Four Lines, All Waiting

There are advantages and disadvantages to having Loads and Loads of Characters; giving each the spotlight can be time consuming as the focus rotates along the cast. To speed things up a bit, some authors use such formulas as Two Lines, No Waiting and Third Line, Some Waiting, in which an episode shifts focus from one group of characters to another, thus creating multiple Plot Threads.

And then there's Four Lines, All Waiting: When a show - typically a Soap Opera, although any Soaperized show will do - maintains four or more concurrent plotlines advancing simultaneously throughout an episode. Sometimes every episode of a season. The episodes are structured like a miniature Soap Wheel cycling through a day's worth of events in "real time", going from one group of people to another then starting the cycle anew.

See also Kudzu Plot.

Anime and Manga

 * Bleach episodes fell into this in the middle of Hueco Mundo arc, and it got worse from there as the plot went into the Fake Karakura Town arc. Things got simplified once everyone started focusing on taking down Aizen, though.
 * Naruto looked like it was doing this (or Third Line, Some Waiting) with Konoha, Taka, Pain, and the rest of the Akatsuki, but recently the plot lines have converged (except one which just ended) and more or less all happen within the same issue or so.
 * The anime seems to be trying to lessen the effect of this by switching around the order of events to keep the narrative more on one story line at a time (for instance, in the manga, Sasuke was split up into two halves with Jiraiya's  between them, while in the anime those two storylines happened separately and in their entire length at once).
 * This might be because of their poor track record with multiple plots. Such as the invasion of Konoha where the 3rd Hokage and Orochimaru were stuck in the same combat pose for weeks, or in the Rescue Gaara Arc with Naruto and Kakashi never actually catching up to Deidara until literally the last few episodes of the arc, despite spending at least 10% of every episode beforehand showing them slowly advancing.
 * And in the latest arc it's doing this with battles. We have the main fight that the majority of the secondarcy cast is in . And then we have   finding some information that they think could "change the entire tide" of the battles. And the manga keeps cutting between everyone, since it's all going simultaneously.
 * {{{spoiler| The secondary characters seem to have finished most of their fights, and are now going to help Naruto and the others fight Tobi.}}.
 * Mahou Sensei Negima:
 * The school festival mega-arc has Negi visiting nearly all of his students, entering a fighting tournament, and . This is actually a clever aversion of this trope though, as
 * The Magic World arc comes close to this: the main plot is still moving at a good pace, but some of the subplots (especially Yue's Laser-Guided Amnesia and ) are still awaiting resolution (although the latter case is almost certainly being saved for The Reveal). Whether this is a problem depends on the reader.
 * Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex Solid State Society was originally planned as a third season, and tried to juggle about four slightly connected storylines at the same time. Had it been a season and not a movie, there would definetly have been a fifth storyline.
 * Legend of the Galactic Heroes is the undisputed king kaiser of this trope. It got to the point where there were so many different character arcs going on at once, they show subtitles with the characters' names every time they appear just so you could keep track of everybody.

