tuning the details of their own worldbuilding, it was hard to play catch up and the comics' creators couldn't really do their own thing. Eventually, they just called it an Alternate Continuity and started playing with the world themselves, with the arc kickstarting this change ending in The Lich getting killed off in particular. As a result, the comic plots are not considered canon to the show's timeline.
• Gargoyles: Clan Building: A case of Canon Discontinuity and Expanded Universe restrictions occurs in Greg Weisman's comic. Continuing the beloved series after the end of Season 2, it refutes everything that happened in the Disney-produced Goliath Chronicles spin-off (sans the first episode and one additional scene), essentially restricting the expanded canon to that comic alone.
• G.I. Joe: Averted because the comics can kill people and make changes as long as the relevant action figure or other toy is no longer in production.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (IDW): The comics have to stay consistent with the show's Status Quo, ensuring any major events get wrapped up well enough to stay self-contained.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • Sonic the Hedgehog (IDW): Being Truer to the Text (and now canon to the videogames), SEGA keeps a close watch on the comic, and all stories need to be approved by them. A full list of speculated mandates can be found here, but most ensure the status quo of game-canon characters doesn't change ^ExamplesDr. Eggman turned good due to amnesia temporarily, but this was reversed after a few issues. Silver briefly joined an Canon Foreigner team, but was kicked out by the end of the arc and teamed-up with his game ally Blaze instead, and none can die. Canon Foreigner characters, on the other hand, are far less restricted.
  • Sonic X: The comics aren't allowed to incorporate characters from the games that weren't featured in the show, nor were they allowed to make any real changes to the status quo.
• Transformers: Averted in the comics seeing that they are almost always alternate continuities.
• Star Wars:
  • Star Wars Infinities: The graphic novels are, from the beginning, set in an alternate universe of the original movie trilogy. As such, the authors are free of killing Luke in The Empire Strikes Back equivalent and have him come back as a ghost in Star Wars: Legacy (one In-Universe century after)
  • Star Wars (Marvel 1977): The series isn't allowed to have the heroes meet Darth Vader in case it upstaged anything from later movies.

• The Basalt City Chronicles: The fanfic is not only an example of this trope regarding its source material, Gene Catlow, seeing that the author goes to the universe's creators for permission for virtually everything he adds, but is also that Verse's Manual.

Gone with the Wind

• The Wind Done Gone: Alice Randall writes it in African-American vernacular English as an explicit refutation of the limitations imposed by Margaret Mitchell's estate on those wishing to write sequels to Gone with the Wind.

• The Hobbit: While one of Peter Jackson's goals was to tie the events of The Hobbit to the The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien's estate refused to grant him access to The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, The History of Middle-earth, or the other Tolkien books containing the material required to do so while remaining faithful to what Tolkien had written. As such, Jackson extrapolated and changed a few details, such as the backstory of the Nazgül, in order to make his story work.
• Star Wars:
  • Writers of the old Expanded Universe, besides following the regular continuity, had to abide by a certain set of rules established by Lucasfilm. Among those revealed to the fans are, firstly, that the protagonists (Luke, Han, and Leia) cannot be killed. Secondly, members of certain alien species cannot become Jedi. Even though several Wookiee Jedi characters already exist, no new ones should be introduced. Thirdly, Yoda's species and homeworld cannot be revealed. And fourthly, before the prequels, writers were told by Lucas to avoid writing in that era. This was solved by creating the Old Republic stories set long before the prequels.
  • With Disney's takeover of Lucasfilm, all new Expanded Universe stories are overseen by a committee to ensure full continuity with the established canon is maintained. However, there are still oversights mostly caused due to the films being made with little to no input from the Expanded Universe's creatives (most notably, all the worldbuilding tie-in material for the sequel trilogy was ignored in the films due to being written by people outside their production).

