The gang's all here: Mario, Luigi, Peach... and Haru?
Rokk: Kal-El, I have to tell you — we've heard of Lois Lane, Lana Lang, even Jimmy Olsen, but we've never heard a thing about any "Chloe Sullivan".
Clark Kent: ...Then you don't know me as well as you think.
Clark Kent: ...Then you don't know me as well as you think.
When an established franchise ventures into the Expanded Universe, writers will often rely on familiar characters and past storylines from the official Canon to ensure that fans of the original material are happy. Sometimes, however, they will also take advantage of their greater creative freedom by making up new characters that were never in the original material.
These new characters will often be added to fill a particular need in the new story, and add a degree of novelty to attract more readers. Frequently, they'll fill some gap in the current cast, such as adding a female character to an all-male cast (or a second woman where there was only one before), or adding some other element of diversity, be it racial, geographic, sexual, or simply personality. If the expanded universe work is focusing on a little-shown area of the setting, the canon foreigner might be familiar with this place and able to provide info for the main cast (and by extension the audience). This can spark new interactions and adventures that wouldn't otherwise occur with the "conventional" cast and series format — one of the main points of "expanded universe" fiction to begin with.
If a fanfic or a spin-off is created from a work of fiction and is full of original characters, it may invert this by including some characters from canonicity. Typically, these characters will not be killed off even if original characters do die.
Depending on how well the character fits into the adaptation or how much the fans like them, Canon Foreigners can either be much beloved or much hated, and if popular enough, may be Ret-Canoned into the official canon where they are known as a Canon Immigrant.
Filler Villain is a Sub-Trope of this.
Compare Original Generation characters, who are Canon Foreigners to several canons at once in a Crossover plot, and Canon Character All Along, when a supposedly new character is later revealed to be a well-established character within a canon. Contrast Adapted Out, where a character in the source material is omitted in the adaptation.
See also God-Created Canon Foreigner (when this character comes from the original creator), Toyline-Exclusive Character (toy-related examples of this trope) and Original Character (Fan Fiction canon foreigners).
Example subpages:
Other examples:
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Art
- There is no mention of a demon in the scene Dante and Virgil in Hell is based on, but lo and behold, there's one flying over the scene smiling. It helps make the setting clear to anyone that doesn't know this is based on the Inferno.
Asian Animation
- The Boonie Bears spin-off Boonie Cubs introduces a number of characters who have no main-series equivalents, such as Olivia the owl and Coach Mac the bear.
- The educational spin-off of Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf, Pleasant Goat Fun Class, introduces a character named Miss Earth who shows the goats and Wolffy around an earth-science themed carnival in the third season. She was created specifically for the spin-off and has no main-series counterpart.
Audio Play
- The Big Finish Doctor Who audio plays had Erimem (companion to the Fifth Doctor), Evelyn Smythe (companion to the Sixth Doctor), Hex and Raine Creevey (both companions to the Seventh Doctor), Charley Pollard (Eighth and later, at least from her point of view, Sixth Doctor companion), C'rizz, Samson and Gemma Griffen, Lucie Miller, and Mary Shelley (all companions to the Eighth Doctor) all slotting in around gaps in the timeline of the TV series. However, in "The Night of the Doctor", the Eighth Doctor mentions Big Finish companions, apparently making them Canon Immigrants.
- As of time of writing in 2022, at least a dozen more have been added. Seeing as Big Finish is a longrunner in the same fashion as the series is, consider this entry incomplete and just think "Lots" when considering the amount of Canon Foreigners in the audio adventures.
- The Blake's 7 Liberator Chronicles introduce the Auron scientist Gustav Nyrron, who boards the Liberator in "Solitude" and is promptly dumped at Avon's insistence. He returns in later episodes.
Comic Strips
- In the Bugs Bunny comic strip by Al Stoffel and Ralph Heimdahl, Sylvester the Cat had a human protégé named Cedric. Together they panhandled their way through each day (at least when Sylvester wasn't actively employed somewhere usually with Bugs). Cedric never appeared in the animated films.
