Quote Originally Posted by Anonymoose View Post
But I agree that it's not inherently bad to have no exit strategy for things that aren't due to come up yet. I joke that there are "George R. R. Martin Problems" (a plan loose enough for its own characters to wander away from) and then there are "Patrick Rothfuss Problems" (a plan detailed enough that - given the inevitable edits and changes to the story as you release it - you have a ton of work to do to make later stuff match earlier stuff, again).
The comparison I always give is to comic books. You've got multiple creatives drifting in and out, all trying to tell what at first appears to be the same contiguous story, but is really every individual writer and artist finding their own ways to contribute and tell the stories that they want to tell, while trying to make it feel like the same characters and the same world.

Long-running TV shows might be a closer comparison, though. I've loved Doctor Who since the revival series, but it's absolutely just a whole cavalcade of different creatives trying to explain why THIS Cyberman episode is completely different from all the OTHER Cyberman episodes, while also linking back to them to a bunch of those episodes to make it clear that these are actually Cybermen and not just their own weirdass thing. And sometimes that's a whole lot of story to work with, and sometimes the fact that they were weak to gold gets simplified or forgotten!