Release order on first experience is the only way guaranteed to not create unnecessary confusion. Works in a continuity that are released after each other tend rely upon prior knowledge of the work to accentuate the experience. Inventing a new angle to experience them through may be valuable as an artistic exercise, but it is very clearly a bad idea to recommend that angle to newcomers. Release order is specifically reliable because it tracks either the creative process/development of ideas in cases of straightforward serialization, or in case of intentionality in release order follows author intent.
The only time a bespoke work order is even debatable is in cases of an adaptation of a work that is not adapted in release order of the original work. Even then, that adaptation may work around that in a way where it makes it, too, confusing to experience outside of its own release order.
Sometimes later works are written with explicit goal to be accessible to a new audience.
Like with StarWars for example you can start with any of the trilogies, watch them in any order as long as you watch the works within the trilogies in order. You can watch just the latest trilogy and ignore the earlier films. Or you can skip StarWars entirely and watch something worthwhile.
Hmm, yeah fair. I can also see it working for say, franchise comics, it gets messy when work count goes into high-double/triple digits.
I think my pet peeve is specifically when people take like, Metal Gear, JoJo’s, or as I first experienced this ick when I was 15, Monogatari, and twist it into a bespoke maze to follow chronology or some other thing, and then it catches on and people start recommending it to new people. It just gives me the ick.
I get some mad at people who started with mgs3 cause its chronologically first. It’s a prequel that assumes you’ve played the previous games. Thats why there is a 3 in the name. For Star Wars, people watching the prequels first has for sure contributed to the modern prequel apologia which I cant at all get behind.
For Trek i generally do recommend starting with TNG and not TOS cause the original is 60s as fuck
Star Trek, you have to start with Lower Decks and work yourself up the ranks.
For Trek i generally do recommend starting with TNG and not TOS cause the original is 60s as fuck
Absolutely seconded. It’s the best entry point into Trek.
Erm sweaty the best metal gear to start with is portable ops and then swiftly move onto the sequel syphon filter. Thank you kojima for metal gear gabe
The best metal gear is rising and then just not playing any of the others
STANDING HERE I REALISE
TOS (including TAS) is the best trek, all the others are star wars wearing a better show’s skin
Weird take
TOS has a chill, relaxed, weird vibe. TNG is space opera with less fantasy. It is to trek what the jackson trilogies are to the books
That said i do realise this is far from the consensus (“weird” as you put it)
I can sorta see what youre talking about but think its still around for most of tng
A great example of this is the newly released Pathologic 3, which despite technically being the third one is the perfect entry point as its from the perspective of a total outsider and is the best gameplay wise. Although its still hilariously obfuscated at times, half the time one of your dialogue options will just be quoting full Latin sentences at peasantry.
Isn’t it just a third of Pathology 1?
It would be more accurate to say its based on one of the three storylines from Pathologic. Its very much its own game like 2 was before it.
watching the prequels first ruins the introduction on dagobah
another reason to like the combined trilogy order of 4-5-2-3-6. if showing someone the series and they want to include the prequels this is my go to order
Now try this for Terry Prachett books lol
Release order is incredibly rewarding because you see the little in-jokes and back-references as they’re cropping up in canon.
Came in here to talk about Discworld. I generally agree with OP but for Discworld I usually recommend one of the standalones first because it’s a good way to get a feel for his writing and to see if you like it, whereas Colour of Magic and Light Fantastic are quite different from the other ones since he hadn’t really gotten into stride yet. Also depending on the person I usually recommend one I think they’ll like because it’s about something I know they enjoy. But I would never try to prescribe a whole reading order, that’s insane
I always recommend Guards! Guards! first because it introduces characters that reoccur throughout most of the other books and is itself the start the Vimes mini-series within the series.
If you don’t love Pratchett at his “parodying Anne McCaffrey for 37 pages,” you don’t deserve him at his “doing extremely problematic fantasy racism with a troll named goddamned fucking Coalface whose ‘characterization’ sounds like a straight-up 4chan meme”
Paragraph 4, and CW should be obvious:
https://discworld.fandom.com/wiki/Constable_CoalfaceThe City Watch series is a land of contrasts
Coalface
Wow, how did I not get this?
