The talk of 'audience medias in res' makes me remember when I'd turn on the TV, encounter a show at a random episode, and if it interested me start watching. Many of my first anime that I saw on Funimation were not encountered through their first episode, so I'd simply piece together the plot based on context clues, and sometimes I'd realize I was wrong about my guesses. Not sure if it was just me, but I feel like that's simply how you watched TV shows with ongoing stories before streaming took over.
And I read the Artemis Fowl series starting at Lost Colony, far from the first book, then read the others including the first, but ended up not reading two that included some key events. Which in a way are fitting because those are the two that concern Artemis losing and regaining his memory.
Dracula Daily does not fully count for this since it has the same beginning, but I feel what it ends up doing is adjacent to what is proposed here, in that it ends up remixing the order of some entries to create a new effect.
My own writing has led to an interesting case of author medias in res. I decided to try writing out the story for a game that is a crossover between some of my writing which was already set in the same world, none of which are published yet. But I ended up publishing it as a serial while those original stories are yet to be published.
For some characters this is genuinely their first story, some are written as an interquel, others as an epilogue. Interestingly the most popular group of characters thus far are the ones for whom it is an epilogue. In hindsight I feel my efforts to cover their backstory were misdirected, but it appears to have worked out for some readers at least.
The talk of 'audience medias in res' makes me remember when I'd turn on the TV, encounter a show at a random episode, and if it interested me start watching. Many of my first anime that I saw on Funimation were not encountered through their first episode, so I'd simply piece together the plot based on context clues, and sometimes I'd realize I was wrong about my guesses. Not sure if it was just me, but I feel like that's simply how you watched TV shows with ongoing stories before streaming took over.
And I read the Artemis Fowl series starting at Lost Colony, far from the first book, then read the others including the first, but ended up not reading two that included some key events. Which in a way are fitting because those are the two that concern Artemis losing and regaining his memory.
Dracula Daily does not fully count for this since it has the same beginning, but I feel what it ends up doing is adjacent to what is proposed here, in that it ends up remixing the order of some entries to create a new effect.
My own writing has led to an interesting case of author medias in res. I decided to try writing out the story for a game that is a crossover between some of my writing which was already set in the same world, none of which are published yet. But I ended up publishing it as a serial while those original stories are yet to be published.
For some characters this is genuinely their first story, some are written as an interquel, others as an epilogue. Interestingly the most popular group of characters thus far are the ones for whom it is an epilogue. In hindsight I feel my efforts to cover their backstory were misdirected, but it appears to have worked out for some readers at least.