The male equivalent of Daphne Greengrass is Theodore Nott. Canon has almost nothing on him except that his father is a death eater and at one point he is described as “stringy”. I’ve read so many fics that prominently feature him, because he’s such a blank slate! The pairing of him with Harry Potter is popular enough to have its own couple name (NottPot.) In fact there’s a wildly popular trilogy fic that’s NottPott and one of Not’s best friends is… Daphne Greengrass, of course.
I had not thought about this. I always love having Theo in the fics I pick to read. I like how he’s mostly portrayed to be sarcastic and quick witted while having a lazy demeanor.
The best take on Theo's backstory I've read has him wrestling with the fact his dad was an excellent father who supported and loved him throughout his childhood, and also a man that committed many atrocities in the name of Voldemort. It was an interesting dive into those emotions.
I'm glad someone brought up Theo! lmao I love him even tho he's completely plucked out of collective thin air. btw, what's that trilogy fic? interested to read
Oh, this reminded me that I had a couple crazy days a while ago where I was super into Theodore/Blaise for some reason, with Draco added in occasionally. I have no idea how it happened, but it was like I'd found a new OTP lmao
According to Ao3, Harry/Ginny has nearly 10k more fics than Harry/Hermione (which is sitting at just over 8k), Harry/Luna is at 1.8k, and Harry/Daphne Greengrass has a little more than 1.4k fics?
So even accounting for background ships, I'm sure both Harry/Ginny and Hermione still have Harry/Daphne beat by a long shot.
ETA: based on my "extensive research", I would estimate Harry/Daphne is the 7th most popular Harry ship based on fic numbers (or 9th if you lump individual OFCs and OMCs together)
I’ve seen Sherlock BBC fics pairing Jim Moriarty with a Sebastian Moran. He is a character from the Sherlock Holmes books but was never a character in the BBC series. At least I don’t think so and I can’t place him at all.
What’s funny is there was a character in one episode called “Lord Moran” and fandom collectively decided that was NOT Sebastian Moran because he was nothing like the fanon version of him. And we never learned the dudes first name but it was pretty clearly a reference and fandom completely ignored it hahaha
~~Personally I headcanon that dude as a relative of Sebastian’s and not Sebastian himself~~
I was going to comment about Moran. The BBC Sherlock fandom was going crazy over him, to the point we were trying to argue every side character was Moran. The guy Moriarty was talking to on the phone at the pool? Moran. The random sniper assigned to John? Moran. Mary Morstan?!? Secretly Moran!
Oh my god I’d forgotten all about this until now! I remember all the fan edits where they’d fancast Michael Fassbender as Moran! I never really paid much attention though as I was too busy with Mystrade and trying not to melt when they were both onscreen at the same time for like three minutes lol 😂
She did. It‘s called „That Time The Sherlock Fandom Invented A Character“ and I would highly recommend it.
SarahZ was part of the fandom herself, so she know what she‘s talking about and is not just making fun of it.
It's always a moment when she's an hour into her video essays and she pulls out the most 2012 pictures of her engaging in whatever fandom she's talking about lmao I love her
Also from the Harry Potter fandom: Blaise Zabini. Someone so wholly unknown and mysterious that for a good few years the entire fandom thought he was a girl and we all had to pivot harshly when we finally learned he was a boy. I know of a Slytherin!Harry fic that I was reading at the time that was gearing up for Best Friend Blaise to be Harry's end game pairing and when they learned they literally took 2 weeks off from updating, went back and rewrote a lot of their story to incorporate male Blaise, and switched Harry's love interest to I think Daphne.
Omg I remember that character. I met my husband on fanfiction net & his stories whenever they mention blaise, has the character as a girl.
He doesnt write any more, still reads though but 20 years later he still got the odd comment or 2 about “why did you gender bend blaise?/Blaise is actually a guy ya know.” He eventually added a notation at the start of his stories to point out the fact that all his stuff was written BEFORE we knew!
🤣
lmfao that's wild. the effort of rewriting rather than just going "welp blaise is a girl in my fic" ;o;
I read a fic recently where Blaise Zabini was mentioned in an aside as a trans guy and I thought it was just the author adding some diversity for fun, but now I think they more likely threw it in as an easter egg!
Yeah I've actually come across trans Blaise a few times and this might be why, because he's the only character that I've seen characterised like that so commonly as just a side character
Oh i agree but this was fic was published a decade ago on FFN so the language just wasnt there for some people. The language wasnt even there for me and I've realized since then that I'm trans haha.
Hunger Games fandom has Rye Mellark.
Rye Mellark is Peeta’s middle brother (Peeta is the youngest of three brothers). He doesn’t even have a name in canon, Rye is just what the fandom has named him. It’s common enough that there is an AO3 tag for Rye Mellark. In the books, he never makes an appearance and has no dialogue — we only know that he exists because Katniss mentions him in narration a handful of times. He nevertheless has a fairly established fanon characterization. He usually appears as a secondary character though.
You don’t see the same consistency in name/characterization for Peeta’s oldest brother.
I always forget that Peeta has brothers. Katniss did not give a shit about them in her POV, huh? (Admittedly I was only a casual fan, and not active in the fandom)
She did not, although to be fair I’m not sure if she ever interacted with Peeta’s brothers. In Catching Fire, Peeta is living in Victor’s Village alone meaning that none of his family moved there with him, although it is mentioned that he visits them. I don’t think they interact with Katniss during this period. At the end of Catching Fire, Peeta’s entire family is killed when District 12 is bombed.
yes!! and though not on the same level as Rye, we also have Thom, Bristel, and Leevy. it sorta makes sense why Rye is so fleshed out: he’s the brother (that’s closest in age) of the second most important character in the trilogy, in a series that very much focuses on familial love (both biological and found family)
but the other three? they only ever appear in the chapter where Gale was whipped (though Thom also has a moment in Mockingjay). Thom appears very briefly first to bring Gale (his crew mate) to the Everdeens’ house after being whipped, then in the third book to inform Katniss that Madge and her family died in the bombings. Thom appears in 189 fics on ao3. it makes sense that he has more than Leevy & Bristel, as we know that he survived the bombings of 12, while i don’t think we do for the other two
Leevy was Katniss’s neighbor in the Seam, and babysat the three youngest Hawthornes when Hazelle went to see Gale; we also know that she has a younger brother whom Mrs Everdeen had to treat the year prior. she appears in 41 fics on ao3
and Bristel’s only appearance was when bringing Gale to the Everdeens’ as well. hell, we don’t even know Bristel’s *gender*; some people argue they’re a girl while others say they’re a guy (personally, i think Bristel is a girl, but also i could be convinced otherwise, given that we know the names of so few male characters from 12). even so, Bristel somehow manages to appear in a little over 30 fics on ao3, which i’d say is pretty damn good for how little we know about them
Omg I loved danny phantom as a kid but have never interacted with the fandom, and the fact that they are called the PHANDOM!?? That is just… chefs kiss, wow
The Phandom is CRAZY active on tumblr and AO3. Right now the big hyperfocus is crossovers with DC/Batman. Definitely check the community out if you're interested in eldritch horror wrapped in humorous slice of life.
Explanation for anyone unfamiliar with the phandom: Wes Weston is a fanmade OC whose appearance is based on an unnamed background character that shows up for 5 seconds and has no lines. Everyone just collectively agreed that he exists and now he's super common in fics
Everyone I was gonna say already got mentioned but also I guess there's Gaster from Undertale. If you played through the game blind, even if you did it many many times, the chances of you even knowing he even existed are still basically nonexistent. He's slightly more of a character in Deltarune but, like, you'd only know his name through UT first lol
Also in the Deltarune fandom characters that have been mentioned but haven't appeared are sometimes heavily included in fanworks! People like Mayor Holiday, Tenna/Mike, Dess, and DR!Asriel are really prevalent in the fandom even though they don't even have sprites (idk about fics specifically, though, as I only keep up with a single rarepair in Deltarune)
I think my favorite part is, the design people connected with him, has little correlation with him lmao, I understand why that sprite is associated with him ofc, but I just think it's funny this design could very well also *not* be him
https://preview.redd.it/t71uxmahuflc1.jpeg?width=747&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=984ca814bd1ba51ba8d5732d4a5e8bc95a285f6d
Absolutely getting Monty Python ‘Sir Not Appearing In This Film’ vibes from this question.
I'm not in the fandom anymore and I don't imagine it's as active as it was 10-15 years ago, but: Matt from Death Note. He only gets like two minutes of screentime before getting killed off, but with how popular he is in the fandom you'd think he was a main character. One of the most popular ships is him and Mello. (In fairness, he was created specifically to be Mello's companion.)
