Sailor Earth / Literature

• Quite a few Animorphs fanfics have somebody new join the team. This plays out interestingly, because the Animorphs already had a Sixth Ranger, but he sold them out to Visser Three to get his parents back. So, naturally, there is some skepticism in the group if they want to take in another new member, Touched by Vorlons or otherwise. But it gets resolved within a chapter, after the Original Character promises not to kill them in their sleep, and Marco mentions he needs a pairing buddy.
  • Another obvious mechanism: Vissers. Vissers Three and One are recurring villains, and with 47 Vissers, only a few of whom we've met, it's easy to bring in a new one.
  • Alternamorphs, the Gamebooks spinoff, actually embrace this trope. In the second one, the reader even plays as the aforementioned Sixth Ranger.
  • There were also the Auxiliary Animorphs who were mostly people who were not suitable controllers (due to being disabled in some way), and a fanfic can easily put the new character in the shoes of one of them, sometimes with varying disabilities. (A good example would be somebody who is autistic and wouldn't be suitable because different behaviours would alert non-controllers that something is up.)
  • There can also be another faction of Auxiliary Animorphs who were deemed unsuitable controllers for other reasons — such as they are children and are too young to be of any use as of yet, they're too old, or they do not have the proper social status to become a good controller.
• The Clique has a common theme in their fanfiction: A new clique comes in and competes with the Pretty Committee.
• Very common in Daughters of the Moon fanfiction. Since the Daughters are either predestined by birth or granted the title by Selene after they earn her favor, many fanfics involve a new girl with mysterious powers moving to L.A., meeting and befriending the original team, and then discovering that she's a Daughter of the Moon. Either that or the author will create a whole new team of Daughters altogether.
• The Dragonlance series has an interesting inversion in the official Tales trilogy; a historian claims to have discovered evidence that there was a gnome member of the original 'Heroes Of The Lance', who was written out of the Chronicles and his existence completely hushed up by the rest of the heroes.
• With Dragonriders of Pern fics and RP fora, this tends to manifest itself mainly in four ways — all of which have some basis in canon:
  • A dragon outside the five standard colors (female Greens and Gold/Queens, and male Blues, Browns and Bronzes); one that isn't a sport or a runt like Ruth (canonical White dragon). Often written to have special abilities (the ability to talk physically as well as mentally being a popular one).
  • Female Bronze/Brown riders and male Queen riders.
  • Riders with Journeyman Craft ranks (usually Harpers)
  • Children of Lord Holders (Pernese equivalents to princes and princesses) becoming riders. This one does apply to canon character Lessa, established in Masterharper of Pern (covering Robinton's life up until the main series begins) as the daughter of the Lord Holder of Ruatha and the only survivor of her family after Fax's takeover.
• Harry Potter:
  • New classmates, especially ones that they would never let be enrolled at Hogwarts in the books or movies. This could include such canonical characters as Blaise Zabini, whose existences were known but who had never appeared "on screen".
  • Students (or former students/graduates) of Beauxbatons or Durmstrang may also show up.
  • And what about exchange students from Ilvermorny school for witchcraft and wizardry? Obviously common whenever an American fan wants to do a self-insert fic, with a variant being to use some of the canon characters as exchange students to an American wizarding school.
  • There is also the common variant of Japanese exchange/transfer students, thanks to the frequent crossover between the anime and Harry Potter fandoms. (Especially common on Gaia roleplaying guilds.) This was helped when Pottermore named a Japanese school. Some RP groups address both problems by explicitly banning Hogwarts student characters who were not born in the British Isles.
    • Chinese ones aren't too far-fetched either, especially if they're of a family with some connection to that of canon Hogwarts student Cho Chang (whose name and appearance have some strong Chinese hints).
  • New professors, too; Defense Against the Dark Arts professors are of course especially common given the position's turnover rate (no thanks to Voldemort). Implausibly young ones are worryingly common.