Fan Works
- Always Visible: It's pointless for Omen IV: The Awakening fans to look for characters they know in Always Visible - even such obvious ones as Delia and Jo were completely changed in relation to their counterparts, and all the other characters are even more irrelevant to the film.
- Eda Clawthorne's son Strix and Selwyn the Dragon are both exclusive to the mix between The Owl House and The Mask, The Owl Lady's Chick.
- The Undertale fan comic, Inverted Fate, has its later chapters introduce a human girl called Lilac, who was Frisk's friend on the surface before they had a falling out that resulted in her being injured.
- Pokémon Crossing: Several characters created just for the story pop up, mostly relatives to canon characters. The most prominent one is Don Hawkwind, who is Apollo's father and the head of Hawkwind Corp.
- Where the Sunlight Ends: Marilyn Juárez seems to have been created specifically for this fic. However, Peter Three's Spider-Sense flares up to a low level whenever he sees her, so her exact identity is up in the air.
- All my homies hate Athalie Severin: God never made an appearance in Muted, but he decides to here for whatever reason.
Literature
- Foundational Problems
, a crossover between Jenny Everywhere and the SCP Foundation within The Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids, featured an original character as the main Foundational official (Doctor Walrick Hinterlist) instead of one of the well-established Foundation Doctor characters.
- Virgin Publishing's Doctor Who New Adventures novels created a number of new companions for the Seventh Doctor, including Bernice Summerfield, Roz Forrester and Chris Cwej. Virgin's Doctor Who Missing Adventures had Grant Markham, a short-lived companion to the Sixth Doctor. BBC Books' Eighth Doctor Adventures range had Samantha Jones, Fitz Kreiner, Compassion, Anji Kapoor, and Trix MacMillan. Innumerable new villains have occurred in the Doctor Who Expanded Universe. One, Faction Paradox, the (Not-So) Evil Counterpart to the Time Lords, spun off into its own sub-universe of audio plays, comics and novels. They began in novels.
- The Hunger Games: The characters Augustus Braun and Porter Millicent Tripp appeared on the now defunct Capitol Couture website, where they were said to be victors in past Hunger Games. Mags was also featured. However, there is no mention of these characters in either the books or the films. What's more, Augustus was said to be from District 1, though his name is more in keeping with District 2.
- Hotblack Desiato and Disaster Area in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe and subsequently the TV version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1981) were created to replace the sequence with the Haggunenons in the radio series, which was mostly written by John Lloyd, and therefore Douglas Adams didn't feel was "his".
- The first StarCraft Expanded Universe novel, Liberty's Crusade, was a Pragmatic Adaptation of the first game's Terran campaign. Its viewpoint character is a journalist named Michael Liberty who is embedded with then-Colonel Edmund Duke's Alpha Squadron (partly to hide him from Confederate magnates he pissed off with his previous story). With the exception of Queen of Blades (which covers the SC Zerg campaign from Jim Raynor's viewpoint) and Speed of Darkness (which focuses on a group of Confederate Marines on Mar Sara who were Heroes of Another Story to the Player Character of the Terran campaignnote ), the other books don't touch the game campaigns, inevitably creating dozens of Canon Foreigners.
- Although, like the comics, the Star Trek Expanded Universe novels seldom used original recurring characters in the late '80s-early '90s, it was the norm by the late '90s and the modern novels make regular use of Canon Foreigner characters, and there are whole book series that aren't based on the shows and are populated mostly by Canon Foreigners or Ascended Extra characters (e.g. Titan, Vanguard, Corps of Engineers, IKS Gorkon, and Department of Temporal Investigations). In spite of their popularity and critical importance in the Expanded Universe, neither Captain Calhoun nor Elias Vaughn has ever been featured in canonical Star Trek. Although one major character created for the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine novels set after the series was intentionally based on a certain extra who was only seen from the back in a canonical episode.