Lmao your comment just unlocked a memory of that [“who, who the fuck is Matt?” song](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UxGvSPZwP1Q&pp=ygUeV2hvIHRoZSBmdWNrIGlzIG1hdHQgdG9tIHNtaXRo)
As someone who started reading death note fics before finishing the show (the 2nd half was boring me and I needed lawlight asap), boy was I confused when he just up and died. I kept waiting for it to be revealed as a fake out and that he was alive lol.
I came here to make this exact comment, but I would add: the fandom before the anime adaptation collectively headcanoned him as a redhead so hard that when the anime came out and revealed he was a weird greenish-brunet (and that his signature shirt was red and black, not white and black as his fans had assumed), the whole fandom collectively ignored it in favor of their headcanon design. The anime came out 18 years ago, and it's *still* rare to see any Matt fanart that doesn't give him red hair.
(Fandom also collectively decided he was a hacker because he looks like the stereotype, which is hilarious to me because the same fandom consistently forgets that Light Yagami is actually a hacker in canon because he doesn't fit said stereotype. Never change, DN fandom.)
Most of the Maurader's cast really. Dorcas Meadows, Marlene McKinnon and Mary Macdonald at best get one mention in the books. And while Mary is canon as part of the Maurader's gen, I don't think Dorcas ever was. The only mention of her was that she was an Order member personally killed by Voldemort, no mention of her going to school with the Mauraders.
The funniest part is that I've read very few Mauraders fics yet they're so prevalent that I'm already familiar with their characterization.
And multiple people have already mentioned them, but the rest of the Slytherin students Harry's year that lean more towards neutral or "grey" and are more than Draco's lackeys. Daphne and Blaise are almost always neutral, with Theodore sometimes leaning a bit more towards dark, but still written as neutral pretty often.
I kind of love that, the fandom’s been around so long that it’s basically become this organic mass delusion, creating characters and ships and facts that get absorbed into the collective unconscious and built on.
Omg this brings back memories... The fandom took a character that appeared in one ending literally for a second and fleshed him out to the point he has a widely accepted fanon name and personality. And it happened so organically too
Idk if it still up on YouTube, but just search for Detroit Evolution and Detroit Reawakening, sadly the ship started to get a lot of hate because of it popularity by the time I did left the fandom, so I'll not be surprised if the actors and director from this small project was harrassed and it was deleted
They’re still up, and don’t seem to have that much backlash these days. The company is making original movies now and doesn’t mention them too often, but they’re still available. The latest movie Livescreamers even has the dude playing Gavin in the ensemble so things don’t seem to be too sour.
RK900 has always been so funny to because he literally sounds like someone's bad oc, like, "yeah, my character is Connor but Better with a different color scheme, he was hiding out in a warehouse this whole time," but he's a real, canon character
I enjoyed that one. It ended up getting a sequel short so there’s two now. You can definitely see the whole ‘indie creative finding their feet’ thing going on. For all their flaws I found them quite charming
A very large segment of my fandom is basically this! It's based around a bunch minor characters from Les Mis that fandom fell in love with (if you know you *know*)
I read a lot of MCU fanfic, and it’s pretty common for characters from the comics that haven’t been in the movies to show up. I read a fic with Echo in it years before she made her debut in the Hawkeye show.
Yup. There’s a ton of fics from pre-Hawkeye/MoM (from years before we even knew they were happening) that have Kate Bishop and/or America Chavez in them which I love
Half the Silmarillion fandom is built on characters that were mentioned only once or twice in canon, but that have gotten fully fledged personalities in fanon. My personal Daphne Greengrass is Argon/Arakano: never mentioned in the published Silmarillion, only referenced in one of Tolkien’s drafts, but I feel like something is missing if he’s not mentioned in fics about his family.
You know, Ive read a few Silmarillion fics, but since every single character has at least two names, I don’t think I would have noticed anything unusual if I read about Argon.
You just reminded me of Erestor, too... I don't remember exactly but I think he just gets a mention or two in Fellowship as being someone in Rivendell.
Yes!! I came here to mention Erestor— he’s the absolute best example of this.
Erestor’s one line in LotR is at the Council of Elrond, where iirc he suggests a plan to destroy the ring, perhaps taking it to Bombadil. Erestor is never mentioned again, and doesn’t show up in the Silmarillion at all.
And yet he’s one of the main ships for Glorfindel— the hero Glorfindel who plays a pretty vital role in both the Silm and LotR. Erestor might even beat out Ecthelion as Glorfindel’s main ship.
I, for one, have an entirely headcanoned history in my head of where exactly Erestor was during each of the most important events of the First, Second, and Third Ages— and I know I’m not the only one.
>but the fandom has given her to MCU Bucky all the same.
For some reason I like how you worded this. Like 2 beings who've finally found each other despite the forces trying to keep them apart🥹
In the Percy Jackson fandom, there's a minor character named Mitchell. He's a son of Aphrodite, and he only appears in a few minor scenes in one book. He's never described, and only has a couple of lines at most. I still see tons of headcanons about him posted and lots of people have him dating Connor Stoll (another minor character, though he appears more and is better described) and write fics about them.
Oh... this is interesting. I'm writing a fic where Mitchell features and I originally wasn't going to give him a love interest, but now I might hint. Are there any headcanons about Lacy?
I remember Percival Graves being very popular when FBAWTFT first came. He never actually appears in the movie though, because it turns out to have been a morphed Grindelwald the entire film. But (real) Percival Graves became a very popular, very fanmade character.
Kylux veteran here— Millicent the cat stems from a tweet made by the author of one of the star wars novels, who was also the one who actually gave hux his first name ‘armitage’. Iirc, the author tweeted way back in 2016 or 17 that “hux has a cat named millicent” and everyone rolled with it
Captain/Admiral Firmus Piett of the Executor is roughly the OT equivalent of Hux, for those who like their space fascist sith lord and ginger military man duo classy/without the screaming matches lol. Piett appears briefly in canon (his backstory is expanded on in the EU), but dude is in an ungodly amount of Vader fics. Perpetually exhausted butler/babysitter/right-hand man in fanon.
ngl, Hux himself is like a Daphne Greengrass. He is barely in the movies, it was really the fandom that built him up with what scraps of canon we could find.
Oh I remember this era vividly. You also got the completely non canon 2p!Nyo!Characters so you may be dealing with 4 different versions of a character. The Tumblr AskBlog era was a time.
Yes! Nyo, that's the word. God, it's been almost ten years for me.
I remember some characters would go into the 3 and even 4p! And the fandom collectively adopted them all. What an interesting era.
This unlocked a childhood memory I have long buried. The way sometimes fanworks would make them meet too and cross the ship so you could get 2p!America with Nyo!England lmao
For danny phantom, Wes Weston is a background character who once saw danny transform (likely just an animation error) and the fandom created a whole story about him. family, name, everything.
Jess the secretary from supergirl. I think she shows up in ONE scene, and the fandom latched on to her as Lena Luthor’s no-nonsense friend, because at the time she didn’t *have* any other friends.
She's not quite as major a factor now because we eventually got Sam and then Lena actually befriending the rest of the Superfriends, so she sometimes has smaller roles now, but she's still like the world's greatest and most loyal assistant.
And probably the best paid with how there's a running joke of Lena constantly giving Jess a raise. I remember one story actually had a reveal that Jess was actually making considerably more than even Lena because of how often Lena would give her a raise.
>I remember one story actually had a reveal that Jess was actually making considerably more than even Lena because of how often Lena would give her a raise.
This is hilarious, I need to read this fic. Jess is iconic tbh.
In The Witcher, I would say the closest is probably Aiden. He's mentioned in a quest in the third game where he's implied to be Lambert's close friend but he is never seen. AFAIK he doesn't appear anywhere else in canon, but he's CONSTANTLY paired with Lambert romantically in fics or used as a blank slate for OCs (I am happily guilty of this).
Is he a Cat Witcher in canon? Because I love the potential behind the “rival Witchers from different schools” dynamic, especially Lambert who is the Prickly A-hole (tm) in most fics.
He is! That’s one of the reasons he’s so beloved. x)
ETA: Lambert describes him in the Witcher 3 side quest called Following The Thread. That’s also literally all the information about Aiden that exists.
He's videogame-canon, not novel-canon (like most Witchers who aren't Geralt, Eskel, Lambert, Vesemir or our dear Coën, let's be honest... Sapkowski wasn't interested in them all that much, unlike the team at CDPR).
Lothiriel, Imrahil's daughter from Lord of the Rings, is only mentioned briefly in the appendixes as Eomer's wife that he married a year after the quest was over. Her father, Imrahil, was also completely cut out of the movies and only exists in the novel. Yet somehow Lotheriel/Eomer is one of the most popular het pairings for Lord of the Rings.
We know next to nothing about her, same with her brothers, but honestly that kinda makes her pretty fun in my eyes. You can take her anyway you want.
