Summon Everyman Hero

And then, Deconstruction ensues.

Uni-Man: I wish for a superhero to help us win! [poof]
Mr. Stocker: Hi, I'm Mr. Stocker!
Narration: Mr. Stocker was a superhero with no powers.

— Axe Cop, Episode 8 ^note Subverted; he loses pretty much instantly.

La Résistance is in peril. The forces of The Empire have them surrounded, and they are trapped. They have no choice, they must use the Dangerous Forbidden Technique to summon a hero from another world to assist them.

And they get Bob Smith, from Normal, Arizona! An average kid who just happens to be what they need for the job. The summoners may be unimpressed, or be totally blind that this guy is going to need a lot of Training from Hell to be useful. Since he is The Chosen One, he will save the day in the end and either choose to stay in the new fantastic world or go home and be normal again at the end of his adventure.

A typical set up for Trapped in Another World stories. This is a very, very popular trope in regards to getting The Everyman from the modern world into the Magical Land.

Sometimes, rather than An Everyman, the spell summons someone who is exactly what's needed for a given situation. If no summoning is involved, he's an Action Survivor. Other times, the everyman really is very average and probably too squishy to last long enough to make a difference, but they will get summoned into the body of someone or something more physically impressive as part of the summoning or just by accident.

Named for the Dungeons & Dragons spell "Summon Monster."

