Ensemble Dark Horse Cleanup

Yeah, people keep misusing this trope for every character who has fans. If so many characters are listed, it's likely none are true examples. I'm not familiar with that series, though.

YMMV.The Avengers Earths Mightiest Heroes Season One Antagonists lists Loki, the Big Bad of season one, under this trope. Does he qualify?

edited 31st Dec '17 6:16:00 AM by dsneybuf

No because he is a major character. Only minor charters can be Darkhorses. Otherwise there is no point to the Trope.

I've commented out Peridot's entry from EnsembleDarkhorse.Steven Universe, along with Lapis, Ruby, and Sapphire's entries as these are all major characters.

Downsizing has Lan Tran who is a major character half way through the film and her actress get billing on the posters which doesn't seem very darkhorse

Dragonheart has Zero Context Examples and plenty of main characters.

Would Strong Belwas from A Song of Ice and Fire count? He's probably the most popular of all the characters in Meereenese arc, excluding the main ones of course. He's at least the best liked.

edited 5th Jan '18 5:36:54 AM by Vampireandthen

Does a work have to have been released in order for a character to qualify as an Ensemble Dark Horse. Because the following was added to YMMV.Sonic The Hedgehog IDW:

And the comic's first issue doesn't come out til April, and said character is set to debut in the fourth issue.

Yes. Because we don't know their role in the story yet. They may be a major character instead of a minor one.

If it's a reveal, the character is the main character in said reveal. Can't qualify.

edited 23rd Feb '18 5:39:05 AM by MsCC93

From YMMV.Thems Fightin Herds

• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Pom the Sheep. Besides the obvious Cuteness Proximity, there's also part of the fandom who portray her as a Memetic Badass instead of an Extreme Doormat, due to this developer art◊ portraying her and one of her sheepdog puppies as Venom Snake and D-Dog.
  • Tianhuo, due to being half-horse and half-dragon, and controlling fire for her playstyle.

The game has six playable characters so far, and none are presented as being more or less important than the rest, so one could say that these characters are members of the main cast.

Yeah, that does sound weak.

From YMMV.Thirteen Reasons Why

I noticed all of the examples seem to simply be "people particularly like this character" with not much relation to the actual trope.

I noted that Heckapoo was removed in both Star vs. the Forces of Evil and Western Animation.

Any opinions about the example in question?

edited 17th Mar '18 7:18:41 PM by MagBas

If there's not enough context, remove them or comment them out with a note.

What's a Heckapoo?

I am not sure, i only noted the example was removed.

I'm not very familiar with Star vs. the Forces of Evil, but according to the edit reason, Hekapoo is not a minor character, which is why she was removed.

From YMMV.Atlantis The Lost Empire:

• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Vinny is arguably the most popular character. ESPECIALLY in the French fanbase.
  • Audrey is perhaps a close second for many.
  • As with Kida, considering who voiced her in this film...
  • Helga's got a strong fanbase too.
  • Also Mrs. Packard, due to her bottomless pit of snark.
  • King Kashekim for being voiced by Leonard Nimoy.
  • The Leviathan only appears briefly but is absolutely beloved - probably because it's a giant mechanical lobster that shoots lasers.

Also, several Harvest Moon pages have bachelors and bachelorettes as Ensemble Darkhorses? Do they count when they're love interests?

I restored the Hekapoo example on YMMV.Star Vs The Forces Of Evil (slightly rewritten and added to) as she was less prominent at the time.

• Hekapoo quickly became the most popular member of the Magic High Commission, due to her appealing design, her personality, and her interesting chemistry with Marco, as showcased in "Running with Scissors". The last season 2 livechat featured a bunch of submitted fanart. Of the 105 pieces shown, 13 feature Hekapoo. That's about 12 percent, or one in eight. At the time, she had only had a minor appearance in "Page Turner" and A Day in the Limelight episode in "Running With Scissors".

Any objection?

Bringing up these examples from Justice Society of America?:

• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Wildcat. Few readers of the forgotten character from the '40s would've expected a Batman ripoff to become a major part of the team, and one of only four Golden Agers left alive.
  • Many of the original members of the team count as this. Characters like Wildcat, Hourman and Dr. Mid-Nite were also-rans of the 40s, vanishing after a very short time period in the books. Effectively failed concepts, they would have never seen the light again if not for their links to the JSA- so when the JLA/JSA team-ups started happening, out came these obscure failed characters. Fast-forward to modern times, and now many of these originals and successors are now popular heroes in their own rights.
  • Cyclone is quite popular, due to being an entertaining Genki Girl with an endearing "Romantic" Two-Girl Friendship with Stargirl combined with also being a huge Woobie.
  • The team itself could count as a whole among the DCU. They're hardly known of at all outside of comics, have been all-but replaced by contemporary superhero teams like the Justice League and the Teen Titans. Despite that, they're so beloved that one of the biggest reasons DC Rebirth is considered to have such a bad case of Arc Fatigue is how its yet to resolve the reintroduction of the group.

No groups. It's a character trope, not an ensemble trope. Each and every member have to count, and if they do, they don't count because they disqualify each other, since the trope is about being significantly more popular than other characters.

From YMMV.Doc Mc Stuffins:

• Lambie. For some reason, her merchandise sells like hotcakes. Taken Up To Eleven with the Hearts a-Glow Lambie during the 2014 holiday season- whenever Toys R Us online gets a fresh batch of it, it's guaranteed to be sold out within minutes^note It may or may not have something to do with the next year in the Chinese calendar being the year of the sheep (and Chinese New Years being just a month away), or the toy containing sufficiently entertaining robotics, but whatever the case may be, they're really going very fast.. Also, a general eBay search reveals more Lambie merchandise available than any of the other of Doc's toys (over 1,000 hits) and the most expensive items are more pricey than any of the other characters, indicating her popularity with the demographics of the show. It also helps when your character is voiced by Lara Jill Miller.
  • Lambie's on the top, but Stuffy's the runner-up. While Stuffy toys don't nearly move off shelves in quantity matching that of Lambie, he does get drawn in a lot of fanart. Also, while the Hearts-A-Glow Stuffy doesn't move off shelves anywhere as fast as the Lambie version, several fans have reported difficulty in locating the Dancing Christmas Stuffy instead, although the Lambie model was also selling quite well.

They're both the main characters besides Doc, so they don't count, right?

Figured I'd ask here instead of having an edit war about this, just to make sure I'm looking at this trope correctly.

From HuGtto! Pretty Cure: Ruru, one of the female villains working part-time at Dark Tomorrow Company, has been warmly received by the fandom for her Emotionless Girl and Dark Magical Girl traits and being voiced by Yukari Tamura of Lyrical Nanoha fame. The fan reception to her redemption arc has also been very positive.

Aside from the issue where it's basically saying "Ruru has fans" without really explaining how her role's minor, the series is a third of the way through and she's been in the spotlight for the past several weeks after having few appearances in the first 10 or so episodes. She's also slated for a much larger role in the story as leaks have shown. Even if she looked like a minor character early on, it's safe to say that since the series still has 30+ episodes to go through, that her status as an Ensemble Dark Horse, if she even qualifies as one, can't really be assessed right now, right?

It does sound like the scope of her role is in question. It might be one of those cases where the story needs to end before her relevancy to the trope can be assessed.

That said, I don't know the work and this sounds like it really needs people who are familiar with the work to weigh in.