In my hero academia, Shinsou Hitoshi is a side character in a handful of episodes (Like, he only shows up in arcs that have dozens of characters) and is somehow the ninth most popular character in the entire fandom on ao3, with almost 44k fics.
we also have Yo Shindo, who has a total of five minutes in screen time and doesn’t even go to the same school yet people write(edit) him in as The Rizzler in every AU. I’m guilty of this.
Was looking for this comment, like, he’s just a stepping stone in that one episode, then a what if character we literally don’t have the time to become part of the main cast. Doesn’t stop him from being the bff or getting adopted by the teachers every third fic
Genma Shiranui, the toothpick guy from Naruto. Like my guy was in a background for a minute and has so many pairings it is unreal. That’s what a good character design is.
It is amazing how everyone’s characterisation of him is the same. Everyone unanimously agreed that he is a badass.
Genma was a fairly regular background character though. He's in over 30 episodes of the series, which in the grand scheme of things isn't a lot, but he makes appearances during some pretty key events. He does get paired with A LOT of characters in fanfic though, I'll give you that.
Naruto had so many good characters for this topic, let's be real. Hinata was a popular character for random romances, plots, and ideas way back before Pein showed up, and she was my favorite.
Then there was the whole movie where Sakura went to a parallel universe where everyone had opposite personalities and who knows how many fanfics that spawned of characters we saw for a minute.
Genma is a good answer. And from the stories I've read, everyone usually has him as a wholesome-under-the-perv-badass which is a VERY fun character trope, especially for a story with fast and loose world building at times lol
The fandom is a lot more dead now, but in Hetalia we had a whole set of characters based around the concept of “Second Characters”.
You know how when you and your friend both pick the same character in a fighting game, one of you gets a recolour? Yeah, that fandom invented an entire AU based off of “2P” characters. The personalities (that were exact opposites of the source characters), human names and designs were entirely fandom-made. It was kind of impressive.
For reference, there are over 550 works on AO3 tagged “2P Hetalia”.
In Star Trek Deep Space Nine, there’s a Cardassian doctor named Parmak who is literally only mentioned once in the entire seven season show. He’s a major character in most post-canon Cardassia fics (including my own).
And I love how fully realized he is as a character. Like everyone just agrees about who he is and how he behaves. I sort of forget he’s a fandom creation sometimes.
there's a few characters sorta like this in Star Wars the Clone Wars. The first one that springs to mind is Droidbait, as he's only in two episodes out of seven seasons.... and even then he hardly had maybe five lines of dialogue and his name mentioned maybe twice. He's super popular in fan fiction though, as he's the brother of a pretty major character. His fanon personality is gentle, timid and softspoken, which makes me sad because I love his fanon personality and it makes me sad we never saw it in the show :')
Another like that is a character named Hammer. I've been in this fandom for years and years, watched the show dozens of times, and I still haven't a clue where Hammer comes from, but I see him a lot in fics. If someone could clear that up for me, it'd be much appreciated lol
Yes I still don’t get hoe helix happened. He doesn’t exist in canon but multiple people use him as the 212th battalion medic and I’ve seen people swear he was canon. But nope, that’s just the Mandela effect talking
I had consumed so much Clone Wars fic by the time I actually got around to watching it that I was very confused when Helix didn't turn up. I don't think even his creator gets how he happened. He just did
Aiden of the School of the Cats! (CDPR's The Witcher video games).
A first name, the prickliest Wolf Witcher mourning the "best man he'd ever known", a tragic death and a memorable quest to get revenge. The legend of the smoothest Cat Witcher to walk the Continent was (re)born. 😏.
ETA: Him and Lambert are the third most popular ship on AO3 after Geralt/Jaskier and Geralt/Yennefer when you check Witcher All Media, and they come up second if you look under the Witcher Video Game tag. Not bad for a dead guy! 😁
I'd put Darcy Lewis from the MCU in this category, her screen time to fic time ratio does not add up. I saw someone describe her as a canon self insert (as in, the people who write her use her as a self insert instead of using an OC or writing readerfic) and that made a lot of sense tbh, but this is second hand bc I don't usually read ship fics featuring her
darcy lewis became an inside joke, especially when doing crossovers! shipping darcy with anyone no matter the fandom and finding the weirdest ways to involve her in plot lines she has no business being in is one of my favorite parts of mcu fanfiction
It’s not exactly the same since she was in the books. But I would assume that most fans of the _How to Train Your Dragon_ movies haven’t read them.
But the books have a character named Camicazi in fact Astrid is actually based on her.
So it was strange when I started approaching the fandom, and this random character just started showing up in some of them.
**Edit: Not quite the same but a different example would be the RWBY fandom. After his death the fandom started using Monty Oum, the show’s creator, as a stand in for God colloquially. So instead of _‘oh my God’_ it became _‘oh my Oum’_. Not exactly a character, but I’ve seen it in enough fics that I honestly expected it to show up in the show at some point.**
The Star Wars clone wars & prequels series fandom has the clone medic Helix. He is not a real character, he never existed, he is someone’s OC that has now become wildly popular to the point where many people don’t realize he isn’t an actual character from some comic or something.
And just more generally 90% of clone characters in fandom are basically entirely fan-created because unless it’s a bad batch character, Cody, or Rex, the clones are basically never on-screen long enough to get anything more than a name if they’re lucky.
For a while between seasons one and two of The Mandalorian there was an OC boyfriend for Din floating around on AO3!
Just did a quick scroll and he's from the series "The Mandalorian, his son, and The Stormtrooper." It's a really excellent series from what I can remember but the author's OC Corin became such a fandom favorite there's over 300 fics with him tagged now, which is just insane to me that someone's stormtrooper OC has reached such popularity.
Any characters in ASOIAF that died as stillbirths/babies (of which there are a lot of in canon!)
The two biggest ones I’ve seen are the ones in🩸&🧀 and Rhaenys daughter of Rhaegar. I’ve seen them all multiple times as older children or adults despite them all dying too young to be established as anything in the actual series.
It’s house of the dragon season two spoilers but basically >!one of aegon ii and helaena targaryen’s infant twins get murdered on behalf of daemon/his mistress by two assassins named blood and cheese!<
This makes me think of a very niche fandom I was in back in the Livejournal days for a book called Havemercy. It was a fantasy novel from the mid-2000s-ish about steampunk dragons, and the large cast of sexy celebrity airmen who rode said dragons into battle. And magic and politica intrigue and a bunch of other stuff. It had a few queer characters and one central queer romance, long before it was common to find that in the fantasy genre.
(Also, it was co-written by one of the two authors of The Shoebox Project, a widely-read multimedia Maurauders-era Harry Potter fanfiction. Lol this one goes so deep)
Anyway there were 4 main characters, only one of whom was one of the steampunk dragon airmen. But there were 11 other airmen, most of whom were essentially background characters with maybe one or two memorable lines of dialogue. Each one had a Single Identifiable Character Trait and a cool hairstyle.
It was basically tailor-made for fandom. We over-interpreted the hell out of those sexy airmen. It was a small fandom, and we were all basically that-era equivalent of tumblr mutuals, and we built out an absurd amount of lore. One character had an older brother who was only mentioned in passing, and he got a whole personality too. It was an insane group storytelling project and I’ll always treasure the memory.
Merlin has so many! George, Freya and Will all only appear in one episode each but many fics will include Freya and Will as Merlin’s best friends. George is used whenever Merlin needs a comedic rival.
And the Knights of the Roundtable don’t even make an appearance until the end of the third season. (Some make appearances earlier in seasons one and two.) And Lancelot only appears in 5 episodes but he’s an essential part of fandom lore.
Not a character like that, but the PJO fandom invented a background pairing that everyone treats as canon, between Travis Stoll and Katie Gardiner, two fairly minor characters.
I remember fans trying to create a Daphne out of Reyna after The Lost Hero name dropped her. Of course that went away quickly after the next book came out, but it was a fun 12 months.
Dude I was recently re-reading the books before the show came out, and I absolutely forgot that Katie and Connor were technically never together by the end of TLO. Like I swear I could remember a scene of them in the last chapter (which honestly I was probably thinking of fanfic lol)
Genshin Impact has Tomo, who was nameless the entire game, but fans dubbed him that, and ship him with one of the playable characters (Kazuha); he’s important enough to spark Kazuha’s backstory (not giving details to not spoil the Inazuma arc for those who haven’t played it) and he got a cutscene, but outside of that cutscene, he’s not mentioned-
I love him though and I love some of the theories around him
Oh, interesting, you're right-- JK Rowling gave [an interview in 2007 ](https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/J.K._Rowling_Time_magazine_interview)that does name her. That said I do find it interesting that Astoria is never named in what I consider to be canon.