See also Recruit Teenagers with Attitude and Stumbled Into the Plot. For some reason, the Everyman will be summoned while doing something embarrassing, mundane, or perhaps just something weird in general.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• Aura Battler Dunbine put an interesting twist on this and the Trapped in Another World tropes. The magical force called aura energy that powers Byston Well's aura battlers is actually stronger on our side, so the Big Bad's initial MO is to summon random people from the Upper Earth since they have much stronger aura potential, and the aura machine's firepower is drastically increased to WMD levels when they all cross over to our world.
• Digimon:
  • The Digidestined from Digimon Adventure, since the summoners were "totally blind that [these guys are] going to need a lot of training to be useful."
  • Digimon Frontier also did this, but with a twist; they summoned a bunch of kids but only kept around the handful that actually got some results.
• Subverted in Dog Days. Millhiore had specifically chosen Cinque to be her country's hero due to his athletic skills (she was even shown writing him a formal invitation in the manga prequel, but never sent it due to realizing that he couldn't read their language). Averted with Nanami and Rebecca, who were just summoned as guests, plus Rebecca wasn't even summoned by the kingdom that she became a hero for. Adelaide on the other hand played it completely straight in the backstory.
• Miaka and Yui, along with the past priestesses of Genbu and Byakko from Fushigi Yuugi.
• The Hero is Overpowered but Overly Cautious: The gods set up a system where they summon people from Earth, grant them fantasy abilities, and send them off to save worlds in danger of being conquered by demons. This is because they're limited in how much they can interfere in mortal affairs. In a twist on this trope, the story is told from the summoner's POV, not the hero.
• How a Realist Hero Rebuilt the Kingdom: Protagonist Souma Kazuya was a college student well-versed in economics and politics, and was originally summoned to the Kingdom of Elfrieden to be handed over as a bargaining chip to the Gran Chaos Empire due to the kingdom's inability to pay for war tributes. Afraid of being turned into a test subject, Souma set out to rebuild the declining kingdom and in the process becomes the greatest king known in its history.
• Rem and Shera from How Not to Summon a Demon Lord summon a guy from Earth and turn him into his MMORPG character but their enslaving spell bounces back at them due to his Demon King's Ring and they become his slaves.
• Kiba is about two friends getting transported to another world independently. Zed willingly steps through a portal created by the spirit Amir Gaul, who actually chose Zed to be his partner before he was born, while Noah is summoned by the nation Neotopia because he is destined to wield another powerful spirit. Noah ends up becoming a villain after being brainwashed by Neotopia and goes even more crazy after Neotopia is destroyed. It is later revealed that Zed's mother was previously summoned to be Amir Gaul's partner, but was sent back after Amir Gaul abandoned her, because he had actually chosen her unborn son Zed, which ended up wrecking her sanity as she didn't take it well.
• The Unique Cheat of the Man Dragged in by the Four Heroes has the Huma (human) kingdom summoning four classmates as Heroes to aid them in their fight against the Evila kingdom. However, the ritual also brought in another antisocial classmate named Hiiro who is treated as an 'Innocent Bystander'. He ditches the other four both because he doesn't feel any obligation to help them or the kingdom and because he doesn't trust the king. Which turns out to be the right call. Hiiro decides to explore the new world on his own and is especially interested in the cuisine it has to offer, being a bit of a glutton.
• KonoSuba: This was actually Aqua's job before Kazuma took her with him to the fantasy world. She gathered up the recently dead to make them fight the overlord, but nobody she summoned (Kazuma included) actually wanted to do it and went off to populate the rest of the land. One of them even became an overlord — keyword here is a, because Kazuma later learns that the overlord he and the party defeat is just one of many.
• Magic Knight Rayearth. The Princess Emeraude, the Pillar of Cephiro, summons the Magic Knights at the moment they all meet (coincidentally) in Tokyo Tower, to rescue the princess from the evil Zagato. Or so they assumed. It's not, and they didn't need a hero — they needed a outsider to kill the malfunctioning Barrier Maiden.
• The TV series MÄR (Märchen Awakens Romance) starts this way, though the high school kid accidentally summoned to help La Résistance of another dimension doesn't stay "normal" for long (the world of MÄR has much lower gravity than Earth, rendering him much stronger than most of the natives). (It should be noted that the series is an intentional takeoff on this kind of stories, with plenty of fairy tale references.)
• The guys from the Monster Rancher anime were trying to unlock a powerful monster to help them. What they got was a kid from our world playing a Monster Rancher game beta disk.
• Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation had this attempted by an unknown nation, summoning Akito, one of the students Rudeus tried to save. While willing to help, he was a completely ordinary boy and was killed in one blow by the enemy army. The Rewind Miko's attempt to save his life resulted in Rudeus' reincarnation and the Mana Calamity.
• Re:Zero is an example of this, as Subaru is a fairly unremarkable high school dropout walking home from the convenience store when he suddenly gets pulled into an archaic fantasy world, and has to undergo a lot of Character Development before he's anything more than a Loser Protagonist. However, in an unusual variation, he was summoned by a villain.
• Deconstructed in The Rising of the Shield Hero. Four young otaku are summoned to become the four Legendary Heroes, as the mechanics of the Legendary Weapons prevent local people from wielding them. However, because they are normal people, none of them have actual training with weapons, and three of them treat the world they are in as a videogame, causing a lot of problems that only get solved because the fourth player (who Had to Be Sharp and has had to learn on his own things the other three took for granted) helps solve those problems.
• RTA Sousha Wa Game Sekai Kara Kaerenai is a parody of this genre, where the hero summoned into the world of the Fictional Video Game Another Verse is a speedrunner who causes all sorts of hilarious chaos thanks to the RPG Mechanics 'Verse meaning his favorite speedrun strats still work.
• That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime: What the Otherworlders known as "Summons" effectively are, and the key difference from "Reincarnators" who end up in this world at random (usually via death and New Life in Another World Bonus). In theory, it's supposed to be a ritual meant to summon someone with the potential to become a Hero, blessed with incredible powers and skills that will be strong enough to someday challenge even the might of the strongest Demon Lords. In practice, it's been abused by many kingdoms who want the advantage of summoned Heroes with enhanced abilities and powerful Skills gained from crossing over to this world (or even just knowledge of their original world that could be put to military use) to serve as a bolstering force for their military might, and the most unscrupulous ones can carve special runes into the Summons' souls that bind their loyalties to their summoners on threat of death (and they're very much aware of this). And the Summoned doesn't exactly get a choice in the matter or even the chance to refuse, plucked from their old lives at any moment. The process is especially bad when children are involved, as they often don't develop the special skills needed to channel their large reserves of acquired magicules, and will usually die in a few years' time without stabilization from bonding with an elemental spirit. It's technically illegal to perform these for said moral reasons, but nations can and will lie about it for the possible benefits. Rimuru truly thinks it's a horrible thing from the first moment he learns about it from Veldora, and once he starts getting influence through Tempest's economic and political power starts advocating for further cracking down on Summons.
• The protagonists of Those Who Hunt Elves were summoned before the start of the story to defeat the Big Bad, which they did immediately by blasting him with the armored tank the spell also summoned. They then spend the rest of the series gathering the parts of the spell that will let them get back to Earth.
• Yuusha Gojo Kumiai Kouryuugata Keijiban (AKA, Hero Union BBS) has several characters who are either summoned heroes seeking advice or retired heroes whose quests started this way. It's mentioned that the Earth series of worlds has an unusually high affinity for the summoning ritual, and one character has been summoned two dozen times. Anyone who acquires an Unwanted Harem in the process meets immediate hatred and scorn (or jealousy) from other heroes except in one case where the four harem girls hated each other, and hated the hero more than each other, and it turns out the hero is a heroine. The other heroes quickly offer her assistance in leaving that world.