By Work:

• Babylon 5: The licensed novels are under severe restrictions in regard to the treatment of characters, Plot Points, and setting. Therefore, they frequently contradict each other (for instance, Blood Oath and Clark's Law both mention G'Kar's wife, but she has a different name in each.)
• Halo: The video games are rather light on plot, allowing the Expanded Universe novels to go hog-wild and be much more creative. Many novels tend to give established characters new or expanded backstories and personality traits that are never hinted at in the games, while introducing new characters, vehicles, locations and more. In addition, the novels also do a much better job of fleshing out the origins of the UNSC, the Covenant, and even the Forerunners, as well as their respective cultures. As a result, the fans regard them as better than the source material. When 343 Industries took over development duties from Bungie, the Expanded Universe became much more integrated with the games from Halo 4 onward, with the introduction of ideas and concepts that only existed before in the novels.
• Mass Effect: Bioware has stated that the official continuity is what happens to the player. Because of this, derivative works have been forced to remain neutral on big issues such as the fate of the original council, the Destiny Ascension, who survived on Virmire, what happened to the rachni and humanity's representative as well as smaller ones right down to Commander Shepard's gender. The exceptions are thus, appropriately vague. The second and third novels reference the Council, but do not specify if it is the original, human-led, or human-only. Retribution and Inquisition state that Anderson leaves the Citadel in disgust at the Council's refusal to acknowledge the Reapers, but do not specify whether he's the Councilor or Udina's aide. Word of God has since said that Udina is the Councilor and Anderson was his aide, he is even stated to be an admiral in Retribution, this has more to do with plot reasons for future novels and games however.
• Star Trek:
  • The Star Trek novels have gone back and forth between Restricted and non-Restricted a couple of times. The novels of the '70s and early '80s tended to give authors a lot of freedom to interpret Star Trek in their own idiosyncratic ways, though the books rarely referenced or built on one another. By the later '80s, Pocket Books' Trek authors began referencing popular novels like Diane Duane's Romulan/Rihannsu books and John M. Ford's Klingon epic The Final Reflection, and authors who did multiple novels increasingly carried continuity arcs forward within them, so an overall book continuity gradually began to emerge. But once Star Trek: The Next Generation was on the air, Paramount began restricting the books and comics, forbidding them from referencing anything but the live-action canon, which killed continuity between books. Those rules began to relax in the late '90s, and by now, with all the shows off the air, the books have built up an elaborate, interconnected continuity. However, the new movie continuity (J. J. Abrams) operates under rules so restricted that only prequels to the movie have been allowed to be published so far.
  • The production of Star Trek: Picard threw the entire novel-verse continuity post-Nemesis out the window. Fortunately, the writers were given enough time to collaborate and give a Grand Finale to their entire timeline, with nearly all ships, crews, and other major characters making at least an appearance. Appropriately named Coda, the trilogy set about its big reveal to its own characters that they were not the Prime Timeline, but were a "splinter timeline" from the original. The characters don't really have a problem with that, per se, but the villains of the trilogy want to use this fact to their advantage, achieving something similar to Turtles Forever: Destroying the Prime Timeline will eliminate all other branches from it.
• Star Wars: The first novel of the New Jedi Order series, Vector Prime, is notable for having killed Chewbacca for real. According to the author, the higher-ups wanted to kill off a major Canon character in order to set up an Anyone Can Die atmosphere. The call eventually comes down that Chewie is to be the Sacrificial Lamb based on his sidekick status and lack of dialogue. The original plan was to kill off Luke, which Lucasfilm understandably objected to.
• Wing Commander: Novels that are built around canon characters from the game, particularly Jason "Bear" Bondarevski (first introduced in the Wing Commander 2 Expansion Pack Special Ops 1), are heavily restricted in terms of not altering the main continuity. For instance, the Landreich, a vague analogy of the early United States (IN SPACE), is created specifically so William R. Forstchen has someplace to play that won't break anything in the "core" universe of the games.

