Best/worst "HOW DOES THIS TIMELINE POSSIBLY WORK" theories.

[Freyr]

One easy way to explain it is that Detective Conan happens on another planet that just happens to be very, very, very, very similar to the one we live on.  This planet takes much longer to go around the sun than ours does, taking somewhere between 50 and 100 months (or possibly more) to actually do so.  The planet wobbles on its axis a lot, meaning the seasons come and go many times in one year, with a new season appearing about every three months.  Because the names of the months are based on the season cycle, and not on the year, there are only twelve named months, and each month will occur numerous times during the year.  So, because the planet has yet to make it all the way around the sun, it makes sense that they haven't aged a full year in the series.

There's also a legend on this planet that the world and everyone on it was brought into being by a god named Aoyama, and he set the lengths of days, months and those really, really long years.  Of course, this has since been disproved by science. 

Course, also would mean they aren't humans, as even though they would be aging a "year," still constantly getting older. Like the poor sods that are born on February 29th, still age 16 years worth by the time they have 4 birthdays (not taking into account legal recognitions, just straight birthdays).

[kirite]

9/10 of the episodes never happened.  They were just made up by Conan.  At the very end of the series a chibi Aoyama will come out and be like "Can you spot the real episodes : D? I left a clue in each episode!"

Which will then propel all the DC fans to rewatch all the episodes over.

[megas88]

9/10 of the episodes never happened.  They were just made up by Conan.  At the very end of the series a chibi Aoyama will come out and be like "Can you spot the real episodes : D? I left a clue in each episode!"

Which will then propel all the DC fans to rewatch all the episodes over.

Seriously? I've never noticed those before. I'm rewatching the series now. When does he pop up?

And this is the perfect topic ^^. I've been analyzing this for a few weeks now. Been a slight obsession of mine. Look at the list of episodes. Take out all the filler (especially the crappy ones) and put together all the manga cases. Considering I stopped reading the manga really early in the series I'm not sure what didn't make it into the anime so please tell me if I'm wrong. Consider the fact that from the point Shinichi was shrunk to the point we're at now in the anime as a time line that has spanned the course of 1 year. Ok, now again I'm rewatching so bear with me if it's really two and if I've made a mistake.

We've seen that the beginning takes place some time in the fall. Hence Shinichi and Ran wearing jackets to Tropical Land. Winter shortly follows and sometime around now summer has come as we see the Teitan high uniforms have changed. That's skipping from begging to end right now.

So, the episode number if matched with the number of days passed still doesn't match up. Of course it doesn't. A ton of these not only have multiple parts (just look at the EPIC case that is the Red and Black saga) but some cases (such as certain one's where Heji comes in) lead into another case entirely. If it's to be believed that these cases take place on the same day or the day after you've shrunken the episode count down to under 190 or so (my estimation).

My theory is that at the exact point of the 1 year anniversary of Shinichi becoming Conan something epic will happen to change everything. I don't know what. I have loads of theory's but more than half of them don't make sense so I'll let that be.

Well, that's my take on the confusing awsomeness that is the Detective Conan time line. Now if only we can get Shinichi to explain it all to us correctly with Haibara jumping in from time to time correcting him ^^.