Intro-Only Point of View

The opening of a story is told from Alice's point of view, about how she saw Bob and what Bob did, and then the point of view shifts to Bob, the actual protagonist—exclusively, or predominantly.

This is a way to ease the audience into the story, because Bob is a very odd or outlandish character, and viewing him from the outside first makes the transition easier. It can cause problems if the opening doesn't arouse sufficient interest in Bob, and the audience may dislike the transition for that reason.

It can also be used to arouse interest in a crime by showing the victim's sufferings before we switch to the crime-solver.

The Teaser-Only Character and Sacrificial Lamb are frequently the introductory character. The Decoy Protagonist is, sometimes, if his part is told in his point of view. If the story does not switch, see First-Person Peripheral Narrator.

Compare Framing Device, which can serve the same purpose, but has some character recount the story in retrospective.

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Example

Anime and Manga

• Dr. STONE: The first chapters/episodes are shown from Taiju's perspective, until the petrification event occurs and three thousand years pass before he's revived. Once he reunites with Senku, the focus shifts to him as the main protagonist for the remainder of the story.
• The iDOLM@STER (2011) has its first episode as an interview of all the 765 Production idols from the perspective of an unnamed, unvoiced cameraman. The end of the episode reveals that the cameraman is their future producer, and was recording these because the company's president wanted the Producer to get to know his charges on a personal level. The rest of the anime is an ensemble piece.
• Episode 20 of Code Geass: R2 opens with an inner monologue from Suzaku Kururugi.
• Trigun begins from the point-of-view of Meryl before transferring to Vash; interestingly, it takes several episodes before the show actually focuses more on the point of view of the true protagonist. This is partly done to emphasize the disparity between his dreaded reputation and actual personality, as it takes a while before the other characters are convinced that this goofy Technical Pacifist is really the legendary gunslinger Vash the Stampede.
• The first chapter of Life in Another World as a Housekeeping Mage is from the viewpoint of Alec, an adventurer who gets convinced to hire Shiori, the titular mage, during a monster eradication quest. Since Alec is a veteran adventurer who's used to the rough and hard life in the field, the uniqueness of Shiori's services (she cooks delicious full meals, provides comfortable bedding for everyone, and gives them countless other luxuries you could never have in the wilderness otherwise) stand out much more. Later chapters switch to Shiori.

Comic Books

• Death's Head II is introduced this way. The first miniseries, Death's Head II: The Wild Hunt, is initially told from the perspective of his predecessor, the original robot Death's Head. But by the end of the first issue he's been decapitated and assimilated by his replacement, with the narrative switching to follow his killer.

Fan Works

• Chapter 1 of Iron Touch is told from Giorno and Polnareff's point of view before transitioning to the actual protagonist, Michelle, in the next chapter. While the POV character does occasionally change from chapter to chapter, the fic opening up with Giorno is done specifically to bridge the gap between the canon of JJBA to the new characters introduced in the fic, as confirmed by the author.

Film

• The opening sequence of Halloween (1978) is a single POV shot from the perspective of Michael Myers, building up to The Reveal that Michael is a small child.
• Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: The hotrodding teens are the first characters to appear in the movie (mainly to establish the time period), but depart from the story about three minutes later.
• The opening sequence of Peeping Tom is from the perspective of Mark's camera.
• The '50s corporate-intrigue drama Executive Suite opens with a scene from the perspective of the company CEO whose subsequent death by heart attack sets the film's plot in motion.
• Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows starts from Watson's narrative perspective before jumping into the Holmes-centric plot.