• The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: The Tolkien Estate gave Amazon the rights to adapt material from The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, but not directly from The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, The History of Middle-earth or other Tolkien books except on a case to case basis, and at the same time Amazon cannot simply remake the stories that the Warner Bros./New Line movies directed by Peter Jackson covered. The Amazon show focuses on the Second Age (as opposed to the Third Age, where the main story of the LOTR and Hobbit books and movies are set) where the vast bulk of Tolkien's writings concerning the period is in other books, but Second Age events and storylines are referenced more vaguely as background lore within the main text of LOTR and its appendices. And so the show has a great deal of expansion and its own take on the background lore of LOTR, not necessarily following what Tolkien actually already wrote elsewhere. As stated by the showrunners:
  J.D. Payne: We have the rights solely to The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, The Return of the King, the appendices, and The Hobbit. And that is it. We do not have the rights to The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, The History of Middle-earth, or any of those other books.
  Patrick McKay: There’s a version of everything we need for the Second Age in the books we have the rights to. As long as we’re painting within those lines and not egregiously contradicting something we don’t have the rights to, there’s a lot of leeway and room to dramatize and tell some of the best stories that [Tolkien] ever came up with.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe: During the Infinity Saga, the TV shows and other tie-in media had no major impact on the movie continuity — the closest things have come is that Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D directly ties into Captain America: The Winter Soldier, but otherwise has no effect on the films' events, outside of small worldbuilding details, such as where Fury got his Mousehole gadget from (Fitz made it), and filled in some gaps for Age of Ultron regarding the location of Loki's sceptre. With the outting of Jeph Loeb (a notoriously unfriendly executive to work with, that mandated some of the TV and films to be split), Marvel eventually strengthened the connections during the Multiverse Saga, thanks to Disney+ streaming projects, as well as Spider-Man: No Way Home, which features Matt Murdock from The Defenders saga from his Netflix show.
  • The TV side of the universe would finally get recognized in Endgame, as Edwin Jarvis from Agent Carter makes a cameo. It helps that his show was already over, and a period piece set in the late 1940s to begin with, so nobody has to worry about the appearance affecting TV continuity. Other series have also been given nods in the Multiverse Saga, with Daredevil receiving a full Revival; Daredevil: Born Again, with the original goal being to outright Broad Strokes the events of the Netflix series, until the production of Born Again got a complete overhaul to instead directly tie the events of the 2015 series into the MCU. Its leads (Matt Murdock and Wilson Fisk) make appearances in various other projects, such as Hawkeye (2021), the aforementioned Spider-Man: No Way Home, Echo (2024) and She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, with Jessica Jones from her own Netflix Series, is set to re-appear in Born Again.
    • Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. during Season 5 tied up the series with references to Infinity War, when it received a surprise renewal; and the showrunners had no idea when the next season would air, much less the plot details. Since they couldn't risk the possibility of spoiling Endgame should the series air first, they had to ignore the Infinity War references and claim that Season 6 was still set prior to Thanos' attack.
    • Any series not featuring movie characters is plagued with questions of "how does this tie in with the latest movie events?" For the Defenders shows, the answer always ended up being "this is a little ways into the past, and the movie hasn't happened yet" (the most up-to-date reference in the shows was to The Raft from Civil War, despite the shows being made up to three years after that point); and they ended before they caught up with the unavoidable impact of Infinity War. Runaways and Cloak and Dagger didn't give answers as to why the events of Infinity War haven't been seen yet, though in the former's case, an Extremely Short Timespan can account for that.

