Question Recommnded Reading Orders and Tagging

You have started with RROs and I'm really grateful for that. That's how I got to read several picked out stories about some of my favourite characters, but I feel like these lists are incomplete or not up to date. I wanted to read up on Danny Franks aka Pounce for multiple and the tagging for Pounce suggests that he's first mentioned in Kayda 8. Now I'm reluctant to start in a series with the 8th part while I'm not entirely sure this is even the first story with and/or about Pounce because I've noticed much of the tagging is not done reactively. For example the Astrodragon tag is only applied on both parts of "A Dragon Abroad" but neither on "Big Apple Come With Calamari" nor "Blood Sisters". I really want to read more into Whateley but I can't really find exactly what I'm looking for. Shouldn't Extended Reading Orders be pretty easy to write for some of the guys who worked on Whateley from the very beginning? Tagging might be more difficult but it would really help orientation. It will help newer and new members of the community a lot when dealing with the overwhelming flood of stories. I think the starting page says 12 million words? That is insane! Good job guys and I really want to make most of it.

Edit: If I'm not mistaken you had a nice table back at crystalhall.org which columns like main character, author, set time, perhaps if it's the 1st, 2nd or 3rd story in that arc and stuff like that this would also be amazing for orientation. Also in the RROs for Kimba you only stated the first one or two stories per character which is quite a shame.

Oneiros wrote: I wanted to read up on Danny Franks aka Pounce for multiple and the tagging for Pounce suggests that he's first mentioned in Kayda 8. Now I'm reluctant to start in a series with the 8th part while I'm not entirely sure this is even the first story with and/or about Pounce because I've noticed much of the tagging is not done reactively.

The good news is that Kayda's had a little brother, now more of a little other, for as long as we've known her. No, that's not a given.

The bad news for his fans is that he's part of the background scenery until Phoenix Spiritus started writing non-canon stories about how he could turn out if he does manifest. THAT became the The Micro-Scenes Thread

Dreamer wrote: Now please stop flooding Kayda's Brother thread with them, Phoenix. Before the poor boy runs screaming for the hills and the thread spontaneously disappears with him.

So, he's a canonical example of an " Ascended Extra " in an extended work that appears to have broken TB Tropes again.

Learning to Hunt is set right barely ahead of Kayda 8, where Danny's story starts moving forward.

As far as the tagging goes, it wasn't even a potential feature until this iteration of the forums, so yeah. Google search, the Wiki, and sometimes even TV Tropes may be helpful until the gaps are back-filled. Even with tagging the wiki will stay useful, as many of the story articles listing characters include those limited to appearances.

If I upset you I'm very sorry I didn't intend to do that t all. I actually thought it was easy for someone who is with Whateley from the very start.
Thank you for for Wiki "pathway" that was very helpful.

Well, a reading order for G2 is actually pretty simple.

The origin stories - Blood Sisters for DragonsFyre, Written in Blood for Glyph, and so on, can either be read first (if you want to know where the characters 'came' from), or later, they are all standalone. Some prefer to read origins first, some dont.

For the story, read The Big Apple Comes With Calimari, then the Road to Whateley. These introduce the main characters. Then I Dont Think We're in Kansas Anymore, which introduces them to Whateley. After that, read in order of publication is as good as any.

G1...no, I'm not going there, I wish to retain what's left of my sanity.

Yeah Gen2 is nice and easy. It helps a lot that I was already with you when Gen2 started, but Gen1 is where it gets complicated. To say the absolute least.

Oneiros wrote: If I upset you I'm very sorry I didn't intend to do that t all. I actually thought it was easy for someone who is with Whateley from the very start.
Thank you for for Wiki "pathway" that was very helpful.

I'm going to put this out there and this is my own opinion about reading stories in a given order. You can't. Not really, unless they are designed as standalones. The reason is quiet simple. People interact with other people. Think of it like you have your own personal bubble around you. As you interact you and others step into that bubble and then when done, you step away.

It's the way that the writers are doing here. It's the same in school, airport and so on. The problem is how people have come to expect books to be read. When you read the story, it follows a certain dynamic, by focusing on the protagonist unless the story by the writer dictates that you should read something along the lines that works with the story. Over the years/decades/centuries writers were taught how to take certain aspects that didn't need to be there and remove them so as to create a better story.

The problem is that it doesn't work that way in real life. Once you leave an area you are cut off from knowing what happens to say Johnny Q at his house unless someone interacts with him and then tells you. But you may not see it as important unless it affect you in some way, such as say he's the one who stole money from you and so forth.

Story writers are told to make stories interesting/compelling worth reading else nobody would really care to read about how Johnny Q vegged out in front of the TV doing homework, unless it had a reason to be in the story.