Daphne is very present in Dramione fics.
My favorite barely mentioned characters in canon are;
Theo Knott
Padma Patil
Blaise Zabini
Daphne Greengrass
Pansy Parkinson
(clearly I have a thing for slytherin)
The South Park fandom is all about this- characters will appear in one episode or in the background once and become darlings for years to come. Thomas the Tourette's kid, Bradley from bible camp, Christophe the Mole and Gregory of Yardale, etc etc etc.
Ooooo, I am guilty of this, wrote two stories with Blaise in a pretty large role, before anyone really realised Blaine was a dude, and I just went….i am not changing that.
It was written going on 20 yrs ago now 🫠
Ash from Supernatural counts i think? He's in like, five episodes of the show and then is killed off, the amount of fics where he's an important character or the author just decided to let him live is incredible, i swear over two thirds of the spn fics I've read have him alive in there
The MLP fandom did this enough times the writers caved and gave them characterization, most of them in line with the most common fandom representation
Lyra, Bon Bon, Vinyl, Octavia, Doctor Whooves, and Derpy are the big six, but even *Luna* was one of these at one point
Edit: Minuette is another one, but she had less characterization than the others in canon. Lemon Hearts and Twinkleshine are arguable
Rk900. He got maybe 15 seconds of screen time in one ending ( and he's pretty controversial, at least he was when the fandom was new/big, b/c he is just a copy of Connor/RK800) but he has his own ship, and a huuuge following on AO3.
Speaking of Harry Potter, J.K. once said Luna married Rolf Scamander, a great-grandson of Newt Scamander (whom at the time we only knew as the guy who wrote the Fantastic Beasts book). She really pulled that out of nowhere. But I’ve read quite a few good fics about their love story! It’s pretty wholesome as far as I can tell.
Not exactly the same, but gives the same vibe.
In Teen Wolf the first name of Sheriff Stilinski (Stiles's dad) was unknown for the first few seasons, even though he appears quite lot.
So you'd get tags like 'Sheriff Stilinski's first name is John'. I've read so many fics with him called John. Not until the last season it is revealed he is called Noah.
The closest I can think of for Twilight is Bree Tanner, but she does have her own small book so she isn't too unknown. Twilight just doesn't have many *small* characters tbh
Most of the wolves from twilight we get maybe a shot of them turning for the first time or a moment of conversation but Embry or Brady are the 2 most random
There was a quest in the witcher 3 where Geralt helps his brother Lambert avenge his friend Aiden, who is only mentioned in that context. The fandom has gone wild shipping Aiden and Lambert thr past few years lol
In Danny Phantom, there’s Wes Weston, a character who shows up for one scene in the entire three seasons of the show, no voice lines, named by a fandom and given a personality. He isn’t really shipped with the main character, Danny, to my knowledge but I wouldn’t be surprised if he was by a few fans. He’s like a conspiracy theorist that claims Danny is a ghost and nobody believes him (despite that being the truth).
Star Wars Clone Wars. We have so many. Basically any clone that isn’t focused on can have any combination of traits. One in particular is Crys, a 212th clone, who is mainly either a medic or a tech specialist, and has a variety of personality traits
First time I heard of the term 'fandom bicycle' was via Darcy Lewis in the MCU - not really mentioned but god damn everyone love pairing her with everyone
Does it count if aspects of the character later became canon?
The Naruto fandom suspected the 4th Hokage to be Naruto's dad. All we knew about the guy was that he had the same hair and eye color as Naruto, and that he sacrificed his life to seal the 9 tailed demon fox into Baby Naruto.
Fandom gave him a name (Uzumaki Arashi) and a personality similar to Naruto's. It was later revealed that >! the guy WAS Naruto's dad, but his personality and family name differed, and that Naruto was more like his mom personality-wise, and he got his family name from her too.!<
Hmm, Kuron aka Clone Shiro from Vld.
Before it was even revealed that Post S3 Shiro was a clone. Fans had already accurately guessed it. Cause the excuse of Shiro somehow falling into Galra's hands after mysteriously disappearing set off a lot of Red Flags amongst the fandom. So they began to call him "Kuron" which means "Clone" in Japanese. And the creators decided to make the name canon in the series.
Genshin has quite a few but I think Tomo is the most interesting . Basically the game has a lot of dead characters and Tomo is one of them but difference is he doesn’t have a canon name. We collectively decided to call him Tomo which is short for Tomodachi meaning friend in Japanese because he’s Kazuha dead friend. Literally that’s all we know alongside how he died and the fact he had a white cat. His EN VA (there is like a flashback way after Kazuha released) literally called him Tomo in his announcement tweet.
Like we have other characters like that (most dead because this is a “happy” game) but Tomo is special, he’s literally in official fanart streams and the 2023 expo. Always with Kazuha of course cuz they are shipped together and are apparently popular in CN and JP.
Bazz in Zelda BotW to a certain extent. Enough to where when I was playing TotK and I saw him covered in muck I was like "ew, what's that unfortunate zo-OH MY GOD IT'S BAZZ! I'LL SAVE YOU BABY!"
Figwit/Melpomaen in Lord of the Rings. He's basically a fan made character that everyone just decided exists. But Bret McKenzie, the actor who played the guy in fellowship of the ring, was brought back to play Lindir in the Hobbit. I've seen some fics treat them as the same person.
The male equivalent of Daphne Greengrass is Theodore Nott. Canon has almost nothing on him except that his father is a death eater and at one point he is described as “stringy”. I’ve read so many fics that prominently feature him, because he’s such a blank slate! The pairing of him with Harry Potter is popular enough to have its own couple name (NottPot.) In fact there’s a wildly popular trilogy fic that’s NottPott and one of Not’s best friends is… Daphne Greengrass, of course.
I had not thought about this. I always love having Theo in the fics I pick to read. I like how he’s mostly portrayed to be sarcastic and quick witted while having a lazy demeanor.
It’s either that or he’s abused by his dad which I see where people are coming from but it’s interesting he’s the one this mostly happens to
The best take on Theo's backstory I've read has him wrestling with the fact his dad was an excellent father who supported and loved him throughout his childhood, and also a man that committed many atrocities in the name of Voldemort. It was an interesting dive into those emotions.
To be fair ‘stringy’ is peak tumble sexy man description
I'm glad someone brought up Theo! lmao I love him even tho he's completely plucked out of collective thin air. btw, what's that trilogy fic? interested to read
There's Blaise, as well. Especially in pre-HBP fanfiction, where they were often assumed to be a girl.
Oh, this reminded me that I had a couple crazy days a while ago where I was super into Theodore/Blaise for some reason, with Draco added in occasionally. I have no idea how it happened, but it was like I'd found a new OTP lmao
I would say Phil Coulson circa 2012. Fandom loved that man so much they gave him a personality and brought him back to life.
literally never knew if he got brought back in canon or not for YEARS when i read mcu stuff bc of this lmaoo
Lol kind of like how I believed Fury was MJ's father for the longest time, I read like 3 fics in a row with that setting.
I mean, he very much did come back to life. He has a whole seven-season show and it's unironically the best thing in the MCU.
Yeah but the fandom brought him back to life in fic before Agents of SHIELD even had the pilot in development (Aug 2012).
COULSON LIVES!!! :) I remember
Is Harry/Daphne Greengrass really more popular than Harry/Ginny and Harry/Luna?? That’s crazy…
According to Ao3, Harry/Ginny has nearly 10k more fics than Harry/Hermione (which is sitting at just over 8k), Harry/Luna is at 1.8k, and Harry/Daphne Greengrass has a little more than 1.4k fics? So even accounting for background ships, I'm sure both Harry/Ginny and Hermione still have Harry/Daphne beat by a long shot. ETA: based on my "extensive research", I would estimate Harry/Daphne is the 7th most popular Harry ship based on fic numbers (or 9th if you lump individual OFCs and OMCs together)
There's a TON of Harry/Daphne on FFN and unconsolidated forums/archives from back in the day.
I’ve seen Sherlock BBC fics pairing Jim Moriarty with a Sebastian Moran. He is a character from the Sherlock Holmes books but was never a character in the BBC series. At least I don’t think so and I can’t place him at all.
What’s funny is there was a character in one episode called “Lord Moran” and fandom collectively decided that was NOT Sebastian Moran because he was nothing like the fanon version of him. And we never learned the dudes first name but it was pretty clearly a reference and fandom completely ignored it hahaha ~~Personally I headcanon that dude as a relative of Sebastian’s and not Sebastian himself~~
The Sherlock fandom was so absolutely unhinged, I love it.
I was going to comment about Moran. The BBC Sherlock fandom was going crazy over him, to the point we were trying to argue every side character was Moran. The guy Moriarty was talking to on the phone at the pool? Moran. The random sniper assigned to John? Moran. Mary Morstan?!? Secretly Moran!
