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Over on the Sci-Fi & Fantasy SE they have a "suggested order" tag which is used for questions where people ask for the order in which they should consume a certain franchise.

Considering that this SE also has a number of those, would it make sense to introduce a similar tag here, e.g. for questions like "In what order should I watch the X-Men movies?"?

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    Hmm, while a reasonable idea, suggested order as a tagname sounds a little too narrowing, since I'd also like to beat the occasional "do I need to have seen that to understand this?" question with the new tag, which while essentially also asking for a (partial) order is a little less obviously labeled with "suggested order".
    – Napoleon Wilson Mod
    May 7, 2016 at 21:37
  • In almost all cases these aren't good questions, because the best answer is "in the order in which they were released", or they are heavily opinion-based.
    – OrangeDog
    May 19, 2016 at 12:39
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    @OrangeDog Your point is a good one in most cases. Sometimes release order is different from intended order, with Firefly being the canonical example of how release order is probably the worst order in which to see something, and there is an objective (non-opinion) basis for that. May 23, 2016 at 18:06

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First of all, I agree that those questions can make reasonable questions with answers that might reveal interesting approaches to a series of films. The answers to such questions, while not necessarily having the one true 100% correct viewing order among them, can still very well be backed by reasonable arguments that do not have to devolve into mere subjective opinion-pieces, even when arguing against both chronological and release order. As long as you can provide explanations in which way a suggested order adds to the understanding of the story, the appreciation of its themes, or the discovery of new interesting connections and don't just say that you "enjoyed watching it this way" or that "half the movies are crap anyway and can be left out". The lack of a single 100% correct answer is not necessarily a bad thing. This doesn't mean that those questions don't offer the possibility to attract opinionated non-answers and shouldn't be kept under close surveillance (and possible protection if misuse becomes apparent). But many interesting questions present that danger.

That being said, if we decide to introduce a tag for them, I would like to slap it onto more than plain "in what order should I watch this series?" questions. We also now and then have questions of the form "should I watch this to understand this?", which even by "suggested order" detractors could be argued to be more objectively reasonable than plain suggested order questions. While they could be argued to ask for a partial order, too, they aren't necessarily asking for a "suggested order" to watch a whole series. So I would like the tag to reflect those kinds of questions, too, and I'm not yet sure the name suggested-order really does that.

As of now we have quite a few of the "classic" full order requests:

And then there are also a few "partial order" questions, or making sense of material without having seen the previous installments:

However, we should be careful to separate those questions against questions that as for a hard order of chronology within the story, which is not necessarily the answer to each of the above suggested order questions. Thos would rather be tagged and are quite different to "suggested order" questions in their essece. I would count all of those questions listed above as "suggested order" questions.

So to sum up: Yes, I think a tag for those questions could be a good idea, but I would like to use it for more than full order questions about a series and would like the tag name to reflect that, which I'm not sure suggested-order does sufficiently.

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