Basic Trope: A plot with large time gaps between individual chapters.
- Straight: The story starts with Alice the Amazon's miraculous birth, then proceeds with episodes from her wacky childhood, first adventure at the age of 16, multiple breakups and reunions with her not-love-interest Cyrus the Cimmerian in their twenties, and her heroic last mission to vanquish Emperor Draco the Dreaded.
- Exaggerated: The entire history of Alice's tribe is told from the creation of the world to the modern day, often with hundreds of years between the death of one heroine and the birth of the next.
- Downplayed: The story takes place in a span of a couple of years, with chapters separated by no more than a few in-story months.
- Justified:
- The story is narrated by a historian who would only mention important events.
- The story is * reconstructed from surviving documents.
- Inverted:
- The story describes everything but Alice's (rather brief) heroic exploits, including her uneventful training sessions and equally uneventful recoveries in minuscule detail.
- There isn't a single time skip in the story, not even a tiny Jump Cut of a few minutes.
- Subverted: After a few chronological jumps, the story jumps back to fill in the gaps with interesting events.
- Double Subverted: ...except that a few big time skips still remain after the story is over.
- Parodied: ???
- Zig Zagged: ???
- Averted: Alice the Amazon's adventure is told from start to finish with no extended interruptions.
- Enforced: The audience wants to hear the story of Emperor Draco's slayer's entire life in one night, forcing The Narrator to only pick out the interesting bits.
- Lampshaded: Alice and Cyrus catch up on what they did in the few years since their last meeting and realize they have nothing interesting to tell. So they go on another wild adventure.
- Invoked: Alice only calls upon her Tagalong Chronicler Bob the Bard whenever something interesting is happening in her life.
- Exploited: Bob the Bard keeps tabs on his heroic acquaintances, including Alice, so he can write multiple heroic epics by joining up with them at just the right moment.
- Defied: Bob the Bard writes down every detail of Alice's life for the posterity.
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
- Implied: No dates or ages are ever mentioned in the narrative but characters grow visibly older between chapters.
- Deconstructed: All the time skips conveniently omit darker and less pleasant aspects of Alice's life and personality, presenting her in a much more heroic light than she really was.
- Reconstructed: Bob admits to making Alice look more heroic than she actually was, but argues that a legend will inspire generations, while an accurate chronicle would have only gathered dust on the shelves forever.
- Played For Laughs: The listener in the Framing Device complains about the storyteller leaving things out.
Back to Dashed Plot Line.
