Arc Fatigue - TV Tropes

"A note to worried readers: There's no more of this sequence. I'm as tired of it as anyone."

— Walt Kelly, at the end of a Pogo Sunday page

• 9 Chickweed Lane's decades-spanning Whole Arc Flashback involving Gram/Edna and Juliette's before-unseen father, Bill. ^note  Brooke McEldowney's taste for Purple Prose did not help in this instance. Nor did it help that the readership hadn't really gotten over the hangover of the last endless arc: Edda and Amos's six-month-long Will They or Won't They? adventures in Brussels. The strip got to spend almost a year telling the same WWII story, only from Bill's point-of-view. This has also included several months of Bill and Martine (a French Resistance member) idly strolling through Normandy during the middle of D-Day.
• Apartment 3-G was like this, at least according to a throwaway bit in an episode of The Golden Girls when Blanche mentions wanting to see the latest strip.

  Dorothy: I haven't read "Apartment 3-G" since 1972!
  Blanche: Oh, let me bring you up to speed! It is later that same day.

• In the Calvin and Hobbes 10th anniversary retrospective book, author Bill Watterson writes about how he wanted to get this reaction with one particular story arc, but wound up fatiguing himself instead. Specifically, this was the surreal arc where Calvin's personal gravity reverses, then he grows so large that he falls off the planet. Watterson wanted to drag the story out until he started receiving complaints from readers—but instead he wrapped up the arc of his own volition first. Aside from getting cold feet over deliberately annoying his readers, Watterson just lost interest in the story itself, describing it as "weirdness for weirdness' sake."
• Candorville suffers from this trope. Big time.
  • Lamont got Roxane pregnant around 2003. It took six or seven YEARS of strips, including the revelation that Roxane's a vampire, for them to break up, and even then it was only after it was revealed that all of the vampire stuff and a giant monster destroying Mexico were just Lamont's delusion while he was in a mental institution. He then promptly prepared to sue her for custody of his child.
  • It gets even worse when you get to Lamont and Susan, who spent years of Will They or Won't They? finding out they have feelings for each other, but besides the Roxanne thing another thing has come up. After pretending to date coworker Dick Fink in order to teach Lamont a lesson about the Roxanne thing, Lamont seems to think it's real and it becomes the cause of his Heroic BSoD and that he would be horribly betrayed if he found out the truth, stalling it LONGER. Later, Lemont started in a Facebook relationship with a woman he had a crush on in college, who's also married with kids but says her husband's abusive. And people say the Ross and Rachel thing went on too long!
  • According to cartoonist Brian Fies, who was friends with creator Darrin Bell, he planned to have his comic's overal arcs to run for multiple decades.
• Dick Tracy arcs are also notoriously slow-paced. Sometimes two-thirds of a comic retell the contents of a previous comic with one new panel. One day of Dick Tracy's life takes several months of comic strips. This was sometimes the fault of the fans, who occasionally enjoyed a story so much they demanded it be continued after it had decisively ended, often requiring a Retcon or two (for example, Flattop, the most popular villain of the series' history, was actually brought back from the dead so that he could be killed again). The new creative team is moving a much quicker pace of about one case a month.
• In Funky Winkerbean, Les Moore has been mourning the death of his beloved wife Lisa since 2007. And it took her eight years before that to die of cancer. Recurring plot lines include books about Lisa, movies about Lisa (two separate attempts), tape-recorded messages from Lisa, Lisa appearing as a ghost (including one time where she called in a bomb threat), and annual "legacy run." To put it mildly, it's getting tiresome.
• Gasoline Alley:
  • The series started as a daily gag strip, but only became popular when main character Walt Wallet found an infant boy on his doorstep, providing a springboard for serious story arcs. The boy (named Skeezix) grew to manhood without ever learning who his parents were. About 80 years later, with Gasoline Alley still running, and with Skeezix Wallet now well into his eighties, one of the strip's artists/writers finally decided to reveal who Skeezix's parents were.
  • The storyline where Walt's wife passed away was initially vague about which spouse had died. This dragged on for about a month before readers got an answer.
• Sister strips Judge Parker and Rex Morgan, M.D. run at such a glacial pace that readers who have been reading for years may realize that, at tops, a week has actually gone past. The comics themselves don't seem capable of keeping track either. For one example, in Judge Parker, while in the real world, it had been several years since Neddie went off to school in France, the comic internally moved ahead roughly a month of time. Yet when Neddie returned in mid-2010, the characters acted as if she'd actually been gone a significant period of time. Rex Morgan, meanwhile, spent the better part of a year on a weekend cruise.
• The "Tiger Tea" arc in Krazy Kat, which went on for ten months without stopping. Not as big as some of these other examples, but when you realize that it's a humor strip, unlike most of the strips mentioned here, which are serious strips...
• Luann had the "Tiffany pervs on Kip" storyline last practically the entire summer of 2023, alongside the Gunther and Bets drama, which continued into the fall. They also rehashed the "Tiffany is obsessed with seducing Kip" storyline for two months straight the next fall.
• The Phantom is one of the biggest, and most famous, offenders. A single story arc, told daily, may take up to a year to tell, and this isn't including the unrelated Sunday strips.
• Perhaps an even worse offender than The Phantom is Prince Valiant, which is only printed on Sundays, and each issue represents maybe a few seconds of time in the story. It doesn't help that the size of comics has been steadily shrinking since its first issue in the 1920s, from half-page size to maybe 1/8.
• Parodied when the Spider-Man strips were used during Spider-Verse. Morlun drops in, intending on feasting on that universe's Spider-Man, only to be thrown off-guard by the world's strange pacing, making him realize it would take him a month to even try to feast on him.

