Trapped By Mountain Lions / Literature

• During his Malloreon series, David Eddings would frequently insert a chapter which revealed what minor characters from all over the world were doing. These were semi-interesting but ultimately had little bearing on the real plot (other than the ones with the ride off the island at the end).
  • It did help to alleviate the "Dragonlance syndrome" where the hero party seems to be walking through an RPG world where nothing happens if they are not directly involved. Eddings used it far more successfully in the Belgariad, though, where the war in the south was far more interesting than the walkabout of Garion, Belgarath, and Silk.
• The Star Wars: Legacy of the Force books are plagued by this, from Jaina's unending token Love Triangle to the Mandalorian subplots in Karen Traviss' books, which are notably being ignored by the other two writers. Guess the main plot, with Jacen Solo and his quest to become a Sith Lord, is just that irrelevant.
  • The Black Fleet Crisis is even worse, with two entirely separate stories, having no connection except that they take place at the same time and end up with characters in the same star system after everything has been resolved, and one of them serving no purpose except to include Lando in the book.
• A Song of Ice and Fire is a strange case when it comes to this - due to the books' sprawling, as-yet-vague Myth Arc, relatively slow pace and numerous characters, people have accused both the currently-central gritty civil war & politics plot and the currently-in-the-background more fantastical elements (Daenerys' and Jon's plots specifically) of being this, although both camps could be seen as missing the point of the series.
  • Then came A Feast For Crows, which features Brienne looking for Sansa and Arya Stark, who by this point the readers know are finally relatively safe and near impossible for her to find, following numerous leads that the readers know are false and finally getting herself hanged and lots of new POV characters in parts of the setting a long way away from the established centre of the conflict - Dorne and the Iron Islands. Lots of people found the new plots to be a case of Trapped by Mountain Lions, which was exacerbated by the fact that the book didn't include roughly half of the older POV characters. It's easy to see that the new POVs might intersect with the established plotlines, but A Feast For Crows did little more than set things up... which is in keeping with the author's description of it as "scene one of act two".
• Any chapter containing the character Fletcher Kale in Dean Koontz's Phantoms. It's made even worse by the fact that, with the exception of the first chapter he appears in and the final epilogue chapter, he never interacts with any of the other main characters at all, and nothing else in the story would have been affected if his character had been cut. It's hard to find the escape of a murderer sociopath the least bit compelling, or find the character the least bit menacing, given the Eldritch Abomination everyone else is dealing with several dozen miles away.
• A large amount of Iain Banks's Look to Windward is concerned with a subplot in which a character discovers what is happening in the main plot and tries to warn or help. However, because of the timing and the huge distances involved between the locations of the two plots, it is obvious from the beginning that nothing he does will be able to have any effect on the main plot, and though the subplot runs through the entire novel, it never makes contact with the main plot.
• In the Inheritance Cycle:
  • Nasuada's chapters in the second book, Eldest, were primarily centered around solving disputes and economic problems within the Varden while Roran and Eragon follow much more meaningful plots.
  • In Brisingr, Roran's role and importance are reduced and he spends most of his chapters fighting inconsequential battles against small numbers of Imperial forces, wrestling down a troublemaking urgal, and spending time and dealing with the matters surrounding his newly-wed and pregnant wife, while Eragon is, as usual, doing more important things. Saphira's chapters only serve to show how arrogant she is, the fact that she misses Eragon, and that her inner-monologue has a bizarre use of adjectives that never turns up in her telepathic speech.
• The necromancers Bauchelain and Korbal Broach in Memories of Ice, the third book in the The Malazan Book of the Fallen. They travel to a city that later comes under siege, interact with various of the main characters, but contribute nothing at all to the overall story. (They do get a series if spin-off novellas, though).
• Dear Lord, the "Perrin rescues his kidnapped wife" subplot in The Wheel of Time. It wasn't remotely interesting in the first place, and the sheer number of books through which it managed to drag on — keeping Perrin perpetually mopey and unable to do anything cool — was simply infuriating.
