Talk:Series

Official vs. fan designations of series

I am probably wrong about this, so I'm mostly asking for more information/explanation rather than actually requesting any change be made (yet). As it appears to me, the "original series" has always been a fan designation covering episodes 1 to 274, but earlier this year (as I gather from edit summaries), the Japanese Pokemon website put up some sort of page dividing it into three "chapters" (Pocket Monsters, Pocket Monsters: Orange Archipelago Chapter, and Pocket Monsters: Gold & Silver Chapter). My question is — how, exactly, does it designate these chapters? Are they on the same "level", so to speak, as BW Season 2, Episode N, and Da!, in which case we're right? Or are they on the same "level" as AG and DP, in which case we're wrong and we should have separate series designations for the three "chapters"? Are there even separate levels, or is everything (the three chapters, AG, DP, and each of the BW subdivisions) presented on an equal playing field, in which case there's ambiguity and we can argue that our distinction is a possible correct interpretation of that ambiguity? And as a second question, if the chapters are roughly equivalent to the BW subdivisions, are the former's use of the word "chapters" and the latter's word "seasons" both canonical, or is one a fan designation (in which case we should change it to the canonical one)?

TLDR: What's up with the original series "chapters"? Can someone give me an in-depth explanation as to whether the Japanese website treats them more like separate series or like the BW subdivisions? Pumpkinking0192 (talk) 18:38, 4 September 2013 (UTC)

The page is this one, at the very bottom, under 'List of Previous Anime Series'. BW's Seasons are considered subdivisions of BW's entry.

The reason BW's Season 2 is called Season 2 is because it uses the English word for 'season' rendered into Japanese (シーズン) in the title, so there's not really any other choice.

The OS subdivisions use 編 in Japanese, which is a label for subdivisions of a work, and so can be translated variously as chapter, episode, arc, edition, volume, part, series, etc; depending on the context. For example, official books translate the title for Orange as 'Episode Orange Islands' rather than 'Orange Archipelago Chapter', though this is ignored on Bulbapedia for some reason. Bluesun (talk) 09:48, 18 February 2014 (UTC)