Comic Books

 * Countdown to Final Crisis:
 * a) Bob the Monitor's party (Donna Troy, Kyle Rayner and Jason Todd) searching the multiverse for Ray Palmer and exploring each universe in varying detail only to get the Your Princess Is in Another Castle screen every time while randomly pretending to kill each other for convoluted reasons.
 * b) Mary Marvel chasing Black Adam, turning evil, chasing Eclipso, killing people, turning good, turning evil again, and beating up everyone.
 * c) Pied Piper and Trickster running around spying on supervillains while handcuffed to each other and trying to avoid being captured by superheroes.
 * d) THE DEATH OF THE NEW GODS OMG. Except no one actually figures out what to do, making the A-listers look like chumps.
 * e) Jimmy Olsen getting plagued with random superpowers and alternating between investigating the death of the New Gods, trying to be a superhero, going on angst-breaks with Superman, getting kidnapped, and getting kidnapped from his kidnapper.
 * f) Harley Quinn and Holly Robinson getting trained as warriors by Granny Goodness disguised as Athena, teaming up with Hippolyta, and winding up on Apokalips, and...
 * g) Triplicate Girl and Karate Kid getting stranded in the past and running around looking for a cure to a lethal virus. All of this interspersed with scenes of Darkseid playing with his action figures, heroes who have nothing to do with the plot running into the main characters, Super-Manboy-Asshole-Prime destroying planets and fighting Monarch, and the Monitors endlessly spouting "We should do something!" "Should we do something?"
 * The entirety of Countdown can be described as "Between Eight and Ten Kudzu Plotlines, All Waiting."
 * Empowered started with several more or less unrelated one-shots, but with time, some plots started to emerge: So far we have Thugboy's plot (his past, and everything Willy Pete-related), Ninjette's plot (involving the other ninjas), the Fleshmaster/Capeys/Manny plot, and of course the romantical plot for our OTP / One True Threesome. And even now, there's time for some smaller stories.
 * Part of the problem of the first year of Amazing Spider-Man's Brand New Day arc. Storylines such as the identity of Menace, the mystery of Harry's return, the election of a New Mayor of New York, and the Spider-Tracer murders were all milked for all they were worth for an entire year, and mostly resolved within a single storyline. Creators have gone on record saying they intended to touch base on the plot threads a lot more in the year prior, but ran out of time. This despite having at least three times the length as any other series to make such plans. And that didn't stop plotlines in the next two years from being milked for all they were worth and not resolved until the "big finale" of Brand New Day- Origin of the Species.
 * Averted, and very well, in Sin City. While you can see some characters talk on the background, some of them are recognizable, or even main characters, their story WILL be expanded on next storylines and issues, and most of these storylines occur in a single frame of time, characters with their own story crossing each other. A particular example is in 'The Hard Goodbye', as Marv enters Kadie's bar, we see how Dwight appears in a bar, as Shellie, a dancer, picks him up, and is in his story, 'A Dame To Kill For'.
 * Batman Beyond Unlimited started out with two features per issue, and by the fourth issue has four separate storylines going on at once.

Film

 * There are at least four ongoing plots tied together in The Secret of NIMH-—Ms. Brisby trying to save her children from the farmer's plow, the Rats of NIMH trying to leave for Thorn Valley, Jenner trying to sabotage their moving plans by, and Jeremy the Crow trying to find a love interest.
 * Blade III. Is it about vigilante Blade versus human law enforcement, the upcoming vampire apocalypse, Blade's attempt to create his own apocalypse via The Virus, or Blade vs. Dracula? Concentrating on any two of these plotlines would have worked, but not four.
 * Also a major criticism of the third Spider-Man film. Having to deal with Sandman, Venom/The Black Suit, Harry Osborn, and the romance between Peter and Mary Jane left the movie feeling more than a little cramped.
 * Averted brilliantly, and frequently by Robert Altman. Take Nashville for example, something like twenty characters, the film constantly shuffles between them, building a world of interplay rather than plot. Also this being an Altman, the dialogue is very low on the sound mix, sometimes several conversations at once, plus music, it's up to you which characters you want to listen to.
 * Also averted quite nicely in Love Actually. Several different intersecting stories, all about love in one form or another, and about an 80% Happy Ending ratio.
 * Cradle Will Rock consists of no less than six concurrent stories woven together to give a picture of Depression-era New York, including: capitalists materially supporting European fascists, a ventriloquist struggling in vaudeville's death throes while falling for a rabid anti-Communist, Diego Rivera painting a mural for John D. Rockefeller, Hallie Flanagan trying to save the Federal Theatre Project in the face of Red Scare politics, an Italian immigrant distancing himself from his pro-fascist family - all of which is united somehow by Orson Welles' and John Houseman's increasingly troubled production of The Cradle Will Rock.
 * The finale of The Phantom Menace cut rapidly between four separate battles, which would not be an example of this trope if they didn't vary so wildly in tone. The rest of the movie also had the Anakin plot, the Sith mystery, the Invasion story, and the Political Maneuvering plot.
 * There are several plots going on all at once in Camp Nowhere. First, there's the primary storyline about the kids faking a summer camp and maintaining the facade. Then there's the four kids' various Character Developments, each of which takes up varying amounts of screentime. There's a plotline about Dennis owing money on an AMC Gremlin, complete with a debt collector on Dennis' tail. And then there are separate subplots about the five leads each getting a piece of the Token Romance pie—Dennis/Celeste, Mud/Gaby, and Zack/Trish. Finally, there are some minor subplots including one character fixing up a classic car, and a minor character goading another minor character into Skinny Dipping.
 * The film version of He's Just Not That Into You, which literally features four different plotlines of varying style. Suffers from some Mood Whiplash because of it.

