I’m interested to hear about anime that give a different experience when putting the episodes in a different order. They can be official orders (broadcast vs dvd) or fan orders (moving arcs around, putting seasons in chronological vs release order). Maybe you can even think of examples where a companion movie is inserted in the middle of a season? Two separate projects by the same author or studio that can be weaved together to form a consistent whole?
The Magical Index series seriously weaves and overlaps in similar timeframes across three different series:
- A Certain Magical Index
- A Certain Scientific Railgun
- A Certain Scientific Accelerator
It’s so intertwined at points you can jump to another series to see what’s happening to that character at the same time as another character. I tried to put together a chronological watch order and got half way through it.
I’m interested in forgetting about it, this is close to triggering my PTSD. I spent way to much time on TVDB/TMDB trying to match obscure anime downloads with some reasonable airing order. And the specials … oh god deliver me from specials and OVAs.
And yes, as already mentioned “Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya” gave me a big headache … I probably spend around 2 hours trying to figure out which episide is which and putting them in one of the officals orders.
I have a folder called “unsorted specials” that is about to hit 1TB …
The famous one is season one of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. In 2021 there was Peach Boy Riverside
Mekakucity Actors, Steins;Gate, Monogatari, Vivy
Basically everything involving time travel/skips I just always watch in release order
I think Monogatari series is a classic for this: broadcast vs novel vs chronological. I’d argue Fate as well. Doing Zero before the Stay Night trilogy gives a different vibe to some of the plotlines than after (dramatic irony vs mystery).
Zero was so boring
The inspiration for the thread: I’m rewatching Tatami Galaxy and I remembered that I accidentally watched it in reverse order the last time. It worked surprisingly well, but I did watch episode 11 again at the end, after I realized what had gone wrong. There’s some time shenanigans anyway, and every episode contains about as many callbacks as callbacks-to-future-episodes and that doesn’t change in reverse order.
The Horimiya anime originally skipped a bunch of stuff that was covered in a later season, titled “Horimiya Pieces” or something like that. If you want to watch the events in the order they happened in the manga it’s a crazy mess.
Baccano!
Hidamari Sketch. The first two seasons have an achronological order. Each episode is a day in their life in one of the twelve months. Online you can find alternative orders that if you follow them, the story is told chronologically. Although I don’t think it would make that much of a different experience given the episodic nature and lack of overall narrative. One thing about the release order is that sometimes the characters refer to something that has happened but the viewer hasn’t seen that yet. That is something that would disappear with the alternative order. From what I heard the manga is mostly chronological so it would be more true to the manga.
The first series that came to mind was Fate. There are a lot of fan orders.
