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What Did You Write Today?

Greninjaman said:
Hence, why I don't plan on doing a long-running story series. At some point, the lore will get so confusing and complex that you can't make heads or tails of it anymore.
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It's not an actual story series, it's just silly lore for my characters and I don't know how it got so confusing
 
deep breath
Some of them have been running since 1950's, which is a very long time to have to come up with new plots each month. Originally this manifested in more-or-less of a "threat of the day": some bad guy/monster showed up, the hero beat the antagonist with some twists along the way, and the status quo was restored with the villain's downfall. There was some continuity (recurring villains, for example), but it never got very heavy. Things shifted eventually, and creators decided they wanted to do deeper plots with heavier character development. But that meant that the character had to keep developing, because the series kept running. And there was still the matter of making new challenges for the hero, so new villains kept appearing and old villains kept coming up with new plots (and sometimes powers). New, interesting elements were added to the world for the hero to interact with...including whole other parallel worlds. It's all in the name of fun and entertainment, but it can still be an awful lot to keep track of.

As an example: a fairly well-known early Justice League story had the League meet their predecessors from the comics of the previous decade, the Justice Society. It wouldn't have made a lot of sense for both groups to exist and have never spoken before, so the story explained that the League and the Society existed in parallel worlds. One quick dimensional hop, and they got to meet each other and adventure together. Neat! A year later, they did the same thing, but with a new twist: both worlds were being threatened by a third world, populated by villainous versions of the heroes. Fun! ...And then it kept going.

Want to write about a group of heroes fighting against a global empire? Just use an earth where the Axis won WWII! Want to write about a major character's kid, but don't want to commit to a ship? Set it on a different earth and use whatever love interest you please with no repercussions on the main canon! Eventually, DC decided their lore had gotten too complicated for the average reader, so they rebooted it in a massive cross-series story called "Crises on Infinite Earths". Everything was condensed into one world. But the stories kept going, and things got complicated again. So they rebooted it again. And again. And now DC has to clarify what major character events have and have not happened in their latest reboot timeline.

Marvel has not rebooted like this, but that doesn't necessarily make things better. If you crack open the Marvel Encyclopedia and take a look at a long-running character (like, say, Spider-Man), you'll see that they've had pretty much every awful thing ever happen in their personal lives, up to and including their own deaths. If a story wants to be anything other than angst-fueled, there's a decent chance it's going to ignore some of the character's personal history for the sake of simplicity.

To be fair, continuing the story for a long time is not the only reason this happens. Other factors include writers changing and the need to explain how a character has been around since the 1950's but has not significantly aged. But hopefully I've explained my comment somewhat?
 
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