Literature

 * Wheel of Time. It started out juggling the threads well enough, but as the series went on, the unbelievably large amount of characters bogged it down to a snail's pace. Add in the Seasonal Rot with Robert Jordan's growing focus on political maneuvering and Costume Porn, and it's a wonder when things happen. Book 10 deserves a special mention for being largely the reactions of every cast group to a single event. Book 10 is over 700 pages long....and the event in question occured in the previous book, where it was the main plot of that novel so already dealt with in some detail. There's a reason fans hate it.
 * To give an example, people get upset when characters are removed from the glossary at the back of the book three books after they were introduced. The reason is that the characters were last seen 500 pages ago (or two books ago in the book you first read five years ago) and you can't remember which of the Loads and Loads of Characters this person is. Is this one of The Forsaken, or the concubine of that Knight Templar, or....
 * Harry Turtledove's Worldwar, Timeline-191 and Darkness series. Loads and Loads of Characters mean we can go 100 pages between appearances of a given character. Sometimes, it works.
 * Essentially anything Peter F. Hamilton writes, Pandoras Star in particular. It is over 900 pages of seemingly unimportant plotlines and occasionally entire chapters of flavour text. Thankfully it's to set up the second, and much more action packed book in the series.
 * Otherland. You have three groups within Otherland; the story arc involving Dread and Officer Skouros, and Mr. Sellar's story arc.
 * The first Uplift novel almost veered into this trope. Thankfully, David Brin got his act together for the rest of the books by changing to a first-person narrative and labeling each chapter with the name of the character doing the narrating.
 * A Song of Ice and Fire relies on this trope to the point that it's a defining characteristic of the series. From the start, there are eight story lines from the point of view of eight characters, and as time and pages move on, more are introduced. Time passes for one character while the focus is on the others.
 * In A Feast For Crows, three of the four most prominent surviving POV characters from the preceding three books are absent. Their storylines are picked up once again in A Dance With Dragons, which also advances many of the characters showcased in A Feast For Crows, though not all of them.
 * Even the first book, A Game of Thrones, follows the POVs of at least eight major characters, switching at every chapter, and only occasionally intersecting.
 * Somewhat in Les Misérables, all plot threads tie together and primarily only alternate between the views two main characters. The problem is that the story only takes up about half the book. The other half is Hugo's long, insightful ramblings about everything. The hair-raising adventures of Jean Valjean will be periodically interrupted by hundred page-long discourses on the daily lives of nuns, the definition of slang, and the sewer systems of Paris. This will lead to something of a One Line All Waiting situation.
 * During a busy period in The King's Justice, Kelson and Morgan are leading one army while Duncan and Dhugal are leading another searching for and finding different groups of the Mearan rebels, while Jehana learns of an assassination attempt against Nigel and wrestles with her guilt, while Nigel (having learned of it already from another source) prepares to deal with it. Then Duncan and Dhugal get separated, and Arilan takes advantage of the opportunity to deal with Jehana and her guilt before reporting to the Camberian Council...This is a very full day in the life.
 * Can you say "Michael Crichton?"
 * Good luck keeping track of all the plotlines in Next without a Character Sheet.
 * The new Stephen King novel, Under the Dome, has anywhere from a half dozen to a full dozen lines at any given time.
 * Against The Day by Thomas Pynchon manages four genres, all waiting. In different parts of the book, one will be become more dominant.
 * A Thread of Grace follows Nazis, Italian Catholics, Italian Jews, and other Jewish refugees all over Northern Italy in the waning days of World War II.
 * The Polish young reader book, "Cyryl, gdzie jesteś?" (Cyryl, Where Are You?) begins with three threads at once since chapter one, and blooms into as many as eight plot threads at once, sometimes jumping between them one sentence at a time. Also, two of the threads ost distant from the main plot are marked with a different font style. When the characters from these two plot threads come together near the end of the book, their font styles briefly meet in a single paragraph.
 * Malazan Book of the Fallen constantly switches between numerous POV characters and plot threads. Some chapters, especially later on, are entirely spent on giving updates of what every POV character in a given location is currently doing, which naturally doesn't allow for any of their plots to progress all that far. The author likes to wrap up most of the threads with a huge fight at the end of a volume, justified with the in-world principle that "power draws power".

