Fans! Want to write your own fiction set in our 'Verse, but don't want to tread on the toes of Canon too much? Fear not, we have just what you need. Here's a kick-ass One-Shot Character that the creators have no plans on using ever again. As such, feel free to write their continuing adventures!
While "Fan Fic Magnet" feels like a vague term that can refer to any character that gets a lot of usage in fan works, for our purposes, it refers only to canon characters who are barely used in the official work, but still inspire heaps of fan fics. Since they are barely used in the canon storyline, there is a lot of freedom in what types of plots that can be told with them while still adhering to the source material (and not having to worry about future events invalidating anything). Besides, if the writers don't see the worth in such a cool character, fandom might as well take up the task.
Compare with Canon Fodder, O.C. Stand-in, Fanfic Fuel and Fandom-Specific Plot.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- In Doraemon - Doraemon: Nobita's Great Battle of the Mermaid King, Princess Sophia gets more love with Ariel fans from The Little Mermaid (by Western Standards, at least).
- Ever since the end of HeartCatch Pretty Cure!, several fanworks showcasing Futaba Hanasaki as a Pretty Cure (usually a pink one like Tsubomi/Cure Blossom and Kaoruko/Cure Flower) have popped up.
- In Pokémon Ranger and the Temple of the Sea movie, Manaphy gets more fanfics since the end of the movie.
- In Ranma ½, the adventures of Ryouga Hibiki. He might be an important recurring character, but he also has an ability to cross oceans as easily as walking through a door, and more than once the manga makes reference to his own adventures that don't revolve solely around Ranma. Where does he go, and who does he meet, what wacky adventures does he have on his own. Only fanfic writers know for sure. All we know is he often wears Leather Pants during them.
- At the end of the Kyoto Arc of Rurouni Kenshin, the popular Dragon Soujiro Seta decides to wander around Japan for ten years, much like the title character. Many fics have centered around his adventures during this time.
- Soul Eater: Hiro appears in a single episode/chapter and never appears again save for a cameo in a panel of the final chapter. This doesn't stop him from being a popular fanfic character due to his personality as an Extreme Doormat Loser Protagonist being firmly established in his only appearance, plus wielding Excalibur for a while.
- In Jojos Bizarre Adventure, Shizuka Joestar, the invisible baby Joseph adopts in Diamond is Unbreakable never appears again after the end of that part. As a result, fans have written numerous stories about her possible adventures, usually in Alternate Universe Fics where the events of Stone Ocean turn out differently from the way it did.
Literature
- You'll be hard-pressed to find an Animorphs Alternate Universe Fic that doesn't give major roles to the real Tom and/or Melissa and/or Loren. All three of them have a personal connection to one of the Animorphs, but the nature of their roles means they don't have much pagetime and they're difficult to fit into canon-compliant fanfics as a result; Tom is a Controller who only appears uninfested once; Melissa needs to be kept in the dark for her own safety; and Loren became a blind amnesiac between the events of The Andalite Chronicles and the series proper.
- The children (Albus, James and Lily II, Scorpius, et al.) who appear in the epilogue to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, because while Harry's time at Hogwarts is over, it's a whole new adventure for the kids.
- Not to mention the adventures of Harry's parents' generation, which has been a staple of fanfiction since Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban established the broad strokes of their Back Story.
- Any of the books (or, for the more ambitious, the whole series) retold from the perspective of a character other than Harry. Some of the more common choices:
- Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets from Ginny's point of view - Arabella's The Very Secret Diary is one of the oldest and easily the most famous take on this plot, but fan writers are still coming out with new versions today.
- Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets from Luna's point of view - Basically, an origin story for her, since it's before her first appearance in canon, but we retroactively know it would be her first year at Hogwarts.
- Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban from Lupin's or Sirius' point of view.
- Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire from any of the other champions' point of view. Usually Cedric in tragedy!fics but Fleur gets her fair share too.
- Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix from Sirius' point of view. Those usually take the story over from his escape from Azkaban.
- Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince from Draco Malfoy's point of view.
- Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows from Neville's point of view - Dumbledore's Army and the Year of Darkness follows this, of course.
- Bill Weasley. It's mentioned that he is more-or-less an Adventurer Archaeologist, but this is never actually shown.
- The Hogwarts founders. These fics are mostly a vehicle for demonstrating that fanfic writers have absolutely no concept of how different life in 1000 A.D. was.
- Characters who are little more than named, providing perfect Self-Insert material, especially among the Slytherins. Aside from Blaise Zabini, we have Astoria Greengrass. Name known only by Word of God, she's Draco's future wife.
- Kelsier's older brother Marsh in Mistborn: The Original Trilogy is prone to be this, since he faked his own death to spy the Big Bad Lord Ruler and becoming a Steel Inquisitor in the process. Worth noting, the Steel Inquisitors are the ultimate fighting machines in the empire for they bestow three branches of the "metal-bending" magic system: Hemalurgy, Allomancy, and Feruchemy. This trope applies only to the first novel and, arguably, the second given that Marsh becomes a major character and plot-device in the last issue of the original trilogy.
