Naive Newcomer - Television Tropes & Idioms

Miranda, from The Tempest

Miranda: O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures
are there here!
How beauteous mankind is!
O brave new world,
That has such people in't!
Prospero: Tis new to thee.
— William Shakespeare, The Tempest

Character whose inexperience with the world presented by the show allows them to act as the Audience Surrogate. Often it is through their eyes that we are introduced to the show's principal characters and milieu (see Welcome Episode). Sometimes incorporates qualities of The Watson and Fish Out Of Water. May lack Genre Blindness.

They may be Trapped In Another World, new additions to a Wizarding School, the fresh recruit, or just The Intern, but the device is the same.

In dangerous situations, this character may condemn himself as a coward for feeling fear, until a sager head tells him that only the Fearless Fool avoids that.

A popular character type in Speculative Fiction, because it allows the reader or viewer to explore the world as the character does, making the character an Audience Surrogate.

Frequently overlaps with Country Mouse. The Bumblebee is similar to this trope, the main difference being that The Bumblebee is also there to draw in younger audiences. Rookie Red Ranger is a subtrope, where the Naive Newcomer is also The Hero.

Examples

Anime and Manga

Shinji Ikari from Neon Genesis Evangelion. However, he is a lot less of a Wide Eyed Idealist than many examples. He also possibly already knows at least one of the hideous secrets of the Evas, though he does chose not to remember it.
Arika Yumemiya in Mai-Otome.
Luffy tends to get most of these moments in One Piece, as he honestly doesn't care how the world works unless it's directly relevant to him somehow. The other members of the Straw Hat crew also occasionally get moments of it, being among the very few denizens of the relatively tame East Blue to travel the considerably more deadly Grand Line, and thus having heard precious little about it beforehand.
Linna Yamazaki in the Bubblegum Crisis remake, Tokyo 2040.
Manta/Morty in Shaman King, though Morty is inflicted with an annoying fanboy mentality in the translation.
Ito Keita in Gakuen Heaven.
Utena early on in Revolutionary Girl Utena.
Rokuro Okajima, AKA Rock, from Black Lagoon.
Ayato Kamina from RahXephon.
In the anime Haibane Renmei, Rakka acts as the Naive Newcomer, appearing in the Haibane's world and having to have everything explained to her by the seasoned residents.
Ahiru in Princess Tutu...since she's a duck that was magically turned into a girl.
Haruhi in Ouran High School Host Club.
Ai Tanabe in Planetes.
Mai in Ghost Hunt.
Deconstructed HARD in the second season of Gundam 00, with Shinji's partial Expy Saji Crossroads.
Keiichi in HigurashiNoNakuKoroNi is played as this in the first time loop, but in later ones it seems like he knows more about Hinamizawa.

Comic Books

Agent J in incarnations of Men In Black comics, and in the first movie.
Robyn "Toybox" Slinger at the start of Top 10.

Film

Rogue, in the movie adaptation of X-Men.
- Kitty Pryde (later Shadowcat) filled this role in the actual books. Notably averted with teenaged girls Rogue, Phoenix II, and arguably Jubilee.
Das Boot: The presence of a war correspondent aboard the titular vessel means that there is a proper excuse for explaining various aspects of submarine operations to the audience, by having crewmembers explain them to this character, who could reasonably be expected not to already know it.
Agent John Meyers in the first Hellboy film adaptation.
Bethany from Dogma.
Shilo from Repo! The Genetic Opera. She was locked in her bedroom for 17 years. A large chunk of the story is about her entering the real world for the first time, and the trouble being naive gets her into.
Lt. Saavik in Star Trek II The Wrath Of Khan. In the next film, she was taken out of this capacity, but stuck around anyway. And was recast with a less charismatic actress.
Dr. Reeves in Twister. As a psychiatrist riding with tornado chasers, she asked questions on behalf of the audience like "What's a Category IV?".
In the film version of Astrid Lindgren's Mio, my Mio (I think the movie title was Mio in the Land of Faraway, but I'm not sure) the titular character serves as the Naive Newcomer as he was taken from the Land of Faraway as a newborn and doesn't return until nine years later. After a while it gets a bit tedious that he constantly needs to have the world explained to him, but it also leads to a rather funny moment (largely thanks to Christian Bale's delivery). It involves Mio (Nicholas Pickard) and Jum-Jum (Bale) gallopping along a bridge that's being raised, and Mio panicks when he can't get the horse to stop. The horse then proceeds to fly across the gap in the bridge, and then the following exchange:
Mio: It felt like we were flying! I didn't know Miramis could do that!
Jum-Jum: (in a kids-are-stupid tone) What you know does not amount to much, Mio.
Skorpan in The Brothers Lionheart.
Subverted in Ghostbusters;; Winston Zeddemore is not a scientist, let alone a parapsychologist, and applies for the job after seeing an ad put in the paper by the seriously over-worked Ghostbusters. His interview is a small moment of comic relief suggesting that he has no idea what he's getting himself into...and then he has no problem with the job, even going so far as to suggest a paranormal explanation for why the Ghostbusters were so over-worked in the first place.
Will Smith in Men In Black learns that his experience as a NYPD cop means precisely dick when he enters the new world of alien policing.

