Archive Binge: Difference between revisions

 

 

Picture the scene. You're just idly surfing the web. You find a webcomic and read the most recent one. You laugh. You decide to read the previous one. That's funny as well. You read a week's worth and laugh at all of them. You feel the urge well up inside you. It's time to go on... an Archive Binge.

Firefox extensions like [https://web.archive.org/web/20101205023812/https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4925/ Autopager] can help by automatically adding the next page as you scroll, so you don't have to click on links. For some of them, you need to be quite technically minded, though.

 

 

 

It is not unusual for fans who have already been following a series to undertake several more archive binges, often initiated by an [[Archive Trawl]]. It's also good practice for [[Fanfic]] writers to undertake this, especially in a new fandom, or one they're going back to. It's often called "Canon Review" in these circumstances.

 

{{examples}}

* Newcomers to [[Anime]] often fall victim to this, due to the sheer amount of ([[Fan Sub|fansubbed]]) material readily available on the Internet. Note that Archive Binging makes reading long arcs easier, cutting down on [[Arc Fatigue]] and eliminating the need to wait a week for the next installment.

* Don't feel like (or can't) torrent? Uncomfortable with fansubs? The below mentioned [[Hulu]].com offers a RIDICULOUS amount of professionally subbed anime. And it has the entire series too. No downloading necessary. It even has a few dubs, though those are harder to get the rights to. Especially if the dub is still airing.

** But one could always check Crunchy Roll, they have quite a few series an average person would've never heard of otherwise.

* Scanlated manga hosts have a very good chance of turning into an Archive Binge.

 

== Comic Books ==

* While ''[[Sonic the Hedgehog (comics)|Archie Comics Sonic the Hedgehog]]'' hasn't been running as long as some famous DC or Marvel names, it's existed long enough to have nearly 240 main issues at the time of this writing, a Knuckles side-series that lasted into the 30s, an on-going ''Sonic Universe'' spinoff that is currently around issue 40, and numerous special graphic novels and miniseries.

* As a gift to fans, every issue of ''[[Elf Quest]]'' was put online for fans to read/re-read/discover/share. Which makes it quite easy to binge on the series.

 

== Fan Works ==

* The fan made game ''[[Heta Oni]]''. It starts out dull at first, but you'll get hooked by the suspense, especially when {{spoiler|Japan goes into the kitchen of the haunted house to investigate, only to hear strange sounds in the foyer and find that the three he came with -- Italy, Prussia, and Germany -- are all gone.}}

* ''[[The Mad Scientist Wars]]'' has been going on for over a year and a half now, and has managed a huge number of pages with several highly complicated plots, and character backgrounds, and running gags... not even *counting* the Lounge (where the creators talk), The mad sci Tales (short pieces to do with MSW), and... so on. To the point where a summary has been worked on.

* Gaedhal's "Queer Theories" has been going for almost a decade now.

* ''[[Cat-Tales]]'' has been updating on a chapter-a-month-or-so schedule for nine years, resulting in 60 separate stories (with almost 350 chapters, combined) and multiple (thankfully much shorter) spin-off series. Although heavily influenced by both the comics and the DCAU, it has its own cast of recurring characters and complicated storylines that require any new reader to start at the beginning before you're able to understand later stories. Thankfully, once you've read through it once, it's easy to stay updated... but oh, that one story back at the beginning was so good, maybe I'll reread it, and let's see, the next story was pretty good too...

* Arguaby, ''[[My Immortal]]''. You hear amusing lines from it. You hear about it. You want to know: "Is it really THIS stupid/silly/bad/awesome beyond compare?" So you read up on it, not wanting to receive the brain damage you've heard you'll get from reading it. Then you give up and read the whole thing out of curiosity, and bile fascination makes you read the whole thing (or you're generally amused by Enoby's adventures). So is it really as stupid/silly/bad/awesome beyond compare as everyone says? Answer: {{spoiler|Yes. A million times, YES.}}

 

* [[The Captain]] in ''[[WALL-E]]'' does this with the starship's encyclopedia after [[City in a Bottle|learning about Earth for the first time]].

* Leeloo in ''[[The Fifth Element]]'' when she is learning about Earth for the first time on the computer. She's supposedly going in alphabetical order, which is why we get a [[Break the Cutie]] moment towards the end when she gets to W (for ''war''). The movie seemed to present her selections as fairly random. A contrived setup for sure, but it makes more sense than if she just skipped some entries.