- Inevitable in Star Wars Legends, since its timeline spans roughly 100,000 years of which the movies comprise about forty. A few standouts such as Timothy Zahn's Grand Admiral Mitth'raw'nuruodo made the jump into canon, along with his name for the galactic capital world, Coruscant.
- Sonic the Hedgehog:
- Stevie, Eggor, and Casear from Sonic the Hedgehog in Robotnik's Laboratory.
- Likewise Carrie the Copyu, Eric the Echidna and The Organizers from Sonic the Hedgehog in the Fourth Dimension.
- Ichneumon (Iggy) the White Mouse from Sonic the Hedgehog and the Silicon Warriors.
- Another Note expands on the LABB Murder case mentioned briefly in Death Note, and introduces L's Evil Twin, Beyond Birthday.
- The Ultima novels introduce Baron Amrik, Ariel, and Sharon, in Ultima Underworld, Cindy, Howard, Philipps, and Zole, in The Cabal of Zole the Mage, Roto, in Adventure Novels: Ultima I, Gauta, in Adventure Novels: Ultima IV, and Aya Mizugami, Takuma Hiura, and Kitasato, the Spirit of Wind, in Monstrous Metamorphosis.
- Many Waters has its protagonists go back to Bible Times and stay with Noah and his family; aside from his three sons and their wives, he is depicted having four daughters. There are also other secondary characters who live in there.
- The Resident Evil novelization by S.D. Perry introduces Trent, a Mysterious Benefactor of sorts. At the time the games had little, if anything, tying them together, so Trent was created as a common point between the books to fill the holes and give them an overarching narrative.
- German writer Gottfried August Burger (1747-1794) adapted and translated Baron Munchausen's narrative of his marvellous travels and campaigns in Russia for German readers around 1786. He elaborated on the original work by Rudolf Erich Raspe by adding a number of companions accompanying the Baron, each having a special ability such as Super-Strength, sharp eyesight, etc. These characters were actually from a lesser known work by The Brothers Grimm titled How The Six Made Their Way In The World. These extraordinary allies to the Baron did make it into other adaptations such as Jean Image's animated films and the 1988 Terry Gilliam film.
- In Search of Dorothy is based on the Oz books and movie and introduces several new characters not in either medium, like the Bull, the Tree, and Trisha the Good Witch of the South.
- Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg's The Positronic Man: When expanding the original story into a Novel, Silverberg introduced several new characters.
- Instead of meeting the robopsychologist Merton Mansky at the regional offices of US Robots, managing director Elliot Smythe and robopsychologist Merwin Mansky came to the Martin house.
- The researchers from Luna City that welcome Andrew to the colonies on the moon.
- Roger Hennessey is the victim of Feingold and Chaney's first legal action to "prove" that robot parts mean you aren't human.
- Trapped in a Dating Sim: The World of Otome Games is Tough for Mobs: Louise Sara Rault, one of the deuteragonists in the Alzer Republic Arc, is original to the Light Novel continuity and never appeared in the Web Serial Novel it was adapted from.
- Universal Monsters: One for the Creature from the Black Lagoon film trilogy — book 5 features a Gill Woman, somehow created by the desires of the Gill Man.
Pinball
- The iconic gumball machine in Twilight Zone was not taken from an existing episode of the series.
- The most prominent toy in Stern Pinball's Batman game (based on The Dark Knight) is a large yellow construction crane that swings out over the playfield — and is nowhere to be found in the movie.
Professional Wrestling
- While several TNA-contracted wrestlers had matches in AAA, the luchador known as Border Patrol specifically represented TNA yet had never worked for it. TNA also has a long running gimmick called "Suicide", to which AAA gave a counterpart in Australian Suicide, who kept the name even after Suicide was renamed Manik.
Radio
- The Adventures of Superman introduced Jimmy Olsen, Inspector Henderson, Kryptonite and the names "Daily Planet" and "Perry White."
- The BBC Radio 4 series The Rivals adds Inspector Lestrade from the Sherlock Holmes books to the adventures of various other Victorian detectives, creating a sort of Shared Universe from unrelated stories.
