Continuity is the internal consistency of a fictional world across its multiple realizations—different works, episodes, installments, tellings, or play sessions set in the same world. A world exhibits continuity when established facts, character histories, spatial relationships, and causal sequences remain coherent from one realization to the next.
Continuity is a structural property of the world, not a social one. It describes whether the parts fit together, not whether anyone has declared them authoritative. This distinguishes it from canon, which is the editorial or social mechanism by which some subset of material is designated as binding. A world can have strong continuity without formal canon (as in many role-playing game campaigns, where the group’s shared memory serves as the consistency mechanism), and weak continuity despite extensive canonical declarations (as in long-running franchises with accumulated contradictions).
In the Reproducible Paracosm framework, continuity corresponds to the gluing condition : local models that agree on their overlaps compose into a unique global model. This is the categorical formalization of the intuition that a world’s parts should cohere. The bisimulation condition captures a related property: different tellings or perspectives that are observationally equivalent count as the same world, ensuring that continuity is not disrupted by changes in viewpoint or presentation.