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Four Lines, All Waiting: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
There are advantages and disadvantages to having [[Loads and Loads of Characters]]; [[Day in The Limelight|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 [[Soaperizing|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.
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See also [[Kudzu Plot]].
{{examples
== [[Anime]] and [[Manga]] ==
* ''[[Bleach]]'' episodes fell into this in the middle of [[Gratuitous Spanish|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 [[Big Bad|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 {{spoiler|finally finding Itachi and then fighting him}} was split up into two halves with Jiraiya's {{spoiler|investigation of Pain in the Rain Village}} 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.
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* ''[[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.}}
** 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
* ''[[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 <s>king</s> [[Gratuitous German|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.
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== [[Film]] ==
* There are at least four ongoing plots tied together in ''[[The Secret of NIMH]]''-—[[Action Mom|Ms.]] [[Cowardly Lion|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 {{spoiler|murdering Nicodemus}}, and Jeremy the Crow trying to find a love interest.
* ''[[Blade|Blade III]]''. Is it about vigilante Blade versus [[Les Collaborateurs|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 Lines, No Waiting|two of these plotlines]] would have worked, but not four.
* Also a major criticism of the third ''[[Spider-Man (Film)|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.
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* ''[[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 ''[[
* Essentially anything Peter F. Hamilton writes, ''[[Pandoras Star (Literature)|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.
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* ''[[Heroes (TV)|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" [[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]].
* A common complaint of ''[[Star Trek Voyager (TV)|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.
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* ''[[Irregular Webcomic]]'', by virtue of being composed of many unrelated, ''very'' loosely related themes, each with a different cast.
* ''[[The Mansion of E (Webcomic)|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 (Webcomic)|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 [[Kudzu Plot|hopelessly tangled together]] in space as well as [[Timey
** As of the End of Act 5, this trope has been more or less turned around. The cast has been divided into three groups: {{spoiler|The Green Sun Team, consisting of Rose, Dave and the surviving trolls, The Scratched Universe Team, with John, Jade, and the refugees of the four planets and Skaia, and the Troll Incipisphere Team, with Jack Noir, PM, and WV. And Serenity.}}
*** And then played straight again with Act 6.
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* [[The Nostalgia Chick (Web Video)|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 Babysitters Club]]'' movie.
* [[Equestria Chronicles]] has numerous "permenant" characters as well as quite a few fringe characters who update sporadically.
* [[The Irate Gamer (Web Video)|The Irate Gamer]] seems to be falling into an unfocused plot. In his ''[[Cool Spot (Video Game)|Cool Spot]]'' review, his [[Evil Twin]] manages to steal his Mangavox Odyssey and create robots based on the [[2001: A Space Odyssey (Film)|HAL]] AI in it. The ''[[
== [[Western Animation]] ==
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{{quote| '''Bender:''' Woo hoo! ''Closure!!!''}}
** "The Prisoner of Benda" follows a similar scheme, when a [[Freaky Friday Flip|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 [[Where Are They Now? Epilogue|epilogue]], and even then it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
* The ''[[American Dad (Animation)|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.
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