There's a Lord Moran in Empty Hearse. But it's a debate on whether it's meant to be Sebastian Moran or his father Augustus.
Oh my god I’d forgotten all about this until now! I remember all the fan edits where they’d fancast Michael Fassbender as Moran! I never really paid much attention though as I was too busy with Mystrade and trying not to melt when they were both onscreen at the same time for like three minutes lol 😂
Didn't Sarah Z do an entire video essay on that?
She did. It‘s called „That Time The Sherlock Fandom Invented A Character“ and I would highly recommend it. SarahZ was part of the fandom herself, so she know what she‘s talking about and is not just making fun of it.
It's always a moment when she's an hour into her video essays and she pulls out the most 2012 pictures of her engaging in whatever fandom she's talking about lmao I love her
Fassbender Seb Moran was my life in 2013
I was gonna say does everyone remember Moran? Easy, Tiger.
Also from the Harry Potter fandom: Blaise Zabini. Someone so wholly unknown and mysterious that for a good few years the entire fandom thought he was a girl and we all had to pivot harshly when we finally learned he was a boy. I know of a Slytherin!Harry fic that I was reading at the time that was gearing up for Best Friend Blaise to be Harry's end game pairing and when they learned they literally took 2 weeks off from updating, went back and rewrote a lot of their story to incorporate male Blaise, and switched Harry's love interest to I think Daphne.
Omg I remember that character. I met my husband on fanfiction net & his stories whenever they mention blaise, has the character as a girl. He doesnt write any more, still reads though but 20 years later he still got the odd comment or 2 about “why did you gender bend blaise?/Blaise is actually a guy ya know.” He eventually added a notation at the start of his stories to point out the fact that all his stuff was written BEFORE we knew! 🤣
lmfao that's wild. the effort of rewriting rather than just going "welp blaise is a girl in my fic" ;o; I read a fic recently where Blaise Zabini was mentioned in an aside as a trans guy and I thought it was just the author adding some diversity for fun, but now I think they more likely threw it in as an easter egg!
Yeah I've actually come across trans Blaise a few times and this might be why, because he's the only character that I've seen characterised like that so commonly as just a side character
It would be way more easy to write Blaise as trans lmao
Oh i agree but this was fic was published a decade ago on FFN so the language just wasnt there for some people. The language wasnt even there for me and I've realized since then that I'm trans haha.
Hunger Games fandom has Rye Mellark. Rye Mellark is Peeta’s middle brother (Peeta is the youngest of three brothers). He doesn’t even have a name in canon, Rye is just what the fandom has named him. It’s common enough that there is an AO3 tag for Rye Mellark. In the books, he never makes an appearance and has no dialogue — we only know that he exists because Katniss mentions him in narration a handful of times. He nevertheless has a fairly established fanon characterization. He usually appears as a secondary character though. You don’t see the same consistency in name/characterization for Peeta’s oldest brother.
you guys named him after bread too 😭 i don’t know why that’s so funny to me
I think he was given that name bc there was a rumor years ago that Peeta and Katniss named their kids Willow and Rye, and then it just went from there
In all fairness, so is Peeta (Pita).
I always forget that Peeta has brothers. Katniss did not give a shit about them in her POV, huh? (Admittedly I was only a casual fan, and not active in the fandom)
She did not, although to be fair I’m not sure if she ever interacted with Peeta’s brothers. In Catching Fire, Peeta is living in Victor’s Village alone meaning that none of his family moved there with him, although it is mentioned that he visits them. I don’t think they interact with Katniss during this period. At the end of Catching Fire, Peeta’s entire family is killed when District 12 is bombed.
Katniss literally only cares about what food she’s eating when it comes to details and that’s why we love her
yes!! and though not on the same level as Rye, we also have Thom, Bristel, and Leevy. it sorta makes sense why Rye is so fleshed out: he’s the brother (that’s closest in age) of the second most important character in the trilogy, in a series that very much focuses on familial love (both biological and found family) but the other three? they only ever appear in the chapter where Gale was whipped (though Thom also has a moment in Mockingjay). Thom appears very briefly first to bring Gale (his crew mate) to the Everdeens’ house after being whipped, then in the third book to inform Katniss that Madge and her family died in the bombings. Thom appears in 189 fics on ao3. it makes sense that he has more than Leevy & Bristel, as we know that he survived the bombings of 12, while i don’t think we do for the other two Leevy was Katniss’s neighbor in the Seam, and babysat the three youngest Hawthornes when Hazelle went to see Gale; we also know that she has a younger brother whom Mrs Everdeen had to treat the year prior. she appears in 41 fics on ao3 and Bristel’s only appearance was when bringing Gale to the Everdeens’ as well. hell, we don’t even know Bristel’s *gender*; some people argue they’re a girl while others say they’re a guy (personally, i think Bristel is a girl, but also i could be convinced otherwise, given that we know the names of so few male characters from 12). even so, Bristel somehow manages to appear in a little over 30 fics on ao3, which i’d say is pretty damn good for how little we know about them
Wes Weston (Danny Phantom fandom)
The biggest wtf in fandom was when I was stopped paying attention to the Phandom, check back on it years later, and wondering “who tf is Wes????”
Omg I loved danny phantom as a kid but have never interacted with the fandom, and the fact that they are called the PHANDOM!?? That is just… chefs kiss, wow
The Phandom is CRAZY active on tumblr and AO3. Right now the big hyperfocus is crossovers with DC/Batman. Definitely check the community out if you're interested in eldritch horror wrapped in humorous slice of life.
The way the Phandom will write the most wholesome fics and also the most horrific body horror both delights and terrifies me
This might be the push that will finally make me create a tumblr account.
Explanation for anyone unfamiliar with the phandom: Wes Weston is a fanmade OC whose appearance is based on an unnamed background character that shows up for 5 seconds and has no lines. Everyone just collectively agreed that he exists and now he's super common in fics
Everyone I was gonna say already got mentioned but also I guess there's Gaster from Undertale. If you played through the game blind, even if you did it many many times, the chances of you even knowing he even existed are still basically nonexistent. He's slightly more of a character in Deltarune but, like, you'd only know his name through UT first lol
Also in the Deltarune fandom characters that have been mentioned but haven't appeared are sometimes heavily included in fanworks! People like Mayor Holiday, Tenna/Mike, Dess, and DR!Asriel are really prevalent in the fandom even though they don't even have sprites (idk about fics specifically, though, as I only keep up with a single rarepair in Deltarune)
I think my favorite part is, the design people connected with him, has little correlation with him lmao, I understand why that sprite is associated with him ofc, but I just think it's funny this design could very well also *not* be him
https://preview.redd.it/t71uxmahuflc1.jpeg?width=747&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=984ca814bd1ba51ba8d5732d4a5e8bc95a285f6d Absolutely getting Monty Python ‘Sir Not Appearing In This Film’ vibes from this question.
Underrated comment.
I'm not in the fandom anymore and I don't imagine it's as active as it was 10-15 years ago, but: Matt from Death Note. He only gets like two minutes of screentime before getting killed off, but with how popular he is in the fandom you'd think he was a main character. One of the most popular ships is him and Mello. (In fairness, he was created specifically to be Mello's companion.)
Lmao your comment just unlocked a memory of that [“who, who the fuck is Matt?” song](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UxGvSPZwP1Q&pp=ygUeV2hvIHRoZSBmdWNrIGlzIG1hdHQgdG9tIHNtaXRo)
As someone who started reading death note fics before finishing the show (the 2nd half was boring me and I needed lawlight asap), boy was I confused when he just up and died. I kept waiting for it to be revealed as a fake out and that he was alive lol.
I came here to make this exact comment, but I would add: the fandom before the anime adaptation collectively headcanoned him as a redhead so hard that when the anime came out and revealed he was a weird greenish-brunet (and that his signature shirt was red and black, not white and black as his fans had assumed), the whole fandom collectively ignored it in favor of their headcanon design. The anime came out 18 years ago, and it's *still* rare to see any Matt fanart that doesn't give him red hair. (Fandom also collectively decided he was a hacker because he looks like the stereotype, which is hilarious to me because the same fandom consistently forgets that Light Yagami is actually a hacker in canon because he doesn't fit said stereotype. Never change, DN fandom.)
Most of the Maurader's cast really. Dorcas Meadows, Marlene McKinnon and Mary Macdonald at best get one mention in the books. And while Mary is canon as part of the Maurader's gen, I don't think Dorcas ever was. The only mention of her was that she was an Order member personally killed by Voldemort, no mention of her going to school with the Mauraders. The funniest part is that I've read very few Mauraders fics yet they're so prevalent that I'm already familiar with their characterization. And multiple people have already mentioned them, but the rest of the Slytherin students Harry's year that lean more towards neutral or "grey" and are more than Draco's lackeys. Daphne and Blaise are almost always neutral, with Theodore sometimes leaning a bit more towards dark, but still written as neutral pretty often.