Live-Action TV
- The revived Doctor Who has been doing this a lot.
- The Doctor and the Master have crossed paths time and time again, but what does the Master do when not crossing swords with the Doctor?
- One of the longest Brick Jokes in the fandom was that, after dropping off Sarah Jane, the Doctor left her in Aberdeen (Scotland) instead of Croydon (London). How did she get back home? What did she do in the intervening years? For that matter, what did ALL of the companions do after they left the Doctor?
- "What if the Doctor didn't depose Harriet Jones?" is just begging to be written, since that decision had profound consequences on the entire direction of the show. Especially since the Doctor noted that had she remained in power, Britain would have entered a modern Golden Age.
- Sally Sparrow from "Blink", and now even Amelia Pond (the 7-year-old version of Eleventh Doctor companion Amy Pond, who doesn't actually travel with him until age 21). This last is possibly because the BBC created a genuinely believable companion character, but then could never get away with having a 7-year-old girl running off in the TARDIS in the dead of night without even so much as a goodbye note to her aunt Sharon. So the fans wrote the stories instead.
- Jenny, the title character of "The Doctor's Daughter", served as this for almost a decade before her expanded-universe return. Her being played by a prior Doctor's daughter certainly helped matters.
- Not to mention the Meta-Crisis 10th Doctor, who depending on if you count the deleted scenes, will have a TARDIS soon and has Rose with him.
- Lady Christina de Souza from "Planet of the Dead", last seen flying off into the night in a flying London bus.
- Madame Vastra and her Ninja Maid Jenny Flint from "A Good Man Goes to War", accompanied by Battle Butler and Heroic Comedic Sociopath Strax. From the day the episode aired there has been an active Facebook group petitioning for them to have their own spin-off show. (Steven Moffat was in favour and even had a title: Tipping the Scales. They eventually got their own Big Finish Doctor Who spin-off.
- While River Song isn't a one-shot character, her appearances are far enough apart in her personal timelines to let fanfic writers fill in the blanks. An especially popular idea is to imagine what it would be like if River ever crossed paths with Captain Jack.
- In The Sarah Jane Adventures serial "Death of the Doctor", Sarah Jane mentions that she's been looking up other companions online. She mentions Ben and Polly are running an orphanage, Ace is running a charity, etc. Fans assumed that, "running a charity" or "running an orphanage" are like Sarah Jane's title of "Freelance Journalist", a small part of what they do, and possibly a cover for other things. That scene was ripe for a blossoming of SJA-like fanfic spinoffs, with every single companion up for grabs. (Also, the one-time return of Jo Grant and her grandson is a more direct example.)
- Ashildr/Me, who only shows up a few times in a single season, canonically lives from the 9th century until the end of the universe. And even then, she flies off through time and space with a quasi-immortal Clara Oswald. The possibilities are limitless, and barely scratched by the short story collection The Legends of Ashildr.
- Hikari Sentai Maskman: X1 Mask, the Ranger who appeared only once.
- iCarly featured a one-episode, badass, smoking hot Gamer Chick named Sasha Striker. She's kinda like Lilah from Ctrl+Alt+Del, shares some romantic tension with Spencer, and finishes the show by giving him a big sexy kiss before leaving.
- Recent Power Rangers biggies include: The "Retro Rangers'" extended offscreen period of action, Conner's brother, previous teams After the End in the Power Rangers RPM universe, and any departing team to keep their powers.
- Irene Adler and her assistant Kate from Sherlock, who are very much a Gender Flip equivalent of Sherlock and John (only with the white-hot Ho Yay actually being acted upon.) Thanks to Irene's line about "liking detective stories, and detectives," it's not hard to assume she wriggled her way into Scotland Yard on a freelance basis the same way Sherlock did.
- Mini-Jack, the clone of Jack O'Neill who appeared in one episode of Stargate SG-1 and was never mentioned again. Here's an example where he goes to live with Cousin Mac in LA: [1]
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- The Noodle Incident mentioned in the episode "Emancipation" in which Carter drank something which apparently caused her to partially or completely strip. Fuel for shippers, naturally.
- Star Trek: The Original Series: Captain Kirk's nephew Peter Kirk, who appeared in an original series episode but then was never even reffed again outside the Expanded Universe, is easily used by fic writers. Usually, he seems to join Starfleet, and rarely does he have anything even remotely approaching the career of his famous uncle. But he could be a farmer, a Locarno/Paris-type, an S31 agent, or the builder of the later Enterprises, because he has no canonical fate beyond being sent to Earth to live with his grandmother in Iowa, and that came from unshot scenes.
- Gary Seven and Roberta Lincoln, who were actually designed to go off on their own adventures, but never did.
- So why did Yeoman Rand leave the Enterprise anyway? One Star Trek novel explained she had been pregnant, possibly with Captain Kirk's child.
- Vash, the Adventurer Archaeologist on Star Trek: The Next Generation, eventually became a major character in the Millennium novels.