Literature

• Animorphs: The Hork-Bajir Chronicles opens with Tobias visiting the Hork-Bajir valley, and Jara telling him the story of his people. The rest of the book is from the Switching P.O.V. of Aldrea, Dak, and Esplin.
• In Dan Abnett's Warhammer 40,000 novel Brothers of the Snake, the first undertaking is told not from the point of view of Priad, the Space Marine, but that of a woman on the planet to which he was summoned.
• Harry Potter
  • Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone opens with the POV of Vernon Dursley as he goes to work and witnesses the wizarding world celebrating Harry's survival and Voldemort's defeat, followed by Dumbledore's meeting with McGonagall and Hagrid about Harry's future (the film version opens with the latter scene).
  • Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire begins from the POV of Frank Bryce, a Muggle who accidentally eavesdrops on Voldemort, and becomes a Sacrificial Lamb in order to establish that Voldemort is at large again in Britain.
  • Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince begins from the POV of an unnamed Prime Minister, the recipient of an Info Dump that sums up the series thus far; it then goes on, more distantly, to follow Narcissa Malfoy and Bellatrix Lestrange as they interrogate Snape, who gives an account of his actions so as to support the idea that he has been working for Voldemort all along.
  • Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows begins with a meeting of Voldemort and his Death Eaters, not from any specific POV, giving a general idea of what they are up to.
• A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov does this twice. Part one is told by the main character's old friend to The Watson, part two—by The Watson himself—and only the last three chapters are narrated by Pechorin (main character).
• The prologue to Dora Wilk Series' final book is the only passage in the entire series written from another perspective than Dora, as it's Varg narrating the events leading to his capture, which kicks the plot into motion.
• In The Impossible Virgin, a Modesty Blaise novel, begins with a man named Mischa Novikov, and follows him until he dies on the fifth page, one paragraph before Modesty enters the story.
• President's Vampire opens with a chapter written from POV of a random soldier who witnesses vampire vs werewolves fight, only to be reassigned back to Iraq and never appear in the story again.
• InCryptid novel Discount Armageddon opens with the omniscient point of view to introduce the whole family watching Verity. After the prologue, the rest of the novel is first-person point of view from Verity.
• While Lolita is told from the perspective of the Villain Protagonist Humbert Humbert, the book starts with a "foreword" by another character called John Ray Jr., who writes from a somewhat more objective point of view. Ray mostly seems to be a sort of Author Avatar for writer Vladimir Nabokov, informing the reader that Humbert is an Unreliable Narrator and an abhorrent person to boot, so he shouldn't be trusted at his word. During his write-up, Ray also drops some other details that allows attentive readers to figure the further fate of some of the characters in the story, the biggest one being that Lolita/Dolores herself ended up dying in childbirth.
• Happens in the Mistborn trilogy Two-thirds of the prologue of the first book is in the POV of a random noblebman who gets killed offscreen between the second and last third of the prologue, and a peasant on said nobleman's estate who shows up only once, very briefly, later in the book. The third book sort of uses it, the prologue is from the POV of a character that gets further point of view chapters later, but it's very short, and the beginning of the first chapter is from the point of view of the leader of a random settlement.
• Each of the A Song of Ice and Fire books start this way. The opening POV character almost always dies by the end of their section. If they don't, they'll die shortly after.
• The introduction of My Ántonia is told from the viewpoint of a character who meets an old friend, Jim Burden, and the two of them reminisce about their youth in Nebraska and their friendship with Ántonia. The rest of the book is a first-person narrative from Jim.
• Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian:
  • In "The Devil in Iron," a fisherman goes into a ruin, takes up a knife, and dies. The rest of the story is how this collides with Conan.
  • In "Black Colossus," a thief breaks into a tomb, fights a great snake, and screams with horror with what he sees. Again, the rest of the story is how this collides with Conan the Barbarian.
• In L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables, the opening scenes are from Mrs Rachel Lynde's POV.