• Heralds of Valdemar makes it all too easy to add a character who is one of The Chosen Many. If being a Herald or a Companion doesn't suit you, you can join the Bards, the Healers, the Tayledras, Shin'a'in, or Kale'da'in, any number of mentioned religious orders, any number of named mercenary Companies, any number of named non-human races, or even become a member of any one of those groups in the past.
• Most Holes fanfics have someone new coming to Camp Green Lake — and it's almost always a girl, despite the fact that it's an all-boys camp. This is rarely even Handwaved.
• In The Hunger Games, there are 73 past Games, meaning 73 opportunities for fans to invent their own victors provided they're not accounted for (after all, the 75th Hunger Games had a special gimmick that past victors are Tributes). Not only that, but it also provides opportunities for 23 other Tributes, leading to a grand total of 1776 total Tributes that may or may not have been accounted for. There's also the Quarter Quells, special Hunger Games with different gimmicks. It's mentioned that there's more than three and they could stretch out to last hundreds upon hundreds of Hunger Games. And of course, if you wish to invoke the What If? scenarios, A Capitol Tribute-based Hunger Games and Hunger Games stretching from the 76th onwards are possible, and thus the Victors, Tributes, and Quells grow.
• In James Bond fanfics, there will often be a character whose codename is either 00x or a letter besides M and Q. This is not helped since the movies have, at various times, either shown or mentioned 3 different 006s, 3 different 009s, 2 different 002s, a 003, a 008, and even a 0011. Most of the other 00 agents that have more than a passing mention in the movies tend to wind up dead shortly thereafter. It's very clear that not only do numbers get recycled when their former owners die, but that any given number works as long as it's preceded by 00 — making 0013, 0069, 0099, or even 008675309 all valid code-names.
  • Makes sense; 00 is simply an agent status, showing they have license to kill.
  • Combined with the Epileptic Tree that James Bond is merely a code name, there exist plenty of fanfics starring a brand new Bond after the previous one was killed/retired. At least it's better than ones about Bond being a Time Lord.
  • Mildly lampshaded in the film version of Casino Royale.
    James: (to M) "Well, I understand double 0s have a very short life expectancy..."
• Fan fiction for The Lord of the Rings:
  • Stories with a "Tenth Walker" in the Fellowship of the Ring are surprisingly common. There are only Nine Walkers in Canon, so these stories are really Alternate Universe Fics. The name "Tenth Walker" references LoTR Book II Chapter 3, when Elrond declares, "The Company of the Ring shall be Nine; and the Nine Walkers shall be set against the Nine Riders that are evil." After setting the number, Elrond chooses Nine and only Nine to become companions.
    • Some authors let the Nine leave Rivendell, and the Tenth Walker joins later.
    • Most stories with a Tenth Walker follow the movies, not the books. In the movies, members volunteer themselves, then Elrond announces, "Nine companions. So be it. You shall be the Fellowship of the Ring." It is easy to insert another volunteer and change Elrond's line to say, "Ten companions."
    • Some stories have Eleventh Walkers, Twelfth Walkers and so on.
    • The official board game indulges in a bit of this (though only in a full five-player game) by having Fatty Bolger accompany the rest of the hobbits to Mordor rather than staying in the Shire. It ignores the Nine = Nine idea because it doesn't use the Fellowship, only the hobbits.
    • A few writers get around the "nine walkers for nine ringwraiths" issue by adding a tenth ringwraith to correspond to the tenth walker.
  • Time Will Tell is unusual, because Jorryn joins the hobbits from Shire to Rivendell, but never becomes a Tenth Walker.
  • A few authors invent a 21st Great Ring, though canon has only twenty. Gandalf briefly mentioned some "lesser rings" in LoTR Book I Chapter 2. If lesser rings do show up (as they did in The Lord of the Rings Online), expect them to follow the naming convention of the Three: a Quenya word ending with -ya.