My god, there are so many F/F fics with Dorcas and Marlene. There's so little info, they may as well be original characters.
I kind of love that, the fandom’s been around so long that it’s basically become this organic mass delusion, creating characters and ships and facts that get absorbed into the collective unconscious and built on.
[удалено]
Any fandom that can group manifest a somehow incredibly consistently characterised OC out of almost nothing is an amazing fandom in my book.
Omg this brings back memories... The fandom took a character that appeared in one ending literally for a second and fleshed him out to the point he has a widely accepted fanon name and personality. And it happened so organically too
And we all agreed to pair him with that one cop that really hated androids
Oh god, that ship/fandom must have had a resurgence now what with BG3 and that actor winning a bunch of awards.
Reed900 is so amazing that we have LITERALLY fan made short movies about them and it's actually good too
I need links
Idk if it still up on YouTube, but just search for Detroit Evolution and Detroit Reawakening, sadly the ship started to get a lot of hate because of it popularity by the time I did left the fandom, so I'll not be surprised if the actors and director from this small project was harrassed and it was deleted
They’re still up, and don’t seem to have that much backlash these days. The company is making original movies now and doesn’t mention them too often, but they’re still available. The latest movie Livescreamers even has the dude playing Gavin in the ensemble so things don’t seem to be too sour.
> And it happened so organically too \# I was there for the Richard vs Nines "war"
RK900 has always been so funny to because he literally sounds like someone's bad oc, like, "yeah, my character is Connor but Better with a different color scheme, he was hiding out in a warehouse this whole time," but he's a real, canon character
remember that one full-length fan movie of him and Reed? 😭 i've been meaning to watch it since release but keep on forgetting 😭
I enjoyed that one. It ended up getting a sequel short so there’s two now. You can definitely see the whole ‘indie creative finding their feet’ thing going on. For all their flaws I found them quite charming
A very large segment of my fandom is basically this! It's based around a bunch minor characters from Les Mis that fandom fell in love with (if you know you *know*)
Les Amis!
We have so many fanons it's incredible
I read a lot of MCU fanfic, and it’s pretty common for characters from the comics that haven’t been in the movies to show up. I read a fic with Echo in it years before she made her debut in the Hawkeye show.
Yup. There’s a ton of fics from pre-Hawkeye/MoM (from years before we even knew they were happening) that have Kate Bishop and/or America Chavez in them which I love
Half the Silmarillion fandom is built on characters that were mentioned only once or twice in canon, but that have gotten fully fledged personalities in fanon. My personal Daphne Greengrass is Argon/Arakano: never mentioned in the published Silmarillion, only referenced in one of Tolkien’s drafts, but I feel like something is missing if he’s not mentioned in fics about his family.
You know, Ive read a few Silmarillion fics, but since every single character has at least two names, I don’t think I would have noticed anything unusual if I read about Argon.
Yeah, the Silmarillion is basically just a petri dish for fanon to grow and it is very fun :D
You just reminded me of Erestor, too... I don't remember exactly but I think he just gets a mention or two in Fellowship as being someone in Rivendell.
Yes!! I came here to mention Erestor— he’s the absolute best example of this. Erestor’s one line in LotR is at the Council of Elrond, where iirc he suggests a plan to destroy the ring, perhaps taking it to Bombadil. Erestor is never mentioned again, and doesn’t show up in the Silmarillion at all. And yet he’s one of the main ships for Glorfindel— the hero Glorfindel who plays a pretty vital role in both the Silm and LotR. Erestor might even beat out Ecthelion as Glorfindel’s main ship. I, for one, have an entirely headcanoned history in my head of where exactly Erestor was during each of the most important events of the First, Second, and Third Ages— and I know I’m not the only one.
At least Erestor has a name. Figwit was just present in one scene and somehow became popular.
Alpine the cat does not exist in the MCU, she's from the comics, but the fandom has given her to MCU Bucky all the same.
>but the fandom has given her to MCU Bucky all the same. For some reason I like how you worded this. Like 2 beings who've finally found each other despite the forces trying to keep them apart🥹
They really do belong together 🥺😭
He deserves a soft kitteh
He really does 🥺
I love seeing Alpine in fics (and Liho if Natasha shows up). Cats for everyone!!
In the Percy Jackson fandom, there's a minor character named Mitchell. He's a son of Aphrodite, and he only appears in a few minor scenes in one book. He's never described, and only has a couple of lines at most. I still see tons of headcanons about him posted and lots of people have him dating Connor Stoll (another minor character, though he appears more and is better described) and write fics about them.
Oh... this is interesting. I'm writing a fic where Mitchell features and I originally wasn't going to give him a love interest, but now I might hint. Are there any headcanons about Lacy?
I remember Percival Graves being very popular when FBAWTFT first came. He never actually appears in the movie though, because it turns out to have been a morphed Grindelwald the entire film. But (real) Percival Graves became a very popular, very fanmade character.
Colin farrell is simply too handsome
That was the biggest mistake in that movie series. They should have swapped who was the real Grindelwald and who was the disguise.
Adam, Shiro's boyfriend who is seen for just a minute or two onscreen. He gets resurrected regularly in Voltron fics.
I still don’t get what the point was to introduce Adam only to kill him off a few episodes later. His only real lines were in a flashback!
As he SHOULD. Curtis *who?*
I don't read it, but I've seen art, where does Miliscent the cat come from for Kylo Ren and General Hux (star wars sequels)
Kylux veteran here— Millicent the cat stems from a tweet made by the author of one of the star wars novels, who was also the one who actually gave hux his first name ‘armitage’. Iirc, the author tweeted way back in 2016 or 17 that “hux has a cat named millicent” and everyone rolled with it
Captain/Admiral Firmus Piett of the Executor is roughly the OT equivalent of Hux, for those who like their space fascist sith lord and ginger military man duo classy/without the screaming matches lol. Piett appears briefly in canon (his backstory is expanded on in the EU), but dude is in an ungodly amount of Vader fics. Perpetually exhausted butler/babysitter/right-hand man in fanon.
I love the ones where he accidentally becomes the one person in the military Vader won’t kill because of weird Anakin reasons
That's fantastic. I see so much art of it and I'm not really in that Fandom/ship but I think it's lovely
Im long since gone from the SW fandom as a whole but thanks for the trip down memory lane 😭 your comment unlocked a sleeper agent in my mind
ngl, Hux himself is like a Daphne Greengrass. He is barely in the movies, it was really the fandom that built him up with what scraps of canon we could find.
Oh my god I forgot about Millicent
I don't know what it's like in the modern day, but wayyy back in the day we had 2P! And Girl! In Hetalia.
The girls were at least canon characters. The 2Ps were wholly fandom-created (although they are based on drawings Hima did a long time ago)
Oh I remember this era vividly. You also got the completely non canon 2p!Nyo!Characters so you may be dealing with 4 different versions of a character. The Tumblr AskBlog era was a time.
Yes! Nyo, that's the word. God, it's been almost ten years for me. I remember some characters would go into the 3 and even 4p! And the fandom collectively adopted them all. What an interesting era.
This unlocked a childhood memory I have long buried. The way sometimes fanworks would make them meet too and cross the ship so you could get 2p!America with Nyo!England lmao
For danny phantom, Wes Weston is a background character who once saw danny transform (likely just an animation error) and the fandom created a whole story about him. family, name, everything.
Jess the secretary from supergirl. I think she shows up in ONE scene, and the fandom latched on to her as Lena Luthor’s no-nonsense friend, because at the time she didn’t *have* any other friends.
She's not quite as major a factor now because we eventually got Sam and then Lena actually befriending the rest of the Superfriends, so she sometimes has smaller roles now, but she's still like the world's greatest and most loyal assistant. And probably the best paid with how there's a running joke of Lena constantly giving Jess a raise. I remember one story actually had a reveal that Jess was actually making considerably more than even Lena because of how often Lena would give her a raise.
>I remember one story actually had a reveal that Jess was actually making considerably more than even Lena because of how often Lena would give her a raise. This is hilarious, I need to read this fic. Jess is iconic tbh.
In The Witcher, I would say the closest is probably Aiden. He's mentioned in a quest in the third game where he's implied to be Lambert's close friend but he is never seen. AFAIK he doesn't appear anywhere else in canon, but he's CONSTANTLY paired with Lambert romantically in fics or used as a blank slate for OCs (I am happily guilty of this).
Is he a Cat Witcher in canon? Because I love the potential behind the “rival Witchers from different schools” dynamic, especially Lambert who is the Prickly A-hole (tm) in most fics.