Live Action TV

 * A rare comedic version was Seinfeld. A typical episode saw three or four separate plots, each involving one of the four main characters. It being a comedy, these different plot-lines would typically come together at the end of every episode, in a single hilarious scene uniting all the disparate stories.
 * Heroes.
 * The format is such that you have multiple characters with powers dealing with the day to day implications and difficulties thereof. Their troubles can grow to be so isolated and insular it's a wonder they interact at all. Occasionally, these characters do meet and then go on their way due to a strange kind of "fate interconnectedness" (a bit of a show theme).
 * The third season has everyone's complicated stories and bloodlines interconnected to the point where trying to comprehend it all is a leading cause of aneurysms.
 * Basically, when Heroes is good, you get Two Lines, No Waiting, occasionally dipping into Third Line, Some Waiting. When it gets bad, it jumps into "everything happens at once and nothing makes sense." Basically, Third Line, Some Waiting is a tightrope that easily lets you fall into Four Lines, All Waiting.
 * A common complaint of Star Trek: Voyager Season Two. You had the Maquis vs. Starfleet plot, Kazon/Seska plots, Paris pretending to be a jerk to get thrown off, is there another Caretaker out there, etc. A key factor of Better on DVD.
 * May possibly have killed Drive. Unless it was the overall lack of planning.
 * The final season of the remake of Battlestar Galactica suffered from this, though perhaps not so much as others. The main problem is that it seemed so full of unresolved questions that it couldn't resolve them all even in the finale and decided not to even try with some of them.
 * Law and Order attempted this in Season Eight, with all six major characters getting a personal subplot:
 * Adam Schiff's re-election fight.
 * Jack McCoy's ethics charges stemming from his actions in "Under The Influence (s8ell)
 * Jamie Ross' custody fight with her ex-husband.
 * Anita Van Buren's discrimination law suit against the department.
 * Lennie Briscoe's turmoil with his daughter - an ex-junkie turned states witness.
 * Rey Curtis' martial strife, stemming from the one-night stand he had in "Aftershock" (s6e23).
 * Most L&O fans consider it the series's low point, as the episodes would come to a screeching halt every time the subplots came along. Season Nine wrapped up every single one within the first few episodes, with only Van Buren and McCoy's plots having any lingering effect past mid-Season Nine.


 * The one or two episodes prior to a Lost season finale have multiple groups of characters setting out on the lines that will blow up in a BIG way during the thrill-a-minute final (2-hour-long) episode. Each group makes some progress, but the payoffs are deferred.
 * Subverted in Farscape in its third season by splitting John Crichton into two people, and then sending each copy on a different ship with part of the crew. For much of the season, episodes alternated between the two crews, allowing the show to more manageably juggle episodic and arc plots.
 * Played more straight in Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars, since it was the fifth season distilled into a four-hour mini-series. It still worked, but at times the plot got very crowded.
 * Passions left Soap Wheel for this. One plot would have supernatural goings on (usually involving Tabitha, Charity, Kay and Father Lonigan), another had potential incest or lesbianism somewhere along the line, a third plot had Theresa and Gwen (and their parents) plotting against each other for Ethan, Plot #4 would have been about Alistair Crane's machinations. The end result was that conversations that would have lasted minutes ended up lasting hours.
 * This is how the show The Wire works. Usually, storylines will be hinted at in an episode at the beginning of the season and won't start to bear fruit until near the end. Sometimes they're hinted at in one season and start to pick up in another season. This is done surprisingly well and never really feels disorienting because you need to pay very close attention anyway to enjoy the show.
 * The trope also grew progressively more emphatic as the series went on. If you read episode summaries on The Other Wiki, the fourth-season summaries, for instance, are about five times longer than the first-season summaries.
 * Also the case with producer David Simon's later show, Treme. For instance, the season 2 premiere, with the job of getting us up to speed on what had been going on since the year-long Time Skip, was only able to give each character two or three scenes.
 * There are so many concurrent plotlines in every episode of True Blood that, combined with their fairly extensive cast, it usually takes half a season to get anything done in any of the plotlines or any of the characters.
 * Desperate Housewives. Typically each of the four main characters will have their own storyline, plus the ongoing mystery arc of each season. The Fauxlosophic Narration always tries to connect them thematically, but this is usually very strained.
 * On Sex and the City, each of the four female leads would typically have a separate story. Often the only place the stories intersected was when the girls would meet for lunch and talk about stuff.
 * Oz had Loads and Loads of Characters who had to be served in every episode. Creator Tom Fontana has said that he wrote each storyline for a season separately, then wove them together to create the actual scripts. Sometimes in the process he would discover that he was using a character in one storyline several episodes after the character was killed off in another.
 * Degrassi has a lot of this, though the characters may cross over into each other's storylines.
 * The West Wing does this constantly, to the point that it can be difficult to care when the fourth or fifth plot of an episode is introduced in the 20th minute.
 * Game of Thrones, based on A Song of Ice and Fire as mentioned in the literature section, naturally runs into this. It's not so bad in season one where there's only three major storylines to keep track of (King's Landing, the Wall, and the Dothraki), but season two attracted some heavy criticism for its pacing issues; suddenly many more characters have their own individual storylines, to the point that the show has to leave one or two out of every single episode, or just give them one scene that comes out of nowhere and leaves just as fast.

