Four Lines, All Waiting: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

{{examples}}

** 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 {{spoiler|the Five Kage vs. Madara, Naruto, Killer B, Kakashi, and Gai vs. Tobi and resurrected Jinchuuriki, Karin trying to escape Konoha, and Sasuke just ran into resurrected!Itachi, who's going off to fight Kabuto/stop Edo Tensei}}. And then we have {{spoiler|Suigetsu and Juugo}} 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.

* ''[[Mahou Sensei Negima]]'':

** The school festival mega-arc has Negi visiting nearly all of his students, entering a fighting tournament, and {{spoiler|dealing with the machinations of his time-travelling Martian descendant}}. This is actually a clever aversion of this trope though, as {{spoiler|Negi uses time travel to do everything in the three days of the festival, and you see it from Negi's chronological point of view instead of a bunch of scene-cuts.}}

* [[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.

** 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.

** 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 [[Atop the Fourth Wall|"We should do something!" "Should we do something?"]]

** The entirety of Countdown can be described as "Between Eight and Ten [[Kudzu Plot|Kudzu Plotlines]], All Waiting."

* 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 (comics)|Batman Beyond Unlimited]] started out with two features per issue, and by the fourth issue has ''four'' separate storylines going on at once.

* 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.

* 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 Development|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/[[Hospital Hottie|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]].

== [[Literature]] ==

** 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.

== [[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 [[Crowning Moment of Funny|single hilarious scene]] uniting all the disparate stories.

** 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" [[You ALL Share My Story|(a bit of a show theme). ]]

** The ''third'' season has everyone's complicated stories [[Luke, I Am Your Father|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]].

* May possibly have killed ''[[Drive]]''. Unless it was the overall lack of planning.

* The final season of ''[[Series/Battlestar Galactica|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.

== [[Video Games]] ==

* [[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.

* 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.

* [[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 [[2001: A Space Odyssey|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 and the Masters of the Universe|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.

** 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.

{{quote|'''Bender:''' Woo hoo! ''Closure!!!''}}

* There's a reason ''[[Titanic: The Legend Goes On]]'' was such a flop. Some plotlines don't even converge until the [[Where Are They Now? Epilogue|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.