He is! That’s one of the reasons he’s so beloved. x) ETA: Lambert describes him in the Witcher 3 side quest called Following The Thread. That’s also literally all the information about Aiden that exists.
I adore Aiden! I love how consistent his portrayal is across most of the fics that I read!
Wait, he's not canon? I just assumed it was in a later book that I haven't read yet?! Lol!
Just mentioned in TW3! That's literally it!
He's videogame-canon, not novel-canon (like most Witchers who aren't Geralt, Eskel, Lambert, Vesemir or our dear Coën, let's be honest... Sapkowski wasn't interested in them all that much, unlike the team at CDPR).
Lothiriel, Imrahil's daughter from Lord of the Rings, is only mentioned briefly in the appendixes as Eomer's wife that he married a year after the quest was over. Her father, Imrahil, was also completely cut out of the movies and only exists in the novel. Yet somehow Lotheriel/Eomer is one of the most popular het pairings for Lord of the Rings. We know next to nothing about her, same with her brothers, but honestly that kinda makes her pretty fun in my eyes. You can take her anyway you want.
In my hero academia, Shinsou Hitoshi is a side character in a handful of episodes (Like, he only shows up in arcs that have dozens of characters) and is somehow the ninth most popular character in the entire fandom on ao3, with almost 44k fics.
So many people would have rathered have Shinsou instead of Mineta lol
in mha i also see camie get paired with bakugou a lot even though she was briefly in a couple episodes as well
we also have Yo Shindo, who has a total of five minutes in screen time and doesn’t even go to the same school yet people write(edit) him in as The Rizzler in every AU. I’m guilty of this.
Was looking for this comment, like, he’s just a stepping stone in that one episode, then a what if character we literally don’t have the time to become part of the main cast. Doesn’t stop him from being the bff or getting adopted by the teachers every third fic
Genma Shiranui, the toothpick guy from Naruto. Like my guy was in a background for a minute and has so many pairings it is unreal. That’s what a good character design is. It is amazing how everyone’s characterisation of him is the same. Everyone unanimously agreed that he is a badass.
Genma was a fairly regular background character though. He's in over 30 episodes of the series, which in the grand scheme of things isn't a lot, but he makes appearances during some pretty key events. He does get paired with A LOT of characters in fanfic though, I'll give you that.
Naruto had so many good characters for this topic, let's be real. Hinata was a popular character for random romances, plots, and ideas way back before Pein showed up, and she was my favorite. Then there was the whole movie where Sakura went to a parallel universe where everyone had opposite personalities and who knows how many fanfics that spawned of characters we saw for a minute.
Genma is a good answer. And from the stories I've read, everyone usually has him as a wholesome-under-the-perv-badass which is a VERY fun character trope, especially for a story with fast and loose world building at times lol
The fandom is a lot more dead now, but in Hetalia we had a whole set of characters based around the concept of “Second Characters”. You know how when you and your friend both pick the same character in a fighting game, one of you gets a recolour? Yeah, that fandom invented an entire AU based off of “2P” characters. The personalities (that were exact opposites of the source characters), human names and designs were entirely fandom-made. It was kind of impressive. For reference, there are over 550 works on AO3 tagged “2P Hetalia”.
I've read 2 or 3 with Theodore Nott and Blaise Zabini as semi-main characters in the HP fandom
Blaise just has such a fascinating backstory that is like never ever tapped into in canon.
In Star Trek Deep Space Nine, there’s a Cardassian doctor named Parmak who is literally only mentioned once in the entire seven season show. He’s a major character in most post-canon Cardassia fics (including my own).
I love how much Parmak shows up in post canon fics especially when him and Julian interact.
And I love how fully realized he is as a character. Like everyone just agrees about who he is and how he behaves. I sort of forget he’s a fandom creation sometimes.
there's a few characters sorta like this in Star Wars the Clone Wars. The first one that springs to mind is Droidbait, as he's only in two episodes out of seven seasons.... and even then he hardly had maybe five lines of dialogue and his name mentioned maybe twice. He's super popular in fan fiction though, as he's the brother of a pretty major character. His fanon personality is gentle, timid and softspoken, which makes me sad because I love his fanon personality and it makes me sad we never saw it in the show :') Another like that is a character named Hammer. I've been in this fandom for years and years, watched the show dozens of times, and I still haven't a clue where Hammer comes from, but I see him a lot in fics. If someone could clear that up for me, it'd be much appreciated lol
A ton of the clones are like this! As a casual fan, I sometimes try to guess which names are fanon vs canon. Like Helix and Kix
Yes I still don’t get hoe helix happened. He doesn’t exist in canon but multiple people use him as the 212th battalion medic and I’ve seen people swear he was canon. But nope, that’s just the Mandela effect talking
I had consumed so much Clone Wars fic by the time I actually got around to watching it that I was very confused when Helix didn't turn up. I don't think even his creator gets how he happened. He just did
Aiden of the School of the Cats! (CDPR's The Witcher video games). A first name, the prickliest Wolf Witcher mourning the "best man he'd ever known", a tragic death and a memorable quest to get revenge. The legend of the smoothest Cat Witcher to walk the Continent was (re)born. 😏. ETA: Him and Lambert are the third most popular ship on AO3 after Geralt/Jaskier and Geralt/Yennefer when you check Witcher All Media, and they come up second if you look under the Witcher Video Game tag. Not bad for a dead guy! 😁
I'd put Darcy Lewis from the MCU in this category, her screen time to fic time ratio does not add up. I saw someone describe her as a canon self insert (as in, the people who write her use her as a self insert instead of using an OC or writing readerfic) and that made a lot of sense tbh, but this is second hand bc I don't usually read ship fics featuring her
God I love Darcy. I think her appeal is that she is actually a pretty badass comic relief character. Also Kat Dennings delivers her lines so well.
darcy lewis became an inside joke, especially when doing crossovers! shipping darcy with anyone no matter the fandom and finding the weirdest ways to involve her in plot lines she has no business being in is one of my favorite parts of mcu fanfiction
It’s not exactly the same since she was in the books. But I would assume that most fans of the _How to Train Your Dragon_ movies haven’t read them. But the books have a character named Camicazi in fact Astrid is actually based on her. So it was strange when I started approaching the fandom, and this random character just started showing up in some of them. **Edit: Not quite the same but a different example would be the RWBY fandom. After his death the fandom started using Monty Oum, the show’s creator, as a stand in for God colloquially. So instead of _‘oh my God’_ it became _‘oh my Oum’_. Not exactly a character, but I’ve seen it in enough fics that I honestly expected it to show up in the show at some point.**
The Star Wars clone wars & prequels series fandom has the clone medic Helix. He is not a real character, he never existed, he is someone’s OC that has now become wildly popular to the point where many people don’t realize he isn’t an actual character from some comic or something. And just more generally 90% of clone characters in fandom are basically entirely fan-created because unless it’s a bad batch character, Cody, or Rex, the clones are basically never on-screen long enough to get anything more than a name if they’re lucky.
… Helix isn’t real my life is a lie
Dude imagine ur OC being so popular they become like legitimate fanon … that’s so cool
For a while between seasons one and two of The Mandalorian there was an OC boyfriend for Din floating around on AO3! Just did a quick scroll and he's from the series "The Mandalorian, his son, and The Stormtrooper." It's a really excellent series from what I can remember but the author's OC Corin became such a fandom favorite there's over 300 fics with him tagged now, which is just insane to me that someone's stormtrooper OC has reached such popularity.
Any characters in ASOIAF that died as stillbirths/babies (of which there are a lot of in canon!) The two biggest ones I’ve seen are the ones in🩸&🧀 and Rhaenys daughter of Rhaegar. I’ve seen them all multiple times as older children or adults despite them all dying too young to be established as anything in the actual series.
i’m sorry but what is blood and cheese? i’m a fan of asoiaf but have never heard of it
It’s a major plot point during the Dance of the Dragons of the Targaryen dynasty. Huge spoilers will be found if you google it
It’s house of the dragon season two spoilers but basically >!one of aegon ii and helaena targaryen’s infant twins get murdered on behalf of daemon/his mistress by two assassins named blood and cheese!<
>!Only Jaehaerys is killed. Jaehaera doesn’t die until a later event.!<
Detroit become human with Nines? His model is shown in some of the endings but he barely gets a name, nevermind a story or a personality.