Comic Books

• This appears to have been part of Cris's back story in The Crossovers. Through a portal in the basement of the family home, Cris visits a sword and sorcery land to become the warrior princess Eradika and lead her forces into and out of battles. Unfortunately, the series ended before many details of how Cris first visited the land could be revealed.
• Dark One plays heavily with this trope. The hero fighting the villain is a cycle that has been going on for as long as the people of the other world can remember, and both of them always come from earth.
• Nova: Reconstructed in a dream sequence, when a dying Rich hears a speech about this from Rhomann Dey, the centurion who gave him his powers in the first place.
  Rich: I have to ask... why?
  Dey: Why what?
  Rich: Why pick me? I'm so completely average! Ordinary! A loser!
  Dey: Exactly. You are ordinary. You are also loyal, trustworthy, and plainspoken. You are an average young man from an average life. The corps always recruits individuals who best represent the typical qualities of their species. We find they make the best centurions. They bring with them no arrogance or pride, no self-importance or elitism. They understand the responsibility. They appreciate the duty. They are the honest bedrock of the corps. Does that make sense? Now, help me save your world.

Fan Works

• Played with to the max in With Strings Attached. First, the ones summoned are ex-The Beatles—hardly “everymen,” though in context they effectively are. Second, when they ask “Why us?” the Fans tell them that their experiences with drugs gave them the necessary wherewithal to adapt to all the things that were going to happen to them. (“You dropped acid; you can handle this.”) Logical enough, except that the reader knows the four weren't brought over to be heroes but to be subjects in a short-term, undergraduate-level Alien Psychology experiment. (Shag, who had fallen in love with them from her universe, simply wanted to see them together again.) After the experiment broke down and things started to happen to the four and the Fans had to talk to them, the Fans had to come up with a logical reason as to why they'd been chosen—aka, a plausible lie.
  • In The Keys Stand Alone: The Soft World, Ringo points out to Theecat that the four wouldn't have been dragged into all this if they'd been “the ordinary blokes down the lane.”
• In Stranded in Fantasy, the main characters are several normal people that get sucked into a Dungeons & Dragons world, carrying only a few things from the normal world. Some die and the rest have to fight for their lives — and some develop magical abilities. Their purpose there is to act as catalysts against the Medieval Stasis the world lives in, and it is not the first time it has happened.

Films — Animation

• In The Flight of Dragons, modern-day scientist and fantasy enthusiast Peter Dickinson is summoned as a champion in a conflict between wizards (his mind gets put in a dragon body, which helps). Nobody is particularly impressed, although his summoner is prepared to trust that "antiquity" had a purpose in choosing this guy. which is proven in the end when Peter discovers that he can use his knowledge of science to cancel out any kind of magic by contemplating the logical rule it breaks, and literally Talks The Big Bad To Death.
  
  Justified in the book that the movie was (loosely) based on. Jim Eckert and Angie are transported into the past/alternate dimension using an astral projection machine invented by a colleague, not summoned. And Jim isn't exactly an "everyman", he's a medieval scholar, which puts him in the perfect position to understand the culture around him but work outside it using modern sensibilities and knowledge.
• In the second VeggieTales movie, The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: A VeggieTales Movie, a princess sends a magic ball to summon heroes to help her save her brother...and winds up with a trio of waiters who just got fired.

