Mysterious Resident of Room 4
Thanks for making this! I'd intended to when I could (had to wait for a slot to open up in the 100 thread limit), but I don't mind being beaten to it! 
Don't have a lot of time at the moment, but I shall add a bit more of my thoughts to this thread later.
edited 26th Jan '14 7:42:31 AM by Yotsuyasan
Boy Scouts ½: the most gratuitous self insert fic, ever! Read, if you dare!
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I think the core problem here is confusion over what an extra is in the first place, as opposed to a minor character.
An Extra is a person appearing in a scene who is not a major or minor character. An Extra can have a line or lines (according to SAG rules, no more than six words, though) or can interact with the main characters in some way but does not have to. The other people waiting in a line with the main characters, the people walking down the street, the person who gets off the elevator as the main characters get on, the people filling the other seats in a classroom or theater, the usher at the door of the movie theatre who says "Tickets?", the people sitting at the next table over in the coffeeshop who don't interact with the main characters at all are extras. The guy who walks out of the bathroom stall the main character was waiting for is an extra, and so on.
A Recurring Extra is a subtype of Extra; an extra who shows up more than once, in the same role. The waitress who works in the diner the main characters go to in every episode but who never does anything more than take their order and bring them their food is a recurring extra. The guy running the newspaper stand outside the main character's apartment where she always buys a paper is a recurring extra. If the show has a running gag where a character always has to wait for a stall in the bathroom, and it's always the same guy who turns out to be using the stall, that guy is a recurring extra, even if he never acknowledges the presence of the main character at all.
A Living Prop is a subtype of Recurring Extra who never has lines, and does not have any interaction with the main characters; they could be replaced by a cardboard cutout with no difference in the way the scenes they are in play out. In Welcome Back, Kotter, all the students in the class with the exception of the Sweathogs (and any potential love interests) were Living Props. They had no interaction with the main character, no lines, and all they contributed to the classroom scenes was that they filled seats. They could just as easily have been cardboard cutouts or mannequins.
In the examples in the first post, Miles and Oz aren't extras at all. They're minor characters, but they are not extras of any kind. I don't know about Emiri; I'm not at all familiar with the work, but she doesn't sound like an extra either, and certainly not like she's a Living Prop.
edited 26th Jan '14 8:33:51 AM by Madrugada
...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.
No, the other one.
Emiri is a minor character. Not an extra.
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Captain of USS Bajor
All right, since these are all preexisting terms, I'm inclined to think "description rewrite and wick cleanup".
Sounds about right to me, though I'm not sure of what the rewrite should be
From this
Image Pickin' thread, we've discovered that there's confusion on what draws the line between this trope and Recurring Extra.
While we do know that Living Props have no lines and doesn't interact with the characters in some way but Recurring Extras do both, someone pointed out that tropes are supposed to be flexible, so that limitation technically makes it Recurring Extra But More Specific.
Even if we're willing to keep the tropes as is, there's still significant misuse, as Yotsuyasan pointed out:
Just a few examples that come to mind after a quick glance:
Emiri Kimidori? Going just by the anime adaptation, she had an important role in one episode (and even got a character album!). And in the original light novel series, she has further appearances of significance.
Miles O'Brian? Even if we limit ourselves to his time on TNG, he was a pretty important reoccurring character, even having multiple episodes that put him in a spotlight.
Oz from Buffy? He was a reoccurring character before joining the main cast, but one with dialogue and interaction with the cast, hardly a nobody in the background.
Having examples like that make it really hard, even after reading the other linked discussion thread, to know exactly what makes this trope unique and worthy of its own entry separate from other extras tropes such as Recurring Extra or Ascended Extra... I can see how the trope can be used, for example a series with a classroom setting where 90% of the students just sit in desks or walk in halls without ever speaking or in any way interacting with the characters and/or plot. (Which is what the current image is attempting to show.) But many of the listed examples on the trope's page seem to be not this.
edited 26th Jan '14 3:31:01 AM by KarjamP