• BIONICLE media was affected by this in a few ways.
  • The "Big Story Engine" twist ("Where, who and what is the Great Spirit Mata Nui?") that drove the story in its first eight years could be foreshadowed but not revealed until the Story Team decided the time was right. Since the world's entire setting was dependent on this, new locations had to be carefully added and designed, so as not to spoil that the universe was a humanoid-shaped Humongous Mecha and the characters were analogues to its biological workings. Also, the mysterious Great Beings were barred from being depicted visually until the franchise was nearing its end.
  • Most primary media like comics and promos had to be tied to toy release schedules and couldn't feature characters whose toys weren't available unless they were necessary to the story. Years with Direct-to-Video films had their pre- and post-movie stories strongly curtailed. On occasion, the books were allowed to feature non-toy characters and the web serials were mostly unaffected. The serials in specific were stories where Anyone Can Die, filled with hosts of wild new ideas and retcons, thus they enjoyed freedom like no other media.
  • In the 2004 Metru Nui arc, when the bulk of the plot was tied to the film BIONICLE 2: Legends of Metru Nui and its concurrently released villain LEGO sets, half a year was spent on filler arcs like the quest for the missing Matoran and the Great Disks or the fight against the Morbuzakh plant and the shape-shifter Krahka. The Vahki enforcers were mentioned but not prominently shown until the year's second half and other villains had to be kept vague. Important characters like Lhikan and events like the Toa Metru's origin were also omitted until the movie. All this expansion even affected the film: Turaga Dume's line "Matoran in the Morning. Toa by the afternoon." was awkwardly redubbed to "Matoran one day. Toa the next." to allow more time for the filler arcs to take place between the film's scenes.
  • In 2005's Toa Hordika arc, Vakama's seduction by Roodaka, his ensuing Face–Heel Turn and the discovery of the mythical beast Keetongu had to be stalled until the film Web of Shadows. Thus, most of the books, comics and web animations told a variety of meandering stories, brought back old characters or gave backstories to new ones. The reveal that the freakish Rahaga used to be Toa heroes was also shuffled from the film to the books and comics to give them more material to work with. The year's final book, Time Trap is a unique case, as it came out after the film and its story was only tangentially tied to the main plot. The author was finally given near total freedom, allowing him to re-frame certain characters and events he believed have been mishandled by the films.
• Doctor Who Expanded Universe
  • Unless the TV series has allowed for new canon to be built, it's safe to say this is the norm. The novels and audios released during the extended hiatus made many changes and revealed great swathes of history, much of which was ignored when the hiatus ended. This doesn't necessarily mean the new content was retconned, what with the setting having considerable Temporal Mutability. On some occasions, Word of God has confirmed that "everything is canon", we're just seeing different possible timelines. For example, one of the post-revival episodes is an explicit retelling of the novel Human Nature, written by Paul Cornell. Likewise in the case of the Doctor Who Magazine comic strips as well as the IDW and Titan comics have been through it in the revival.
  • On July 5, 1969 —two weeks after "The War Games" aired— TV Comic begins a series of stories where the Second Doctor is exiled to Earth. During this period, the Doctor lives in the Carlton Grange Hotel and becomes a newspaper-headlining celebrity. In "The Night Walkers" (November 8-22, 1969), the Doctor investigates a story about scarecrows that walk at night that turns out to be a trap by the Time Lords so they can enforce the second half of his sentence. The scarecrows begin the regeneration process and set the TARDIS controls to dematerialise, leading seamlessly into "Spearhead from Space" six weeks later. So, averted in that case.

• Avatar Legends: The Roleplaying Game: Should a game session strictly adhere to canon, players will limited in their choices. For example, some of the listed techniques haven't been invented yet during some eras a game could be set in (e.g. Metalbending, Bloodbending, Aang's Air Scooter etc.). Secondly, one can't play an Airbender during both the Hundred Year War and the Aang Era. And thirdly, a lot of villains during the Hundred Year War, such as Ozai, Zhao, or Long Feng, are bound to remain Greater Scope Villains due to the Gaang defeating them in canon.

