Hero Of Another Story / Literature

By Author

• Happens frequently in books by Stephen King, particularly the ones where there are lots of characters. For instance, Sue and the other women that Stu and his group saved from the rape gang, or Dayna Jurgens, from The Stand. Any of the side stories in The Shining, or the stories about the town in IT would also be interesting.
• Frederick Forsyth:
  • Paul Devereaux is this in Avenger. The main character of the novel is Cal Dexter, a Vietnam veteran, lawyer, and sometime unofficial private detective who's hired by a billionaire to kidnap a Serbian war criminal turned arms dealer who murdered the billionaire's son (an aid worker) so that he can stand trial in the United States. Completely unknown to the main character, Devereaux is a CIA officer working with the war criminal to help him become a major arms supplier to Osama bin Laden, in the hopes of drawing him out so they can capture or kill him. Dexter's kidnapping is successful... leaving Devereaux's plan dead in the water, costing the CIA its best shot at Bin Laden, and therefore indirectly causing the 9/11 attacks. Devereaux became the hero of his own story a few novels later in Cobra, where he's put in charge of a covert war against the South American drug trade (having recruited Dexter as his assistant in the meantime).
  • In general, it's not uncommon for Forsyth to reuse or reference side characters from one novel to another; however, they're as likely to be the Villain of Another Story as this trope. (One of the mercenaries in The Dogs of War, for example, formerly served under one of the OAS terrorists who hired the title villain in The Day of the Jackal.)
• Mario Puzo is fond of this, though his protagonists tend to stretch the definition of "hero;"
  • The Godfather: the conference that ends the Mob War between the Corleones and their rivals brings together the leaders of all the major Mafia families not only in New York, but in the United States (except Chicago). Each of them gets a paragraph or two of exposition describing them, their business, and how they came to power, which could be expanded to a novel of its own.
  • The Sicilian: Michael Corleone is this in the novel, playing a small but pivotal (and unknowing) role in Giuliano's eventual downfall.
• Matthew Reilly:
  • Many of the people targeted by The Conspiracy in Scarecrow.
    • Israeli soldier Simon Zemir has spent a lot of time training to stop the villains and working out their plans on his own, showing up out of nowhere during the finale and nearly managing to stop the Evil Plan by himself.
    • British spy Alec Christie and Mossad agent Benjamin Rosenthal spent a lot of time undercover, independently spying on the Big Bad.
    • CIA agent Damien Polanski stole all kinds of documents from the Soviets and aided various cold war defectors before becoming a Broken Ace.
    • General Weitzman foresaw the possibility of the country's missile system being compromised and pushed through a program to test soldiers for their ability to manually take control of the missiles while they were in mid-flight.
  • Both Trent in the first Shane Schofield book and Knight in the third have had long, cat and mouse games with ICG killers which remain largely off-screen.
• Rick Riordan: As the "Riordanverse" grows, Rick likes having his characters have brief appearances in crossovers more and more.
  • The Camp Half-Blood Series, Rick's "main" series:
    • Percy Jackson and the Olympians: Thalia and Nico start out as side characters, but head off in their own direction after a while. They come back occasionally, and as they are demigods (and children of the other two-thirds of the "Big Three") no matter what, they often hint at their own ripe share of brushes with death. Nico even gets kidnapped off-screen in what we presume to be an epic and never-to-be-known quest.
    • The Heroes of Olympus: Retroactively, Jason Grace. We know that while Percy was fighting Kronos, he was fighting the Titan Krios, and that he's been on quite a few quests— enough for him to start rehabilitating the reputation of the Fifth Cohort and be elected praetor. After he regains his memory, Riordan sprinkles in little references (such as going to Charleston with Reyna and having some kind of experience with the dead of the Civil War), but fleshes nothing out.
  • Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard: Percy Jackson and Annabeth Chase (the protagonists of The Camp Half-Blood Series) show up, with Annabeth being the title character Magnus's cousin. Percy and Annabeth show up in The Ship of the Dead to help train Magnus and Alex on their journey.
• Children of the Red King: Benjamin's private investigator parents occasionally reference being involved in interesting cases unrelated to the magical war between good and evil that dominates the plot (although this also causes them to neglect their son at times). In Midnight for Charlie Bone, Mrs. Brown mentions how an investigation into the disappearance of a window washer who later turned up in a cave in Scotland. In the third and fourth books, they take their son to Hong Kong while spending several months on the trial of a stolen necklace.
• Tolkien's Legendarium:
  • J. R. R. Tolkien did this several times in his Middle-Earth stories. He was creating a mythology, and he knew that mythologies are never perfect records, and there are always gaps which leave tantalizing hints of other stories.
  • The Fall of Gondolin: As Tuor and Voronwë are travelling towards Gondolin, they briefly cross paths with "a tall man clothed in black and holding a long black sword then appeared and came towards them, calling out a name as if he were searching for one who was lost. But without any speech he passed them by." Tuor will never know who that person was, as they've never met before, but he is his own first cousin Túrin, fleeing from the ruin of Nargothrond as told in The Children of Húrin.
  • In The Hobbit, while Gandalf is certainly involved in the main plot, he also spends much of the novel attending to "other matters," This turns out to be destroying the Mirkwood stronghold of the Necromancer, otherwise known as Sauron.
  • In The Lord of the Rings, there are hints of adventures that the other members of the Fellowship had before meeting the hobbits at Rivendell, such as Aragorn's capture of Gollum, or Gandalf's escape from the Ringwraiths. At one point, Sam wonders if Gollum thinks he's the hero of his own story.
  • Both stories focus on the exploits of Gandalf, who is only one of five wizards who were sent into the world by the Powers That Be, each with missions of great importance to all of Middle-earth. Little is known of what Saruman did before he became evil, and Radagast is only mentioned fleetingly. The other two wizards, Alatar and Pallando, are not even named in the main story but it is mentioned elsewhere that their actions in the East were crucial in weakening Sauron's forces.
  • There's also the battles at Lothlórien and Dale, which are briefly mentioned and correspond closely with the battles at Minas Tirith. The latter one beneath the Lonely Mountain is stated to be the largest one of them all because of its close proximity to Sauron's Easterling forces.
  • Overall, the entire northern arm of the War of the Ring is only briefly described in the books, despite its importance in diverting a very large portion of Sauron's strength from Lórien, Rivendell, and Gondor. The Men of Dale and the Dwarves of the Lonely Mountain gave their southern allies the time that they needed to fight off Sauron's primary forces and destroy the One Ring.

By Work

• 100 Cupboards: The first book describes how only two people on Earth (neither of whom actually appears in the series) would recognize a piece of wood from another dimension due to some interesting experiences. One lives in a bad part of Orlando, Florida and "very much wanted to believe that most of his childhood had not actually happened." The other is the widow of a French WWI soldier whose husband came home "with some very strange stories and a small sapling in a tin cup," having been given that unique tree as a gift by someone from that dimension.
• 2666: Lola Amalfitano’s exploits abroad serve as a counterpoint to Oscar’s story.
• 4 Kids in 5E and 1 Crazy Year:
  • Most of the kids in the class besides the narrators clearly have a lot going on with their personal lives and backgrounds (such as adoptee Natalia, who is learning more about her biological mother), their investment in the writing class (it is mentioned Ashley takes her notebook to bed with her every night), or both (such as the artistic Ah Kum having an abusive father and fond memories of China and Lin gradually becoming an invested student even though he has just moved from China and speaks no English at the start of the year).
