As the title says, I’m looking for stories that have hand-offs within the Relationship Story Throughline. Whether it’s a single player or multiple players that switch out. Multiple players switching out, one at a time, would be preferred, though.
Does anybody know of any stories that do this?
Black Panther was supposed to be one. The female spy/warrior, along with the usurper cousin. I think it’s mentioned in the analysis thread.
40 Year Old Virgin - the Steve Carell/Catherine Keener relationship switches back and forth with the Steve and his group of guy buddies collective relationship.
Not quite sure how you mean multiple characters, but I Tonya - Tonya and her mother switching with Tonya and her husband. Professor Marsten and the Wonder Women - Elizabeth has RS relationships with both William and Olive.
@mlucas I watched Black Panther, but I never really analyzed it. I’ll have to take a look again.
@Flight I’ll check these out, as well, they sound fairly close to what I’m looking for.
Actually, to better answer that question, here’s an ideal example of what I’d like to find: The RS would initially focus on the relationship between Jim and Jane. Later in the story, somewhere around the end of traditional act one, we also meet Mary and Mark, who have a relationship. This relationship need not necessarily be the same. Marriage for one, while barely friends for the other is perfectly fine. By the end of the story, though, the focus will have turned toward the relationship between Mary and Mark.
If there were something like that…
Sounds great! The Incredibles doesn’t really shift the focus from one relationship to the other the way you’re describing, but it definitely bounces back and forth between the husband/wife and sister/brother relationships. In this case both RS relationships share space in the same storyform and examine very close to the same issues of getting along within the family.
Are you thinking of the two relationships sharing the same storyform that way, with two characters sharing the MC POV and two others sharing the IC? Or are you thinking of creating a second RS relationship that doesn’t have an MC and IC? (I went searching for the great thread from a little while back about whether its possible for all 4 throughlines to have characters who never meet - and discovered it was yours! So I’m completely intrigued now! http://discuss.dramatica.com/t/separated-characters-in-separated-throughlines/2315
One other story that does something similar but with two separate storylines is Crimes and Misdemeanors. Don’t know if either story is a complete storyline, but it’s a nice model of two storylines directly comparing the same issue of dealing with guilt for transgressions. A paragraph about it (with a spoiler) shows up in chapter 11 of the Theory Book. http://dramatica.com/theory/book/story-reception
I’ll have to think on that. I’m inclined to say it’s more like the second, but I’m not sure now that you’ve asked! 
I’m still working on that, by the way. Just slowly.
How about A Christmas Carol? Stagecoach and the Wagon Train series bouncing off a film with that format was very effective and believable. Grand Hotel and similar [lots of different people sharing the room one at a time] movies might fit. Remembering back on seeing Lawrence of Arabia in the movie theater in 1962, I’d venture there could be an argument for IC trade offs, at least through audience reception.
Re-reading this post, I think I discovered the real reason I asked this question.
This article helped, too. That couldn’t have been better timing, @jhull! Thanks!
It turns out that I have two players exploring what happens in the relationship when the views are taken to extremes. Those are the players that don’t fulfill the role of MC and IC in the larger story. The players that do fulfill those roles have a “mirror” relationship that starts balanced, and thanks to those other two players, weakens to be closer to their antagonistic relationship.
Writing this all out, I now strongly suspect there are a number of sub-stories that are entwined between all of these players. It is a novel, and I suspect, from my muse, that it is the first novel of a series. I’ll need to figure out how to untie this Gordian knot of a story for my outline…
Thanks a bunch for all the help!
I always found my most satisfying reads to be those stories that have the mirror thing going on. I always thought of it as repeating a pattern, and it was so enjoyable in the read. I never knew why, exactly, but I always admired the writers who gave it to me.