Haruhi is an example of that. I finished that show in about 24-48 hours (granted I had plenty of breaks in between each episode). Towards the end of Death Note, I probably was doing 8-10 episodes a day, and maybe 6-7 episodes a sitting. But that was a rare occurrence where I was just hooked by the story and had to know what came next.

So then we ask, what’s the pace that optimizes the enjoyment of those that are “worth it”? We want enough time to reflect on major events, but not feel starved for days. I feel weekly watching is way too slow, so I’ll always go back to rewatch the things I really liked. On the other hand, hard marathons (6 or 7 episodes in a sitting) are too much. A lot of us just don’t have that kind of time, and personally, I feel drained after that kind of thing. Like, no way I can do that on consecutive days, especially on the same anime.

I find my optimum pace is something like 2-4 episodes a day, depending on the pace of the series itself. For example, I took Planetes at 2 episodes a night, and doubled that pace just at the end of the series. Aria I watched 1 episode a night, and LotGH at 2-3. Yeah, so those two took a couple months to get through, but I feel I maximized the value I got. I think my patience was rewarded.

I think it’s interesting that once I took away my top 5, I rated the shows I watched weekly higher, both in overall averages and compared to the global averages (of the 8+ group at least). That doesn’t really prove anything, since the list includes completely different shows and there’s no real control. But it may suggest that the smoothing effect is limited.

Now to be completely honest, I will admit that I was more likely to initially rate a show I marathoned higher, then come back later and downgrade it a point or two. I didn’t do that with too many shows, and I wish I had some numbers to quantify that, but it’s possible that if you took my original scores, you’d see the smoothing effect more in play.

About the only downside of doing a marathon with a great show is there isn’t that anticipation of waiting to find out what happens. The great moments still feel great, so I don’t think there’s a huge detriment to enjoying a great show this way.
.-= super rats´s last blog ..What My Top 5 Anime Says =-.

The type of show definitely has an impact too. For me, I struggle with anything that’s heavy or stand-alone episodic.

Great shows are probably great shows whether you watch them weekly or marathon them. I guess I just had the misfortune of not really starting to watch anime until later 2007, and not really watching on a weekly basis until the latter half of 2008. I can’t help but wonder what I would’ve thought of Haruhi and Higurashi when they first aired. I want to compare them to my experiences watching Haruhi S2 and Umineko weekly, but that seems somewhat unfair, just because they’re weaker shows in comparison.

Probably the best marathon vs. weekly comparison experience I had was marathoning the first season of Code Geass and watching the second season week to week. I will say the weekly experience definitely sharpens my memory of certain cruel plot twists like you mention. I can think of a handful of crazy plot twist cliffhangers in the second season, while there’s almost none I remember from the first season (although there were probably less to begin with). But the downside is you do lose that momentum and the crescendos from highlights and lowlights along the way.