  • Giovanni's Cool Big Sis Anna Marie is learning about fashion and garment-making and spends a lot of her free time gathering discarded materials and making perfect copies of unaffordable dresses that she sees in the stores.
  • Vinny the Hammer is a local boxing legend who some of the kids find contemplatively browsing through the poetry section of the library one day, emphasizing how there are lots of people experiencing the same feelings that they have about reading and writing.
• Possible Ur-Example: many warriors — particularly Trojan ones — of The Trojan Cycle are only fleetingly mentioned, and could well have had other adventures before or after the war. Virgil took a brief appearance by the Trojan Aeneas as free rein to cast him as literally the hero of another story: The Aeneid.
• Not dissimilarly, a number of well-known characters from the Arthurian cycle - Percivale, Tristram, Merlin and quite possibly Lancelot - appear to have started out as the heroes of stories of their own that were gradually absorbed into Arthur's.
• The Afterward: Sir Erris Quicksword was the leader of the seven companions and the hero of the quest that saved the world from the Old God, and was crowned queen at its end. In the book itself, she's a supporting character to Kalanthe and Olsa.
• A to Z Mysteries:
  • In The Ninth Nugget, Thumbs is implied to have lost his thumb in a bear attack that he walked away from otherwise unscratched, but no details are given.
  • As the kids investigate a case at their school in The School Skeleton, they briefly encounter another group of kids doing the same thing, who have solved some of the same clues they did. It only affects the plot to show that the mystery is one that the whole student body is being encouraged to solve.
• Another Note's Beyond Birthday. Except he's more properly the villain of another story. His case was mentioned briefly in Death Note.
• Discussed and lampshaded in one of the Aubrey-Maturin books by Stephen Maturin and Jagiello, right after Jagiello loses his grip on a ship's mast, narrowly avoids the deck, plunges into the sea, and is pulled out roaring with laughter: in a bit of metafictional humor, Jagiello jokingly says that the hero of the story never dies in such a unspectacular fashion, and that he considers himself to be the hero of his own story.
• Avalon: Web of Magic's main plot is about the forces of darkness trying to conquer all the worlds and corrupt their inhabitants. However, our protagonists run a refugee camp on Earth, so the narrative is centered there.
  • Zach is the last human on Aldenmor and an orphan raised by a mistwolf pack, which he was later exiled from. Although embittered by this, he remains committed to fighting the Sorceress with the help of his bonded dragon. We know this because he was the deuteragonist of one book and played only bit parts in the others.
  • Lorelei is one of the web's unicorn protectors and a teacher at Dalriada Academy. She shows up in the fourth book so Emily can heal the trauma of having her horn cut off, helps Emily to defeat a siren, and then...basically goes off to do her own thing.
• Bazil Broketail: Evander is the main protagonist of The Wizard and the Floating City side story, unrelated to the main Bazil Broketail series apart from the fact that it's taking place in the same setting. Serena is the deuteragonist of the story.
• At the end of Beowulf, there's a passing-of-the-torch moment between the title character and the young warrior Wiglaf after they kill a dragon together, and Beowulf lies dying of his wounds. It's implied that Wiglaf would go on his own grand adventures, but if anyone ever chronicled them, that poem has been lost.
• The Bone Wars: Professor Cunningham, the leader of the third expedition, only has a few scenes but comes across as an equally talented fossil hunter who has more professional ethics than Babcock and DeMott (both of whom sabotage him at times, with Cunningham retaliating against Babcock at least once), while also using his influence to try to prevent the mistreatment and exploitation of Native Americans.
• The William Johnstone novel Brotherhood of the Gun. After the heroes win a shootout a local deputy named Lars shows up, having heard the gunfire as he returned from pursuing a pair of cattle rustlers. When it's commented that the local undertaker has six new bodies to bury, Lars says it's eight bodies, as he caught up to the rustlers and brought them back draped over their saddles.
• Buffyverse:
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
    • In Spike & Dru: Pretty Maids All in a Row: Ariana describes Watchers Council director Trevor Kensington as "the oldest man she had ever seen" as well as "the most powerful." He has magical talents unmatched by most characters and Skrymir knows him by sight and asks "Will you ever die?" during their duel. All of this implies that Kensington has had his share of heroic exploits that the readers never learn about.
    • In The Gatekeeper Trilogy, Buffy and her friends are busy globe-trotting to deal with an apocalyptic threat which is causing Sunnydale to be even more dangerous and plagued by monsters than usual. Willow's fellow teenaged witch Amy Madison finds herself stepping into the Scooby Gang's role to try and protect the people of the town and does a good job at it, even though her efforts are only shown in two chapters of the Doorstopper trilogy.
  • Angel: In Stranger to the Sun, once Voice with an Internet Connection character Franklin Ayers-Bishop gets an inkling about the true nature of the Evil Plan, he quickly organizes many wizards in different countries to respond to the ritual the Big Bad is doing to permanently shroud the Earth in darkness, all without ever meeting another named character in person.
• In Castle Hangnail, two of the castle's minions are a talking goldfish and an animate voodoo doll named Pins. The goldfish reflects on Pins's heroic journey crossing the desert and fighting monsters, all carrying the goldfish in a plastic bag. The narrator observes that it shows that minor characters can also have been heroes.
• In The Chronicles of Narnia, where the protagonists from our world might be The Only One for the brief time they are there, but Narnia exists for thousands of years without them and is said to have many adventures and heroes of its own that we never hear of (as well as many times where nothing exciting at all is happening). The (adult) Pevensie children become this in The Horse and His Boy and Shasta is this to them (his being the story we get to see).
• In Ciaphas Cain (HERO OF THE IMPERIUM):
  • Amberly Vail clearly has lots of adventures fighting enemies of the Imperium in between those times when her path crosses with Cain's. Her footnotes occasionally make references to these.
  • In stories when Cain is serving with the 597th Valhallan it's also usually mentioned that there are several other regiments on the same planet (most notably "Duty Calls", where he notices a young Commissar who shows enough signs of competence that he wonders how he did later on).
  • Several minor characters wrote similar memoirs to Cain (that is similar to his "official" memoirs, not the candid ones that the stories consist of). Most notably Sulla (who's only a Lieutenant/Captain at the time of the books, but is Lady General by the time she wrote them). Other examples include the Medic (who was essentially a fictionalised James Herriot) from "Death or Glory" and Sgt. Tyber, who went on to write a book about the events of the same.
• Colin Lamb from Agatha Christie's The Clocks. Even though he's the (partial) narrator of the novel, whose written accounts of the murder investigation helped Hercule Poirot reach the solution of the mystery, Colin himself contribute nothing to the investigation, as he's more concerned with his duties as a British Secret Service Agent.
• While Connie is The Chosen One, she isn't the only adventurer out there thwarting disaster in the Constance Verity Trilogy. There's Professor Arthur Arcane (ghost-expert), Dr. Ishiro Hirata (the world's leading Kaiju expert and mech-pilot), Doctor Dynasty (Master of Mystic Arts), Eloise Purvis (leader of the World Crime League Task Force), Mariana Challenger (Explorer of the Unknown), Caligula Fox (World's Greatest Detective), Amun (an immortal mummy from Ancient Egypt), Peter Tachyon (Master of Time) and countless others.
• Two of colleagues of the anti-kidnapping expert protagonist in The Danger (by Dick Francis) are in South America, negotiating for the release of an oil executive whose kidnapping they believe was an inside job. It's never revealed who was behind that kidnapping or whether they get the executive back safely.