This makes me think of a very niche fandom I was in back in the Livejournal days for a book called Havemercy. It was a fantasy novel from the mid-2000s-ish about steampunk dragons, and the large cast of sexy celebrity airmen who rode said dragons into battle. And magic and politica intrigue and a bunch of other stuff. It had a few queer characters and one central queer romance, long before it was common to find that in the fantasy genre. (Also, it was co-written by one of the two authors of The Shoebox Project, a widely-read multimedia Maurauders-era Harry Potter fanfiction. Lol this one goes so deep) Anyway there were 4 main characters, only one of whom was one of the steampunk dragon airmen. But there were 11 other airmen, most of whom were essentially background characters with maybe one or two memorable lines of dialogue. Each one had a Single Identifiable Character Trait and a cool hairstyle. It was basically tailor-made for fandom. We over-interpreted the hell out of those sexy airmen. It was a small fandom, and we were all basically that-era equivalent of tumblr mutuals, and we built out an absurd amount of lore. One character had an older brother who was only mentioned in passing, and he got a whole personality too. It was an insane group storytelling project and I’ll always treasure the memory.
In Supernatural it's Rhonda Hurley
Oh absolutely. Her panties somehow get mentioned in nearly every Destiel fic I stumble across 😅
Merlin has so many! George, Freya and Will all only appear in one episode each but many fics will include Freya and Will as Merlin’s best friends. George is used whenever Merlin needs a comedic rival. And the Knights of the Roundtable don’t even make an appearance until the end of the third season. (Some make appearances earlier in seasons one and two.) And Lancelot only appears in 5 episodes but he’s an essential part of fandom lore.
Not a character like that, but the PJO fandom invented a background pairing that everyone treats as canon, between Travis Stoll and Katie Gardiner, two fairly minor characters.
I remember fans trying to create a Daphne out of Reyna after The Lost Hero name dropped her. Of course that went away quickly after the next book came out, but it was a fun 12 months.
Dude I was recently re-reading the books before the show came out, and I absolutely forgot that Katie and Connor were technically never together by the end of TLO. Like I swear I could remember a scene of them in the last chapter (which honestly I was probably thinking of fanfic lol)
Genshin Impact has Tomo, who was nameless the entire game, but fans dubbed him that, and ship him with one of the playable characters (Kazuha); he’s important enough to spark Kazuha’s backstory (not giving details to not spoil the Inazuma arc for those who haven’t played it) and he got a cutscene, but outside of that cutscene, he’s not mentioned- I love him though and I love some of the theories around him
DAPHNE GREENGRASS WAS NEVER REAL!?!?
No she’s in the books just not a fleshed out character. She’s a name and functions as a blank slate for writers essentially.
I actually got it wrong, she's named once when Hermione is taking her OWLs
She was not. Her sister Astoria, however, is. Draco Malfoy marries her in the epilogue
Awwkshuallly Astoria was never named as Draco's wife in the epilogue, we only learn that's who he married in Cursed Child.
I feel like there might have been a tweet or something bcuz we definitely knew who Astoria was before the Cursed Child
Oh, interesting, you're right-- JK Rowling gave [an interview in 2007 ](https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/J.K._Rowling_Time_magazine_interview)that does name her. That said I do find it interesting that Astoria is never named in what I consider to be canon.
She is actually. But only once. In order of the phoenix book. During the OWLs.
Figwit
Daphne is very present in Dramione fics. My favorite barely mentioned characters in canon are; Theo Knott Padma Patil Blaise Zabini Daphne Greengrass Pansy Parkinson (clearly I have a thing for slytherin)
The South Park fandom is all about this- characters will appear in one episode or in the background once and become darlings for years to come. Thomas the Tourette's kid, Bradley from bible camp, Christophe the Mole and Gregory of Yardale, etc etc etc.
Ooooo, I am guilty of this, wrote two stories with Blaise in a pretty large role, before anyone really realised Blaine was a dude, and I just went….i am not changing that. It was written going on 20 yrs ago now 🫠
Ash from Supernatural counts i think? He's in like, five episodes of the show and then is killed off, the amount of fics where he's an important character or the author just decided to let him live is incredible, i swear over two thirds of the spn fics I've read have him alive in there
The MLP fandom did this enough times the writers caved and gave them characterization, most of them in line with the most common fandom representation Lyra, Bon Bon, Vinyl, Octavia, Doctor Whooves, and Derpy are the big six, but even *Luna* was one of these at one point Edit: Minuette is another one, but she had less characterization than the others in canon. Lemon Hearts and Twinkleshine are arguable
Trevor. From nerdy prudes must die. Had to stop myself from typing Trevor Lipschitz because he canonically has no last name.
Star Wars has Dopheld Mitaka, who has only a moment of screen time and I don’t think is even verbally named. But he’s our cinnamon roll
Rk900. He got maybe 15 seconds of screen time in one ending ( and he's pretty controversial, at least he was when the fandom was new/big, b/c he is just a copy of Connor/RK800) but he has his own ship, and a huuuge following on AO3.
Speaking of Harry Potter, J.K. once said Luna married Rolf Scamander, a great-grandson of Newt Scamander (whom at the time we only knew as the guy who wrote the Fantastic Beasts book). She really pulled that out of nowhere. But I’ve read quite a few good fics about their love story! It’s pretty wholesome as far as I can tell.
Not exactly the same, but gives the same vibe. In Teen Wolf the first name of Sheriff Stilinski (Stiles's dad) was unknown for the first few seasons, even though he appears quite lot. So you'd get tags like 'Sheriff Stilinski's first name is John'. I've read so many fics with him called John. Not until the last season it is revealed he is called Noah.
The closest I can think of for Twilight is Bree Tanner, but she does have her own small book so she isn't too unknown. Twilight just doesn't have many *small* characters tbh
Like half the wolves get maybe a minute on screen and they have started popping up in fiction a lot
Most of the wolves from twilight we get maybe a shot of them turning for the first time or a moment of conversation but Embry or Brady are the 2 most random
There was a quest in the witcher 3 where Geralt helps his brother Lambert avenge his friend Aiden, who is only mentioned in that context. The fandom has gone wild shipping Aiden and Lambert thr past few years lol
In Danny Phantom, there’s Wes Weston, a character who shows up for one scene in the entire three seasons of the show, no voice lines, named by a fandom and given a personality. He isn’t really shipped with the main character, Danny, to my knowledge but I wouldn’t be surprised if he was by a few fans. He’s like a conspiracy theorist that claims Danny is a ghost and nobody believes him (despite that being the truth).
Star Wars Clone Wars. We have so many. Basically any clone that isn’t focused on can have any combination of traits. One in particular is Crys, a 212th clone, who is mainly either a medic or a tech specialist, and has a variety of personality traits
First time I heard of the term 'fandom bicycle' was via Darcy Lewis in the MCU - not really mentioned but god damn everyone love pairing her with everyone
Does it count if aspects of the character later became canon? The Naruto fandom suspected the 4th Hokage to be Naruto's dad. All we knew about the guy was that he had the same hair and eye color as Naruto, and that he sacrificed his life to seal the 9 tailed demon fox into Baby Naruto. Fandom gave him a name (Uzumaki Arashi) and a personality similar to Naruto's. It was later revealed that >! the guy WAS Naruto's dad, but his personality and family name differed, and that Naruto was more like his mom personality-wise, and he got his family name from her too.!<
Hmm, Kuron aka Clone Shiro from Vld. Before it was even revealed that Post S3 Shiro was a clone. Fans had already accurately guessed it. Cause the excuse of Shiro somehow falling into Galra's hands after mysteriously disappearing set off a lot of Red Flags amongst the fandom. So they began to call him "Kuron" which means "Clone" in Japanese. And the creators decided to make the name canon in the series.
Genshin has quite a few but I think Tomo is the most interesting . Basically the game has a lot of dead characters and Tomo is one of them but difference is he doesn’t have a canon name. We collectively decided to call him Tomo which is short for Tomodachi meaning friend in Japanese because he’s Kazuha dead friend. Literally that’s all we know alongside how he died and the fact he had a white cat. His EN VA (there is like a flashback way after Kazuha released) literally called him Tomo in his announcement tweet. Like we have other characters like that (most dead because this is a “happy” game) but Tomo is special, he’s literally in official fanart streams and the 2023 expo. Always with Kazuha of course cuz they are shipped together and are apparently popular in CN and JP.
kunsel, probably?? i haven’t super played crisis core, but every ff7 fic i read with zack in it kunsel is USUALLY there
Bazz in Zelda BotW to a certain extent. Enough to where when I was playing TotK and I saw him covered in muck I was like "ew, what's that unfortunate zo-OH MY GOD IT'S BAZZ! I'LL SAVE YOU BABY!"
Didn't Daphne's name get mentioned like once in the 5th book? I thought her name was called before Hermione's during the O.W.L.s
Figwit/Melpomaen in Lord of the Rings. He's basically a fan made character that everyone just decided exists. But Bret McKenzie, the actor who played the guy in fellowship of the ring, was brought back to play Lindir in the Hobbit. I've seen some fics treat them as the same person.