Board Thread:Spoilers!/@comment-10663213-20191216223744/@comment-25926288-20191222174928

Walecs wrote: More like, it's all connected because the writers tried to cram as much stuff as possible in the show when they had no reason to, they were to lazy to come up with better explanations and making everyone related was a lazy and easy way to make plot twists. I agree with you partially. Some of their explanations lean more on convenience and poor explanations.

However, you are discounting how a narative is structured and suspension of disbelief. Random Character A isn't going to be a constant focal point of the show/movie/book/medium if they are completely to the story.

Once did have characters that did and did not cross paths with the core group in the way distant past. I'm going to use Belle in the below example.

Crossing pasts: Belle interacted with Anna in the past. This does not make the world smaller, but Belle's experience in the world bigger and the world more united. This was a simple way to loop in Belle with the Frozen arc without her interacting much with the Frozen cast. This crafted a nicely knitted story. I can see it being done differently and how much is too much but "it's a wash" at worst.

Not crossing pasts: Belle runs into Merida and has a neat little side story that later sets up a side-story. Perfectly fine. Could they always do that? No. If you take Merida in the larger scheme of things, she could have been written out of the story easily as she did very little. You could argue from the other side that Merida's inclusion was a waste due to the minor connections she had to the story.

All in all, it's a tough balance. It's rather subjective and there's a flurry of factors that go into stories acorss different media.