• In the Daniel Faust series, FBI Special Agent Harmony Black is basically a classic urban fantasy heroine, veteran of many past adventures, squaring off against some evil bastards. Too bad for her, this series is about the evil bastards.
• Famously discussed in the opening lines to David Copperfield.
  "Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show."
• In Devil Venerable Also Wants To Know, it's shown that there exist books from other worlds that tell the same story but with different characters as the protagonist and point-of-view character. Wenren E, the protagonist of the main narrative, receives a copy of a book in which he's only a side character and Baili Qingmiao, a side female character in his own story, is the protagonist and there turns out to also exist a book trilogy that has He Wenzhao, Baili Qingmiao's boyfriend, as the protagonist instead.
• Dortmunder: In The Road to Ruin, Kelp buys a fake ID that previously belonged to a man named Harbin before he moved onto another alias. Very little is revealed about Harbin, but he is on the run from a European dictatorship and is one of the few people ever to escape their main assassin.
• Down to a Sunless Sea: As the narrator and the passengers on his plane struggle to find a place to land, they sometimes talk to other people on the radio also struggling to survive and help people (although most to all of them are doomed to be killed by the fallout). Most notable are the Funchal airport staff, who are tirelessly coordinating with planes still in the air to help as many of them possible land before they run out of fuel.
• In the Dragonriders of Pern series, Menolly and Piemur are literally this; as well as appearing here and there in the books, they have their own trilogy that runs concurrently with the first three books. This in turn causes major characters from the first few books who appear in the Harper Hall books to themselves be heroes of another story.
• Any named character from The Dresden Files. Special credit goes to:
  • Carlos Ramirez, professional badass and Harry's best friend on the Wardens. The regional commander of the Wardens on the West Coast, he gets into almost as much trouble as Harry.
  • Michael Carpenter's exploits against the Denarians could make a fantastic series on their own.
  • Sanya. As of Small Favor, he is the only active Knight of the Cross, which means that he is single-handedly patrolling the world and putting down various supernatural threats. This is a normally a job for three people, but, as Harry notes, he seems to be handling it with aplomb.
  • Morgan. Come on, we get to hear the stories about how he nuked a shapeshifting demi-god of pure evil, and cut his way through the entire Red Court, fully intent on dueling a being that has Odin matched for metaphysical muscle.
  • Karrin Murphy, and the rest of S.I. After the first few books Harry mentions that S.I. has gotten good enough at handling minor supernatural threats that they don't call him in as much.
  • The Alphas. College kids turned werewolves, dealing with the troubles of young adulthood by day, wolf-shaped vigilantes by night.
  • John Marcone counts as well. The short story "Even Hand" is told from his perspective, and lays ground for potential future narratives. "Aftermath" informs us that, since the death of Harry Dresden, Marcone and his people have repelled several attempts by the Fomor and other bad guys to infiltrate the city.
  • Thomas Raith, Harry's half brother provides vital back up on a number of occasions, but we eventually find that he's a member of the Venatori, and has been fighting the Oblivion War off and on for years.
  • Elaine Mallory, who starts up a similar Wizard for Hire business in Los Angeles.
  • Molly Carpenter, Harry's apprentice, whose Coming of Age Story is going on in the background. After she takes on more responsibilities it's implied her adventures get even stranger and more dangerous.
  • Simon Pietrovich died off-screen before he could really do much of anything in the series. However, one might be interested in what a Senior Council Member who commanded a "brute squad" of combat mages who specialized in hunting down supernatural predators got up to earlier in his career. There has to be good adventures in there.
• Dying With Her Cheer Pants On: Several other teams, such as the Goblin Sharks, attend the cheerleading tournament and clearly have knowledge of the supernatural (and implicitly supernatural members) themselves. Unusually for the trope, at least some of them hate the heroes of the main story due to blaming them for having to compete in the tournament (where the lowest scoring squad never gets to go home).
• The Elder Empire: The whole point of splitting the universe into two parallel stories. Of Sea and Shadow is about Calder Martin, Captain of the Navigator's Guild, trying to raise up a new God-Emperor after the old one died, in order to help unite humanity and protect the species from the predations of the Elders; he is opposed by anarchic assassins who want to see the thousand-year Empire fractured since it will be more profitable for them. Of Shadow and Sea is about Shera, Gardener of the Consultant's Guild, trying to stop a Great Elder from resurrecting herself and destroying humanity, and to keep the Empire split so that humanity does not have a single point of failure in a God-Emperor; she is opposed by insane cultists and tyrants who think they can handle the power themselves.
• Elemental Blessings: Ghyaneth's cousin is never seen, but he mentions that she and her husband have been working to counter his plans to kill her to avoid a Succession Crisis. Ghyaneth claims that she's not exactly a hero and is just as ruthless as he is, but the truth of this claim is debatable.
• Emberverse: Although the PPA is an antagonist in the first part of the series, the citizens of Walla Walla regard them as heroes, as it was an expedition from Portland that rescued the city from convicts who had taken over after escaping the nearby state prison in the aftermath of the Change. This trope also applies to many characters the main cast encounter in their journeys. Abbott Dortje, the new Iowa civil government (and Ingolf's brother), the Senegalese pirates, Captain Wellman, the Last Eagle and his successors, and even Justin Gruber are just a few of the people who could become (or are already) heroes to their own people. The current tetrology introduces even more, including Reiko's grandmother and father and the Loyal Men who preserved the Nipponese royal line, King John of Darwin, and the leaders of Topanga and of the Mist Hills.
• The Empirium Trilogy: After Rielle and company split ways with Ilmaire and his companions, Ilmaire doesn't make a further reappearance but he isn't fully out of the picture; excerpts from the letters he sends to Audric, and from his journal, are placed at the beginning of several chapters in both Kingsbane and Lightbringer. The excerpts show his own personal journey as he tries to fit into the crown his recently deceased father left, deal with Merovec, and eventually strike out on his own to find a way to aid Audric and his kingdom with the angelic threat.
• Bean, from Ender's Game, was made the "hero" of Ender's Shadow, though it's technically the same story from a different perspective. There are also further novels (known as the Shadow saga) focused on other characters from the original story.
• Ex-Heroes: Some if the Mauve Shirt Disaster Scavengers such as Mark Larsen and Ilya, appear in flashback scenes as normal people who do a lot of work fighting off zombies and protecting people with them even before the superheroes show up to take them to the Mount at the tail end of their adventures.
• The Exile's Violin: Serge went on many adventures with Jacquie's father and one of them involved finding treasure that is relevant to the main plot; the key that unlocks the chest containing the Exile's violin. He made a lot of friends that look down on Jacquie for lacking his experience.
• This is discussed in Fifth Business. Dunstan Ramsay isn't even the hero of his own story; instead, he (according to Liesl) is destined to be the vital supporting character to everyone else. Strictly speaking, the hero of the story is the successful, handsome Boy Staunton, but the narration only checks in on him now and again.
• In For Whom the Bell Tolls, the partisan leader El Sordo appears to be the best in the area, with many exciting battles under his belt. But the narration focuses on Pablo's band, and we only see Sordo in one conversation scene and one combat scene.
• Gate has the rest of the JSDF: Itami wasn't the only one making friendly contacts in the special region. The Third Recon team also serves as this when Itami is relieved of his command and the team is sent to Akusho.