Literature

Harry Potter, in most of the first book and every so often thereafter.
- Given the fact that they are attending a school, nearly all the students count as this to a degree., especially Ron, Hermione, Neville, and Draco. Ron and Hermione both have the humorous dichotomy of being both the one asking the question and the one answering the others questions, depending on the subject.
Eustace on his first trip to Narnia in Voyage of the Dawn Treader; likewise, Jill on her first trip in The Silver Chair.
Thursday Next herself in the Thursday Next series. She's an apprentice in the BookWorld, and is always being educated in its many intricacies.
Harry Crewe in The Blue Sword.
Lemuel Gulliver from Gullivers Travels, making this trope at least Older Than Steam.
The viewpoint character of nearly every utopian novel ever written (often combined with The Watson.
Paul Carpenter in Tom Holt's The Portable Door (and subsequent novels). Considering the entire place pretty much is having fun keeping him thinking he's insane due to all the crazy things happening, he doesn't really fall into this trope as much as sink horrifyingly into it as it slowly closes its inky black waters around him.
Dr. Maturin in Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels often serves as an excuse to explain naval lingo, especially in Master and Commander. Partially subverted because Maturin is otherwise the most sophisticated character on board.
In The Tempest, the situation is inverted: the new world is brought to Miranda's island.
Claire Lyons in the The Clique.
Most fantasy novels do this to some extent. If the lead character isn't summoned from another world, he's almost certainly from a small town and hasn't experienced the larger world. Either way, many things must be explained to him and, thus, the reader. Examples are numerous.
- Just see the Summon Everyman Hero page, there's no need to get redundant.
- Bilbo and Frodo Baggins grew up in the Shire, isolated from things that made you late for breakfast.
- Garion grew up on a small farm, specifically isolated from the larger world by his "aunt".
- Rand al'Thor and his friends grew up in a small town far from the turmoil of the world.
- Skeeve grew up in an isolated, backward universe.
- The Ohmsfords from Shannara.
"His name was Gaal Dornick and he was just a country boy who had never seen Trantor before."
Skorpan in The Brothers Lionheart.
Gavin Darklighter in the first two or three books of the X Wing Series.
George Fewkoombey in Bertolt Brecht's novelisation of his play The Threepenny Opera. he doesn't survive it.

