Instead of the regular cycle of year names in, for example, the Chinese calendar, these names are always entirely unique, generated by scholars through obscure, and possibly prophetic, methods. In a fantasy setting, years may be named rather than numbered. If Alternative Calendar is used in Science Fiction with Earthian years, it may mean that the work takes place After the End or something else that Hit So Hard, the Calendar Felt It or that everybody have Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions and chose something significant for their reference point. In Sci-fi settings, these calendars are frequently used across multiple worlds, becoming Standard Time Units. When an Alternative Calendar is used to measure the progress of "days", it's common for characters to use Microts as smaller, more manageable units of time. Real lunisolar calendars solve that problem by adding a leap month to certain years some purely lunar calendars (like the Islamic one) ignore the solar year altogether and just declare twelve lunar months to be a year (resulting in the lunar calendar falling behind 11 days every solar year, making the lunar months slowly rotate through the seasons over the decades, completing one full rotation every 33 years). However, there are actually somewhat more than twelve lunar months in an Earth year. In some cases, the author will actually have twelve different names of the form "_ Moon" to replace the twelve months of the Gregorian calendar. In fantasy, a popular version of this is to measure time in "moons" instead of months. This also elegantly sidesteps the problems of Exactly Exty Years Ago. This makes it clear to the reader that the story takes place either in another world, or in a version of our world so far in the future that time isn't even counted the same way. In Speculative Fiction, it's common to use a different calendar than the real world.
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