• The Warhammer 40,000: Gaunt's Ghosts novels make extensive use of other Imperial Guard regiments fighting alongside or in the same area as the Ghosts, with the commanders typically being named, likable individuals. Watch out, though, for the other commanders ever getting character development. If they do, bastardry will ensue at some point during the book.
• Goblin Slayer plays with this in that Goblin Slayer and his party are the "another story". While they clear out goblin dens, a battle against the Demon Lord for the fate of the world is occurring just offscreen, led by Hero, a young adventurer who has been crossing paths with Goblin Slayer since he saved her hometown from goblins.
• In 2013 novel The Gods of Guilt, protagonist Mickey Haller has a brief encounter with his brother Harry Bosch in court; Harry says he's working on "a cold case from 'ninety-four." This is a reference to Harry Bosch short story "Switchblade", which was published the following year.
• Harry Potter:
  • The previous generation characters (Lily, Snape and the Marauders) had more than enough high drama to support their own series. Plus, the epilogue gives us the tantalizing hint of a whole new generation headed for Hogwarts. It's not surprising that novel-length Marauder-era and next-generation fanfics are so common.
  • The Order of the Phoenix, a resistance group that fights Voldemort. Both the past Order (which disbanded before the beginning of the series) and the present incarnation are alluded to having many off-screen adventures that we never hear about.
  • Albus Dumbledore was apparently the Harry Potter of his day — his most famous feat was his defeat of the previous Dark Lord before Voldemort, Predecessor Villain Gellert Grindelwald, in what is regarded as the greatest Wizard Duel in history. Grindelwald also happened to be his Evil Former Friend, First Love, and (since Dumbledore swore off love after him) the love of his life. Deathly Hallows briefly touches on his past, and the Fantastic Beasts films cover his conflicts with Grindelwald.
  • In Deathly Hallows, while Harry, Ron, and Hermione were on the run from the Death Eaters and hunting down Voldemort's Horcruxes, Neville, Ginny, and Luna formed an alternate trio of heroes at Hogwarts, turning the students of Dumbledore's Army into La Résistance and leading them in defying Snape's and the Death Eaters' reign of terror at the school.
• Helen and Troy's Epic Road Quest:
  • According to Waechter, a random plumber in North Dakota pulled an enchanted mace from granite and was named King of the Djinn for it.
  • At the battle arena in Gateway, Nevada, Helen and Troy meet Smith, a seasoned warrior who was promised a seat among the gods if he beats 77 monsters in his lifetime, Clifford the Cyclops being his 41st match.
  • Pollux mentions a quester in Colorado — a middle-manager — who's quest involves procuring a golden fleece or else "you can kiss the Atlantic Ocean goodbye."
• Hollow Kingdom (2019):
  • Many animals with their own focus chapters, such as a polar bear searching for her lost cub, only have small parts of their large stories shown.
  • S.T. occasionally finds notes or graffiti left by people who avoided being infected and were trying to find loved ones, warn other people to avoid technology, or get to safer areas. A parrot acquaintance of S.T. also recalls people with farms in the countryside riding around on horseback in the final days of the outbreak, shouting offers of sanctuary. It doesn't appear that any of their efforts succeeded, as the only confirmed human survivor is a baby several states away.
• Honor Harrington:
  • Admiral Hamish Alexander, Earl of White Haven, is already an admiral when the series begins, and thus spends most of his time commanding large fleet actions that are analyzed in exhaustive detail by the main characters after the event. Probably the first notable instance of this is the Third Battle of Yeltsin, a spectacular Manticoran victory that was critical to the opening phases of the war — which we never see.
  • In Echoes of Honor several prisoners have spent years hiding in the bush after faking their deaths while receiving assistance from some of the prisoners who remained behind. After the prison revolt, they spend a lot of time capturing (or lynching) fugitive members of the State Sec garrison, relying on the years they spent learning the island's hiding places. They feel like they could have had their own book, but only get mentioned over about two pages.
• Since The Hunger Games are told entirely from Katniss's point of view, there's a lot of details and stories we miss out on because she is unaware of what's happening.
  • Thresh and Foxface throughout the first novel are off having adventures completely separate from Katniss. Foxface and Katniss unknowingly cross each others paths a couple of times but Katniss only runs into Thresh once during the games. Thresh is also apparently off having a major battle with Cato for several days while Katniss and Peeta are in the cave.
  • In the first half of the first book, Peeta could be considered this as he has some agenda and his own adventures with the Career Tributes. We find out about some of these actions later after he has revealed his true colors.
  • The Avox Girl, who apparently had an entire adventure before she ever crossed paths with Katniss.
  • Bonnie and Twill. Katniss hears the first half of their story but is left wondering what happened to them.
  • We also never find out what the rebel movement was up to before Katniss came on the scene (it's way too big and organized to just be a reaction to one defiant act), or how and when Finnick, Johanna, Beatee, etc all joined it and their stories.
  • Nor do we see Gale evacuate what remains of District 12 after they are bombed. He is considered by many a literal hero.
• In the Hyperion Cantos, Rachel Weintraub, who we see travel to the far future at the end of Fall of Hyperion, and then learn that she later returns to a (slightly less distant) the future. Just read the books.
• InCryptid features the ghost Rose Marshall as a minor recurring character and Honorary Aunt of the protagonists. She's the main protagonist of the Ghost Roads series by the same author.
• Roran Stronghammer of the Inheritance Cycle is an example. He's technically a point of view character, but over the course of Brisingr he slaughters nearly one hundred men from atop an ever-growing mountain of their shattered corpses, is summarily beaten to within an inch of his life for disobeying orders, immediately goes out and wrestles an Urgal chieftan into submission, and leads his new troops to several important victories over The Empire. And everyone completely forgets about him once Eragon gets back from his vacation, to the point that he isn't even mentioned during the Final Battle.
  • Saphira gives a blessing of sorts to an infant girl, later informing Eragon that the girl won't have an ordinary life after receiving it, and that what he just witnessed was the beginning of a whole new legend. And then it turns out that they screwed up and cursed her to suffer other people's problems. After they find out, they try to remove the curse, but only partially remove it, resulting in someone who is aware of other people's problems, but is not inclined to help. It's implied that she is now on a path to become a villain.
  • An even more blatant example comes in Brisingr, when Angela asks Eragon to bless a mother and daughter whose fortunes she had just read. She even lampshades this later by refusing to tell Eragon anything about the two, and they only have one more brief appearance in the final battle in Inheritance.
  • Eragon's mentor (and father) Brom has had a century's worth of adventures, which include founding the Varden (the rebel group opposing Galbatorix), including his lifelong vendetta against the Forsworn, the traitorous Dragon Riders serving Galbatorix. Special mention goes to how he met his friend Jeod, another supporting character who encounters Roran in the second book; Paolini has personally expressed interest in writing a prequel expanding on that topic.
• The Ink Black Heart: Jago's oldest daughter from his first marriage, Christabel, is The Ghost, but is repeatedly described as standing up to Jago when he abuses her sisters (only to get hit herself) and seeking online information to help her family get out from under Jago's thumb online.
• Robin Hood as "Locksley" in Ivanhoe. One could argue that it led to the Legend of Robin Hood actually being a popular thing; like an ancient spinoff.
• Jack Ryan: Due to the scale of the novels, an enormous number of characters qualify as this. To cite only the most recurring ones;
  • Dan Murray is largely Jack Ryan's counterpart at the FBI, one of their star officers who eventually ends up head of the organization. Ryan also has several foreign counterparts, most notably Sir Basil Charleston in Britain and Sergey Golovko in Russia.
