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Gotta read 'em all!
Captain: Computer. Define "Earth". ...Define "Sea". ... [several minutes later] Define "Hoedown."
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.
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.
Firefox extensions like 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.
Archive Binge is common for first timers of this wiki. It is also an increasingly common phenomenon with regard to TV shows, now that it is possible to buy whole seasons of a Long Runner on DVD.
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.
Webcomics Long Runners for a list of especially binge-worthy comics.
Examples:
- Newcomers to anime often fall victim to this, due to the sheer amount of (fansubbed) material readily available on the Internet.
- Archive Binging makes reading long arcs easier, cutting down on Arc Fatigue and eliminating the need to wait a week for the next installment.
- Using OneManga has a very good chance of turning into an Archive Binge.
- 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.
- This troper discovered RPG World one evening, started reading...and finished around 6 o'clock the next morning, having totally neglected studying for the exams that were that day.
- Questionable Content took this troper from about 8pm when he discovered it until the next morning. Another of those 5 days a week webcomics with a fair amount of character driven material.
- Older Webcomics that had 5-7 comics a week fall into this category.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 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 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...)
- Schlock Mercenary has been running like clockwork 7 days a week, 365 days a year for over NINE 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.
- 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.
- User Friendly has been running for over ELEVEN years (anniversary was November 17 2008) and been doing 7 comics a week (Sundays usually larger than the Mon-Sat & in colour), 365 days a year. Those who REALLY want an archive binge can start here.
- Count Your Sheep has a strip almost every day, starting in early June of 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...
- Misfile is only (only?) a thousand pages or so at this point, but This Troper knows more than a few people who have lost sleep due to this trope...
- Good luck trying to Archive Binge at Mezzacotta. It might take a while, with comics for every day back to 1st 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 years, and assuming ideal condition that you can read 1 strip per second, which makes it 31536000 strips per year (no leap year, still). The amount of time to finish the whole archive is 115740740.7 years! Yep, that 10^8 years you need to read to finish it. This raises the question of how they made so many...
- They're computer generated. There's no way they can't be...
- They have to be. If you assume the above formula is correct and also assume that actually generating one strip takes, for simplicity's sake, ten seconds, it would still take 10^9 years to create. Assume a staff of ten and that gets reduced to 10^8. Every multiple of ten reduces the number of years by an equal amount. The only logical explanation is if you had a writing staff of 100,000,000 (I may be off; math was never my strong point), in which case it would take a mere ten years to finish the archive.
- You insult us artists. I only know about .000000000000001% of the other staff personally, but I am telling you the truth when I say every strip is really hand drawn and written by one of my co-workers or myself (did you like the shading on the strip 1.546 X 10^5 series? My brother worked on those). Just because you cannot comprehend does not mean that we cannot go beyond the impossible, kick reason to the curb, and write a whole lot of comics.
- Newshounds started in 1997 and is running in the form of the creatively named Newshounds II. Needless to say, it takes a while to wade through it.
- Funny Farm has just ended. It 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.
- Sinfest is another 7 days a week 365 days a year strip, that has been running for just over eight years (with some gaps). However, Tatsuya Ishida seems to be fond of occasionally going back to earlier one-shot comics and giving them sequels (the Politically Incorrect Fringe Rangers are probably the best example; now up to their sixth iteration, often over a year apart). This inevitably leads to the reader going "wait, what, when was the first one?", and heading backwards a couple of years to refresh their memory. Then remembering how much they loved the arc after that, and continuing from there. Recursive archive binging. Not pretty.
- Many new fans of Yu Me Dream have Archive Binged the 500+ page comic in one night.
- And Shine Heaven Now has been going up six days a week since 2003; even the author's hiatuses use Guest Strip filler. New readers have been known to lose a weekend there.
- Worse yet is that it uses Hellsing TV series and Read or Die continuity.
- This troper has personally read through ALL 1000+ strips of 8-Bit Theatre.
- Zelda Comic has 306 strips that are all fairly funny and can take a few hours to get through. Then you discover that it has an updating schedule that makes erosion look like the Road Runner. In fact by now it appears to have stopped entirely.
- Sequential Art has an interesting page... it starts on the page after the last one you read every time you go to it. This makes it much easier to get through the 500+ strips in an Archive Trawl instead of one big Archive Binge.
- This troper once read every Order of the Stick (up to 300 at the time) in one day, so...yeah.
- Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal hands down. Then there's the "Classic Smbc"...
- This is ridiculously easy with Let's Plays. Screenshots aren't too bad, but the long video ones...
- The 10-minute video time limit of You Tube, the most commonly used host for Let's Plays, doesn't particularly help either. This is how two hours of gameplay gets spread across 12 videos, and how veteran LP uploaders can rack of ridiculous statistics like having on average a new video uploaded every 10 minutes.
- Speaking of Youtube.. The Amazing Athiest's videos are an example of this. He does on average 1 video a day and has 664 videos.
- This troper does this with the TV Tropes site. I'm sure he's not alone in this...
- This troper spent the better part of a week reading all the stories at Not Always Right.
- And this one has spent days over the past several years watching all the Strong Bad Emails from start to finish.
- Even websites about comics succumb to this - such as The Comics Curmudgeon. C'mon, I dare you to not keep flipping back through the archives of commentary.
- 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.
- Aw, I'm already hooked on the RPG.net motivational posters... there's anime ones? I have two tests tomorrow. Well, a few minutes won't hurt...
- 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.
- Half the point in Board Hunting on Game FA Qs.
- The Whateley Universe site tends to cause this in some... which can be frustrating, or enlightening, when one reads five variations on the same story from different viewpoints.
- This Troper recently spent most of an entire weekend watching the entirety of Red Vs Blue, except for the portion of the first season that she'd already seen.
- Archive binges can get ludicrous when applied to text-heavy mediums, like blogs. Long-running, text-heavy, frequently-updated blogs can easily take your free time for a week to properly binge. Of course, this also applies to series of novels, newspaper columns, and other similar media, but blogs tend to be the easiest to access.
Newspaper Comics
- Thanks to online archives of traditional print comics on comics.com and gocomics.com, the websites of the two biggest newspaper comic syndicates in the United States, you can put traditional pre-Web favorites like Peanuts and Garfield on there too. Bonus points awarded, since many of these comics and their archives stretch back decades.
- Got bored once and wrote a script that downloaded every single Doonesbury. That strip has existed since 1970 (though there was a 22 month hiatus in The Eighties). Took me ages to get through it, but my constant research on the Other Wiki to get the jokes means that I am probably technically qualified as a political scientist now.
- If you start reading with a vague idea of what was happening at the time, the jokes are somewhat accessible. For example, I had vague knowledge of Watergate but the names Mark rattled off on his radio show never fazed me (in spite of being unfamiliar) because I knew why they were funny. In fact, I've learned more about the '70s and '80s from archive-binging Doonesbury than I have from school.
Fan Fic
- Undocumented Features. This fic started in early 1992, is still going strong today, and has several hundred stories with over 20 megs of text.
- The Mad Scientist Wars has been going on for over half a year 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.
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