Tropes related to letting a story go on for longer than it might have. If a series keeps going for a long time but keeps getting different stories to go with its new installments, that's something else.
No examples of works here, please. Leave it in the relevant trope entries.
Tropes
- Arc Fatigue: When the story itself, or at least parts of it, go on for a really long time with little progress.
- Ending Fatigue: It seems like it will end, but then it doesn't.
- Exponential Plot Delay: The rate at which the plot progresses decreases as time goes on.
- Fake Longevity: A video game trope in which the advertised "hours of gameplay" are artificially increased with irrelevant things.
- Filler: Almost entirely meaningless segments or installments in a franchise's storyline.
- Overtook the Manga, although sometimes this results in new stories as opposed to the same story taking longer.
- Padding: Like filler, but on the scale of individual scenes as opposed to entire episodes or installments.
- Prolonged Prologue: When the prologue of a story takes a long time to tell.
- Slow-Paced Beginning: The story is bogged down with exposition and takes a while to get off the ground.
- Trilogy Creep: The tendency of some trilogies to have additional, unexpected installments.
- Writing for the Trade: When a story is more suited to being absorbed in one installment (i.e. one book/movie/comic), but is broken up into several parts.