Live Action TV

Dr. Daniel Jackson from Stargate SG-1. But he quickly fit in.
- His Jonas Quinn, well, Jonas Quinn did much of the same thing, oddly enough, long after the show and other characters had all been well-established to the audience.
  Sam: How come you're not smiling?
  Jonas: Should I be?
  Sam: Well, it is your first time being captured by a Goa'uld.
  Jonas: Funny.
John Crichton on Farscape.
Buck Rogers.
Dr. John Carter (also later Lucy Knight and to a lesser extent Neela Rasgotra), ER.
Diane Chambers, Cheers.
Jack Carter, Eureka.
- New episodes (in the third season) still play Jack as the Naive Newcomer, but focus more on his inability to understand complicated science rather than his lack of comfort with the many world-ending experiments performed in the city.
- One could argue that he's evolving into The Watson, at least to a point.
Kyle from Kyle XY.
Just about all of the Doctor's companions in Doctor Who, but especially Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright in the original show, and Rose Tyler in the current revival. In those case we get introduced to the Doctor through their eyes, whereas in other companion introductions we already know the Doctor when we see him meet them.
Gwen Cooper, Torchwood.
Taken to its fullest potential in Greys Anatomy, where the main quintet (that's Five Man Band dressed up) are all Naive Newcomers.
- Arguably stolen from Scrubs, which did the "group of new interns" thing first.
  - And Scrubs was heavily influenced by the '70s novel The House Of God.
Simon of Firefly
Will Zimmerman, Sanctuary.
PC Jim Carver, The Bill.
Constable Maggie Doyle, Blue Heelers.
Detective Brian Cassidy, in the first season of Law And Order SVU. Played with in that he does not last the season.
Harry Kim from Star Trek Voyager, though after seven years of terrible life (and numerous death) experiences he is...exactly the same.
Tobias Beecher in the first season of Oz.
Detective Tim Bayliss is this for most of the run of Homicide Lifeonthe Street ultimately subverted at the end of the series and in the subsequent movie, where he guns down a serial killer set free in the former and confesses to his ex-partner in the latter and presumably goes to jail.
Power Rangers is rather fond of this, typically putting one of these in as Red Ranger. This in contrast to Super Sentai, more fond of having the same ranger be The Ace, leading to occasional amusing dissonance between character and behavior in the American version.
John Burns in the first season of Taxi. Elaine Nardo was one, too, in the pilot episode.
Donna's orientation by her predecessor in a flashback sequence of The West Wing. She's not only tricked into thinking there's a nuclear warhead on the White House grounds, she reveals her surprise of this "fact" in an interview with a teen magazine, showing her "bambiesque naivite" to the world ("I'm too stupid to live!").
Ben in Carnivale who is the butt of many a joke among the carnival folk at the beginning of the series.
Betty Roberts in Remember WENN

Radio

Arthur Dent in The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy.

Tabletop Games

The Tau Empire in Warhammer40000. That being said, they are still a force to be reckoned with.

Video Games

The first two Shadow Hearts games have the female lead be a Naive Newcomer to the world of monsters and the supernatural, while Yuri is a relative old hand—and the Cool Old Guy is very much an old hand. From the New World inverts this, with the male lead being the Naive Newcomer, and the female lead the old hand, while the Cool Old Guy is likely as or more naive than the male lead, although he's too crazy to show it.
Tidus from Final Fantasy X. His father Jecht, while not a Point-of-view character, also suffered from this several years earlier.
Though an antagonist rather than a viewpoint character, Elena of the Turks in Final Fantasy VII.
And Vaan of Final Fantasy XII, though he's barely even an Audience Surrogate in the actual plot.
Legaia: Duel Saga has the protagonist filling this role. Which is really, really irksome when, after playing for twenty hours, you realize he's entirely oblivious about everything, when everything quite literally revolves around him.
Shirou in Fate Stay Night has no training as a magus except a basic grasp of strengthening and a rather intuitive knowledge of projection. Tohsaka gets pretty annoyed that he knows next to nothing about magic and nothing at all about the Grail War. He's drastically unprepared for the violence going on, so it's a good thing he's The Hero and has a Servant so brokenly strong that she's still a match/superior to any of the other Servants except Berserker and possibly Lancer.
Call Of Duty 4 starts off by new S.A.S. member Soap MacTavish showing his proficiency at a firing range and making his way through a 'killhouse' shooting pop-up terrorist targets. The game suggests a difficulty based on how well you manuever through said killhouse.
Gears Of War 2 features the main characters leading a 'green as grass' new recruit on his first patrol - who, by bizarre coincidence, is one of the three brothers of the redshirt on Marcus's squad in the previous game.
Like Winston Zeddemore discussed under "Films" above, the Rookie in Ghostbusters: The Video Game doesn't have much of a problem adjusting to the job of catching ghosts and stopping a supernatural apocalypse. The trope is played straight at the same time, however, as he's caught somewhat off-guard when told his job description in layman's terms is to test new gear on the off-chance it explodes. Interestingly, it's suggested that Winston has become a scientist in the time between the first movie and the game.

Webcomics

Calix plays this role in the "Oceans Unmoving" arc from Sluggy Freelance. Most of the explanations he gets about Timeless Space are done in the form of extremely boring informational videos, even when the people around him could answer his questions far more quickly. Calix gets kinda pissed about this.
Alice the main character of Nowhere University

Western Animation

Todd in Wayside.
Fry from Futuramawas a prime example of this trope...but he adapted too quickly and the writers decided to make him Too Dumb To Live.
Jubilee in the 1990s X-Men cartoon.