Films — Live-Action

• The Forbidden Kingdom did this, with the slight inversion that the normal kid accidentally summoned himself to the magical land. Of course, it was All Just a Dream. Or Was It a Dream?.
• The Last Starfighter did a non-magic version. A con man looking for recruitment bounties wants to recruit the most talented pilot he can find in order to get paid by the Star League. He does this by seeding planets with a testing booth disguised as an arcade game called Starfighter; the one person who beats the game turns out to be a human teenager living in a desert trailerpark.

Gamebooks

• While Merlin doesn't summon the body of an everyman hero in GrailQuest, he does summon their mind. Yours.

Literature

• The Beyonders has Jason and Rachel brought to Lyrian because of a prophecy that stated a "Beyonder", that is someone from another world, would defeat Emperor Maldor. Rachel turns out to be quite talented with magic but Jason spends a lot of the trilogy wondering why he was summoned.
• Several of The Chronicles of Narnia books: Prince Caspian, The Last Battle, and possibly The Silver Chair. It's explained in story that the heroes have been Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve and that only children and devout believers understand Aslan, explaining the kid thing. Why some kid with ninja training skills wasn't summoned instead, though, is a mystery.
  • In Prince Caspian, the Narnians were trying to summon the legendary kings and queen from the Golden Age (basically their King Arthur equivalent). They just didn't realize that the form they would come in was British schoolchildren.
  • The Silver Chair starts with the kids praying to go to Narnia, and besides one of them already had, so he was already 'part of the story,' and Aslan seems to prefer some form of continuity when linking up the worlds. The Last Battle doesn't involve anyone new, and Jill especially has spent the whole time since her last visit practicing skills specifically useful to a quest in Narnia. Note that thanks to Narnia Time, the entire history of Narnia occurs within the span of Diggory Kirke's life. The trips there seem to be as much for the enlightenment of English schoolchildren as to solve Narnia's problems.
• Several stories in the Chicks in Chainmail anthologies.
• The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant: Thomas Covenant is a normal guy except for having leprosy. Infamous for not taking it well. Linden Avery fits the trope in the second series.
• Cradle Series: Referenced. Princess R'leya of the Fractured Realms is facing a losing war with the Dark Lord. She leads her greatest wizards in a legendary spell to summon a hero from another world—they've already done this twice, and the heroes were slaughtered. This is their last chance, and she has little hope, but she has to do something. Except instead of a naive everyman, she summons Yerin Arelius, Disciple of Death, member of the new Reaper Division of the Abidan. The summoned heroine kills the Dark Lord in five minutes, and most of that was just spent double-checking that he was actually the bad guy instead of a bait-and-switch situation. (He was the bad guy. The constant rants about ending the world made it obvious.) The biggest problem at the end of the five minutes is that there's not much left of the Dark Lord to actually prove she killed him. Then she leaves under her own power; she has other worlds to save today.
• Somewhat subverted in two books of the Darkover series. The summoned characters are both doppelgangers of two members of the main cast. One of them eventually becomes a second protagonist of the book, while the other just serves for a Twin Switch or something like that.
• Lots of Dave Duncan's books use this premise. The Seventh Sword trilogy with Wally Smith being transported to the subject world is a good example. On Earth, Wally is a chemist who dies of encephalitis. In the other world, he is turned into a great swordsman (sort of). In this case gods needed a super-swordsman with an engineer's knowledge, since just a super-swordsman wasn't enough.
• The Demon Tech series by David Sherman begins with an evil wizard and a good "philosopher" each performing magic to summon assistance for his respective country. The bad guys wanted knowledge, so they wind up with a batch of 20th-century military doctrinal manuals (which they eventually manage to translate and use). The good guys wanted leadership. They get a USMC Gunnery Sergeant (in full dress uniform). His first words to them: "Who's in charge of this circle jerk?" Well, from then on, he is.
• Discworld. Rincewind, after being thrown out of the universe at the end of his previous appearance, is summoned by Eric, who is trying to summon a demon.