  • A few authors invent a sixth wizard. Canon has exactly five Istari.
• Percy Jackson and the Olympians is constantly prone to a new demigod, which is made extremely easy by the ending of the fifth book stating that more and more demigods will be claimed and are coming across the border to Camp. And the sequel reveals that there's also a camp for the children of the Roman gods. And then the sister series gave us not only characters descended from Egyptian gods and an Ancient Conspiracy, but confirmed they all exist in the same 'verse. And the next series, Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard, gave us the Norse gods.
• The Railway Series has The Island of Sodor and Sodor: Reading Between The Lines, which suggest that there are eighty locomotives on the Fat Controller's railway alone, as well as a number of engines formerly working on Sodor and several branch lines, minor railways and industries that could be rail-served. Fanfic characters are therefore usually just a case of finding a gap in the Sodor stockbooks and dropping an engine (often the author's favourite class of locomotive) in. In many cases, as real locomotives have been turned into characters in the series proper, creating a character is often as simple as putting a face on a real engine and inventing a reason for them to come to Sodor.
• In Isaac Asimov's Robot Series there are fifty Spacer worlds. Three are visited on-page, and another three are named but not visited. The remaining forty-four are free for the use of other writers; the spinoff Isaac Asimov's Caliban uses one of them as its setting.
• A Song of Ice and Fire:
  • Lost Targaryens who just happen to stumble on dragon eggs and start conquering stuff.
  • There are a lot of noble houses in Westeros, but only a few of them have names: the rest are only mentioned by their heraldry. This allows for would-be Sailor Earth makers to create their own house by making up a coat of arms or taking one of the many heraldic designs described in the book. The A Song of Ice and Fire tabletop RPG by Green Ronin includes this as an option in its character-building process.
  • It is not hard to add an original character in via an additional Sand Snake: It is not hard to write Oberyn Martell having gotten another child into the world without stretching the suspension of disbelief, and with how far he traveled there are very few origins for said child you can't realistically do (and most of them are probably genetic limitations).
• Star Wars Legends used this quite often.
  • Obviously, at the end of Return of the Jedi, Han/Leia is standard, but what about Luke? Enter Mara Jade.
  • Who helped Leia get the Death Star plans? A former stormtrooper turned mercenary turned Jedi Knight named Kyle Katarn.
  • Luke needs Jedi students, so... Kevin J. Anderson gave him a dozen. In the Fix Fic I, Jedi, in addition to that dozen, Mara, and Kyle, we have Corran Horn.
  • The surviving Y-wing pilot from A New Hope is canonically you in the X-wing games.
  • So we have Jacen, Jaina, and Anakin. They need friends to join in on their adventures, plus show romantic subtext. Hence Tenel Ka, Zekk, and Tahiri, respectively. There's also Lowbacca.
• 99% of fanfiction for Mary Hoffman's Stravaganza series involves the introduction of a new Stravagante.
• The Warrior Cats fanbase is notorious for this. Most Warriors fanfics have no involvement with the canon characters. The most common ways to do this are to involve a kittypet kit joining a Clan, a twoleg (occasionally a reader transported into the series) being transformed into a cat and joining a Clan, the descendants of canon cats, or a random OC just plain being born into a Clan. There are also a lot of fanwork revolving around new Clans. The Troll Fic StarKitsProphcy is an especially infamous example.
• Wings of Fire makes it easy. Just choose a tribe and follow the naming conventions of said tribe and you're good to go. As of this writing there are ten tribes to choose from and plenty of fans have come up with their own tribes.
• Since most of the plot of Worm takes place in the American North East, it is easy to write about events that take place in other parts of the world either as a member of the Protectorate/Wards or one of the superpowered gangs that will fight that particular branch. Inserting new characters into Brockton Bay itself is also easy with transfers from one Protectorate branch to another, or just a new trigger; there are a lot of trauma sources in that city.

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