Series

A fanfic series is a group of stories sharing elements in common (characters, setting, etc.), each typically but not always written by the same author. The stories sometimes fit together along a common timeline and appear in sequence. Despite these shared elements, each story stands alone. The Daria show itself, though its various episodes were not always presented in chronological order, is an excellent example of a story series.

The stories in a typical Daria series are nearly always intended to be read in a certain chronological order, unlike series works in certain other fandoms and genres in which characters do not change and past events are unimportant, so chronological order is not maintained. Daria series are heavily dependent on some or all episodes of the original TV series for continuity and frequently spin off from events depicted in a certain TV episode or season. The individual stories in a Daria series are often dependent on past events occurring in previous tales in the series, though time usually passes between the end of one story and the beginning of the next. The ties between stories in a series may be loose, but all tend to fit within a broadly defined story arc, such as "Daria in college" or "Daria and Trent's romance."

A series differs from a serial in that a serial itself is one long, complex story whose separate parts (chapters, episodes, etc.) cannot stand alone; each segment advances the plot of the serial a certain degree, then the next segment takes off from the last segment's end, sometimes with no lost time between. A series could be composed of serials, but not vice versa.