  • All of the CIA's senior management that we first meet in The Hunt for Red October qualifies. Bob Ritter is said to have had a very successful career running spies behind the Iron Curtain. Admiral Greer is a naval veteran who fought in the Pacific theater of World War II. Director Arthur Moore served in the OSS in the same war, and later in the CIA in The Korean War before leaving the service to become a judge.
  • For that matter, quite a few of the politicians have their own exciting backstories. President Durling served as a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne during The Vietnam War. President Fowler and his unnamed predecessor, meanwhile, never got close to any military or foreign policy work, but both of them only entered politics after a career as mob prosecutors, the latter even surviving an assassination attempt.
  • John Clark was originally supposed to be this, a character written for one action sequence in The Cardinal of the Kremlin in which he extracted a pair of Soviet defectors from the USSR. He proved so popular with fans that Clancy brought him back as a main character in the following novel, and he stayed on as part of the main cast after that (even getting a couple novels of his own).
• James Bond: Bond has two main foreign counterparts, René Mathis in France and Felix Leiter in the United States. The latter is better remembered due to his much larger role in the movies. In the books, he retires as an active-duty CIA agent after being badly maimed in the second book, but quickly finds a second career as a Pinkerton Detective, while remaining in the CIA's version of the reserves, both of which allow him to still cross paths with Bond from time to time.
• John Putnam Thatcher:
  • In Accounting for Murder, NYPD accountant Fred Cohen has just wrapped up an investigation of a mobster who he helped get deported and casually mentions that he and his superior officer got shot at by a mobster during The Roaring '20s.
  • Kate and Lorna, the archaeologists from When in Greece, make some brief references to being part of the Greek Resistance in World War II.
  • In Double, Double, Oil and Trouble, Thatcher gives his summation to two executives who missed the media coverage of the arrest due to briefly-mentioned interesting problems of their own (a CEO preventing a hostile takeover and an accounting expert and college professor thwarting her university's efforts to push her into retirement in favor of an unseasoned up-and comer. Although, given the CEO's "famous tolerance for bribery", he could qualify as the Villain of Another Story instead.
• Journey to Chaos:
  • Many members of the Dragon's Lair were hired to take part in the Starvation War. It took place pre-series and was fought between Latrot and Mithra. As part of his recovery from mana mutation and monsanity Eric watches videos of a couple of their adventures.
  • During the course of A Mage's Power Sathel Aranid bodyguarded Abbott Tolis from Our Lady of Perpetual Mischief abbey and thwarted several attempts on his life. Between that book and Looming Shadow she hunted soulcrafters in Najica with her husband, Retina.
  • Due to a reoccurring case of Blind Jump, Annala becomes one of these in Transcending Limitations. Order speaks of how she is "bouncing around Noitearc thwarting the plans of his other principal servants". She herself will make off-hand reference to her off-screen adventures whenever she pops into the main narrative.
• Judge Dee: Several other stories feature secondary or minor characters who have been working heroically against the villains outside of Dee’s investigation. One minor but notable example is a pair of monks in The Chinese Bell Murder, who have been taken prisoner by false monks who took over their abbey. One of the monks pretended to go along with the criminals but has been spying on them to gather evidence and help the authorities tell which ones are corrupt and which ones are Unwitting Pawns.
• In two of the early stories from Larry Niven's Known Space series ("There is a Tide" and "Flatlander"), a Terran cop named Sigmund Ausfaller shows up as a minor recurring character, but its implied that this guy is an even more competent adventurer than Schaeffer is. We'd have to wait for nearly forty years before Niven would co-author a trio of novels featuring Ausfaller as the hero... and it turns out he's absolutely more competent than Schaeffer was.
• Inspector Javert from Les Misérables is off stopping real criminals when he's not trying to arrest Jean Valjean.
• The first Lorien Legacies book mentions a man in Columbus, Ohio, who captures a Mog scout and tortures him into revealing the Mogs' plan to hunt down the Garde. Upon getting that information, the man known only as the mysterious caller alerts a conspiracy magazine about it before disappearing from the story.
• Malgudi Days: The Municipal Chairman from "Lawley Road". The Talkative Man mentions that the Chairman supplied blankets to the army during the war, before proceeding to say that "That's an epic by itself and does not concern us now", and resuming the tale about himself and the statue on Lawley Road.
• Maul: Lockdown: Artagan has spent decades on the run from the sinister Bando Gora cult working as an undefeated fighting champion and mentor to his son before becoming a Dented Iron guy looking to escape from prison.
• A literal example in Moon Rising; Moon only learns about her mentor's Dark and Troubled Past when she reads about it in a history book. Thousands of years ago, Darkstalker was an incredibly powerful animus dragon who was (supposedly) executed by his lover and best friend when they felt he could no longer be trusted. However, Darkstalker was not killed- simply bespelled to sleep eternally. A spell which broke eventually.
• The Neverending Story lives off this literally. It is maintained by dreams and stories and everyone has one. To quote the narrator time and again throughout the novel, “But that is another story and shall be told another time.” Specific examples include:
  • Pyornrachzark, Blubb, Vooshvazool, and Gluckuk, the heralds that travel to warn of the Nothing early on in the novel. We lose track of them, but presumably they all go on to, at least, make the journey back home.
  • Hynreck, the disgraced hero who left on his own while his comrades followed Bastian, went after a monster who kidnapped his love interest, and won, but we're spared the details and what happens next.
  • Yikka, a mule who served as Bastian's mount for a while, is not exactly an example, but after being granted fertility and a faithful encounter with a pegasus stallion by Bastian, she has a son called Patalplan, a half-mule, half pegasus hybrid that is himself an example, as he reportedly had many peculiar adventures.
  • And then we have The City of Old Emperors, where every single inhabitant qualifies. Or rather, was. The City is the final destination of every single human visitor to Fantastica who failed/refused to go back to the real world. They all inevitably attempted to replace the Childlike Empress, bringing chaos and war to Fantastica before eventually wasting away all of their memories of the real world by abusing Auryn. Once they lost all memories, they became blank husks of the people they were and ended up in the City.
  • If Hykrion the Strong is to be believed, one of the many visitors to Fantastica from the real world was William Shakespeare himself.
  • The biggest one is Atreyu, because after Balthasar is told that he can't leave Fantastica until all the stories he set in motion are finished, Atreyu volunteers to finish all those stories in his place so Balthasar can go home.
• Nevermoor: Fenestra, the housekeeper at the Hotel Deucalion, has secretly been helping rescue Wunimals from persecution and violence in the Wintersea Republic by smuggling them into the Free State, immigration laws be damned. In doing so, she's undoubtedly saved many, many lives.
• In the final stage of the Nibelungenlied, the last survivors of the besieged Burgundians are at last taken out by the retinue of the Gothic king Dietrich of Bern (not Bern in Switzerland, but Verona in Italy). Dietrich, the mythical version of king Theoderic the Great, and his followers Hildebrand et al. literally are the heroes of a whole different cycle of legends and stories, so the decision to bring him in not only was an early example of a "cross-over", but also served to enhance the standing of Gunther and Hagen.
• Pact stars Blake and Rose Thorburn, the same person born as different genders, who inherit their familial heritage of property, books on demon-summoning, and the karmic debt of seven lifetimes worth of monstrous deeds. Early on they meet Maggie Holt, a teenaged goblin binder who's dealing with a prophecy that demands she experience three rounds of "blood and darkness and fire" in return for her family's lives. Though they occasionally assist one another, Maggie feels compelled to deal with her problems her own way-after helping the Thorburns defeat the Incarnation of Conquest, she remarks that being the side character isn't really her thing.