Tabletop Games

 * The Magic: The Gathering tie-in novel Alara Unbroken switches between a bunch of different threads, following Ajani Goldmane, Nicol Bolas, Rakka Mar, Gwafa Hazid, Sarkhan Vol, Elspeth Tirel, Mayael the Anima, Marisi, a group of Vithian refugees...

Toys

 * Bionicle, so so much. As of this edit, there's Marendar trying to kill the biomechanicals (which is about 90% of the cast), Kopaka and Pohatu being stuck in orbit with a character who had been presumed dead for years, and also investigating a murder mystery, Lewa being captured by tribesmen, the golden being becoming a godlike entity, the Toa Mahri being his slaves, the Great Beings looking for a way to stop a disaster, a Gelu and three Toa looking for said Great Beings but being caught by a savage tribe, and another mystery regarding a Great Being masquerading as well-known character. These are just the new unfinished plot-lines. Older ones include the Mask of Time being stolen by Voporak, Vezon and a rag-tag bunch of ultra-powerful characters meeting a Great Being, and that's not even counting all the minor but still ongoing stories.

Video Games

 * The Subspace Emissary in Super Smash Bros. Brawl. There are at least 8 threads (maybe 10, depending on how you interpret things), with some characters jumping between threads willy-nilly, and until the band starts coming comes together halfway through there's no way to know which events are happening alongside each other.
 * Dragon Quest IV is split into five chapters. The first four chapters each take place at roughly the same time, each focusing on different character(s) that will accompany the hero in the final chapter. Many players believe that the game only truly begins with the final chapter.
 * Halo, moreso in 3. There's the mystery of the installations, the Covenant civil war, the Covenant war with humans, the flood, and Gravemind speaking with Cortana. What makes it worse is that pretty much every line except the first is finished off so quickly and quietly they all seem like D-plots.
 * Yakuza adores this trope, from the very first game. Sub-plots are constantly clashing into each other and everything you knew as the player is constantly being turned upside down. The amazing part is that the games actually handle it well.