• Basically every single arc of Brockton's Celestial Forge comprises of this, as the MC and his team spends chapter after chapter doing basically nothing.
• In Attack on Titan: A Blacksmith's Tale, Psychic MC, Dillon's character arc of learning to live with himself and his girlfriend Annie, was trapped in a limbo state for years, with nothing really changing his situation. The second he got "better", something else dramatic would happen and send him back to square one. This is in addition to canon storylines taking much longer than necessary due to a slow update cycle.
• In The Stalking Zuko Series, the second installment, "Not Stalking Zuko" mainly takes place on Ember Island — for those who aren't familiar with the series, that was the setting of the recap episode between "The Southern Raiders" (when Zuko and Katara finally became friends) and the four-part Grand Finale. It takes almost half of "Not Stalking Zuko," the longest installment in the series, to get up to "The Ember Island Players," and there's still more than a few chapters to go before it gets up to "Sozin's Comet."
• My Hero Pokedamia: The Sports Festival Arc. Due to a combination of introducing many new characters, constant cutaways from the action to the reactions and thought processes of other characters, some setup for future arcs, and the length of time between updates increasing, the Sports Festival Arc took nearly 2 years and 9 months from start to finish.
• Unbreakable Red Silken Thread: The Solomon Grundy arc, which the authors both admit has its flaws, even if it has served its intended purpose. The problem, however, is the abrupt shift of focus after fourteen chapters featuring Cody and Heather to their near-total absence.
• Xendra has the L.A. Arc where the Scoobies head the LA for Joyce's brain surgery. The entire arc is 55 chapters of the story (which had been 225 chapters when the arc finished) due to the writer wanting to solve the entirety of the Angel series before the Scoobies go back to Sunnydale.

• Ice Age: Sid's abandonment issues. While a lot of fans like it given they feel it turns Sid into a much more interesting character that just an average Plucky Comic Relief, some fans also felt the arc was overstaying its welcome, given it had been the main focus of his character for the first three sequels, and wished the writers did something else with the character. Ironically, his arc in Collison Course took the character in another direction and it was universally despised.

• More than a few viewers of The Kissing Booth 3 expressed exasperation that Elle and Lee's friendship rules are still the source of much of the story's conflict after three movies, especially given the first movie already established how many of their rules have been outgrown, cannot always be realistically applied, and at worst makes their friendship come across as controlling and dysfunctional (not helping is that they came up with these rules when they were in elementary school and they're now legally adults). During Elle and Lee's big blow-up in this movie's third act Elle furiously declares that their friendship rules are officially over, which lots of viewers felt should've been over and done with long before.
• Rey's family background dominates her story arc for the entire Star Wars sequel trilogy (2015-2019). The Force Awakens establishes that Rey was abandoned by her parents on Jakku for unclear reasons. In The Last Jedi, Rey and the audience are confronted with the knowledge that her parents were junk traders who sold her for drinking money and are irrelevant to the story, rather than anyone important. Rian Johnson (writer/director of The Last Jedi) said learning she was "nobody" was the most devastating answer Rey could get, but that she could now move on, which seemed to close this arc. The Rise of Skywalker instead reopens it by abruptly revealing that Rey is actually the granddaughter of Palpatine. Lots of viewers found this frustrating, both because it comes off as an Ass Pull and had already been done in Star Wars (and elsewhere), and because they wanted Rey's story to focus on other things, such as her Jedi training. And there are still unanswered questions around her heritage by the end. Rey's actress Daisy Ridley later revealed there wasn't a concrete plan for Rey's heritage and the answer kept changing between films — even during the filming of The Rise of Skywalker writer/director J. J. Abrams wasn't fully committed to Palpatine being Rey's grandfather.

