L.J. Writes

Ooh! "Still, that is no excuse at all for the novel not to stand on its own. For one thing, not everyone can get all the "necessary" books; the two books I got were the only ones available to me, and I didn't have the internet to tell me the proper series order. For another, call me old-fashioned but I think every book should stand on its own and be enriched by their connections to others, rather than needing them to make sense. Ideally any work in a franchise should serve as a decent entry point, being entertaining on its own and leaving readers to hanker after more."

This could probably stand as part of its own essay. I have reservations about agreeing with this idea because... well, long and byzantine plots seem like they wouldn't work in this case. There are definitely series where any or almost any installment can be a decent entry point but it strikes me that I can only think of one example where the series also has a long narrative arc spanning all the books, and in that one case, there comes a point (around the fortieth book, or thereabouts) where entrypoints and plot-movement become mutually exclusive. I don't know how you think this should work for series with overall plot progression; how, for instance, would you have rewritten Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince to be more accessible to people who hadn't read the first five books?

I mean, Pern isn't that kind of series, anyway, so that's perhaps a bit off topic. (But the Ninth Pass books specifically do contain two sequences that function as that sort of series: the Dragonflight > Dragonquest > The White Dragon > All the Weyrs of Pern > The Skies of Pern sequence, and the Dragonsong > Dragonsinger sequence that makes up two thirds of the Harper Hall trilogy. And there's definitely a sort of relation of this sort between Dragonsdawn and some of the stories from Chronicles of Pern: First Fall.)

I don't know, this is kind of off-topic, but it stuck out at me.