History Main / LittleHeroBigWar

* ''Literature/ASongOfIceAndFire'' has this dilemma with Jon Snow and the Night's Watch. At the climax of [[Literature/AGameOfThrones Book 1]], when his brother Robb Stark calls his banners, Jon makes a break to leave the Watch (to which he is sworn, and from which desertion is punishable by death). He feels the War of the Five Kings to avenge his father's death is the greater conflict than the Night's Watch, only to be corrected by Lord Commander Mormont and his fellow Watch-friends. As the story advances, the drama for the series is that the real conflict is being fought by the neglected and underfunded Night's Watch who is neglected by all Southron rulers [[spoiler:except Stannis Baratheon who comes to aid the Watch in its hour of need in ''Literature/AStormOfSwords'' and ''Literature/ADanceWithDragons'']].

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* Even the [[Anime/NeonGenesisEvangelion Evangelions]] are tiny compared to the scale of Aeon War in ''FanFic/AeonNatumEngel''. Most evident in Operation CATO where after the initial beachhead assault they get a little OutOfFocus.

* In ''Fanfic/SugarPlums'' the fan fiction spends a lot of time building up to actual social and political causes of the Land of Water, however the moment it starts all the main characters promptly leave the country and do other things. In setting it's justified because they are building up their resources so they can meet up with and help bolster the rebellion which they do eventually return with.

* This is a theme of much of Creator/JRRTolkien's work. Part of the subtext of all his Middle-earth stories are that what looks important to mortals is not necessarily what is actually important, and the world is so big and complicated and subtle that really, only God knows (literally!) what is and is not important, and how much so.
** Bilbo is the main character of ''Literature/TheHobbit'' but actually spends the entire climactic final battle unconscious, having been accidentally hit in the head with a rock. On a larger scope, while it looks like the most important thing to come out of the war is the reestablishment of Erebor and Dale, the really important thing is eliminating Smaug as a potential ally to Sauron. And of course, Bilbo's discovery of the One Ring and pity on Gollum are both more important than even that.

** Frodo from ''Literature/TheLordOfTheRings'' is the primary main character, but he does none of the fighting, and does not get involved in the war directly at all. What he gets is the equivalent of a behind the lines assassination attempt. Even he only manages to succeed because his gardener tagged along.
** Even in the First Age, the story ''looks'' at first glance like a war story in which the angry Noldorin Elves march to war against the Dark Power, there are armies and sorceries and great cities and fortresses...but in the end, what really mattered in the Elven war against Morgoth was to bring Men into indirect contact with the influence of the Valar for good and wisdom, and to bring Beren into contact with Lúthien, and Tuor with Idril, bringing a strain of each race's inheritance into the other race.

* In the original ''Anime/MobileSuitGundam'', while the titular Gundam and the battleship White Base were state-of-the-art {{Super Prototype}}s, they were still just one ship; the story focused not on the Gundam single-handedly destroying Zeon, but rather trying to survive while the Federation forced them into being decoys and eliminating enemy elite units, while they assembled their RedshirtArmy to ultimately win the war. The various OVAs set during the One Year War are full of this.

* ''Literature/ASongOfIceAndFire'' has this dilemma with Jon Snow and the Night's Watch. In Book 1, ''Literature/AGameOfThrones'', at the climax, when his brother Robb Stark calls his banners, he makes a break to leave the Watch (to which he is sworn to, and from which desertion is punishable by death). However, he feels he the War of the Five Kings to avenge his father's death is the greater conflict than the Night's Watch, only to be corrected by Lord Commander Mormont and his fellow Watch-friends. As the story advances, the drama for the series is that the real conflict is being fought by the neglected and underfunded Night's Watch who is neglected by all Southron rulers [[spoiler:except Stannis Baratheon who comes to aid the Watch in its hour of need in ''Literature/AStormOfSwords'' and ''Literature/ADanceWithDragons'']].

* The eponymous ''Comicbook/{{Rogue Trooper}}'' may the the [[{{Last of his Kind}} last surviving]] [[{{Super Soldier}} GI]], but he's still one guy (well, technically four guys, but three of them are Rogue's equipment) in a planet-spanning theatre of a war which engulfs an entire galaxy. In the end, he isn't even the one who takes out the Traitor General.

* StarWarsExpandedUniverse: This is pretty much the bread and butter of the Disney EU novels. Most are set within the timeline of the original trilogy, where the major turning points and battles are already very well know, as are their key players. Instead, many of the novels that don't follow minor adventures of the major characters follow new or background characters undertaking missions that seem very important to them but do little in the scale of the grand conflict.

->''"[[Literature/TheLordOfTheRings Saruman]] believes it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. It is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love."''

* ''Webcomic/SchlockMercenary'' focuses on a few dozen mercenaries in a galaxy of trillions. Of course, they do have more of an impact on galactic affairs than a random sample of a few dozen sophonts, and wind up getting caught in the middle of many important conflicts. It's worth noting that the page quote continues...