* ''[[The Lord of the Rings (film)|The Lord of the Rings]]''. Regular editions: 9 hours. Extended editions: 11 hours. Extended editions with the appendices: 92 hours. That's 4 days. Not even counting the regular editions, [[Riff Trax]], or regular edition's special features. Good luck!

 

== Literature ==

* [[Baen Books]] via the [http://baencd.thefifthimperium.com/ BaenCD at The Fifth Imperium], a promotional site sponsored by Baen, haas nearly their entire library on the internet for free for promotional purposes. ''[[Honor Harrington]]'', ''[[Vorkosigan Saga]]'', [[John Ringo]], ''[[1632]]'' have nearly their complete works up there, along with many, many others. ''[[Honor Harrington]]'' is 16+ [[Door Stoppers]] and Counting alone. Plus the authors lesser works and it gets large quick. The 1635 disc has ''68 novels alone''.

 

 

== Live-Action TV ==

* Jazz musician Sun Ra has over a hundred full length albums, which add up to over 1000 songs.

* Spotify has almost all of recorded music in history, for free.

 

== New Media ==

* ''[[(The Customer is) Not Always Right]]'' has thousands of stupid customer quotes.

* [http://dailycoyote.net The Daily Coyote] has updated every day and includes archives back from when Shreve Stockton first started to take care of the coyote we know as Charlie.

* Most online streaming services, notably Netflix where you have access to entire seasons worth of TV shows at a time can be useful for wasting an entire day... or several.

* [http://www.cracked.com Cracked.com] Those countdown articles are addicting... and plentiful.

* Skeptical blogs such as [http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/ Pharyngula] and [http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/ Respectful Insolence] not only make reference to older articles about similar topics or the same person, they often reference other skeptical blogs that have written about the same topics/people.

* Facebook's newly introduced "Friend X and Friend Y" friendship review pages can have this effect.

* Darn you, [https://web.archive.org/web/20131101105136/http://www.damnyouautocorrect.com/ Damnyouautocorrect.com]!

* When going through a language program similar to ''Rosetta Stone'' you may end up going through a whole language without getting any sleep for several nights, then forgetting most of it.

* The ''[http://www.customerssuck.com/board/ Customers Suck!]'' forums. Especially Gravekeeper's posts.

 

 

== Video Games ==

* ''[[Freedom Force]]'' likewise has a huge number of skins and models for pretty much every conceivable superhero and supervillain, as well as many other characters.

* Any video game with an in-game encyclopedia can turn into an Archive Binge. Notable examples include the codex section popular in ''[[BioWare]]'' games or vast selection of in-game literature of ''[[The Elder Scrolls]]'' series. Many a gamer has found him/herself spending several hours reading about the game world's history instead of actually playing.

* The proliferation of ROMs available for older consoles, (SNES, Genesis, NES, N64, PSX, etc.) can allow a gamer to lose themselves in thousands of free games on a computer and now, most smartphones.

 

== Web Animation ==

* Strategically keying up all nine-plus hours of ''[[Red vs. Blue]]'' so it can be watched in one marathon session. A bandwidth-intensive mission though.

 

== Web Comics ==

* ''[[Its Walky]]'' (and its spinoffs) has been going on for 15 years, but is especially bad because it has a rather detailed plot.

* ''[[MS Paint Adventures]]'' will take days to read since it is often updated with 10-15 individual pages of actions every day, with only few breaks.

* Pity on the one who decides to just now get into ''[[Sluggy Freelance]]''. Usually a comic a day for over ten years. It will be a long time before you see the sun. A "weekly" mode has been (re)added to the archives. If you can hold yourself to an hour a day on weekdays (in other words, one's lunch break) and you're a speedy reader, it'll take you about six weeks.

* ''[[Girl Genius]]'' is a rather interesting example. Initially, the comic was split into two sections: the 101 beginner's section, which started from the beginning, and the "Advanced" class, for those who had been following the comic since it was originally released in print. Both sections were updated three times a week. In July 2007, the 101 section finally caught up to the beginning of the "Advanced" section, which resulted in a mass simultaneous Archive Trawl/Binge by those who had been reading the 101 comics. This both exceeded the site's monthly bandwidth and caused the server to crash.