• In The Bad Guys, Prof. Marmalade is introduced in the second book as the Big Bad — and almost every book until the tenth book involves him trying to one-up the titular Bad Guys, only to end them all on a Cliffhanger where something has gone wrong or he has something new. After a few books, this can get a little annoying, despite all the wacky hijinks and Character Development our heroes get up to in the meantime.
• The Black Magician series seems to have a problem with this, particularly in the second book, Novice. Most of the over 500 pages consist of a bog-standard bullying story. The overarching plot only makes an appearance halfway through, and then only in the form of a hostage situation that remains at a perfect standstill both when it comes to understanding motivations and resolving the situation until the epilogue. By contrast, there is another subplot in Novice that consists of a scavenger hunt across the world, a budding romance and a major character development and exploration of the character and the politics of the world that is given 50 or so pages to develop, flashing by on one or a couple of pages in between dozens of pages of yet more bullying and blackmail.
• It's not as bad as some examples due to only taking up one book, but the plotline involving Leila stalking Ana in Fifty Shades Darker starts to show signs of arc fatigue. It lasts nearly the entire book (which is over 500 pages long) and yet nothing truly significant happens with it until the last third when Leila unexpectedly shows up at Ana's apartment with a gun. It doesn't help that it has little if any impact on the story in the next book and that the situation could've been resolved early on if Ana and Christian had just called the police, instead of trying and miserably failing to deal with the problem themselves.
• The Empyrean: Many readers found the plotline in Iron Flame where Violet and Xaden constantly yo-yo between fighting over secret-keeping and a lack of trust in their relationship, to being lovey-dovey with each other and hooking up, to be tiresome. It lasts the entire book (which isn't a short book, either) and their arguments generally consist of them repeatedly going over the same issues, which isn't all that interesting after a while. A lot of readers felt the only narrative reason the couple kept temporarily making up was so more sex scenes could be added, which readers felt didn't much help the development of the Official Couple's relationship given they'd be back to bickering again before long. At one point, even Violet expresses exasperation over the fact she and Xaden have been fighting over the same problems for five months straight.
• Light and Dark: The Awakening of the Mage Knight: The 'normal school' arc in the beginning dragged on and on until the 8th chapter. It served its purpose, introducing the characters, in the first. One can only assume Daniel Fife wanted to make sure the reader identified with Protagonist Danny.
• A Song of Ice and Fire:
  • This happens to several different characters once they are separated from the War of Five Kings.
  • Daenerys's prolonged arc in Essos, while teaching her a lot of useful lessons about effective rulership and politics, has got a lot of readers tearing their hair out waiting for the dragon battles already!
• Larry Niven's novel The Ringworld Throne did very little to actually move the plot of the overall series but did manage to use its last couple of chapters to set the next novel up pretty handily.
• Left Behind has stretches of arc fatigue, because it was extended from 12 books to 16. Not impressed? The original plan for the series was three books. Still not enough? The second book is based on the idea that the second year of Tribulation would be completely uneventful. The worst part is that, according to the authors' eschatology, the tribulation doesn't even begin until near the very end of the book. The book is mostly spent on Romantic Plot Tumors and other pointless diversions.
• The Alicazation arc of Sword Art Online lasted ten volumes. It started on volume nine of the series, and the longest continuously running arc in the series up to that point was only two volumes long. Between that and the arc in question being tonally different from the earlier arcs while dropping pretty much the entire original cast other than Kirito until the finale, a lot of people got tired of the series before the arc finished.
• The "Three" arc in Warrior Cats. Partly because they couldn't decide on what power Hollyleaf would have by the time they were halfway through the six-book Power of Three series, and then Vicky finally got the idea that maybe Hollyleaf isn't actually one of the Three, and the story arc got dragged on to fill the fourth series, Omen of the Stars, as well. The purpose of the Three is that they all have special powers that will help them defeat the Dark Forest when they invade the Clans; this wasn't even hinted at until partway through Omen of the Stars. Instead, the two series were mostly filled with short filler conflicts, and there was no real villain throughout all of Power of Three.

• BIONICLE head writer Bob Thompson intended the franchise to have Rotating Arcs, a few years dedicated to present-day arcs split up by occasional prequel years. The 2004 Metru Nui arc was such a prequel, but LEGO and Advance put so much money into designing the Metru Nui setting, an intricate island metropolis, that execs wanted them reused for another year to save up on costs. Hence 2005, aka the "Hordika arc" became an interquel, an extension set during the final scenes of the 2004 story that fans already knew the ending to, with the main present-day plot stalled for a year. Several books, comics, one movie and a series of online short videos told a loose, meandering story which reportedly confused kids so much that LEGO banned any more flashback arcs. Many former fans on various online surfaces have also reported losing interest in the series around the Metru Nui-Hordika arcs. This necessitated cramming prequel material into books, comics, short stories and web serials, but never fleshing them out into full year-long arcs as Thompson envisioned. All this had beneficial and detrimental effects on the brand. Prequel protagonist Vakama and his Toa Metru team became some of the series' most developed and relatable characters, in stark contrast with the meager focus their present day selves received. But co-writer Christian Faber thought the franchise became stale by 2005, which prompted a huge shift in storytelling and media presentation for 2006.