• Lost: In the video game Expanded Universe, nothing your character does can really affect the plot, so you end up doing various side things to advance your own story, while the show's plot happens offscreen.
• The Matrix Online: The game features in its first chapter as Morpheus eventually commits terrorist acts against the Machines, demanding that they return Neo's body. That character goes so far as to create "code bombs" to reveal the Matrix code even to people still jacked in and not ready for such a revelation. Then he is Killed Off for Real by a program known as the Assassin.
• MechWarrior is forced to exist in the preestablished footprints of the core BattleTech source material. There are a few deviations allowed—sneaking in rare chassis or weapons into 3025 as one-off Star League tech, for instance—but by and large the games are obligated to follow various the rules of the setting: no Clan tech before 3050, no inclusion of supernatural or alien elements, no deviations in the storylines of major personages reserved for the sourcebooks/novels.
• Perfect Dark: The series leaves a large gap between the original and the prequel game, leaving the Greg Rucka novels (and comics) to expand and improve the characters and conspiracies of the universe. Those also change the backstories of Daniel Carrington and Cassandra Devries by placing them into a relationship.
• Super Mario Bros.: Nintendo's iconic franchise has been reported to have an IP-overseeing committee that dictates certain guidelines that outside studios working in Spin Offs of the series are obligated to follow in order to keep it consistent with the mainline platformers. In particular, the introduction of original characters is very restrictive nowadays—a turnaround from entries around The Noughties and before, when such a practice was more prominent. This is most evident in the Paper Mario subseries, which went from having many unique variations on staple Mario NPCs to mostly standard Toads and enemies from the fourth game onward. That said, the Super Mario RPG and Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door remakes do suggest the mandates have weakened slightly, given that both maintain their unique designs for the NPCs.
• Tolkien's Legendarium:
  • The video games have long faced restrictions from two opposite directions because the licenses to adapt original literary works and Peter Jackson's movies were sold to separate studios. On one side were the games unable to use any of the designs, lines or actors from the movies even when they were very well-known and liked (The Fellowship Of The Ring, The Hobbit (2003), The Lord of the Rings: War of the Ring, The Lord of the Rings Online). On the other side were the games unable to include anything at all that was not explicitly referenced on-screen in the movies, severely limiting available plotlines (The Two Towers, The Return of the King, The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age, The Battle for Middle-earth). And of course, nobody at all has the rights to The Silmarillion, Beren and Lúthien, The Children of Húrin, The Fall of Gondolin, The Fall of Númenor, Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth and other texts, placing events and characters exclusive to those books permanently off-limits.
  • Eventually, some studios were able to obtain both licenses, allowing the games The Battle For Middle Earth II (and its expansion pack) and War in the North to combine the likeness of actors and location designs with various elements that were Adapted Out from the movies. The general consensus is that (quality of the gameplay notwithstanding) this allows for a much more coherent Middle-Earth experience.
  • The Lord of the Rings Online
    • The game is still going strong after many years and expansion packs, but its license is limited to The Lord of the Rings and its Appendices only. Rumours are, even The Hobbit material cannot be used if it wasn't also mentioned in LOTR as well. This, among other things, prevented the developers from making a proper tie-in to The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey—players had to revisit Bilbo's path in the "present" days of the War of the Ring instead.
    • It isn't allowed to change the main story in any way either, so a lot of the quests don't directly relate to the plot ("Bring Me Twenty Wolf Ears") and those that do are portrayed as being things that help the main characters without actually being able to have a huge impact on the outcome.
• Star Trek Online is set in the prime universe post-dating the Hobus supernova from Star Trek (2009). However, due to a confluence of legal issues —the license comes from CBS rather than Paramount—, it can only use story details, not visuals. CBS also has veto power over Cryptic's ideas, and they're also restricted in their use of TV-canon characters because, while the character belongs to CBS and is thus usable, the likeness belongs to the actors so Cryptic has to negotiate with them separately or use an Off-Model (the latter of which they've mostly stopped doing). They also have to negotiate separately to use elements from other works in the Star Trek Expanded Universe (although they do often get permission).