The SRU Timeline

One of the small joys of curating this project for as long as I have been is maintaining its long, storied history: keeping track of when things happened, which things happened before other things, and how different disparate things effected other things that happened later.

This probably sounds sarcastic. But it’s not! Most of the time, it’s not. I love fictional timelines. However, fictional timelines are unique from real world timelines because, well…made up stuff has no obligation to historical fidelity. And, in an evolving serialized narrative penned by multiple authors over many years, continuity errors are embarrassingly common!

In fact, the SRU is nothing without its much-compounded continuity. We even have continuity errors that I liked so much they became canon! So when I set out to make a timeline of events in this fictional universe, you kind of have to accept that even the dates and facts you see here are subjective and may change one day.

It’s primarily a reference source, the same way the rest of this wiki is. Even if some dates do change, the facts appended to them are still “canon”, and their relationship to each other is still as correct as correct gets for us. For now.

And on and on.

Many years ago, when the SRU still lived on Fanfiction.net, I began working on a so-called “Appendix”, the purpose of which was to collect relevant information from the game into a single place for ease of access by the players, so that we wouldn’t do things like forget how old someone was or whether or not someone had a gun (this was a real problem in the early months) and so on.

This appendix’s biggest feature was a master timeline. It was a mess, and I stopped updating it in 2021…it never even got to all the crazy time-related shenanigans. It was also not intended for general perusal.

This timeline…or, rather, timelines…will be, I hope, different. Owing to the massive amount of information we’ve accumulated, a single master timeline will be unwieldy. Don’t get me wrong…there still is one, but if you’re looking for something specific related to a certain story thread, family, or concept, there will be dedicated timelines for those.

A general note for all timelines: there are footnotes throughout with citations for each attestation.

Timelines

Master Timeline: Everything that has ever happened, anywhere in the SRU. Includes all information from all other timelines, except for the media timeline, for the simple reason that it isn’t necessarily important to know when Doritos were invented in relation to the ongoing soap opera of Lakewood, Louisiana.

Births and Deaths Timeline: A chronological index of character births and deaths. Useful for determining peoples’ ages and for detecting all the times I couldn’t be bothered to do math.

Media Timeline: An exhaustive, and I do mean exhaustive, timeline of every real world media, product, brand, and person ever attested in the SRU. This is one of those side projects I began in my original Appendix years ago and, like that attempt, is here because I thought it was fun to track. Maybe you’ll agree.