• The original ECW had two notable feuds that went on way past their expiration date (even if they did result in some still good matches): Mike Awesome's ridiculous amount of "We got nothin' else booked so just go out there and wrestle Masato Tanaka with tables and chairs again" matches, and the absurdly longstanding Tommy Dreamer vs Raven feud that never did quite end, or, at least, only ended just long enough for it to be revived when they both went to TNA.
• TNA's monster masked wrestler Abyss, portrayed by Chris Parks, was attacked after a match in January 2012 and disappeared from the show. In March, his identically-built brother Joseph Park showed up on the show looking for him. Joseph's search for his brother and supposed legal training allowed him to get involved in a few storylines and he eventually went to wrestling school and was able to compete in matches (albeit poorly due to his mild manner and lack of experience). However, after suffering enough punishment or getting cut open he would Hulk out and/or perform his brother's finishing move. This went on for almost two years until December 2013 and the not-so-Shocking Swerve that Abyss and Joseph were the same person. Not only had all but the dimmest viewers known or at least suspected this for months but it effectively meant that Chris Parks had been forced to wrestle badly for an extended period of time for a character whose potential would never be maximized. It didn't help that it was a combination of Kaz, Daniels, and Eric Young who worked out the secret since they were not exactly portrayed as the brightest members of the roster.
• The original Fingerpoke Of Doom was hard to swallow; it reset the nWo storyline back to where it was in 1996, a full three years prior. No wonder it was the beginning of the end for WCW.
• The WWE has had many moments that qualify.
  • The "Higher Power" story is disliked since it revived the Austin-McMahon rivalry which had long since stopped being fresh and interesting. At the expense of the far more interesting Ministry of Darkness storyline at that. Even The Undertaker admits that was a Jumping the Shark moment in a later interview.
  • Many fans grew tired of the Jerry Lawler vs. Michael Cole feud, believing that it should've been resolved by Wrestlemania XXVII. Made worse by Cole frequently getting away with his villainy and constantly gaining the advantage over Lawler. Not even the King humiliating Cole at Over the Limit (along with an assist from both Jim Ross and Bret Hart) brought a satisfying ending.^note 
  • The latter part of the fifth season of WWE NXT became this after months without an elimination. Then, they dropped all pretense of it still being a contest and it became a C-show with their lower midcarders. When Season 5 of NXT finally ended, it had aired 67 episodes. It was then retooled into a show that showcases talent from their developmental system.
  • The John Cena/Randy Orton feud has been going on, on-and-off, for years. The feud itself never quite connected with the audience as being anything legitimately special, despite WWE's attempts to portray it as being one of the greatest rivalries in not just WWE itself, but in all of sports. Fans are so sick of it that around 2014, Cena/Orton matches began being received by live crowds with anything ranging from silent apathy to outright hostility. Luckily, the company eventually got the message and they haven't wrestled a match against each other since then, partially because 2015 is when they both started transitioning to part-timer status (Cena more than Orton).
  • The "Anonymous GM" of Raw was either this or a Myth Stall (since it was supposed to be the overarching essence of Raw itself), or something altogether different (since WWE made no effort to explore the identity of this GM, meaning it wasn't even a storyline). A few wrestlers interacted with the laptop that the GM sent emails through but no one since Chris Jericho actually demanded the GM reveal themselves. The "character" was disliked by the viewers not for being a heel (it had a track record that skirted the line between heel and face), but simply because people were just tired of it. It's almost like it was a vehicle solely to make Cole look bad.
  • WWE's controversial Invasion arc, which technically kicked off when Shane McMahon (in Kayfabe) bought out WCW in April of 2001 through to Survivor Series in November of that year likely counts, largely due to how the majority of former WCW and ECW talent weren't pushed. The initial concept seemed somewhat meaningless towards the end, where "Stone Cold" Steve Austin and Kurt Angle, The Rock and Chris Jericho were feuding with each other, all of whom were with the WWE at the start of the arc.
  • Some people feel that the 2013-14 WWE "The Authority" storyline went on far longer than it should have. In short, Daniel Bryan wins the WWE title at SummerSlam, gets Pedigreed by Triple H and cashed in on by Randy Orton and screwed out of the title, and the screwjobs continued for months afterward, as Triple H, Orton, and Stephanie McMahon (and later Kane) spend months bullying and beating Bryan, getting no lasting repercussions for their actions in the process. It wasn't helped by random detours in the plot, such as Bryan feuding with The Wyatt Family for a few months for no particular reason, especially since Bryan ended up losing the payoff match to that feud, and that doesn't even touch on the inexplicable, two-week period where Bryan suddenly turned heel and joined the Wyatts (the idea was actually to write Bryan out of the Authority angle, meaning he'd get no payoff twice over but he remained too popular for that to be feasible). Eventually, though, Bryan would win the title back at WrestleMania, overcoming Triple H, Batista, and Orton (though that was an Author's Saving Throw following the overwhelming negative fan reaction to Batista winning the Royal Rumble a few months prior).

