this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2026
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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.

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[–] Philosoraptor@hexbear.net 5 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

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.