I’ve seen people in the TDP tags wondering about the mechanics/practicality of Claudia preserving her dad’s dead body for two whole years (while meeting and dating a remarkably open-minded elf boy, no less), and y’all, let’s just be Doylists for a second.  This is a retcon.

I’ve suspected for a while that the “Phase 2” production cycle took an unusually long time** not just because of pandemic complications, but mostly because the franchise went through some major restructuring post-s3, and this awkward retcon supports my suspicions on that front.  If it’d been planned this way from the start, Claudia wouldn’t have the exact same character model as before down to her hair length/style, nor would it include a slew of visual cues screaming “A Few Days After The Spire Battle!” for a very young audience to pick up on.  Claudia’s specific mention of Aaravos spinning his cocoon “two days ago” is also in keeping with TDP’s many (arguably ill-conceived) Biblical references, implying that Viren was dead for two days and resurrected on the third.

Now, why was this scene retconned when Viren’s quick resurrection and the two-year timeskip could totally coexist?  There could be some plot mechanics reasons, but I have a feeling that they mostly wanted an excuse to 1. establish Claudia and Terry’s relationship offscreen, without Viren around to complicate things, and 2. not totally overhaul Claudia and Viren’s character models.  Claudia’s going to have a cute braid later, sure, but that’s small potatoes compared with having to remodel the protagonist trio entirely.  It’s also very convenient to keep Viren in his plain white robe as long as possible.  Wonderstorm doesn’t have an infinite budget, so as appealing as it is to do a soft reboot timeskip, they’re probably compelled to cut corners wherever they can.

These new s4 clips bode much better for the rest of the series than I expected, so I’m really not saying all this to be a Negative Nancy.  I just think that, before discussing the Watsonian mechanics of this retcon, we ought to acknowledge that the creators probably aren’t secret geniuses who planned all along to confuse the nine-year-olds in the audience by only ~pretending~ to set the last scene of season 3 a couple days after the final battle.  Sometimes you just need to clumsily retcon stuff in order to do a soft reboot on your sprawling multimedia franchise that may or may not have gone into production with an incomplete/overly malleable series bible, and maybe that’s okay.  Or maybe it’s not okay and the creators have no idea what they’re doing, idk.  Time will tell.

**Since I’ve seen pushback on this before: based on their end-of-year update from Dec 2021, I know the creators would have fans believe that it’s ~very unusual~ to “work on multiple seasons simultaneously,” and that this is why Phase 2/seasons 4-6 took so long.  Respectfully, this is bullshit; TDP may release content in many short “seasons” in the vein of Netflix shows like VLD, but like VLD and most long animated series, the production cycle of about 25-27 episodes remains the same.  I don’t have a problem with them taking a pretty long time (like 2.5+ years??) to finish 27 episodes, but I wish they were more honest about why the delay happened.  Big, complex “waterfall”-style production cycles with a quick turnaround are the norm in animation and it’s unfair to other studios to pretend their own process is exceptionally intricate.