    In a related case, many people feel the entire concept of the Authority had run its course a long time ago, but the stable/angle kept getting extended whenever it looked like it was about to finally come to a close. Daniel Bryan beating Evolution and The Shield soundly squashing Kane and the New Age Outlaws at Wrestlemania 30 end up meaning nothing because they just switch opponents and send Evolution after the Shield and Kane after Bryan. Sting makes his WWE debut to help Team Cena beat Team Authority at Survivor Series 2014, with the explicit stipulation that Triple H and Stephanie McMahon would be ousted from power if they lost; never mind, Seth Rollins forces Cena to reinstate them a few weeks later, setting the entire thing back to square one. Sting and Triple H face off at WrestleMania 31 with the implication the Authority would take a huge hit if Sting won? Never mind, it became a nostalgia segment and Sting lost anyway. The angle didn't end until one year later, after Roman Reigns defeated Triple H at WrestleMania 32.

  • Paige and A.J. Lee's feud in the summer of 2014, particularly after Paige won the title back at SummerSlam. It got to the point where the feud had originally featured sneak attacks and intense promos — and ended up with random segments where AJ walked out on her tag partners and the two only exchanged stern looks — despite supposedly hating each other's guts.
  • Layla and Summer Rae's storyline was heading in this direction when they decided to team up and make Fandango's life hell. For four weeks they just appeared at ringside to interfere in his matches — and it was obvious there would be no pay-off match since it's a women vs man feud. Thankfully it actually was ended pretty quickly and the two were integrated into the women's division as a tag team.
  • Much in the vein of the Cena/Orton feud, fans got sick of the AJ Styles/Christopher Daniels feud years ago. While the matches were amazing, the feud always had Chris as the heel and his turn always happened for the same damn reason. It eventually culminated in the Audience-Alienating Era that was Claire Lynch, which would win the Gooker Award for 2012. Thankfully, that was the final run of the feud in TNA, and most agree that if anything, they at least got Bad Influence out of it.
  • Played with in the case of the feud between John Cena and The Rock. The feud, overall, ran for 26 months, beginning with the Rock's return in February 2011 and ending at WrestleMania 29 in April 2013. However, despite that incredibly long run-time, the Rock spent the majority of this time away from the show, leaving Cena to do other things until it was time to resume their feud. It still stands for the most part, however, since most fans felt it at least should have ended with their "Once in a Lifetime" match at WrestleMania 28 instead of reviving the angle just to give Cena his win back.
  • The love trapezoid angle in 2015 between Rusev and Lana, Dolph Ziggler, and Summer Rae went on for an unreasonably long time and seemed to get the heel/face dynamic backwards. Ziggler came off as a thorough Designated Hero who acted like a smug prick about Lana leaving Rusev for him and taunting him over it every chance he got. Rusev, on the other hand, was seen as the most sympathetic party in the story despite WWE's attempts to portray him as some sort of Domestic Abuser, since he lost his undefeated streak and United States Championship to John Cena, was sidelined with an ankle injury, and then his girlfriend leaves him for a guy that actively devotes time to mocking him about it, he came off as a legitimately broken man and fans saw his hatred toward Ziggler as being completely justified. The seeds of a Rusev and Lana breakup were planted as early as March and didn't "resolve" for at least another six months. Part of the problem was that the storyline hit several nasty snags along the way, like Rusev and Lana each being injured at different points and Ziggler taking time off to film a movie, but rather than just scrap the storyline since it wasn't really all that popular with the crowd, they kept stalling and extending it until the missing party returned. Rusev and Lana's involvement didn't end until Lana posted photos of herself wearing an engagement ring from her real-life engagement to Rusev, at which point WWE effectively let them bail on the angle, and even then they extended and rewrote the angle to be Ziggler and the debuting Tyler Breeze feuding over Summer Rae.
  • The feud between Charlotte and Sasha Banks was received this way by plenty of people. While neither of them are bad, WWE decided that what they needed to give the new-look Women's Division and new Women's Championship legitimacy was to have a long, great rivalry. Unfortunately, they went about it in a very forced and hamfisted way that only made many fans sick of the angle, with many directly comparing it to a compressed version of Cena and Orton's rivalry. All in all, the angle lasted (with a bit of on-and-off here and there) somewhere in the ballpark of 16 months, featured many "first time ever" matches like the first women's Hell in a Cell match for no real reason aside from being able to promote it was the first time ever, and worst of all, featured the new Women's Title hot-potatoeing back and forth between the two so often that they each racked up a number of title reigns in this span of a little more than a year that even many legitimately legendary wrestlers never touch in their entire careers ironically did much more to hamper the title's legitimacy than it did to build it, as well as the fact that the feud was so prominent for so long that it became a Spotlight-Stealing Squad, all of the other women on the show were Demoted to Extra, and ironically did more harm than good to the division as a whole. The fact that the feud was mostly one-sided in Charlotte's favor, with most of the hot-potatoeing being Sasha winning the title and then almost immediately losing it back to Charlotte, also did the new title no favors.