* ''LightNovel/CrestOfTheStars'' is like this. While one of the two protagonists, Lafiel, is the Imperial Princess and third-in-line for the throne of a galaxy-spanning empire, her actual military rank is nothing special (commander of a single attack ship, though later she's promoted to vice-commander of a squadron), and the accomplishments she and Jinto achieve ultimately have little impact on the overall war. The story is more about her and Jinto's personal struggles during this time of strife.

** The [[Anime/MobileSuitGundamSEED Cosmic Era]] gets into this, too, with ''Manga/GundamSEEDAstray Astray'' and ''Anime/MobileSuitGundamSEEDCE73Stargazer''.

* ''VideoGame/{{Assassins Creed|I}}'' is set during the Crusades, with Richard the Lionheart's army of Crusaders fighting the Saracen armies of Saladin. However, with the exception of a scene at the end of the game where Altair [[OneManArmy hacks his way through half of both sides' forces all on his lonesome]] most of the action is relegated to the background, with the Assassins fighting the Templars covertly in the cities supporting the war. These aren't the standard Cruasader Templars either; they basically form a ''fourth'' independent faction (the Assassins are the third).

-->-- '''Creator/PeterJackson'''

-->-- ''Creator/PeterJackson''

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* Across the various storylines of ''Machinima/RedVsBlue'', the Red and Blue simulation troops aren't even fighting in the war against the UNSC and aliens. They're just the bottom-of-the-barrel failures they've asigned in backwater planets to test out various combat scenarios. As a result, the amount of aliens the Red and Blue teams have actually encountered can be counted on one hand, and most don't even realize the war's been over for a few years in an uneasy peace. While the super soldiers that took part in Project Freelancer were combat-ready troops outfitted with armor enhancements and AI implants, they're still only a costly fringe experiment that are dealing with inter-human infighting and not actually part of the war either. Through implication, they did act as the blueprints for the later Spartan soldiers and thanks to the Director drastically changed Artificial Intelligence testing, so not entirely a footnote in human history at least. Even when the Reds and Blues do get involved in a proper war, it's still on the extremely remote colony world of Chorus. The civil war that's been going on for a generation has killed off much of the already small population and it's now a few thousand exhausted men and women locked in a tired cycle of vengeance.

** It should be noted that, due to the scale and typical [[{{UpToEleven}} over-the-top approach]] in nearly all setting aspects of 40K, the definition of "little" is scaled up as well with the trope remaining in effect nonetheless. Basically, considering the sheer size of the Imperium and the fact that it is has been waging a war for survival on ''hundreds'' of fronts for several millenia, any sufficiently local struggle is a side-show to the overarching war. The little hero, by 40K standards, is not a single person or group of people, not even a company or regiment, it literally can mean that the life-or-death struggle of an entire planet with billions of inhabitants and several tens of millions of actual combat troops (more than, say, real-world China and North Korea simultaneously could muster) is an insignificant footnote in an Imperial war report, without any impact on the Imperium as a whole, frequently unremembered and, well, irrelevant.

** Pretty much the way ''VideoGame/WarcraftIII'' works period. It's hard to raise a large, useful army when you've got a food cap of 100(''90'' before the expansion), going over certain food limits taxes your gold supply and there are units that can use '''7''' food ([[UpToEleven 8]] with neutral dragons); this probably stems from the fact that the game was originally planned to be much closer to what [=DotA=] is. It is also justified by engine limitations: the game can only support about 200 units per player before slowing down.

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* ''Literature/RedStormRising'' by Creator/TomClancy plays on this theme, in a story about a WorldWarThree fought only with conventional weapons, with multiple small groups of military personnel having some small impact on the overall progress of the war in various ways that collectively get more coverage than the supposed "big men" commanding the respective militaries.

* ''WebVideo/CriticalRole's'' second season sees the Dwendalian Empire and the Kryn Dynasty officially go to war with each other in Episode 18. The Mighty Nein pointedly avoids getting directly involved the conflict, instead taking mercenary jobs and pursuing personal goals that specifically take them outside the Empire, to avoid the possibility of a draft. [[spoiler:By Episode 57, the fighting has escalated to a point where the Nein feel they can no longer ignore the war, and Caleb proposes that they [[TakeAThirdOption set themselves to the goal of]] [[PreventTheWar preventing the war]], or at least minimizing the casualties and damage caused by it.]]

Say what?

* ''{{VideoGame/Freespace}}'' was heavily criticized for this, the second installment in particular. Several early missions are intended to fail, and you are given objectives which make absolutely no tactical sense whatsoever, with no justification beyond "need-to-know basis". [[spoiler: As you gain security clearance, it becomes increasingly obvious that this was all part of a ploy to gain control of ETAK which failed spectacularly]] One of your wingmates even lampshades it.
--> Why did we attack the Iceni? Why did we destroy that cargo? I can live with being a pawn if the game makes sense!
* In ''VideoGame/StarWarsTheOldRepublic'' each individual character class has a separate story and goals with varying degrees of relevance to the overall Republic vs. Empire conflict. Canonically, all 8 of these stories are happening at the same time within the larger scope of the war. Players can take a more direct role in the war effort by doing various planetary missions and storylines, but even so it's mostly along the lines of "Hey, as long as you're here on the planet, how about giving us a hand with securing this location/retrieving that doodad/recruiting those allies/etc.?"