Quotes / Year X

Diego: ...Which time period?
Rokko: The year 20XX.
Mana: But... X isn't a number!
Diego: ...Are you so far into the future they managed to void out the last digit of the year?
Rokko: I dunno! I was only born a few months ago. 20XX is all I know.

—We Are Our Adventuring Avatars

"Geez, I really hope no more Foxes play on this stream cause I'm just gonna have to listen to this endless complaining about how good my character is… [Aziz "Hax" Al-Yami] has this running joke about—so you know how in Megaman, in the Megaman Show, it's like, "the year is 20XX…" So Aziz's thing is, "the year is 20XX, everyone plays Fox…" And there's this whole post-apocalyptic universe that is built off of Fox being the only viable character left… Humanity has reached its pinnacle… The peasants are living in poverty… And there's these monasteries where these Fox monks just levitate and TAS Fox with one hand, and win a tournament with the other… The tournament metagame has gotten to this point where everything is played out to theoretical perfection, so they Rock Paper Scissors for port priority, and that's the set, and everyone gets really excited about the port priority RPS. So RPS's metagame has really evolved to where it's really just like RPS tournaments are now. […] And then we have warriors like Kevin "PewPewU" Toy and Europhoria desperately trying to prevent the apocalypse, the Fox Apocalypse, from happening with their Marths…"

—Popular in-joke with Super Smash Bros. Melee

In the English language, x is often used to refer to an unknown variable, a practice that got its start in mathematics. It later made the jump over to pop culture in the 80s and 90s to refer to something that is just... unknown. See Mega Man games happening in 200X, for example. Yeah, it turned out that it doesn't matter what number we put in there- we didn't have robot shotas at all in the 2000s. Maybe Mega Man X will be more on-the-nose, they use 20XX. The usage here is that it's some unknown time in the future. It's a deliberate vagueness of when the events take place. The purpose of it allows the author to buy themselves a bit more time and extend the realism of the story. Oh, it's 2022 and that future event didn't happen? Well, rather than writing 2022, if you write 20XX, it can happen any time between now and 2099, extending the plausibility of the story.

—ShortFatOtaku, An X For Latinx.