Zenos Race/Sandbox



Let us posit the following mathematical question.

Suppose Ash sets out on a quest to collect the Eight Badges. He manages to get his hands on four of them during season 1. He spends most of season 2 trying to get the fifth and then narrowly misses the sixth during the season-spanning cliffhanger. That one he gets in season 3. It takes another two seasons for Ash to finally get the next one, and then it turns out that the guy he has to fight to get the last one has been kidnapped, and the Eight Great Crystals must be collected in order to rescue him...

Does Ash ever complete his quest?

Ash is trapped in Zenos Race. Greek philosopher Zeno believed that movement was an illusion; his reasoning was that to walk from point A to point B you first have to walk halfway from point A to point B, and then halfway of what's left, and then halfway of what's still left, and so on and so on, and in the end you never get there at all. It took mathematics a few millennia to show that the rapid decrease in the duration of these "walks", which Zeno failed to account for, means an infinite amount of them can happen in a finite amount of time. Some serial works of fiction, on the other hand, seem to operate by exactly this logic -- they seem to take as much time getting to the next halfway point as they did to the last one.

Such a work may start normally, but if it goes on long enough -- and as long as this trope is in effect, the work is not going to reach the end naturally -- then the plot will eventually freeze over. You'll know from watching the early installments that the story is supposed to be arc-driven, and the Reset Button is never used at any time; but the story will eventually be moving forward so slowly that new viewers will assume that Status Quo Is God.

The possible causes are many: an accidental Kudzu Plot; a Sorting Algorithm of Evil so efficient that just as The Hero triumphs over a foe, he repeatedly finds out about an even worse foe out to get him; a network's determination to preserve some semblance of plot in a series which it is desperate to keep. Whichever it is, fans will likely soon start feeling the effects of Arc Fatigue.

This can happen in nearly every medium or genre. In Anime and Manga, often the cast and premise will be introduced up front so you know who to root for during the thousand-or-so viewing hours of high-octane battles that make up the rest of the series. In a Romance Novel, the hero and the heroine will exchange hellos on page 3, go on their first date on page 50, seriously consider their relationship on page 400 and get married at the end of the trilogy. In Video Games, action and revelations will rain down on the player immediately to get them invested then gradually slow to a halt -- though gamers are more forgiving about a game falling into Zenos Race as long as the game stays interesting in the meantime.

Sample structure of a work in Zenos Race:
 * Intro Dump: Roughly half of what you'll ever need to know about the work will be introduced in the first five installments. Superpowers? Space-age weaponry? Talking animals? Whatever you're in for, it's going to be there right at the start. Take notes.
 * Things will move at a comfortable rate for the next ten to fifteen installments, in which you'll meet the supporting cast and learn some of the nuances of the world the story is set in.
 * Plot development beyond the twentieth installment will slow dramatically. Maybe there's an attractive tangent that will turn out to be a Plot Tumor; maybe the first truly major villain has finally appeared. Maybe the writers got distracted by something shiny. The introduction of anything relevant to the show's original premise will eventually cease entirely, leading to:
 * Pseudo-Status Quo Is God: This is it. The forces of good and evil will be locked in a sporadic but unending battle. Story Arcs will rise and fall, and may themselves drag out and succumb to Arc Fatigue, blurring the original story even further. Beyond this point, no progress toward any goals that were set in the start of the series will be made. You may find yourself looking forward to the Filler episodes, since these at least don't even pretend to move things forward.

Eventually, either the series ends or we reach the heat death of the universe. In the former case, the Cosmic Deadline will likely compel the writers to suddenly force the story into a Resolution. That or it'll just be Cut Short with No Ending, which is especially likely if the cancellation took the creators by surprise (e.g. Author Existence Failure occurs). Sadly, at this point any resolution given will probably seem unnatural or inorganic, or even a genuine non sequitur, after so many years with so little progress.

Even if the series has taken way too long and is driving you mad with its lack of progress, you may find yourself feeling sad to see it go. You'll have gotten to know the characters very well by the time it ends.

Compare and contrast Cosmic Deadline.


 * Bleach
 * The Dragon Ball saga, taken collectively.
 * Inuyasha Episode 1: Kagome travels back in time. Episode 3: Kagome and Inuyasha start searching for shards of the Shikon jewel. Episode 24: All of the major protagonists have been introduced, except Koga. Episode 36: Koga. Episodes 96 - 101: Individual filler episodes. 102 - 122: Fighting. Episode 167: The show Overtook the Manga so they just don't make any more episodes.
 * ...until the manga finished, anyway.
 * Ranma ½ is similar, but this arguably works in its favor, as it can focus on being an episodic comedy series without worrying about maintaining any sort of continuity or major plot arc.
 * Yu Yu Hakusho
 * Final Fantasy XII The first quarter of the game has you breaking into a palace, escaping, getting arrested, meeting the guy who killed your brother, escaping from there, your girlfriend getting kidnapped, you go to rescue her, get arrested again, and escape again. The second quarter has you going on a longish fetch quest, then one of your party members betrays you and dies. The third and most of the fourth quarter has you trek halfacross the world to find out how to use the shiny paperweight you fetched, then treking across the other half of the world to find out how to destroy it, then trekking across the entire map to destroy the rest, then trekking back across the map to find out how to make more. It's only in the second-last dungeon that the plot finds itself again and the plot threads that have been left hanging for half the game are resolved.
 * The Wheel of Time: To the point that you can go for an entire book without seeing one of the three male leads.
 * Oddly, also a possible inversion, as the pace has apparently picked up since the existence failure of the original author.
 * The Pokémon anime follows the above formula almost exactly. Originally it was working up to a conclusion, then it got a popularity explosion and the execs wouldn't let it finish.
 * This seems to be where Safehold is headed as of the fourth book. Characters are added faster than they're killed off, and with all the checking in on minor figures like Gorjah, hundreds of pages can pass before the big players like Nahrman so much as make an appearance. And of course, since many of those big players are spying on everyone else, they spend a lot of pages discussing new developments before they actually decide to take action on any given situation.
 * Kamen Rider Agito follows this trope exactly, right down to the four criteria. The first one-third to half is pretty interesting, and then the Arc Fatigue kicks in and things go unresolved for a long while, after which they're tied up in a hurry in the finale. Unfortunately, this happens to be a Signature Style of the main writer, Toshiki Inoue. A similar condition returns in Kamen Rider 555, also by Inoue, only with less favorable results.
 * Some of the quest series in Runescape. The main examples are Elves, Menaphos and Morytania quest series. They started at rather fast pace when they were released, but each installment will either grant less progress than the previous installment of the quest series or suffers from Schedule Slip. Later though a few of the quest series have still been wrapped up.
 * In Pirates of Dark Water, the crew got their hands on the first 2 of the 13 treasures of rule in the five episode mini-series, 5 more in the next 8 episode 1st season, before taking the entirety of the second season to get their hands on 1 more. Then came cancellation with only 8/13 found, and enough filler episodes that could have been used instead to finish the story.