The systematic read-through is a common larval stage of more-than-casual fans of a
webcomic. Such comics progress very slowly by most standards but online archives make back issue availability unparalleled. Even if reading a single installment takes seconds, a person coming across a new strip finds dozens, hundreds or even thousands of times as much new content.
So he'll sample
a few... then a few more... then, if things are really working out, all of them.
The depth of the resulting addiction can be estimated from the disruption of daily life caused and from the degree of withdrawal symptoms once the reader finishes and has to follow the update schedule from then on. More sensible people time themselves and read up a little at a time. These are the people that can eat only one potato chip.
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.
Contrast with
Archive Panic.
Examples:
- 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, such as this editor, who had been reading the 101 comics. This both exceeded the site's monthly bandwidth and caused the server to crash.
- This troper actually lost 24 hours on discovering Girl Genius.
- Some of us also do this with blogs written by people we have recently met.
- Or with podcasts. And it may take a lot longer to get through an archive of those.
- Some do this with DVDs of a TV show: usually we'd only be able to watch one episode a day/week, but you keep saying 'just one more', then it's four o'clock in the morning and you have a splitting headache.
- This troper ended up skipping two days of High School just to finish watching Full Metal Alchemist. And just to demonstrate that she didn't learn her lesson, she skipped University to watch Samurai Champloo.
- This troper watched the entire run of Arrested Development (all 53 episodes) in one weekend.
- This troper seems to be the very embodiment of this. In the past 6 months he watched the entire run of "The X-Files" "Scrubs" "The Pretender" "Stargate SG-1" "Stargate Atlantis" "Teen Titans" "Jackie Chan Adventures" "Farscape" "The Dresden Files" "Smallville" "Doctor Who" "Torchwood" "The Sarah Jane Adventures" "Sliders" "Moonlight" "Lost" and more.
- Please tell me you just mean the new series of Doctor Who.
- This troper also did it on the first 3 seasons of the new series of Doctor Who, watching each episode TWICE, because of commentaries.
- Indeed, the old series would run you a good two weeks if you watched it straight.
- This troper did it with all three seasons of Slayers. Yes, he did go to school, but he thought of little else. It was one of the most surreal feelings he had even dealt with when it was all over and he had free time again.
- This troper watched the entirety of Avatar The Last Airbender in four days shortly after the series finale premiered. He had only seen like three episodes beforehand (thanks to Nick's Network Decay keeping him away from the channel) and figured that with the series complete that he may as well watch it now. He liked it enough that he's actually going to get all the DV Ds despite having watched it all streaming online.
- This troper has done this easily many times on webcomics. Being a teenager helps having the time to read what the internet has to offer... which still isn't enough and doesn't help your ability to sleep, however.
- Newcomers to anime often fall victim to this, due to the sheer amount of (fansubbed) material readily available on the Internet. The huge number of series this troper digested over the course of one month with almost no sleep is truly mind-boggling in its madness.
- Lampshaded in F@NB0Y$.
- 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 he 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 wrong.
- Dare I say, this very wiki?
- Agreed. Just another way that TV Tropes Will Ruin Your Life...
- This newly-arrived reader has spent most of his day reading this wiki... and now is going to bed. He thought he was the only one this happened to, and is marginally happier for knowing he has company, and very sad to think how little he accomplished today.
- Actually, this seems to be a feature of wikis in general if they've been around more than a few months; this troper has had several such sessions over at That Other Wiki as well as here.
- This site's design makes it easier to archive binge than most other wikis.
- This xkcd strip sums it up pretty well.
- This troper read the entirety of Kid Radd in two. Fracking. Days.
- [[This troper]] managed it in one night.
- This troper read the entirety of Penny Arcade in two days. Last week, in fact. Not much else was achieved.
- This troper once read all of Sluggy Freelance in one day. This was back in 2001.
- This troper tried to read all of Sluggy Freelance in one day in 2008. He failed. It really is that long.
- Order of the Stick consumed this troper's life for several days when she discovered it a few months ago.
- This reviewer has gone on an archive binge with Mac Hall at least 3 different times in his life.
- Applegeeks and Megatokyo have done so for this troper... MANY MANY TIMES!
- This Troper had an addiction to 8-bit Theater. Read the whole thing in two days.
- Really? This Troper started reading it as a "summer project" (Thank you very much, TV Tropes). He still hasn't caught up in it. (Finally finished today!)
- This is frequently caused by Survival Of The Fittest - over one hundred characters, each with their own unique storyline spanning almost a year of RPing. That's a hell of a lot of archive to get through, and the hours can be quickly whiled away reading the stories of a few characters you like, let alone the whole lot.
- Schlock Mercenary has been running like clockwork 7 days a week, 365 days a year for over EIGHT YEARS. Go on, you know you want to.
- 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.