- Dimension X: In episode fifty, an adaptation of Isaac Asimov's "Nightfall":
- The Latimer from this adaptation is a brand-new character that Sheerin, the psychologist, introduces to Theremon, the newspaper reporter, so that he can interview one of the victims from the Tunnel of Mystery.
- Everyone that Theremon meets during his Vox Pops scene is invented purely for this broadcast. We hear from Pellet (who is a power technician) and a nameless cultist.
- While the characters of the software are guests for New Dynamic English, there are also new characters being interviewed. There's also Elizabeth Moore, who's the host of Functioning in Business, and can be heard socializing with Max and Kathy in the Story Interludes.
- X Minus One: In episode twenty-eight, an adaptation of Isaac Asimov's "Nightfall (1941)":
- The Latimer from this adaptation is a brand-new character that Sheerin, the psychologist, introduces to Theremon, the newspaper reporter, so that he can interview one of the victims from the Tunnel of Mystery.
- Everyone that Theremon meets during his Vox Pops scene is invented purely for this broadcast. We hear from Pellet (an urban resident) and a nameless cultist.
Tabletop Games
- Call of Cthulhu: Nathaniel Ward of the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society's projects is an unusual case. Originally created as a RPG character, the hosts of the Dark Adventure Dark Adventure Radio Theatre series later spoke of him as the hero of a separate program within the audio adaptations' own miniature universe. Eventually, Ward featured in the HPLHS's film adaptation of The Whisperer in Darkness, a monograph, and three of the Society's other radio dramas to date (The Dreams in the Witch House, Imprisoned with the Pharaohs, and Dagon: War of Worlds). He's implied to have an epic life beyond even the aforementioned titles.
- BioShock Infinite: The Siege of Columbia: To ensure that there are an equal number of leader cards for both the Founders and the Vox, two new characters named Meyer Herzog and Owen MacKenner were added to the latter faction to even things out.
- Whenever Clue comes out with an expanded version or spinoff based around Boddy Mansion (as opposed to say, Star Wars or The Simpsons) it seems traditional to add a bottle of poison as a weapon, as well as the appearances of Madam Rose, Sgt. Grey, M. Brunette, and Miss Peach as extra characters.
- In Robotech, the mecha in Strike Force and Return of the Masters are not from the series canon. In-universe, they're generally either intermediary designs between the RDF mecha and the Southern Cross and REF designs, or they're experimental units that didn't pan out for either technological, cost, or political reasons.
- The European release of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Pizza Power Game includes the addition of Canis and Cayman, a mutant dog and caiman respectively, as additional enemies to face.
- Magic: The Gathering: The mage/planeswalker Jodah was created by Jeff Grub for the novelizations of the plot of The Dark and the Ice Age cycle of books, created in 1999 (where the sets were created in 1994-5). He'd prove popular enough to get an Avenger card in Planar Chaos.
- The NERV White Paper: This Neon Genesis Evangelion RPG game introduced Maria Vincennes, a female EVA pilot from America.
- The Warhammer 40,000 RPG Deathwatch has six Space Marine chapters, five of them are from Warhammer 40K proper, and the sixth chapter, the Storm Wardens, are an original creation of Fantasy Flight Games. Similar on the Blood Ravens created for Dawn of War.
Theatre
- The Most Happy Fella, adapted from the straight play They Knew What They Wanted, built the comic Beta Couple of Cleo and Herman out of whole cloth, and gave Tony a sister Marie to object to his marriage. (In the original play, the objector is the Catholic padre; also, Amy jokingly refers to herself at one point as 'Cleo', playing off Antony and Cleopatra.)
- Several characters in As You Like It (which was Shakespeare's adaptation of the Thomas Lodge novel Rosalynde), most importantly Touchstone and Jacques (of "All the world's a stage" fame). The rest of the Canon Foreigners in the story are all related to them in some way: Jacques, being a cynical philosopher, gets a scene where he plays off the idealistic, music-loving "Amiens", while Touchstone's subplot necessitates the inclusion of his love interest, "Audrey, a country wench", a country priest named "Oliver Mar-Text", and "William", Audrey's ex-boyfriend.