  • Everyone agrees, Mat Cauthon is the best of the Two Rivers characters. Robert Jordan remedied this by having him spend an entire book unconscious, and when he finally wakes up spend another book, nearly one thousand pages, as sex-slave to a deranged queen through blackmail and threat of force, while the supporting characters actively encouraged it. And he's sad to leave (Double Standard Rape: Female on Male). A man with the power to attract evil like a beacon and Badass Normal fighting skills, the memories of a thousand conquerors trapped in his brain... and his entire role in that book was to have chapter after chapter dedicated to describing the pink frills he was forced to wear.
    • Luckily Robert Jordan realized that the one character people actually liked was shut away in a closet somewhere (almost literally) and Mat spends the next book showing everyone just how badass a Fourstar Badass can really be. And then he got about 3 chapters in the book after that. Figures.
  • Averted in Knife of Dreams. At the end, when Tuon finds out she is the new head of the Seanchan, she kisses Mat and rides off to claim her throne. Normally, this would have been at least a books worth of writing. Thankfully, it is cleaned up by the Epilogue.
• The original novel of The Godfather contains two sub-plots which were cut from the movie for their total irrelevance to the main plot. One of the sub-plots involves Frank Sinatra Johnny Fontane and his buddy in Hollywood; the other follows the adventures of Sonny's mistress in Las Vegas and contains, among other things, no less than twenty pages on the subject of women's reproductive health. Presumably the author felt that this was an anvil that badly needed to be dropped on 1950s America, but still...
• The Waterloo sequence in Les Misérables. Several other chapters qualify, but Waterloo gets the mention because it's 60 pages long and only the last 2 are at all relevant to the rest of the plot. That said, it is brilliantly written.
• Theo Willoughby's whole plotline in Kate Furnivall's The Russian Concubine. Why do we care that the heroine's high school teacher is being blackmailed by his girlfriend's father into participating in the drug trade? Much less his sexual exploits with said girlfriend?
• Subverted, interestingly enough, in Ian Irvine's The Three Worlds Cycle, with the inclusion of various plotlines that, while all containing major characters, are usually completely separate from each other. Then, just as it looks like a Trapped by Mountain Lions moment, the plot strands all come together to form a major twist. Though this arguably happens in every book in the series (and this is literally eleven books already), the best example from the first Story Arc (the first quartet in the Cycle) would be in The Tower On The Rift, where the main heroes are essentially split into three groups. One group is Karen and Shand who seem to be making their way across a desolate wasteland desert for no reason except that Karen has a 'feeling' that her lover is in the random fortress in the dead centre (that has blatantly been placed there for no other reason than to extend the series by one extra book). Guess where the Big Showdown takes place...
• The adultery and organized crime subplots in Jaws. It's utterly obvious why those plots didn't make it into the movie.
• The crazy state trooper subplot from Friday the 13th: Road Trip, and everything involving the two FBI agents from Friday The 13th Hate-Kill-Repeat.
• The FBI's search for the terrorists who caused the subway bombing in Final Destination: Destination Zero; it eventually culminates in an abrupt yet brief Genre Shift from horror to action, involving stuff like a warehouse shootout and a high speed chase through the city during rush hour.
• In The Lord of the Isles series, at least two out of the four main characters are Trapped by Mountain Lions for a significant portion of each book, after the first novel.
• Really, several parts of The Twilight Saga. Even when there's this huge vampire war looming, the focus of the first book is still on the relatively shallow romance between the two main characters.
  • Stephenie Meyer released a few scenes cut from the book. It's clear why her editor nixed them—one interrupted the whole "fleeing from a psychotic vampire" plot so that Alice could take Bella shopping for expensive clothes, while another one, set after the battle, had them and Edward randomly stop to gamble in Vegas on the way back to Forks.
  • In Eclipse, right at the final battle, Edward and Jacob decide to take Bella away from it to keep her safe. The battle is almost completely ignored so that we can focus on Bella (predictably) choosing Edward over Jacob.