• Piranesi is an Ontological Mystery with an Amnesiac Hero, but late in the story he encounters policewoman Sarah Raphael, who helps him escape his situation. When she explains how she came to be there, it becomes clear that from her point of view, this has been a slightly more straightforward supernatural mystery, and her success in solving it is impressive. One of her colleagues later describes another problem she dealt with, and clearly regards her with admiration.
• Ruled Britannia:: Peter Foster, a suspected petty thief and neighbor of Shakespeare, is arrested and then promptly breaks out of jail after bidding Shakespeare a cordial goodbye, without ever revealing exactly what got him arrested or how he escaped.
• Safehold:
  • Sidmarkian Archbishop Zagyrsk and his staff spend the civil war providing food and medical care for forced laborers, preventing the inquisitors from harming people under their jurisdiction, and smuggling hundreds of children out of concentration camps. However, none of this is mentioned until the end of the conflict, when they meet Green Valley and he reveals his knowledge of their actions and praises them when they except to be arrested or worse as enemy prelates.
  • In the eighth and ninth books, soldiers assigned to at least four concentration camps mutiny to try to save the prisoners (two groups succeed, one fails, and one is wiped out but does save some prisoners) but only of one of these mutinies is shown.
• The Saga of Grettir the Strong:
  • The life of the outlaw Hallmund is apparently quite a story not unlike that of Grettir himself. When Hallmund lies dying, he recites a poem commemorating his adventures, and "many exploits of his did Hallmund recount in the lay, for he had been in every land." Only a short piece of it is given, but it hints at a most extraordinary tale:
    The giant-kind and the grim rock-dwellers,
    demons and blendings fell before me,
    elves and devils have felt my hand.
  • The outlaw Grim who kills Hallmund goes on to become a famous adventurer himself: "Grim became a great traveller and there is a long saga about him."
• The Scholomance: Plenty of students at the Boarding School of Horrors who barely interact with El have interesting backstories and struggles. Notable examples are Luisa being stuck there without preparation due to being a Mage Born of Muggles, Clarita using a Beneath Notice strategy while working to become valedictorian, and Maya Wulandiri putting all of her efforts into trying to gain admission of herself and her family to the Toronto enclave.
• In Second Stage Lensmen, Nadreck of Palain VII. He goes on a solo mission to destroy an enemy base that no one has been able to touch. He does so by inciting the locals into a civil war. However, despite great urging, he absolutely refuses to tell anyone how he did it, because in his eyes the mission was an unmitigated disaster. His shame comes from the fact that he comes from a race of cowards, and he was forced at one point to kill three people directly to complete his mission, rather than causing them to kill each other. To make the point clearer, these people included the highest-ranking enemies at the base, and in a society where Rank Scales with Asskicking is taken to the extreme that means he had to personally fight the hardest targets.
• In The Secrets of Drearcliff Grange School, there are occasional reminders during the earlier parts of the book that the school has plenty of students and exciting events apart from Amy and her friends and their adventures. (Less so after the main plot kicks in and the school gets taken over as part of an Assimilation Plot, because then everything happening at the school becomes part of a single story.) There's also the case of Enid ffolliott, who dramatically appears in time to save Amy from a peril after being missing for two years; it's strongly suggested that what she was doing during those two years was adventurous and possibly world-saving, although we don't get many details.
• * Serge Storms: Many books have supporting or minor characters who have colorful pasts and are involved in their own adventures that Serge has little to no role in (although some would be more of an Anti-Hero of another story). This is most notable with Serge's neighbors during his brief periods of living in suburban neighborhoods or condos (all of whom are introduced in a rambling tangent alongside other more important characters in each book).
  • The minor neighbors in Triggerfish Twist include an inventor who has spent twelve years building a plane in his garage.
  • The Atomic Lobster neighbors include two men in Witness Protection and a Genocide Survivor turned plastic surgeon.
  • The Bit Character condo dwellers in Mermaid Confidential and The Maltese Iguana include board game tournament champion Jen-Jen, Joey (an expelled Scholarship Student football star who was expelled from school for breaking into a chemistry lab and is on the run to avoid process servers out to make him repay the scholarship funds), Alfred and Hazel (who use fake names for reasons no one is quite sure of), Professor Fontaine (an academic testing how long it's possible to live off of delivered goods without ever stepping out of his apartment), Mr. Kelley (who has spent years faking an injury while being spied on by insurance company detectives) and Sit Aston Neville ("the last heir of an infertile lineage on a cluster of North Sea islands dominated by rookeries").
• Shadow Children: Mr. Talbot is a high ranking government agent who secretly leads some sort of organized resistance, and usually helps out the kids. Another revolutionary shows up repeatedly to aid the heroes in book 5 and 6 rescuing them in the former and executing a gambit in the latter. We don't know what his name is, but he goes by Nedley and later Mike, and is implied to be working behind the scenes as a government officer.
• A meta example of this happens in Gregory Frost's Shadowbridge duology. The protagonist Leodora is collecting stories from all over the spans of Shadowbridge. While talking to a sailor she learns of a new story that's spreading for months from the southern spans where she had traveled from. Referring to it as the Navigator's Tale, it's a morality story warning of a wicked whore who had broken many taboos on the island she's from - including riding one of the island's sacred krakens while nude. She tries to leave the island, but the kraken brings her back where the islanders stone her and the kraken and then they drown her in its ink as a purity rite. Leodora is horrified by this tale and vows never to perform it. The story is a combination of what happened that led to the fleeing of Leodora and years earlier - her mother Leonara, that's been corrupted by her uncle's sick fantasies and had some details altered. Leodora sadly notes that now she's become a character in a tale, just like the ones she tells.
• The eight and ninth Erast Fandorin novels, She Lover of Death and He Lover of Death, are two completely separate mysteries being investigated by Fandorin in Moscow at the same time. Each book contains a few passing references to Fandorin's other case.
• Sherlock Holmes VS Dracula, or The Adventure of the Sanguinary Count, basically makes Holmes and Watson this for Van Helsing’s team of vampire hunters in the original novel. The core theme of the novel is that Dracula was fighting Holmes and Watson when he wasn’t dealing with Van Helsing and his allies, Holmes thwarting Dracula’s attempt to travel to America after his efforts in London have come to an end before leaving Van Helsing to track him back to Transylvania.
• Sir Apropos of Nothing seems to be beset with many, many heroes of other stories. Whenever they try to regale him with their adventures, however, he always cuts them off...because he abhors such stories.
• Slacker Before the first book, Felicia Hochuli once engaged in some bold Kid Detective antics to prove that Jordan was innocent of writing graffiti on the bulletin board, which is interesting but unrelated to the main plot.
• Slugfest: The unnamed new coach of the Falcons, a nearby running joke football team, has spent a lot of time training them to be formidable players who actually have a shot at winning.
• Due to the series' large cast, A Song of Ice and Fire is full to the brim with these. Special mention should go to King Stannis (who survived a siege, later described as "They were down to rats and beets, horses and dogs have been eaten long ago"), Dolorous Edd (just about anything he says, but highlights include finding a dead brother of the Night Watch floating in the barrel of wine and being attacked by a bear!), Maester Aemon (the man was 102 years old when he died and has lived through most of the history known to main characters), Aegon the Fifth (A hero from Tales of Dunk and Egg, long dead in main novels), Barristan The Bold, Tormund Giantsbane, Theon's friend Cleftjaw, Mance Rayder and Lord Bloodraven... This list goes on and on.