    Really, Charlotte holds a title for so long and so many times, it's rare to even see her not carrying gold. By her seventh championship win, she began to receive X-Pac Heat after pinning Becky Lynch during a triple threat match at SummerSlam 2018, which also involved defending champion Carmella. The match was initially supposed to be only between Becky and Carmella after two months of buildup in Becky's favor, but Charlotte immediately returned to the title spot after a two-month absence, ruining all of Becky's potential and rendering her efforts a waste. It wasn't a surprise when Becky turned heel on her, with Charlotte the one who received boos from the fans.

  • Brock Lesnar's first Universal Championship reign, far more than any other reign in recent memory. Initially his reign started out well when he defeated Goldberg for the title at WrestleMania 33 — who the fans soured on after he defeated the previous champion, Ensemble Dark Horse Kevin Owens, in a Squash Match. By the end of 2017, however, fans were bitterly reminded of why they disliked having a part-timer as champion, as Lesnar barely showed up outside of the occasional title defense, to the point that many even forgot that RAW had a world title, with some even considering the Intercontinental Championship the top title on RAW. It had reached a point where many were actually happy at the idea of Creator's Pet Roman Reigns winning at WrestleMania 34, as it meant they'd have a full-time champion again, and Reigns was far more likely to lose the title in a smaller time frame. Except he didn't win. And then he didn't win his next title match at The Greatest Royal Rumble in Saudi Arabia. In fact, Reigns didn't win the title from Lesnar until SummerSlam 2018, at which point Lesnar's reign had surpassed CM Punk's historic 434-day reign by two and a half months. By that point, not only had Lesnar's reign entered Arc Fatigue but so did his feud with Reigns; when Reigns finally won the title, the fans actually cheered for it because they figured that would be the end of it all since Reigns defeating Lesnar for the title had been his goal since at least 2015. Unfortunately, two months after that, Reigns had to relinquish the title and go on hiatus from wrestling to start treatment for his leukemia, which had returned. His next title defense, a triple threat with Lesnar and Braun Strowman, became a one-on-one match for the vacated title... which Lesnar won.
  • Speaking of Roman Reigns, he has somehow surpassed Brock's aforementioned reign by almost twice as much. As of February 2023, Roman has held the Universal title for over 900 days, more than any other wrestler in modern history. What compounds this is that Roman is the undisputed champion, meaning he holds both the Universal and WWE Championships. After finally performing a much anticipated Face–Heel Turn and aligning himself with Paul Heyman, Roman won the Universal title at Summerslam 2020 in a Triple Threat match between him, Bray "The Fiend" Wyatt and Braun Strowman. He would then recruit his cousins, The Usos (Who like Roman, are the Undisputed Tag Team Champions), to solidify and maintain his position and dubbed himself "The Head of the Table". Roman would beat every opponent that tried to face him; Kevin Owens, Edge, Bryan Danielson, Drew McIntyre, John Cena, and even the aforementioned Brock Lesnar. His feuds with Lesnar were particularly egregious as they had fought a total of three times during this reign, including at Wrestlemania 38 where Roman beat him to unify the titles. Like Lesnar, Roman would make fewer appearances on weekly television, leaving both RAW and Smackdown without a top title to compete for until Roman decided to work. Things then got even more egregious when NXT’s Solo Sikoa was called up to the roster to act as even more muscle for Roman, debuting in a match against McIntyre to screw him over, arguably because he just happened to be the brother of the Usos. While many fans have enjoyed this historic run, the general consensus is that Roman has become an Invincible Villain and are desperately waiting for someone to beat him for at least one of the titles so that there can be another top title to compete for. In the end, the angle finally came to a stop at Wrestlemania 40, where Cody Rhodes beat Roman at his own game to win the title… Or so it seemed because then the angle devolved into more nonsense as more Samoans appeared.

• The Big Finish Doctor Who Divergent arc, in which the Eighth Doctor was trapped in an alternate universe without access to time and space travel, lasted only eight audios/a little over a year but felt like it dragged on and on for years, made worse by the fact that its very premise negated one of the main joys of Doctor Who. It apparently wore down Paul McGann so much that he considered leaving the role. It was killed, but more because of worries about the future of Big Finish in light of the new series getting the go-ahead than because of anything else. After all it might have turned off potential new listeners if the on-going story with the newest incarnation of the Doctor, saw him trapped in another, completely different universe, leading the arc to have a somewhat abrupt and unsatisfying ending so the Doctor could return to the original universe.

• In-Universe in Sentinels of the Multiverse, sort of. The Letters Page reveals that the OblivAeon Crisis Crossover comes right on the heels of the already lengthy and complicated Skinwalker Gloomweaver event.