• In the first chapter many of Tony Hillerman's mysteries, the point-of-view character is someone going about their life, ending with them witnessing something suspicious/criminal (people walking in the desert who find a dead body; a researcher at a hospital who sees a car blow up in the parking lot). One book begins with the POV of a blind old woman who is present when two murders are committed.
• The opening to The Ghost Brigades opens from the POV of a scientist whose base comes under attack during the aftermath of the prequel book Old Man's War. The kicker comes during the final lines when we realise his abductors are human—the scientist belongs to the species that served as Big Bad in Old Man's War.
• The prologue of Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep is mostly told from the viewpoint of the nascent Eldritch Abomination/Sealed Evil in a Can as it rapidly gains sentience, though a small portion of it is also told from the viewpoint of several other nascent AIs in the same network.
• A staple of Frank Peretti books. If the opening-POV character survives the introduction, they might be a minor character in the main narrative, or might never show up again.
• The prologue of The Dinosaur Lords is that of a farm boy who witnesses the arrival of the first Grey Angel to appear on Paradise in centuries. The Angel quickly wipes his memory of the encounter.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • The prologue of Star Wars: Kenobi is from the point of view of Wyle Ulbreck, a suspicious old moisture farmer who's gone to Anchorhead to drown his sorrows. Consequently, he's too drunk to really understand what he's seeing when Obi-Wan Kenobi shows up with the infant Luke Skywalker and intervenes in a bar fight between some locals and some of Jabba the Hutt's thugs. Ulbreck is a minor character in the rest of the novel. We don't see his POV again, but we do find out later that the events of the prologue caused him to quit drinking.
  • The first few pages of Star Wars: Scoundrels take place from the point of view of Captain Worhven of the Star Destroyer Dominator as he very grudgingly uses his awesome warship to ferry Lord d'Ashewl, a foppish member of the Imperial Court, and his manservant Dayja, on a pointless errand to Wukkar. It's only after we leave his POV that d'Ashewl and Dayja are revealed as undercover agents of Imperial Intelligence, who have a very good reason to want a Star Destroyer nearby as backup.
• The first book of the Republic Commando Series, Hard Contact, has the prologue told in a first person perspective from Darman. After this, the narrative shifts into an omniscient third-person perspective and stays that way.
• The prologue of Forever Amber is based around the POV of Judith, who gives birth to Amber and then dies.
• In Deltora Quest, the first few chapters of the first book are told from the perspective of Jared, a young boy living in Del Palace as the best friend of Endon, the heir to the throne of Deltora. The novel goes on to show how he came to discover an ancient conspiracy to overthrow the kingdom plotted by the evil Shadow Lord. Afterwards he escapes the palace, becomes a blacksmith, and eventually helps Endon escape as well in order to keep the royal bloodline and the Belt of Deltora safe, both crucial to eventually banish the Shadow Lord. The story then cuts to years later, introducing the real protagonist of the series: Jared's son, Lief.
• Most of John Buchan's Richard Hannay thrillers are narrated throughout by Hannay, but in The Courts of the Morning he manages to insist, successfully for once, that he's retired and doesn't want another adventure; he disappears from the narrative at the end of the third chapter, and from the fourth chapter on the story is narrated in third person as it follows the people on whom the adventure falls instead.
• Isaac Asimov
  • "Does a Bee Care?": The story starts by focusing on Thornton Hammer, director of the project. Once it establishes that Hammer sees Kane as his Good Luck Charm, the story changes view to describe Kane's thoughts.
  • "The Message": The story opens with three old war veterans in the twentieth century, reminiscing about their past. Then it flips to a time-traveller student from the thirtieth century, who is in World War II.
• The Croning is mainly seen from the viewpoint of the elderly geology professor Donald Miller in 2012, but the first section of the book has a few jumps in perspective, the first being to the Early Middle Ages were we briefly follow a character nebulously referred to as "the Spy", before jumping to a young Donald Miller in 1958, and then to NSA agent Tommy Crane in 1980.
• Every Wings of Fire book has a prologue from the perspective of one character and an epilogue from the perspective of another, separate from the one (in the main series) or three (in the Legends prequels) focus character(s) for that book.
• In The City We Became, the primary avatar of New York narrates the first chapter, but he's in a coma for the rest of the book until he gets to narrate the epilogue.