• Enchantment, a lesser-known novel of Orson Scott Card: Ivan Smetski, college decathlete but otherwise normal grad student, saves a sleeping princess from a giant bear, and next thing he knows, he's in ninth-century Ukraine. Naked. It's never revealed who exactly summoned him.
• The five protagonists of Guy Gavriel Kay's The Fionavar Tapestry.
• Subverted heavily in Mary Gently's Grunts! Some odd piece of magic summons a U.S. Marine staff sergeant into the middle of a battle between a swarm of alien locusts and a battalion of trainee elf marines and their orc marine sergeants (yes you read that right). However, he panics at being sucked into a new dimension and flees screaming. Later on his logistics skills do help the Orcs defeat the aliens.
• The Kingdom of Fantasy series of Geronimo Stilton applies this to the acclaimed rodent journalist, pitting him against witches, dragons, giants, trolls, and all manner of evils in the titular dreamlike land.
• A Hero's War starts with a country in peril attempting to summon a Hero, and getting not one, but two everymen from modern-day Earth. Morey, who appears in front of the summoners, does in fact turn out to have a decent aptitude for magic once properly trained, along with natural charisma and a head for tactics (although he knew nothing about those beforehand). Cato, however, is a materials engineer who lands in a backwoods farming community and can't use magic at all — in fact, he's immune to some types of magical attack because he seems to have no soul. Nonetheless, Cato's knowledge of chemistry and physics allows him to kick-start an industrial revolution that gives the nation a very different way to fight the zombie hordes.
• An attempt at summoning a group of everyman heroes going wrong is what kicks off the story in Isekai ni Otosareta... Jouka wa Kihon!. The main character is dropped deep into a forest when the summoning goes awry.
• Done in Keys to the Kingdom. To be fair about it, they were looking for someone about to die of natural causes. To be more specific, the villain, Mister Monday, wanted to avoid passing his Key onto a mortal, although he was legally supposed to do so. Instead of outright ignoring his obligation, Monday decided to circumvent it by giving the Key to a critically ill mortal who would die shortly afterwards. He could then quite legally take back and keep the Key. Unfortunately for him, he was being manipulated by his enemy, and the power of the Key saved the mortal's life. Whoops.
• A Mage's Power averts this trope. Eric was not summoned to the magical world of Tariatla to be a hero. Tasio regularly pulls people from other worlds and drops them there because it amuses him. Eric becomes a novice battle mage for a mercenary company during peacetime.
• Played with in Magic Kingdom for Sale — SOLD!, where the everyman hero is summoned by the Genre Blind villain with the expectation of being useless as a hero, complete with a job interview designed to ensure uselessness. The hero is just the latest in a long line of summoned everymen who were until then as useless as expected.
• Grey Murphy, the title "Man From Mundania", comes to the land of Xanth to save the day.
• The first time Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion is summoned goes like this; although it's only the mind that he's The Everyman, the body he gets stuck in is significantly more formidable. Interestingly, although recalling his Everyman hero identity staves off a Heroic BSoD near the end of that incarnation, on the instances when the Champion recalls previous incarnations he tends to adopt the identity of his first summoning, as opposed to Mr. Everyman, claiming 'it was the only time I experienced true happiness'. An odd instance of Becoming the Mask, since he has innumerable masks to choose from.
• Terisa Morgan in Mordant's Need by Stephen Donaldson. What they wanted was a mighty warrior from another world armed with powerful rayguns. What they got was a lonely rich girl with microscopic self-esteem and no combat skills. They tried again. And anyone who Genre Savvy enough will not be surprised that Terisa turns out to be just the champion they needed after all. Though the guy with the rayguns helps eventually, even if he originally panics and blasts a hole in the castle.
• The Neverending Story is a book that sucks in its reader. Very meta.
• The Ru Emerson sextet Night Threads summons 3 people — a lawyer, her sister, who is a hippie, and her teenage nephew, while they were out for a day trip in the desert.
• Out of Time: Yanked! by Nancy Kress.