• Atop the Fourth Wall had to deal with this for the "Contest of Champions" storyline. It was meant to be a low-stakes storyline, but trying to do a Tournament Arc proved to be something of a logistics nightmare. Then the COVID-19 Pandemic hit. Then the graphics needed for one of the matches weren't done. The storyline started in 2018 and didn't end until Christmas Day 2023 with a scathing Self-Deprecation about just how long it took and the crap he went through storyline-wise and in real life.
• RWBY:
  • One common issue fans had with the first volume was that the six episodes immediately after "Players and Pieces" were very slow-paced episodes dealing with school life where Weiss had to grapple with Ruby becoming team leader and Pyrrha discovering Jaune's secret and Jaune dealing with the consequences of it. The slow pace of those episodes, the shortness of each episode, and the fact that they were split across six weeks when the show first aired meant that many fans got tired of waiting for something interesting to happen. This stopped being a problem after the DVD was released, which included a "film" format that allows the entire volume to be watched in a single sitting.
  • Volumes 4 and 5 were criticized by some fans for having multiple plotlines that took a long time to resolve due to the main characters being split apart. One particularly common complaint was that Blake's arc in Menagerie was taking too long to resolve. Another arc that was complained about was RNJR's arc in Mistral in Volume 5, which mostly involved them hanging around the house, only training in one episode, and having exposition-heavy scenes, all while waiting for the plot to advance, while Blake managed to conclude the Menagerie arc all by herself. The experience was much improved on DVD, where you can watch a volume in one go.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series fell into this hard thanks to Schedule Slip, which is frustrating since the source material ended two years before the abridged series even began. LittleKuriboh started abridging the Battle City arc in 2007, and did not finish that arc until 2014, by which time, even he had forgotten some of the Running Gags that he made up. (He later lampshaded this.) The anime ran from 2000 to 2004, meaning that it took longer to abridge a single arc than it did to broadcast the whole original series! And there are still two seasons to go...

• Eroninja: Naruto's overall goal has always been world peace, which he's been working towards since the first chapter. However, the story is over one hundred chapters long and, with the supplementary material, caps in at over two and a half million words. Despite this, Naruto and his group are no closer to their goal than they were to start, even though almost every canon villain and antagonistic faction has been dealt with, partly due to the author inventing several more as part of their world building.
• The Stalking Zuko Series has a fairly slow-paced romance arc between Zuko and Katara. They do work out their differences by the end of the first installment, and Katara gradually realizes her feelings for Zuko over the course of the second, but since the author chose to stick to The Stations of the Canon, Katara doesn't confess for a long time. Katara does confess after Zuko's Agni Kai with Azula, but he ends up forgetting said confession as a result of his near-death experience and ends up getting back together with Mai for a little while. As a result of that and various other factors, such as Hakoda's disapproval of Katara seeing Zuko, Katara doesn't confess again until near the end of the series.

• The Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Ever since the end of The Avengers, the franchise took six years to set up the confrontation between the heroes and Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War; Thor: The Dark World, Guardians of the Galaxy, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Captain America: Civil War, Doctor Strange (2016), Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Thor: Ragnarok and Black Panther all have subplots leading to the long-awaited battle. Needless to say, there were quite a few fans (and critics) who felt that the Thanos Myth Arc had been going on for way too long, and just wished it would finally happen so they could be done with it. Downplayed in that the aforementioned films mostly focused on major conflicts separate from the Thanos arc, with the Infinity War tie-ins being more fanservice than anything else.
  • Phase 4 was quickly hit with arc fatigue. After the release of Thor: Love and Thunder in Summer 2022, quite a few people began to complain about how aimless and meandering the next saga of the MCU was starting to feel, with no clear plot emerging beyond some extremely vague, confusing, and sometimes seemingly conflicting multiverse stuff after nearly 70 hours of total runtime between the movies and shows that made up Phase 4 up to that point. This wasn't helped by how Phase 4 is collectively longer than the previous three Phases combined and even heavier on continuity — in order to keep up with everything viewers would need to have not only watched the previous 23 films prior to Phase 4, but also the various TV shows found on Netflix and ABC (Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Daredevil (2015), etc.), and past Marvel properties that weren't (originally) part of the MCU like the X-Men Film Series and the Spider-Man Trilogy in addition to staying on top of any new releases.

