Floating Timeline

A device that explains why the ages of characters are changed hardly, if at all, even though real-world time suggests that the characters should be significantly older than what the franchise shows their ages to be. This is especially employed in older franchises that have been around for decades and whose characters haven't all shifted a generation up. To avoid any further confusion, writers working with Floating Timelines often stray from using dates or years to mark when a certain event occurred, instead referring to the time it happened with loose terms (e.g four years ago, last month, some days from now). A Floating Timeline also solves the problem of the world seeming to move forward (with new technologies or historic real-world events being relevant in the franchise) as the characters' ages appear to be frozen in a single point of time. This is where the name possibly came from: the world is moving around the characters who are motionlessly positioned "above" — and therefore are kept from moving with — the world around them age-wiseundefined.