Live-Action TV

• In their first episodes, both the old Doctor Who and the new focused on human characters—Barbara and Ian, Rose—who tracked down mysterious happenings and found the Doctor at the bottom of them.
• An episode of House did this in the literal sense, for a patient with locked-in syndrome. The first fifteen minutes or so of the episode were shot through the patient's eyes, with his thoughts in voiceover.
• This happens a lot on Bones (and probably other crime dramas as well). About one out of three episodes opens with some random characters living their lives, then finding the Victim of the Week. The POV then switches to the main characters for the rest of the show.
• Law & Order and its spin-offs. Every once in a while, you wonder what happened to those people at the beginning.
• At the very beginning of Game of Thrones, the story is seen through the eyes of Will, the ranger who re-encountered the White Walkers in the Haunted Forest and would later be beheaded soon after by Ned Stark.

Magazine

• Analog: In the July 1931 issue, Willy Ley's "Geography For Time Travelers" begins with a fiction of space explorers whose "space-warp" sometimes has a "time-warp" effect. This is a premise to show how different Earth looks compared to three hundred fifty million years ago. The fiction stops and Ley begins explaining how the geography of the Earth has changed from the Devonian Period to the map of today.

Video Games

• The first three sequences of Assassin's Creed III follows Haytham Kenway, father of protagonist Connor Kenway. At the end of the third sequence, Haytham is revealed to be a Templar and one of the major antagonists. The point of view is then switched to his son for the rest of the game.
• The prologue of Assassin's Creed: Unity has the player controlling Templar Grand Master Jacques de Molay's unnamed advisor during the fall of the Knights Templar on 13 October 1307. The rest of the game is spent playing as Arno, an Assassin operating during the French Revolution centuries later.
• The opening of Assassin's Creed: Odyssey has the player as Leonidas, fighting at the battle of Thermopylae, showing the player some of the game mechanics, before he dies. The rest of the game is spent playing as his grandchild.
• Batman: Arkham Knight starts with the player controlling a random cop in Gotham City. After a short Scenic-Tour Level, he's driven to madness by The Scarecrow, in an attack meant to draw out Batman. The cop, named Henry Owens, slowly recovers from the effects of the toxin over the course of the game.
• Fate/EXTRA begins from the point of view of a School Newspaper News Hound. As he tries investigating around the school, he can run across many of the main characters, before stumbling into the Arena and dying, begging for someone to at least remember his name.
• You play as the main character's older brother, Reks, in the prologue/tutorial of Final Fantasy XII. One the sequence is over, perspective shifts to Vaan. He's stabbed by Gabranth posing as Basch at the end of the sequence, which is why he's not in the rest of the game.
• In The Last of Us, you play as Joel's daughter Sarah for the first few minutes of the game, before she breaks her leg. After that, you control Joel as he carries her out of the burning city.
• In The Last of Us Part II, you control Joel for the first few minutes of the game as he explains what happened at the end of the first game to his brother Tommy. Then the game jumps forward four years and you assume control of Ellie.
• Elemental Gearbolt opens with a scene centering on mysterious black-clad person called Tagami, who is surveying a ruined city and sees a vision of how it was destroyed. For the main action of the game, the player takes on the role of the destroyers.
• You control Boris Schultz for the first minute of Thimbleweed Park, after which he's killed. Then the playable perspective changes to Agents Ray and Reyes, who solve his murder.
• Dead Space 3 begins by following two soldiers from the Sovereign Colonies Armed Forces. They are promptly killed off at the end of the prologue, then we jump 200 years later into the future and get back to series protagonist Isaac Clarke.
• The first mission of Call Of Duty Infinite Warfare follows SCAR soldier Dan "Wolf" Lyall and his men on a mission to Europa. At the end of their mission, they're brutally murdered by SDF forces. The rest of the game follows another SCAR soldier, Lt. Nick Reyes.
• While the "zeroth" chapter of Eternal Darkness follows actual heroine Alex Roivas, the "first" one lets you play the main antagonist, Pious Agustus, during his Start of Darkness.
• Max Blaster and Doris de Lightning Against the Parrot Creatures of Venus has two of these. It starts by featuring playable interludes with Captain Dotar Sojat, who is attacked by Max, and then Doctor Hackles, who is foiled by Doris. These villains don't appear after the intro, and mainly serve to introduce both heroes and their differing modi operandi.
• Robo Recall has you play as a random civilian in the intro, after witnessing the news, turn to see all the domestic robots went berserk and attacking your character.
• Lacuna (2021) starts out with a prologue sequence which puts the player in the shoes of the teenage girl Mira as she experiences the infamous "Sector II incident" on the colony of Drovia. After this, the story jumps 40 years ahead in time and to the planet of Ghara as it introduces us to Neil Conrad, the actual protagonist of the story. Depending on the player's final action during the prologue, Mira either makes another appearance in a newspaper article where she is interviewed about her experience of losing her parents during the incident or her mother is interviewed and explains how Mira's death destroyed her marriage.

Visual Novel

• In Fate/stay night, the prologue chapter is told through the point of view of Tohsaka Rin, instead of the protagonist Emiya Shirou. In the actual first chapter you see some of the events that took place in the prologue chapter from Shirou's point of view.

Web Comics

• In Spare Keys for Strange Doors, the first story is told from the point of view of a woman who finds the two main characters to tell them about her friend's problematic use of magic, and the second from a ghost's.
• The prequel to Marla introduces Carmickle and Hink, two Funny Animal friends who bumble their way through a series of comic mis-adventures. They are unceremoniously killed off in the first pages of the prologue, at which point the real story begins.

Western Animation

• Star Wars Rebels briefly uses this as the Cold Opening of "Through Imperial Eyes" through the literal eyes of Agent Kallus as he silently awakens to a emergency siren and sees himself in the mirror before he rinses his face. It is used to deliver how tired and stressed out he is due to his role as The Mole and that Grand Admiral Thrawn is trying to find out who the mole is. Apparently, the entire episode was supposed to be shown this way, but proved to be too time-consuming to make (the episode title and the introduction are artifacts of this idea).

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