• Animorphs was never meant to go on as long as it did, and it really shows towards the end — other than a single Megamorphs and Visser, nothing between Books 35 and 45 contributed to the overarching plot at all, instead defaulting to filler books the entire time.
• A Certain Magical Index has Aleister Crowley and Lola Stuart being set up early on as main villains. In the first series — 22 books long, not counting side stories or other material — their plans aren't actually revealed, with only a few hints as to what they might be. These are only revealed in Book 18 of the second series.
• The Dresden Files's Will They or Won't They? plot between Murphy and Harry stretched for 11 books, with occasional moments of romantic and sexual tension that both people acknowledged but rejected whenever the subject was brought up. First it didn't work because Murphy didn't trust Harry. Then it didn't work because she only wanted a casual relationship. Then it didn't work because both were dating other people. Then it didn't work because Harry was killed before they could consummate it. Then it didn't work because Harry was too ashamed of himself to renew their friendship. Then it didn't work because Murphy didn't trust Harry (again) and feared the Mantle's effects on him. Then it didn't work because Harry's demon brain-baby crippled his interactions with other people. Some actual fans of the relationship lost interest in it because A) the author took thousands of pages to provide a conclusion, and/or B) it became hard to believe in the characters' constant claims of affection and loyalty when they didn't do anything about these feelings. And then they finally get together only for Murphy to get Killed Off for Real immediately after it.
• People started thinking that Gone would do this after the release of Lies, which contributed nothing to the main plot, other than Drake and Brittney coming back to life and Sharing a Body. But Plague changed their minds.
• The House of Night: Neferet is the primary villain of the series and is plotting to Take Over the World. Zoey and her friends realize Neferet is evil and vow to stop her in the second book, Betrayed. There are ten more books in the main series after this and stopping Neferet is the protagonists' primary goal the entire time. Notably, in-universe only about a year passes, but the books themselves were published over seven years. A lot of readers have mentioned finding the books more of a drag to read around the halfway mark, especially as they tend to be padded out with Zoey's romantic drama rather than actual plot progression.
• The Kingkiller Chronicle suffers from this in relation to Kvothe's pursuit of the Chandrian, which has barely advanced at all over the course of two huge doorstoppers. Kvothe only sporadically makes any effort to find information on them, leading to what is supposedly the series' myth arc falling by the wayside frequently as more mundane issues like Kvothe's student finances take centre stage for extended periods of time.
• The prologue of the first book of A Song of Ice and Fire, featured a Night's Watchman encountering an Other, a creature long thought extinct, and its appearance heralding an oncoming apocalypse. Five books later, the Others have still not reached the Wall, on the northermost end of the seven kingdoms, and have only had one significant 'on-screen' appearance since that first prologue. Daenerys Targaryen, the last surviving heir of the previously ruling Targaryen dynasty, has, five books in, still never set foot on the continent of which she claims to be the rightful Queen.
• Warrior Cats. The story of the three was extended to two miniseries, which means The Three's story will take twelve books, while the other stories took six each.
• The Wheel of Time:
  • The plot kept getting slower and slower and slower over the course of ten books, with Books 8-10 representing the lowest point, though Book 11 had as much actual plot development as the previous three combined, and the last three books (completed by Brandon Sanderson after Robert Jordan's death) continued at this pace.
  • The most egregious case was Book 10 "Crossroads of Twilight" which is a multiple hundred-page-long book about people's reactions to the finale of the previous book. It plays out the day of and its following day or so over and over with all the main characters and most of the significant side ones. And this took place just after we had gotten out of three books wherein the three main protagonists had maybe five chapters between them, and had focused solely on the exploits of the trio of Elayne, Egwene and Nynaeve, and all their various doings. Which were important, admittedly, but still should not have displaced the main three protagonists roles.

• Malifaux has an arc relating to the return of the Tyrants, but any actual progress is glacial. The Mass Empowering Event that occurred in Book Two had its immediate aftermath (a matter of about a week) stretched out over three years of books.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • Invoked. For 30 years in a row, absolutely no one on the development team had any ambition to let the in-universe timeline advance past December 31st, 40,999. Officially this is because 40k isn't so much a story as a setting, so it doesn't technically have a storyline, only a backstory. More to the point, however, "advancing the storyline" would have logically meant killing off the Tau and possibly the Imperium as well; which were the two best-selling factions as of 2013.
  • As of 8th Edition, which was released in Summer 2017, we are a few centuries into the next millennium, and the plotline has advanced. The Imperium hangs on hard-pressed, and the Tau are advancing. The more things change...
  • Fans of Warhammer, the fantasy predecessor to 40k, were also familiar with this problem as the setting didn't really seem to develop much at all for years. Then came the End Times and the resulting reboot, Age of Sigmar, which... makes more than a few old players miss the Arc Fatigue days. Based on the example the End Times, not everyone is sure they want 40k to advance anymore.

• The Spoony Experiment: Spoony was trying to develop a Myth Arc over the course of the reviews. The story seemed to be that the Gate Cleaner and the Ultimate Warrior were working for the Guardian, who was intending to invade and conquer our world, but he abandoned his plans because Sephiroth was going to destroy the world with a meteor, and somehow was harnessing Spoony's hatred of Final Fantasy for his plan. There were also hints that Burton had been reprogrammed for some purpose (implicitly by Sephiroth), Spoony may have been trapped in some Platonic Cave illusion (which may or may not be related to the Burton subplot), and somehow Pumpkinhead may have been involved. Whatever the story was supposed to be, the Kudzu Plot nature of their development, Spoony's sporadic updating schedule, and the fact the story wasn't very good and didn't seem to have a point, meant that a lot of viewers didn't really care either way.