• Dahlia Lynley-Chivers only appears once in The Sookie Stackhouse Mysteries in the book All Together Dead as a one of the vampire summit judges, but she's the main star of the various short stories and novellas that expand the supernatural universe of the books, often investigating threats to her vampire nest.
• In the Star Trek Novel 'Verse, each series could be considered this to the other ones. However, Star Trek: New Frontier really plays this role. Because Peter David has sole control over New Frontier, any major events that the Excalibur cannot somehow be excused from, such as Star Trek: Destiny, are told through Broad Strokes by the other authors. Whether we actually get to read those stories depends on whether Peter David wants to write them.
  • Two Diane Carey novels, Dreadnaught and Battlestations, are something of Lower Deck Episodes in regards to the series. The main characters are younger Expys of the main Star Trek characters. While they do perform acts to further the plot, when they cross paths with Kirk and company, it's clear for every thing the youngsters have done, the senior officers have done 5 or 6.
• In the Star Trek: Mere Anarchy series, the fourth tale attempts to give the impression that Starfleet captains across the board have noteworthy adventures, avoiding the implications that Kirk is the guy to which everything interesting happens. When Kirk mentions he was present at a particular event, the captain he's talking too responds with a casual "oh yeah, that was you", and it's mentioned that this captain was off having his own adventure at the time.
• Star Wars: The Princess and the Scoundrel:
  • Amidst the hordes of callow Bystander Syndrome sufferers on the ship, Leia also notices two Rebel sympathizers who secretly provided the campaign against the Empire starship funding and information respectively, but neither of them interacts with her on page.
  • A group of people on Madurs have spent some time resisting the Imperial occupiers with bold and clever acts of sabotage (although they do little more than inconvenience the garrison) and preparing covert messages asking for help. However, the protagonists only learn of their existence in the last quarter of the book.
• Star Wars Legends
  • Republic Commando Series:
    • Order 66' has the main commandoes briefly run into several disguised Jedi apprentices who escaped the massacre at the Jedi Temple and are trying to get off-planet (with at least one of them escaping after they are discovered). However, most of the commandoes would object to calling those Jedi "heroes" part of the trope, since the Jedi accidentally kill some civilians while deflecting blaster bolts in a closed space and one of them accidentally cuts down Etain when she tries to save a clone who reminds her of Darman.
    • Near the beginning of 501st, the Special Operations Brigade commandoes are given a list of clone troopers who deserted and ordered to remain on the lookout for them. While most of those commandoes are main or supporting characters who end up on Mandalore, the previously unmentioned Hyperion Squad is never seen or mentioned again. This suggests that Hyperion Squad is on the run from the Empire elsewhere in the galaxy, and that they have different motives for deserting than Clan Skirata.
  • Coruscant Nights: The Gray Paladin Jedi sect spent years training themselves to become minimally reliant on the Force and use weapons besides lightsabers. Two dozen of their members on Coruscant alone survive Order 66 and play a major, offscreen, role in evacuating the survivors of the Jedi Temple. Those two dozen become the backbone of a resistance movement against the Empire on its capital planet. Jax Pavan notes that they have an advantage over their fellow Jedi in avoiding the notice of Palpatine and his Inquisitors due to being able to blend in better with ordinary civilians. Nonetheless, only one Gray Paladin, Laranth Tarak, appears in person or gets a name ^note  Not just in this series, but in the whole EU..
  • The Han Solo Adventures: Gallandro has a very long and well-known list of accomplishments in his gunslinging career. Despite his overall villainous nature, he's actually the hero of another story several times over.
    Badure: Gallandro? Slick, you're talking about the guy who single-handedly hijacked the Quamar Messenger on her maiden run and took over that pirate's nest, Geedon V, all by himself. And he went to the gun against the Malorm family, drawing head bounty on all five of them. And no one has ever beaten the score he rolled up when he was flying a fighter with Marso's Demons. Besides which, he's the only man who ever forced the Assassins' Guild to default on a contract; he personally canceled half of their Elite Circle—one at a time—plus assorted journeymen and apprentices.
  • Wedge Antilles, outside of the X-Wing Series, where he is The Hero. Outside of that series, he's rarely in focus, but almost always there, performing important tasks. In the X-Wing Series, Luke, Leia, and Han Solo are the Heroes of Another Story to Wedge.
  • In general, Lando Calrissian has this role throughout the expanded universe. He regularly crosses paths with Luke, Leia, Han, and Chewie, and they remain close friends, but he isn't part of their family (eventually starting his own) or involved in the Jedi and New Republic business that governs their lives, preferring to chart his own career as a successful businessman with an increasingly diverse set of interests.
  • X-Wing Series: Several.
    • The focus of the novels is on the main characters and their elite unit - Rogue Squadron at first, Wraith Squadron later on. The books take some pains to remind us that these units are only two tiny components of the Rebel Alliance/New Republic's war machine, and that there are millions of other beings also working tirelessly and heroically to defeat the Empire. The most notable examples are probably Colonel Salm and General Crespin: both are introduced as Obstructive Bureaucrats but it quickly becomes clear that they're just like Wedge, officers trying to accomplish their missions while keeping as many of their pilots alive as possible. All of them also acknowledge that the way the Rebel Alliance has promoted its starfighter pilots as Living Legends tends to unfairly overlook all the other elements of the fleet, such as cargo pilots and capital ship crews, who share all the same dangers as the starfighters while receiving none of the glory.
    • Iella Wessiri, New Republic Intelligence. She crosses paths with the Rogues regularly, and ends up married to Wedge, but she's got her own lively career as one of her agency's best spies. Prior to joining the Rebellion, she was also a detective in the Corellian Security Force (she was Corran Horn's partner and the two of them joined the Rebellion together).
    • Mirax Terrik and her father Booster are both legends of the smuggling trade. Their lives intersect with those of the Rogues regularly (due largely to their status as childhood friends of Wedge), but they never abandon their careers, and effectively live the kind of lives that Han and Chewie would if they'd never joined the Rebellion.
  • I, Jedi: Imagine you're a police detective in the Corellian Security Force, partners and best friends with a Jedi Knight. One day you wake up to find that your friend has been killed and your entire galaxy is now under the boot of a fascist regime. You quickly take the Jedi's widow and child under your protection (eventually marrying the widow), then set up an Underground Railroad to help surviving Jedi, their families, and other victims of the Empire disappear and survive under a false identity. Despite doing this for twenty or thirty years, you're never caught. You do all this while continuing to perform your peace-keeping and crime-solving duties as a police officer, and doing it so well that you eventually rise to the position of Director. When you finally retire, you could give all that up in favor of your gardening hobby, but instead decide to start a second career as a benevolent version of J. Edgar Hoover, using a lifetime of knowledge about crime and corruption on Corellia to blackmail corrupt politicians in order to deter their worst abuses and at least occasionally nudge them towards better behavior. ... All of this is the offscreen life story of Rostek Horn, grandfather of main character Corran Horn (who didn't even know about this for most of his life, as his father died before he could bring him in on the secret, and he walked away from Corellia to join the Rebellion soon thereafter). It's safe to say that Rostek's life story could have easily supplied enough material for a book series as prolific as Corran's own X-Wing Series.
