

This may not be the appropriate place to ask this, but since you guys are the
most intimately familiar with the anime, I thought I'd ask here.

I'm designing an anime database for a personal project (not unlike MAL or
AniDB), but unlike those two, I have a much stricter definition of the two
terms. I define them as:

  * **sequel** : a work produced after the original story _and_ continues or expands upon the original story.
  * **prequel** : a work produced after the original story _and_ is set chronologically before the original story.

This means that all prequels are implicitly sequels, which is what a
[prequel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prequel)
[means](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Prequel).

Now, the situation with F/Z and F/SN:UBW is tricky. Everyone and their mother
tends to see F/Z as a _prequel_ to UBW, because the F/Z visual novel actually
_is_ a prequel to the F/SN VN.

However, when it comes to the anime, F/Z was produced first, and then UBW
after. In this case, would the UBW anime be considered a _sequel_ to the F/Z
anime? Some have argued that UBW was not intended to be a sequel to F/Z at
all, but then what would their relationship be? Spin-off?


CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-03-20T21:22:02.757
30687
2016-03-21T15:40:20.917
2016-03-21T00:15:14.393
15276
22855
question
fate-stay-night fate-zero
Fate/Zero and Fate/stay night: Unlimited Blade Works - prequel vs sequel vs something else?


Because the Fate/SN UBW anime is an adaptation of one of the UBW route in the
F/SN VN, it cannot be a sequel to F/Z as it is not its own original work. You
can think of it as a remastered version of the work itself.

Yes, the F/Z anime came before the F/SN UBW anime, but the F/SN UBW route
itself already existed long before F/Z. The Wikipedia article that you linked
states:

> A sequel is a narrative, documental, or other work of literature, film,
> theatre, television, music, or video game that continues the story of, or
> expands upon, some earlier work.

Having both played the VN route and watched the anime, I can say that the
anime did not fulfill the definition. The anime itself isn't adding anything
more to the story that we didn't already know in the VN. It merely adapts the
VN. Although, I suppose you can argue that the last episode of Fate/SN UBW is
a sequel as it portrays Emiya and Rin's life at the clock tower, which the
original VN only alludes to. I would call it more of a reinterpretation of the
ending than a full-blown sequel.


CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-03-20T22:21:10.547
30689
2016-03-20T22:21:10.547
293
30687
answer


The answer to this question depends on whether you're talking about a literary
analysis, or an analysis for data modeling purposes, which is what the post is
actually asking for.

The Wikipedia page linked in the OP gives the literary definition: a prequel
is a sequel whose timeline is earlier than the original work. In this sense,
Fate/Zero is a sequel to Unlimited Blade Works because it expands on the
original work, the VN which had UBW as one story route. In this sense,
Fate/Zero is also a prequel to UBW because it takes place earlier in the
timeline than UBW.

But you don't really need the literary definition: you want to model
relationships between series in a database of some sort. Using a literary
definition for this will be a nightmare, because literary definitions are
often imprecise, sometimes vague, occasionally contradictory, and usually
fuzzy around the borders. The Wikipedia page gives some good Western examples
of this; I'll here list some anime examples:

  * Deen Fate/Stay Night and Unlimited Blade Works take place in the same universe at exactly the same time, both being adaptations of story routes from the Fate/Stay Night visual novel. You can't really say that these shows are either prequels or sequels to each other in the usual sense. In the visual novel, Unlimited Blade Works does expand on the Fate arc (adapted in Deen Fate/Stay Night), but it occurs neither before nor after Fate; it occurs _instead of_ Fate.
  * Yuru Yuri and Rewrite happen in the same world, at the same school, and involve several of the same characters, but it's vague where they actually sit relative to each other in the timeline. 
  * Owarimonogatari, despite being the most recent series, takes place after Nisemonogatari and concurrently with the first arc of Second Season.
  * If you include manga, then all the Madoka manga except the first one (which directly adapts the anime) occur in alternate timelines. You can sort of order them because Homura experiences them in a certain order, but it's usually impossible to tell where they go relative to each other. Also, _The Different Story_ Volume 1 is a prequel--its events take place before the anime and hold for all the alternate timelines--but Volumes 2 and 3 are yet another alternate timeline.

I would just throw out the prequel/sequel jargon altogether. It's somewhat
useful for literary analysis, but it's too coarse-grained to make for good
data modeling. There are two important things with anime: the in-universe
chronology, and the order in which to take in the various parts of a
franchise. The second one usually corresponds to production order, though it
gets weird when you don't have the original work to fall back on (as is the
case with the Fate series). The in-universe chronology is clear: Fate/Zero is
before Unlimited Blade Works. It's also clear, when you include the original
work, that you were meant to experience the visual novel, then the Fate/Zero
novel or anime, then the Unlimited Blade Works anime. When you take the visual
novel out of the equation, there's no clear answer, as [this old question of
mine shows](https://anime.stackexchange.com/questions/12832/what-is-the-
viewing-order-of-fate-related-works). But you will drastically simplify the
data modeling by treating these two separate things as separate pieces of
data.


CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-03-21T06:16:19.977
30699
2016-03-21T15:40:20.917
2017-04-13T12:54:49.090
-1
7579
30687
answer