Now its the same with writers here. They interact characters from other writers be it one shots or casual appearances. This may be for many reasons. One to keep a character alive in a sense because the creator either A. lost interest with them, B. Died, C. Quit writing, but readers want that character around. There could be other reasons also not mentioned.

Then there's the story itself. Maybe a writer is collaborating with other writers to bring them together. Comic's have been doing this since the 80's for various reasons. One is to drive up revenue by forcing readers to buy their comics if they want to keep up with a certain arc. I should know, I could spend upwards of over $200 a month on comics to support a habit that I loved.

Now - here its the same. No - I'm not saying writers are doing this to force you to read each others stories, but to show that life is messy. People interact for no reason at times. Others give a brief hello and move on with their own business and so on and so forth. But in some cases, those lives interact for a purpose only the writers know, leaving us guessing. Here, they like to leave clues and from the forums you can read about how people speculate over one thing or another. It keeps things interesting.

My point as was stated earlier, is there is no real way for anyone to say which stories to read first except for those when they came out. Sure you risk not knowing if it has your fav character, but that's real life, for who can say when you plan to meet someplace with friends and either A you can't because something came up, or B something happened to them, or C some catastrophe prevents all of you from it. Some will recommend their way, but if you've read what Kristin has stated, it boils down to starting with the first release and work your way up.

Now I'm not picking on you, for as Kristen has stated, and not in this thread, but many others. New readers will bring up the same question yet again but don't read through the messages as they grow and for many are 'strewn' around in various sections. The site is growing just like the previous one and just imagine how unwieldy that would be if we had 'all those' messages still also.

But of course that will never stop someone from bringing it up again.

Yeah, the problem for us is that those people "behind the scenes" that you think should be able to just whip this stuff out are, when thinking about Whateley, trying to spend the majority of that time writing and coming-up with ideas.

On top of that, when we talk about secondary characters like Danny "Pounce" Franks we have a character that's been in every story where Kayda was at home, maybe some worrying about him while at school and then a few of his own stories now... and we'd need to reread all of the Kayda stories to be sure. This is where things like the Wiki have helped us in the past by noting appearances of the characters as the stories come out... to the writers, that was a great tool for the other writers and even the authors of the character. But recently we've had him appear in 2 installments of his own story and several of the Tansy stories that aren't listed there... And I'm not trying to put this back on the people helping with the Wiki (a bit hypocritical if I were)... but that'd be my first place to look for information about characters like a reading order since we have several dozens of secondary characters and we can't go through and make a new reading list for every one of them.

As its been stated before. Wiki is a 'volunteer' site not associated to this site. It's a site done by fans for fans. And yes I'm sure its helped the authors also. Nobody on either site gets paid and very few have an in depth knowledge of coding as with 'time' to keep it up. Many people have complained about it being out of date at times. And overall, it can be, I'm sure, a pain in the ass.

And in some cases, people have complained about how unfriendly Wiki can be, or not to their liking. You can please some people, but not all, for there will be someone who think things can be done better, overall, but offer no real solution on how to implement it. And I'm not just saying either here or at Wiki.

I can't add very much here except that I agree with Kristin inasmuch that the only real advice regarding reading order I can give is "go for the publishing order". Even that has a few caveats; do you go for the strict, chapter-by-chapter publishing order or are you allowed to read an entire story all at once, despite it having been published intermeshed with other stories? If so, do you order by the date of the FIRST chapter, the LAST, or somewhere in the middle? No rule is totally satisfying.

As for the wiki, as one of the active users there, I can only say one thing to the ones who are unhappy with it... PLEASE, PLEASE, HELP US MAKE IT BETTER! Editing a wiki is not that hard, you can use the WYSIWYG editor (which is the default one, by the way -- although I don't use it, I'm more of a "let's get our hands dirty and delve in the depths of the code" myself).
I don't care if English is not your native language and your grammar is poor -- someone will come later and proofread it.
I don't care if you don't understand Wiki formatting conventions and put it all as a bunch of plain text -- someone will come later and prettyfy it.
You don't even have to put the info in the page itself if you are intimidated by it. Put it in the entry's Discussion subpage if you like, or even put it at the Wiki thread at the forums. Someone will take it and add it to the wiki (but in that case, you won't get credited in the Wiki history of the page)

The overall rule is: ANY data (ugly data, broken English data) beats NO data 99% of the time.
The secondary guideline (not a rule, but it really helps) is: please tell us where you got the data. The story name, the forum thread... do it in whatever way you feel comfortable, so even if you don't know (or care) how to do the references thing, someone later can put it a more standardized format.

Research is the really hard part. We can use any help there.