- Swiss Miss from Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. Within the actual story, it's more or less acknowledged that she was created to add a female villain to Spider-Man's otherwise male rogue's gallery.
- A lot of characters in the Sera Myu musicals. Sailor Astarte, Space Knight, Lemures Baba, a whole bunch of new Shadow Galactica members...it'd take too long to name every new character introduced.
- Noah Smith's stage version of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde adds two female characters: Helen, the beautiful and intelligent young woman who attracts Jekyll's interest, and Cybel, the prostitute who forms a relationship with Hyde.
- The Tsukiuta series tends to have some of these in every entry. There are several recurring actors who have played original characters in multiple series entries, particularly Sean Suzuki, who has been in 5 of the 8 entries so far, playing a total of 7 different characters.
- Westeros: An American Musical: The Interactive Narrator is a talking antropomorphic raven. Antropomorphic talking ravens don't exist in the story the play is parodying.
- The musical It's a Bird... It's a Plane... It's Superman features more of these than established characters. Superman fights against Dr. Abner Sedgwick, an embittered scientist who never won the Nobel prize despite coming close several times. His assistant, Jim Morgan, is a Romantic False Lead for Lois Lane, who also contends with the unwanted affections of her co-worker Max Mencken, a chauvinistic former song-and-dance man who hates Superman (and is something of a Supporting Villain Protagonist). Meanwhile, Max's secretary, Sydney Carlton, hides her affections for her boss by making advances on Clark Kent.
- Sylvia, the nymph messenger and close friend of Eurydice's, is original to the opera L'Orfeo, and while Apollo is a Greek God who fathered Orpheus in some traditions, he doesn't normally feature in the Orpheus and Eurydice myth.
- In Eurydice, Eurydice's father is unique to the adaptation, as even in stories where he's mentioned at all (usually said to be Apollo) he doesn't feature in the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.
- Orpheus in the Underworld has John Styx, Pluto's jailer, who's original to the opera.
- The Pantomime versions of Cinderella and Aladdin have Buttons and Wish-washy respectively, who give the protagonists someone to talk to and provide comic relief.
- Pinocchio: The Musical adds a bunch of characters, such as Geppetto's coworker and future wife Angela, Lampwick's mother and a gossip-loving owl that lives in the Blue Fairy's house.
Theme Parks
- In Disney Theme Parks, Star Tours introduces the Star Tours travel agency, the StarSpeeder 3000, the Tzarina luxury yacht, and a third Death Star, retconned as a worldcraft habitation sphere. Star Tours: The Adventures Continue introduces Ace the AC-38 droid, the StarSpeeder 1000, and Spaceport THX1138. The G2 repair droids, G2-4T and G2-9T, and Rex, the RX-24 droid, appeared at both rides. In Tokyo Disneyland, the max-W 100, P-6, and S-4 PanaRobo droids are manufactured by Matsushita Electric (Panasonic), the F series repair droid F-24 appeared at the first ride, the F-25 droid appeared at both rides, and the RX-Series pilot droid HHG-RX appeared in The Adventures Continue.
- At Universal Studios:
- E.T. Adventure shows all of E.T.'s friends that weren't shown in the film or any of its spin-off material, including Tikli, Orbidon, and Magdol.
- Hagrid's Magical Creatures Motorbike Adventure has the Blast-Ended Skrewts, which never appeared in the Harry Potter movies. Slightly averted as they did appear in the books.
- Kung Fu Panda Adventure features Kang, a villainous wolf pirate determined to stop the heroes from achieving their goal.
- Lord Darkenon, the villain of Poseidon's Fury, is not a part of any form of Greek mythology, instead being a character created just for the attraction.
- Star Trek Adventure introduced new Federation recruits, a Klingon crew, the Preceptors, and the planet Akumal 7.
- The T-1000000 or "T-One Million" in Terminator 2 3-D: Battle Across Time, making a cameo in the Nuclear Twilight comic.