    • For that matter, Rostek's Jedi partner, Nejaa Halcyon, also qualifies, having lived a full and exciting life before and during the Clone Wars, which we catch glimpses of in the novel Jedi Trial and the short story Elusion Illusion. There's also Hal Horn, Nejaa's son and Corran's father, who had his own distinguished career as a Corellian Security Force detective.^note The novel appeared before Attack of the Clones invented the principle of Jedi celibacy. Nejaa's wife and son are retconned in hindsight either as Corellian Jedi being a distinct tradition with slightly different rules - which this book had already established as being true - or simply as Nejaa, like Anakin Skywalker, ignoring the rules and having a family that he kept secret from the Jedi Council.
  • Several characters from Children of the Jedi come across as people who were the protagonists of their own intense stories in the lead-up to the book.
    • Master Plett is (or was, as his present status is unclear) a Science Wizard who used botany skills and his wide array of unusual Force powers to benefit the planet he watched over, helped dozens of young fugitivies hide from the Empire after the Great Jedi Purge, defeated attacking forces, and then somehow arranged for the only Honest Corporate Executives in the region to set up shop on the planet he'd had to leave so it could continue prospering. He vanished long before the novels take place, but there is a strong impression that his exploits could have filled a book or two.
    • Cray Mingla is the descendant of Order 66 survivors who remained out of sight while studying under some of the people who were later recruited to work on the Death Star, fell in love with a fellow Force-sensitivie scientist, and tried to transfer his consciousness into a droid body to save him from a deadly disease shortly after they joined Luke's Jedi Order. However, during the main story, her role is rather limited.
    • Triv Pothman is the Sole Survivor of a garrison that spent decades fighting Gammoreans and each other, was Made a Slave, somehow escaped, and transformed from a tough stormtrooper to a kindly gardner and embroiderer.
    • Han's friend Drub McKumb was a Rebel sympathizer and methodical treasure hunter who was kidnapped and brainwashed by the villains of the book but escaped in a moment of lucidity to warn Han about the danger they pose, kicking off the main plot in the opening chapter.
  • In general, the enormous scale of the universe and the prolific number of stories written in it guarantees that Star Wars is full of them. This is especially true if you go back to the early years, when writers were busily expanding the universe beyond what we'd seen in the movies and in the process introducing a plethora of new characters and settings, not all of whom by a long shot could be given the follow-up they deserved. The best example of this is probably the anthologies collected in the Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina, Tales of the Bounty Hunters, Tales from Jabba's Palace.
• The Stormlight Archive: Several. Hoid is a hero to the Cosmere as a whole (if not the Big Good), but his goals on Roshar only rarely intersect with everyone else. The interludes introduce a number of new characters who are running around on their own adventures, a few of whom are in the process of becoming Surgebinders. And of course, at the end of the second book Jasnah comes back, having escaped the ambush on the Wind's Pleasure by teleporting into Shadesmar, where she has been adventuring for months.
• In the Tairen Soul universe, fey compare fate to a musical concert. There are consecutive Dances, whole eras of time (The Chosen Ones are said to lead a Dance). Every Dance consists of smaller Songs and Harmonies; when The Hero sees that a human nobleman owns a Legendary Weapon, he theorizes that the guy is marked out to lead one of the former.
• They Thirst: Vulkan's lieutenants tell him about large groups of humans fleeing the city via the Santa Monica Mountains, many of whom are getting past their patrols, but none of those people are shown, as the story remains focused on those survivors still in the city.
• Trash of the Count's Family has a unique example in Choi Han; he's the protagonist of the story-within-the-story The Birth of a Hero. However, the protagonist of this story is Cale, who reincarnates into the world of ''The Birth of a Hero''. Choi Han remains a main character, however.
• True Grit: By-the-Book Cop LT Quinn and Scarily Competent Tracker William Waters are unseen marshals suggested as other candidates who could help Mattie chase Tom Chaney.
• Mikhail Tanner and his quest to locate and mercy kill his beloved Sonya Karp after she turned Strigoi in Vampire Academy. The quest is briefly mentioned but never fully described.
• In The War Gods, the white wizard Wencit of Rūm often crosses paths with the main characters Bahzell and Brandark. More than once he gives them help with whatever adventure they're on at the moment, but he always goes his own way after a while. All that they (and the reader) ever know is that Wencit is working to some schedule of his own, seeking to prepare for the day when the evil Council of Carnadosa tries to conquer Norfressa.
• In Warrior Cats, there are several times when characters other than the heroes are off on their own quests to save the Clans. There are several such as Yellowfang, who in the first book was organizing a resistance against Brokenstar; Stormfur, who was helping the Tribe become strong enough to defeat the Mountain Invaders; Tigerheart, who spied on the Dark Forest so that he could protect the Clans; and even Jingo, a cat trying to protect her band of former kittypets after their lives were ruined by Sol.
• The protagonists of Watchers of the Throne occasionally cross paths with people who have their own stories going on off-page; often, this is tied to another Warhammer 40,000 book or campaign. Among them is Tor Garadon, returning from his actions in Gathering Storm; Roboute Guilliman, who returns from Gathering Storm and then departs for Dawn of Fire; and Navradaran, who has a more prominent role in Vaults of Terra, but is also noted as suspiciously absent in second books of both Vaults and Watchers.
• In The Wee Free Men, the second Discworld YA novel but the first to be integrated into the adult novels' chronology, Miss Tick spends most of the novel off-page, seeking out Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg and convincing them to return to the Wold with her in order to begin Tiffany's training.
• An unusual example in that the character in question is actually a key villain of the main story: Demandred in The Wheel of Time makes references to having had a series of adventures on the other side of the world in which he fulfilled a set of prophecies parallel to those of the Dragon Reborn ultimately leading him to become the ruler and Dark Messiah of The Empire of Shara. Word of God even notes that Demandred was essentially the hero of his own parallel version of The Wheel of Time that the reader just barely gets to glimpse.
• Willow the Movie Novelization: Several years ago, Mauve Shirt Vohnkar went on a years' long adventure to see the splendor of Tir Asleen. He repeatedly clashed with Bavmorda's Mooks during that time and abandoned his quest upon realizing that people like him were needed to protect his home from Nockmaar.
• Wrath of the Lemming Men has General Sir Florence Young (sic), who at the conclusion of the book is being knighted for winning a critical battle which (from the central characters' perspective) was fought completely off-stage.
• Many Defector from Decadence Confederate deserters and people who harbor deserters and/or escaped Union prisoners in the nonfiction book The Yankee Plague are clearly involved in lots of adventure and heroism that the book doesn't cover, much of which is lost to history due to how few of them left behind memoirs of their own.
• Zorro (2005):
  • Many of Zorro's trappings (including the name "Zorro") turn out to have originated in his years as a student in war-torn Barcelona, where he joined a secret society named La Justicia. Originally an Underground Railroad founded two hundred years ago to shelter Protestants, Jews, and other victims of the Inquisition, it has since diversified into fighting other forms of oppression, such as slavery in the colonies, or Napoleon's occupation of Spain. The number of heroes and stories the society must have produced in 200 years is not small.
  • The pirate Jean Lafitte is this crossed with Historical Domain Character. He captures Diego and his friends on their return to California from Spain and holds them for ransom, but he's Affably Evil at worst, eventually shows his better side as he falls in love with Juliana, and has a Lovable Rogue personality that Diego can't help but appreciate. (The real person had a colorful enough career, not just as a pirate but as an American patriot in the War of 1812, to have been portrayed in a couple dozen novels and films).