Because we’re so accustomed to racist cop dramas that it didn’t strike anyone as out-of-place in a fantasy comedy series?
- Mort
- The Diggers trilogy
- Feet of Clay
- Feel bad because those were the only ones my local library had as a kid.
I’d avoid basing the reading order on the story arcs for most part, it’s more fun to randomly run into known characters again. Other than that, it’s difficult to mess up. I’d consider the Nomes as a start too. For the Nomes I’d read the books in order and consecutive.
Me watching all 9! permutations of the mainline Star Wars films only to discover that watching by release date still beats all other 9! - 1 permutations
Me watching all 9! permutations of the star wars films only to realize that my experience would be much better served by pretending the series ended in 83
You can safe a lot of time by watching the superpermutation of all the films instead of just watching all the permutations in sequence.
I can’t agree. Sure, release order is how I’d almost always choose to engage with a series, but that’s because I don’t trust hardly anyone to tell me which order to experience stuff in!
If I do trust someone who’s well-versed in a series and they tell me to experience works in a certain order, yeah, I’d do that. But everything is so subjective, you really have to trust the person who is telling you which order you should engage with the works in the series, and on the internet, that trust is hard to build.
But still, I definitely think there are frequently arguments for skipping a certain title in a series, or reading a series in some order other than publication order. Not every work in a series is going to be as easy to get into as every other, and often earlier entries are clunkier than later ones.
For some concreteness:
In The Elder Scrolls, I started with Oblivion (IV) and I’m glad I did. I went back to Morrowind (III) later and I think I enjoyed it more because I sort of knew what an Elder Scrolls title is like.
I played Pathologic 2 before Pathologic 1 and would never suggest anyone start with Pathologic 1.
The first Dark Souls game I beat is Dark Souls 3, after bouncing off Dark Souls 1 pretty hard.
We’ve been watching the Predator movies recently, and I’d suggest skipping the original Predator and jumping straight to Predator 2, unless you really like Arnold Schwarzenegger or you’re really, really into the series. The original Predator is just boring, in a way the later ones aren’t. (It’s also, arguably, the best of them in terms of cinematography, themes, the overall craft, etc. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a large contingent of people who hate the Predator movies other than the first. Which kind of complicates my argument, but I stand by it!)
I’m sure there are other relevant examples, but I sure can’t think of them at the moment!
as someone who’s never watched past Predator 1, what are you talking about that movie is awesome
I didn’t like it! I thought it was boring and better skipped! These things are so very subjective!
I think the partner to this is also the idea that “it’s ok to be confused and not know everything that is going on at all times. Sometimes a work can mean more when there is an unexpected or surprising moment that puts previous information into a new light.” And a lot of these “recommended read orders” tend to focus on comprehension against this idea so the audience is never “in the dark” but it also makes twists or reframing devices from earlier works in a series lose all their impact.
It is also related to the “wikification” of media, where people focus on the plot and the plot alone, and not on how a story made them feel or made them think.
the only other time it’s debatable for me is release order but with ‘problematic’ (i.e. hard to experience/gatekeeper/turn-off) or ‘unnecessary’ (spinoff/non-canon/retread/etc.) skipped, but that shifts it to a debate on that criteria, which is separate from the order itself.
Historical Materialists vs Revisionists be like
I get it for stuff like Brandon Sanderson’s cosmere works. It is, at this point, a pretty sprawling network of (mostly) loosely interconnected books and stories with occasional much denser connections. You can technically start pretty much anywhere based on your genre preferences and tolerance for epic doorstop books, but there are some sequences that will let you get more out of the books than others, and some sequences that will spoil what look like totally other series. Reading them in release order is fine for spoilers, but front loads some of the weaker books since he’s developed a lot as an author in the last couple of decades, and would also mean you’re doing things like breaking up trilogies in ways that might sometimes be annoying. Likewise, though, just reading all the books in one series straight through might sometimes cause problems.
Release order is the only order. Publication date is everything. Anything else is just fans being silly.