- EVAC was created just for Transformers: The Ride, servicing as the Autobot that primarily deals with evacuation matters, as his name would suggest.
Visual Novels
- Moe Mortelli from Daughter for Dessert is mentioned (as "a fat guy on a trench coat") once in Double Homework. He gives Johanna a toaster. Wonder where he got it?
- Koko, the famous singer from Dating My Daughter, reappears in Melody as a rising star. The Perfect Ending stems from Melody being able to tour with Koko.
- Georgina, also from Dating My Daughter, appears as a fashion show model in the Cool Aunt Ending.
- The player character in Namco High is one of the Prince of all Cosmos' many cousins, created exclusively for the game.
Web Animation
- The Transformers: Combiner Wars: Maxima is created by the Machinima team to be an original entity in their series who wasn't present in the comics the show adapts from.
- DSBT InsaniT: ???'s Guardromon Mooks and Tyrannomon are from Digimon. Killdra even references this.
Killdra: That's copyright infringement. You don't have the license to use trademarked characters like those.
- The bus from The Magic School Bus is added to the cast as of episode 7.
- Dreamscape: Vampire Lord comes from Yu-Gi-Oh!.
- Madballs:
- Skull Face's exposed brain was an inanimate object in the original eras. The web series turns him into a new character named Lobe, separate from Skull Face's being.
- Many Madballs in the webseries-backed toyline, both released and scrapped, are characters that never existed in the 80s era.
- Zatanna: Trial of the Crystal Wand: Damon Zatara, Zatanna's brother is a character made exclusively for the cartoon. In the comics, Zatanna was an only child and the closest thing there's ever been to Damon is her younger cousin Zachary Zatara, who didn't exist until three years after the pilot was released.
- Fazbear and Friends (ZAMination): This is most often played in Fazbear and Friends, which features characters that do not appear in the games but were created for the series, such as Circus Blueby, Girl Foxy, Girl Bonnie, Purple Girl, Purple Dog, Red Montgomery Gator, Bunzoey, Sissy Long Legs and Tabby Lynx because they are not from the games, but from the same series.
Webcomics
- ReBoot: Code of Honor: The Guildmaster and the Code Masters (besides Lens), Gnosis, the Guardian Cadets (besides Little Enzo), Vector, and Exidy are all original characters that were not present in the original series.
Web Original
- Donovan Corbett in Street Fighter: The Later Years.
- Lewis Lovhaug is the White Zeo Ranger.
- The Richard E. Grant Ninth Doctor from the Doctor Who web animation Scream of the Shalka, and his companion Alison Cheney.
- Pokémon/Digimon Mon Wars: While set in Pokémon: The Series, characters from Pokémon Adventures and the games themselves may appear, even though they had yet to show up in the anime. Same could be said on the Digimon with characters outside Digimon Adventure.
- Ultra Fast Pony is an abridged series that nevertheless has a few original characters thanks to creative editing. There's Snuggle Berry, who's referred to a few times but never appears on-screen—and dies in the same episode she was introduced in. There's also Mutation: in UFP she's a separate character, but in the original canon she was just a shared secret identity.
- The Glass Scientists keeps a lot of characters from The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and other victorian novels, but Jasper, a werewolf Audience Surrogate, is a new addition.
- Most of the characters in Wolverine: The Long Night that aren't Logan, including the Big Bad, a young mutant named Hudson Langrock. The second season adds a few canonical characters like Gambit, Mastermind and Master Mold, but also features a new character named Marcus as Logan's sidekick.
- Defunct Hunger Games website Capitol Couture introduced the characters Porter Tripp and Augustus Braun, who were said to have won the Thirty-eighth and Sixty-seventh Hunger Games respectively. However, there is no mention of them in either the books or the films. Also, Augustus is from District 1, but his name doesn't fit the usual naming pattern for that district.note
- Kryoz is notably the only member of SMPLive's Tekkit spinoff server who isn't also a member of the main series.
