Paternalistic continuity is what you call it when a writer/editor gets protective (or paternalistic) of the continuity of a particular character, and goes out of his/her way to control the history of said character.

The first notable example of this that I can think of is when John Byrne decided that Dr. Doom ("his" character, as Byrne was writing Fantastic Four at the time) was written poorly by Chris Claremont during an Uncanny X-Men appearance. So Byrne decided to show us all that that appearance was NOT "in continuity" by having the Doom from that X-Men story revealed to be a Doom-bot.

Another recent example was Jim Starlin in his Infinity Abyss mini-series, where he used an almost exact idea (instead of Doom-Bots, he used clones of Thanos) to explain away recent appearances of Thanos that he, Starlin, felt were out of character for Thanos (including the infamous Thanos/Ka-Zar fight). At least Starlin CREATED Thanos, so I guess paternalism is not that weird for him.

A final recent example is the X-Editors/Chris Claremont (one or the other) deciding that the Magneto in Grant Morrison's run was NOT the actual Magneto driven mad by Sublime, but a changeling.

Can anyone think of any other examples of paternalistic continuity?