Web Comics

 * The most common complaint about Charby the Vampirate. Largely a side-effect of having Loads and Loads of Characters. In fact, over a dozen characters live together in a single house, all of whom have their own plotlines. It's no surprise that a single party storyline took two years to tell.
 * Irregular Webcomic, by virtue of being composed of many unrelated, very loosely related themes, each with a different cast.
 * The Mansion of E has currently, after 7 years of running, the main plotline of 2 of the 3 first characters, the line of the 3rd first character, the 6 or so lines of the various side cast, one line to rotate between new characters or events, and one that shows up every Sunday and is almost totally unrelated to the rest besides being set in the same universe. So yeah, it's pretty much all waiting, even when your favored characters show up again.
 * Homestuck focuses on one character - or, sometimes, one entire facet of the Geodesic Cast - at a time. Every character has a storyline, and all the storylines are hopelessly tangled together in space as well as in time. The sheer number of characters and tendency to switch the point of view at inappropriate times doesn't help much either.
 * As of the End of Act 5, this trope has been more or less turned around. The cast has been divided into three groups:
 * And then played straight again with Act 6.
 * Ménage à 3 seems to be headed in this direction...
 * ...as is Something*Positive.
 * xkcd is not an example of this trope, but does attempt to model it here.
 * In El Goonish Shive, the Hold On Hope storyline was like this.
 * Schlock Mercenary finished an arc which was itself part of a bigger arc during which the Toughs were split into four commands; each command got it's own arc, and arcs after the first would occasionally have a caption stating where, temporally, these events were taking place relative to the event that ended the larger meta-arc. It took well over a year, and this is a daily comic.
 * Girl Genius gets like this from time to time, but only maintains B- and C-plots that will tie back into the broader Myth Arc eventually.
 * Order of the Stick, once the party splits up - we follow Elan, Durkon and Vaarsuvius on the ship with, Haley and Belkar in Azure City, Roy  and O-Chul , not to mention few lesser subplots. The party has since been reunited.
 * Goblins is following three teams simultaneously - Goblin Adventuring Party (Complains, Ears, Fumbles, Chief and Taco), Human Adventuring Party (Minmax, Forgath and Kin) and party send into the Well of Darkness (Dies Horribly, Saves A Fox, Grem and K'Seliss).
 * Iji the MSPA Fan Adventure use this formula for the multiple simultaneous devastating demented sub-plots involving involving secondary characters and crossovers.

Web Original

 * The Whateley Universe is such a Loads and Loads of Characters 'verse that there are something like two dozen main characters and shedloads of side characters. Even with a new story (or chapter) coming out weekly right now, we can go months and months without seeing a new scene about our favorite character.
 * Arguably the low point of the series, The Descendants spent two months on a story arc called War Machines, which meandered through various pieces of plot such as Juniper's Samaritan Syndrome, Liedecker's past, the return of some old villains, and a some teasing of the relationship between two characters. It entered head-against wall territory when it turns out that the entire arc was just setting up future arcs. In a series that has taken months to revisit some arcs.
 * The Nostalgia Chick's opinion of Spice World: "Does it have a plot? No! But it does have at least four subplots, each one more painfully useless than the last." She noted a similar pattern in The Baby Sitters Club movie.
 * Equestria Chronicles has numerous "permenant" characters as well as quite a few fringe characters who update sporadically.
 * The Irate Gamer seems to be falling into an unfocused plot. In his Cool Spot review, his Evil Twin manages to steal his Mangavox Odyssey and create robots based on the HAL AI in it. The RoboCop review sees the return of R.O.B. from his Stack-Up and Gyromite review, this time as an ally who was sent out to destroy the invading HAL robots. His He-Man review was promoted as the "Robot War Aftermath", but the war was ignored, focusing instead on the Irate Gamer obtaining a "Sword of Inferno" from a monk. His Silver Surfer review actually dealt with the aftermath of the robot war, but also introduced an Eldritch Abomination called the Pixel Demon, which was released after the Silver Surfer game was beaten.

Western Animation
"Bender: Woo hoo! Closure!!!"
 * The point of the Futurama episode "300 Big Boys," which follows several main and supporting characters spending a tax rebate. In the conclusion, Leela remarks that "At least we got a few mildly interesting stories out of it."
 * At the end, Bender bemoans that his story petered out without a lesson learned. Then the two cops burst on the scene and start beating him with laser nightsticks, prompting Bender to joyfully conclude his story thread.


 * "The Prisoner of Benda" follows a similar scheme, when a mind switching machine causes various characters to end up in each other's bodies. The threads connect when characters need to switch bodies (for various reasons) but otherwise run separately until near the end.
 * There's a reason Titanic: The Legend Goes On was such a flop. Some plotlines don't even converge until the epilogue, and even then it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
 * The American Dad episode "Finances with Wolves" has Francine starting a muffin kiosk at the mall, Stan giving Klaus a human body, Hayley caught up in a group of hippies that want to tear down said mall, Steve and his friends seeing a scary werewolf movie, and Roger adopting a wolf that causes trouble for an unsuspecting Steve.