* ''[[Charby the Vampirate]]'' forces you to do this, so cancerously numerous are the characters... and unlike some amateurs, the author will keep track of every single one of them correctly and will give us time to be emotionally attached before she gets around to killing them off so the archive binge is as necessary as it is recommended purely to get full emotional stress when the killing begins!

* ''[[Irregular Webcomic]]'' shows how to do it [http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/669.html wrong]. At this point, newcomers to ''Irregular Webcomic!'' can expect to go through multiple Archive Binges. They'll find a theme they like, start reading the archive and then realize that in order to understand it you have to read this other them too and then to understand ''that'' one you have to read this one and...

* [http://xkcd.com/214/ This] ''[[Xkcd]]'' strip sums it up pretty well.

* ''[[Schlock Mercenary]]'' has been running like clockwork 7 days a week, 365 days a year for over TEN YEARS, with an extra two strips on Sundays. That comes out to 4500+ plus strips (or a mere 3500+ you don't count Sundays extra). The only time updates were halted was when the servers hosting the site were flood-damaged. The comics for those particular days were hosted on an emergency server, and were posted only a few hours late. Mr. Tayler has a record to uphold, after all. ''Schlock Mercenary'' makes it unnecessarily easy for even experienced Schlockers to do this, as the sidebar contains a "random strip" button that throws you back into the archives.

* ''[[Count Your Sheep]]'' has a strip almost every day, starting in early June 2003 and continuing today. Not only that, Adis, the author, has at least two other strips that he also updates in addition to CYS. What a dynamo... Though recently it hasn't updated that much so you could probably read the last few years in one sitting.

* ''[[Misfile]]'' is only a thousand pages or so at this point, but more than a few people who have lost sleep due to this trope. As of September 2011, approaching two thousand pages... and yes, I lost sleep...

* Good luck trying to Archive Binge at ''[[Mezzacotta]]''. It might take a while, with comics for every day back to 1 January, 9999999999999 BC (according to the proleptic Gregorian calendar). Just for sake of simplicity, the amount of strips that are there is 3650000000732555 strips ((9999999999999+ 2008)* 365) without including leap days, and assuming ideal condition that you can read 1 strip per second, which makes it 31536000 strips per year (no leap days, still). The amount of time to finish the whole archive is '''''115 million years!''''' Yep, that 10^8 years you need to read to finish it.

* ''Funny Farm'' has lasted for 9.5 years. And it updated every, single day. There were only a few months in which he didn't update every day. Instead he updated 4 days a week for a month or two, then 5 days a week for a month or two, and then back to every day. However, the entire archive has been removed so he can post the 9.5 years worth of 7 days a week over 5 days with commentary. So the weekend strips tend to rest on weekdays now. It's no longer an archive binge, more an archive wait.

* ''[[The Class Menagerie]]'' had ran for a little while, and the archive binge doesn't take as much as some strips like ''Newshounds'' and ''Funny Farm'' (Which it has crossed over with). Unfortunately, the strips are listed in the archive ''out of order'' so it's rather odd to see the "introductory" strips right after you finished several notable-sized story arcs. To make matters worse, some of the strips are even ''repeated''. (The crossover with ''Newshounds'' shows up twice if one reads the archive from the beginning)

** Casually ''glancing'' at the index at the bottom of the page, particularly if you see a trope you're unfamiliar with or haven't seen in a long time, only worsens the problem -- ''especially'' with the various groupings/lists of related tropes.

** This page is especially bad. If the other examples here are offenders, this page is an offender squared. A large archive of large archives...

* Even websites ''about'' comics succumb to this, such as [http://www.joshreads.com The Comics Curmudgeon]. C'mon, I dare you to not keep flipping back through the archives of commentary.

* [http://www.crunchyroll.com/forumtopic-350792/Anime-motivational-posters.html?pg=0 The Anime Motivational Posters thread at Crunchyroll.] First you see an anime you recognize, then you see one that's really smart, then you start to notice the hilarious banter between the moderator and the regulars, and before you know it, you've gone 200 pages. The fact that it grows around 5 to 10 pages a day does not help.

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Webcomic Tropes]]

[[Category:Audience Reactions]]