Toys
- The Hero Factory Recon Team was specifically set up by LEGO as a place where fans can insert their own Hero into the Hero Factory 'verse. (And where LEGO can sell custom action figures of said fanfic Heroes, natch.)
Video Games
- Fire Emblem: Three Houses has Patricia, born Anselma von Arundel, Edelgards' mother and Dimitri's stepmother. Some vague information about her is revealed across the game's various routes, namely that she didn't die in the Tragedy of Duscur, that she might have had a hand in it and all of this could imply she was killed and replaced by one of "those who slither in the dark" like her brother Lord Arundel was, but she never directly appears and these plot points were unresolved. She's a common magnet in post-Blue Lions fanfics, since that's the only path where those who slither in the dark aren't dealt with directly.
Web Animation
- Red vs. Blue: Pick a Freelancer agent. Any of them. Even the ones that technically haven't been named in the series yet - they're all named after states.
Western Animation
- Anything related to Walt Disney has a countless number of fanfics and fanart, no exceptions, this leads to little kids and Disney fans imagining their own "Disney Adventures".
- For Avatar: The Last Airbender:
- Koh and the Spirit World is visited once and vaguely alluded to several other times in ways that seemed to foreshadow a return visit and... nothing. At the end of the series absolutely nothing came of any of it, making things perfectly open for fanfic writers to speculate like crazy on what all of that build up led to.
- In addition to this is the backstories of Iroh and Bumi, who are both old and have had major influences on the world. Bumi for being Aang's friend before he got frozen and Iroh for being a former General and having actually traveled to the Spirit World.
- There was an online game between Seasons 2 and 3 where comatose Aang revisited the Spirit World and had to fight Koh; the creators consider it canon, but it certainly doesn't satisfy as much as watching an episode on DVD would.
- Ursa gets a million fics explaining what happened to her, because we as viewers have absolutely no clue.
- Codename: Kids Next Door: Since the show only really focuses on Sector V even though the organization is stated to be global, with the final revealing it's even galactic in scope, the amount of stories one could write with other sectors both real and fan created is endless.
- Miraculous Ladybug centers around two Transformation Trinkets and their wielders' adventures. There are five others that are occasionally alluded to and mostly serve as Sailor Earth fodder.
- My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic has the continuing adventures of Daring Do.
- Any "background pony" probably has a story or two, if not several dozen, written about them. Even if they only showed up for a few seconds stuck in a fence.
- Any "background pony" probably has a story or two, if not several dozen, written about them. Even if they only showed up for a few seconds stuck in a fence
- TaleSpin has more than its share of interesting one-shot characters. Many of these have become popular with fan writers and artists, including Adventurer Archaeologists Myra ("In Search of Ancient Blunders") and Katie Dodd ("For Whom the Bell Klangs") and spunky Princess Lotta Lamour ("The Road to Macadamia").
- She-Ra and the Princesses of Power: both Entrapta and Scorpia tend to get fanfics about their backstories as they are rather mysterious.
- Was Entrapta truly raised by her robots? Did they exist before she was born? Does she have human parents in the past? How was Dryl able to achieve such technological progress?
- How did Scorpia's mothers get to know each other? Did they belong to the horde? How did they get affected by the fact that the former king surrendered to Hordak? How did they die?
- South Park: One-shot characters Damien, Gregory, The Mole, and Thomas are featured in a number of fanfics - but 99.9% of these are for shipping purposes only.
- Red X (as his own character, not Robin, who was X in his first appearance) appeared twice in Teen Titans, and is the show's Ensemble Dark Horse with many fanfics. It helps that he's an Anti-Hero / Anti-Villain whose identity is still a mystery.
- Robotgirl from Robotboy. She's only in two episodes, but gets a lot of fan art and YouTube videos.
- Winx Club: one could go as far as to say that any fanfic focused on any other character besides Bloom uses this trope since all seasons' plots and character development go to her and her only. However, for objectivity's sake, we're going to exclude all of the six Winx girls as possible fanfic magnets.
- Mirta was intended to be Flora's girlfriend on season one but thanks to Helia's debut, she was demoted to extra in the following seasons.
- Several minor antagonists are fanfic magnets due to their short appearances in the original series, such as Diaspro, Chimera, Countess Cassandra, Dark Bloom, Mitzi, and Lucy. Though the most explored are Diaspro and Dark Bloom. Diaspro since she has been systematically mistreated and humiliated since season one. And Dark Bloom because of her being the fandom's favorite.
- Bloom's older sister Daphne could have fit in here before the ret-con of her death from season five onwards. Even now she's merely a minor character and can be used to explore several plot holes or poorly explored events in the series such as Domino's Fall, the Nymphs of Magix's creation by the Great Dragon (aka god), and Daphne's sacrifice to save her baby sister Bloom.
- Earth's fairies, especially Morgana and the Major Fairies (Diana, Nebula, Aurora, and Sybilla) count as fanfic magnets because they were pretty much set aside by the canon after season four. Similar to Daphne, they can be uses as devices to explain the series' deficient worldbuilding in regards to how Earth lose its magic or when exactly the Fairy Hunters started their genocidal hunt.
