History Main / WeAreTeamCannonFodder

** It finally comes to a head in ''Anime/DragonballGT'', where even Gohan, Goten, Trunks, and Vegeta to an extent are rendered completely ineffectual against the BigBad of each main storyline. That's right; everyone who's not Goku squarely ends up here eventually.

** ''ComicBook/FantasticFour'': In the early days of the Fantastic Four, Susan Storm was the physical embodiment of this trope. Stuck with a stealth power on a team that had no real use for stealth, her role in stories tended to amount to [[DamselInDistress getting captured by the villains]]. Even Creator/StanLee thought she was TheLoad; her forcefield powers were eventually introduced purely to put an end to this and ensure she could fight alongside the rest of the family.

** The ComicBook/JusticeLeagueOfAmerica gets this problem a lot, so much so that it’s [[NeverLiveItDown permanently stained the reputations of some members]]. Characters/{{Superman|TheCharacter}} alone is so powerful that he can make many heroes feel utterly superfluous if handled badly. Older series like ''WesternAnimation/{{Superfriends}}'' were really bad about this, so you would have characters like Superman handling everything while others like ComicBook/{{Aquaman}} would just get [[TheWorfEffect beat up by villains]] and feel useless.
** ComicBook/TheAvengers get hit with it almost as often, though that team’s members have largely avoided having their reputations tarnished by it (except poor ComicBook/{{Hawkeye}}). The inherent problem is that, like the Justice League, the power disparity between the various Avengers can be ridiculously huge; {{Badass Normal}}s like ComicBook/BlackPanther or the above-mentioned Hawkeye can feel useless when put next to people like [[Characters/TheMightyThorThorOdinson Thor]] or [[Characters/MarvelComicsSteveRogers Captain America]].
** As a general rule, if Characters/{{Batman|TheCharacter}} is on a team, he ''will'' steal the spotlight at some point and he ''will'' make other heroes feel pointless. Ironically, Batman actually used to be on the receiving end of this for a long time, with many joking about how out of place he felt on the Justice League. Creator/GrantMorrison's seminal JLA run did a lot of work to dispel that problem... and [[GoneHorriblyRight inadvertently created]] the “[[GodModeSue Batgod]]” issue in the process, or at least made it more pronounced.
** On good days, the ComicBook/XMen are a diverse [[EnsembleCast ensemble]] where everybody gets moments to shine. On bad days, they’re just there so Characters/{{Wolverine|JamesLoganHowlett}} has somebody to talk to while he’s [[WolverinePublicity stealing the show]], or to get smacked around so Wolverine can have a BigDamnHeroes moment.
** In the early days of the ComicBook/FantasticFour, Susan Storm was the physical embodiment of this trope. Stuck with a stealth power on a team that had no real use for stealth, her role in stories tended to amount to [[DamselInDistress getting captured by the villains]]. Even Creator/StanLee thought she was TheLoad; her forcefield powers were eventually introduced purely to put an end to this and ensure she could fight alongside the rest of the family.
* Under bad writers, the alien ComicBook/{{Green Lantern}}s will feel like nothing but {{Red Shirt}}s used to fill in the background or die to show how dangerous something is, while [[MostWritersAreHuman the human Green Lanterns will do everything important]]. The sheer fact that there are multiple human Lanterns reeks of this trope; canon had previously held that every species only had one Lantern, two at most, until it was decided that [[EarthIsTheCenterOfTheUniverse Earth somehow warranted multiple Lanterns]]. Fortunately, this seems to have lessened a great deal since the start of the Creator/GeoffJohns run.

* In ''Anime/DragonBallZ'''s later arcs, the effectiveness of the characters in the grand scheme of things was basically whittled down to a few Saiyans. The overall narrative structure of ''every one'' Z's sagas could be summed up as "major characters of varying degrees of importance lose against the main villain one by one (if they're lucky, they'll be able to kill a secondary enemy or two) until Goku is able to step in, fully recovered from whatever last held him back and stronger than ever, to finally defeat them," with the exception of the Cell Games, where after initially seeming to play this straight, he has Gohan do it instead. In the Namek Saga, this happens ''twice,'' and in the Buu Saga he ends up ultimately [[PassingTheTorch stealing the torch]] ''[[InvertedTrope back]]'' from his son!