Board Thread:Questions and Answers/@comment-4548390-20160209183748/@comment-61022-20160229180923

Edward Zachary Sunrose wrote: Ahh... So it could be a divergence of that reality instead of the reality itself. Yeah, there's almost 80 years of history here that I kind of need to brush up on.

Well you don't need to go that far back for all these alternate-alternate realities. It started becoming an issue in the late 80s. Pretty much anytime someone wanted to revisit a "Days of Future Past" type reality they took a lot of creative liberties (mostly because the Earth-616 universe had changed so much since the original story was published) that these became alternate realities *similar* to DOFP. It's gotten somewhat worse (for lack of a better term) In the last 16 years or so.

I don't know why that is... Maybe it's an editorial decision, so they can go back and revisit an original version down the road (kind of like when they did the Age of Apocalypse series in recent years), maybe it's writers paying tribute and not wanting to trample on someone else's work, or maybe writers just don't want to delve into all the possible continuity pit-falls that might come from resurrecting an old alternate reality plot line.

It's my experience that whenever they revisit an alternate reality they almost always try to introduce characters that are currently popular, or new concepts that have come up since (particularly if it's a reality that involves the X-Men), sometimes that's a little more difficult to pull off if you stick with the original story.