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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.
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.
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** 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.}}
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* [[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.
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** 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 [[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
* ''[[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]] / [[
* 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 (comics)|Batman Beyond Unlimited]] started out with two features per issue, and by the fourth issue has ''four'' separate storylines going on at once.
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* 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 [[The Great Depression|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 Development
* 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.
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* ''[[Against The Day]]'' by [[Thomas Pynchon]] manages four genres, all waiting. {{spoiler|They are boy's adventure, western revenge, geek eccentric science and spy adventuress.}} 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 [[Painting the Fourth Wall|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 [[Crowning Moment of Funny|single hilarious scene]] uniting all the disparate stories.
* ''[[Heroes (TV series)|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
* A common complaint of ''[[Star Trek:
* May possibly have killed ''[[Drive]]''. Unless it was the overall lack of planning.
* The final season of the remake of ''[[
* ''[[Law & Order|Law and Order]]'' attempted this in Season Eight, with all six major characters getting a personal subplot:
** Adam Schiff's re-election fight.
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** 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,<ref>Prior to Season Twenty's parade of political anvils</ref> 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. {{spoiler|Ironically, the copy of John Crichton involved in the more arc-oriented episodes was the one who ''didn't'' survive.}}
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== [[Video Games]] ==
* The Subspace Emissary in [[Super Smash Bros.|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.
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** 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.
* ''[[Ménage à 3]]'' seems to be headed in this direction...{{verify}}
* ...as is ''[[Something
* ''[[
* 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''.
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* 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 [[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.
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** 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!!!''}}
** "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]]'' 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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[[Category:Script Speak]]
[[Category:Just for Pun]]
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[[Category:Plot Thread Tropes]]
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