• In the Codex Alera book Furies of Calderon, two characters spend a while being pursued by Kord, a creepy rapist who seems more interested in creepy slave rape than he does in the fact that Calderon is currently being invaded. However, in later books in the series the abuses of the Aleran slave system and characters working against it will become a significant plot point, and the sadistic High Lord who is the ultimate backer of the slave trade will become a major villain; Kord's character exists to set this all up for the reader.
• The Redwall series: If a novel doesn't involve the Big Bad trying to take over Redwall, but there is still a Redwall subplot involved, it probably falls under this trope. Some examples include...
  • General Ironbeak’s segments in Mattimeo, could qualify, but they sure provide a memorable villain.
  • There are five storylines in Salamandastron; in addition to the titular storyline, which at times falls to the side, there are two corresponding storylines each about a pair of characters who eventually converge, and two storylines that are followed regarding a “dryditch fever” plague: that of those dealing it at the abbey, and that of the search party that’s out to Find the Cure!.
  • The Slipp and Blaggut subplot in The Bellmaker. But since this subplot involves Blaggut, the first vermin who isn't truly evil or a Jerkass, you'll probably find yourself drawn into it.
  • Veil Sixclaw's entire subplot from Outcast of Redwall is this. Considering Veil is the title character (It's called "Outcast of Redwall", not "Sunflash Kicks Ass") that's quite an achievement.
• The subplot in Neil Gaiman's Stardust about the princes Primus and Septimus trying to kill each other isn't very well integrated with the main plot about Tristran and Yvain. The main characters briefly meet Primus and never meet Septimus, who ends up getting anticlimactically killed by the Big Bad. To be fair, it reads less like clumsy plotting and more like Gaiman was deliberately working against readers' expectations. This was re-written a bit for the movie, with Septimus being given a more active role, and he and the hero meet during the climax.
• She is the Darkness, the eighth book of The Black Company, has the wizard Goblin on a secret mission for most of the novel, with the narrator occasionally checking in on him via Dream Spying. It's revealed late in the novel that the purpose of this secret mission is to keep Goblin's ongoing squabble with another wizard from complicating matters during this critical junction in the war.
• Tales of the City has a few of these kind of plots:
  • In More Tales, while Mary Ann tries to discern how Burke lost his memory, Michael finds the love of his life and decides to come out of the closet, and Mona discovers a big secret about the identity of her father, Brian engages in voyeuristic games with a mysterious woman (who turns out to be Mona's mother.)
  • In Further, there is the active plot of Mary Ann and DeDe desperately chasing after the man who kidnapped DeDe's children, and Prue Giroux's arc of being completely oblivious to the fact that her new boyfriend's a psychopath... and then there is Michael's arc, which involves him going off and having sex with an unnamed celebrity.
  • In Sure of You, as Mary Ann and Brian's marriage falls apart and Michael finds himself stuck right smack in the middle, Mona goes off on a quest to get laid.
• China Mountain Zhang by Maureen McHugh focused on the titular protagonist but 3 of the 5 POV characters had little or no connection to the protagonist. Two of them were staying in a Martian commune where the protagonist never visited but he became an online tutor for one of the POV characters there while other one is an acquaintance to his friends and only had one encounter with him. However, these characters provided different perspectives of the political and cultural setting where the protagonist lived in.
• Enforced and Played for Drama in Stephen King's Time Travel epic 11/22/63. Protagonist Jake Epping goes back in time to stop the assassination of John F. Kennedy. However, the time portal he uses can only go back to September 9th, 1958, not a day earlier or later, requiring that Jake spend five years integrating himself in late-50s and early-60s society. Thanks to Stephen King's skill with world-building, some fans consider these portions to be the best parts of the book.
• Fifty Shades of Grey The subplot in Fifty Shades Freed where Jose, his dad and Ray are involved in a car accident. All three of them ultimately make full recoveries and it has no impact on the rest of the plot.
• In The Shadow Isle, the penultimate book of the Deverry saga, minor character Kov is suddenly abducted by a never-before mentioned and barely foreshadowed race called the Dwrgi. Halfway through the final novel The Silver Mage, he manages to escape, and the whole thing is never brought up again, nor do the Dwrgi have anything to do with the main storyline.

---