Why the 5 year jump?

Question

In the second season premiere of Young Justice, the story jumped 5 years into the future.  This jump seems to undermine a significant portion of the show's premise of showing young heroes trying to establish themselves beyond the shadow of their adult mentor heroes.  In the new season, the former new heroes are now veterans, some members of the Justice League, and are mentoring a new wave of young heroes.  The jump has also disrupted the growing relationships between the characters, as those relationships developed and changed during the 5 year gap.

Have the showrunners explained the reasoning for the drastic change?

Jack B Nimble · Accepted Answer

It is possible the season jumps due to the availability of new characters. From the Wikipedia article:

Although there were several characters the producers were not allowed to use in the first season (a list that has become shorter along the course of the development), they were usually in charge of the decisions determining which DC Universe character would or would not be used.

The dramatic time jump could have given them an opportunity to remove certain characters from the spotlight off screen and allow them to introduce new characters into the story. Rather than having all those messy breakups take up time they can clear the relationship slate and start new after a 5 year gap.

This is all just speculation.

user31178 · Answer

A similar question was just asked on Movies & TV, where I answered it. Note that the quote from my answer was given a couple months after this question was asked, and about a month after the latest answer was given.

This is taken from the Station Eight fan site. It's a quote from Greg Weisman, one of the show's head writers.

Greg Weisman says:
  "While developing Season One, we had a solid idea of what we had in mind for Season Two - including the time skip. And we had/have solid ideas for Season Three, including another time skip."
  [Response recorded on July 17, 2012.]
  "We planned on this time jump from day one. Because we knew, again, that if our show's about growing up, then you can't show a character grow up in 6 months' time. So the idea is that our first season told 6 months from July 4th to January 1st. Our second season tells another 6 months from January 1st to July 4th, but there's a 5-year gap in-between that we planned."

If you analyze the characters post-jump, you'll see that they have matured and do behave differently, and this isn't something that could be accomplished realistically in even an entire extra season. The show the progress of the Team, and show the results of the track they were headed on, it was necessary to skip forward in time.

Why the 5 year jump?

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