>>3776105It's not a bad way to spend some time if you're looking for something to watch. There is, as always with Japanese media franchises, a lot of side material, but it's almost entirely unnecessary for understanding the core story. There are no vital plot details squirreled away in some obscure restaurant promotion or anything asinine like that. The watch order is:
>Free! Iwatobi Swim Club (S1) [12 ep]>Eternal Summer (S2) [13 ep + OVA]>High Speed: Starting Days (film)>Take Your Marks (OVA packaged as a film)>Dive to the Future (S3) [12 ep]>Final Stroke 1 & 2 (films)Technically you could watch Starting Days any time before TYM because it's a prequel and TYM is when most of those characters start becoming more relevant, but the movie assumes you're already familiar with a few of the characters so it's not a great starting point for a new fan. Starting Days is based off High Speed 2, which is one of the LNs that Free! was based off of. Both High Speed and High Speed 2 have fan translations which you can easily find on Google if you're interested. S1 skims over the basics from High Speed 1 as part of its backstory, but if you want a more comprehensive picture of that aspect, then I would suggest reading the LN. There's also a manga that covers HS1 but it came out so late in Free's lifecycle that I don't think anybody gave enough of a fuck to TL it.
There are some recap movies (The Bond & The Promise), but they're for people who watched the first two seasons when they first came out and then drifted away because of the gap in production between S2 and S3 rather than newbies. They have a couple minutes of new footage, but you can just look that up on YouTube. There's also a recap movie for S3 called Road the World, which has the most new footage of the recaps, but again, you can look those scenes up.
S3 is controversial among fans, but even if you tap out there, people will be more than glad to talk to you about the earlier material.