• In a duology within the Saga of Recluce, a spaceship suffers from a Hyperspace malfunction which lands them in a universe where magic is real. In the second book the main character ends up aiding an Enchanted Forest against The Empire, which wants to seal the forest away. The main character's companion speculates that the magic forest might have summoned them by causing the Hyperspace malfunction in the first place.
• Jon-Tom from Spellsinger by Alan Dean Foster. A Sanitation Engineer (janitor) was summoned to the world where the story takes place by a wizard searching for a more technical type of engineer. That he turned out to be a magician after all, which is what Clothahump expected an "engineer" to be, suggests it's not just Jon-Tom whose magic brings what's needed rather than what's expected.
• In the Spellsong Cycle by L.E. Modesitt Jr., magic is done by a combination of song and music. The fact that music has magical effects leads to the paradoxical situation where musical theory is stunted, since the musical experimentation required to advance theory is dangerous. The summoned heroine is a professor of music whose trained singing voice, advanced knowledge of musical theory and Every(wo)man knowledge of science allows her to do things with magic that no one who was born in the world could possibly match.
• Andrei Belyanin's The Thief of Baghdad books feature an ordinary modern-day Russian man being whisked away to "Arabian Nights" Days by a genie at the wish of Omar Khayyám. While Omar is initially disappointed at the genie's choice (he expected a Middle Eastern man, not an infidel), Omar eventually accepts the protagonist as his student in thievery. The subsequent books have him be summoned again by the genie, although, by that point, he's hardly an "everyman" anymore.
• Also, this is the basic premise of Un Lun Dun by China Miéville.
• The Wandering Inn: Erin, the main character, was teleported from Earth to another world. It was later revealed, or rather strongly implied, that it was the cause of a summoning spell, wishing to get the help of heroes. The problem was, though, that the spell seemed to have gone awry, resulting in people being teleported to all kinds of places, sometimes to monster-infested places, making their survival unlikely.
• The War Gods has the novella Sword Brother where a Wencit, in summoning help, ends up getting a gunnery sergeant and a corporal driving a Striker.
• Christopher Stasheff's A Wizard in Rhyme series has a couple of these.
• William "Wiz" Zumwalt from Rick Cook's Wiz Biz series. At first (in Wizard's Bane), he appears to have no magical abilities, despite being summoned to fight against powerful evil wizards. Turned out that the summoner did pick the right guy — a computer programmer was just what was needed. Once he learns that magic can be programmed... And then improved on in the second book (The Wizardry Compiled) when to improve Wiz's original code, they bring over an entire programming team recruited at a SCA war... two of which join him in the magical world at the end of that book.
• Sergey Lukyanenko and Nick Perumov's novel Wrong Time for Dragons features a teenage girl coming to an average Russian man and asking him to come with her. He ends up in a world where magic is real and told that he is the next Dragonslayer meant to protect this world from an invasion of dragons from another world. To this end, he must absorb the power of the four elemental magics. At the end, he finds out that one of the people chasing him is his own grandfather, the previous Dragonslayer, and that his grandmother was a dragon in human form, raped by his grandfather and banished to our world.
• Eliezer Yudkowsky sometimes utilizes this trope in his short stories.
  • The protagonist from The Sword of Good, Hirou, is apparently snatched from our world before the story starts, and aside from a prophecy and ability to wield the titular blade, is less than stellar hero material. He doesn't take the pressure and stress well, and the casual slaughter of "evil monsters" nauseate him to the point of vomiting. The deconstructive twist ending is quite memorable.
  • Also used as the main premise in The Hero With A Thousand Chances Another deconstructive twist; while The Sword Of Good was about how this trope interacts with ethical standards, this story uses the trope to reframe the anthropic principle.

Live-Action TV

• Amazon High, a failed pilot episode that had some of its footage used in the Xena: Warrior Princess episode "Lifeblood". A tribe of women warriors uses magic to "summon their savior"... and get Cyane, a wimpy teenage Valley Girl from the modern times. The tribe is greatly disappointed at first, but after Cyane gets some Character Development and Took a Level in Badass, she helps the tribe rise to greatness. The tribe renames themselves the Amazons at Cyane's suggestion.

Tabletop Games

• The Castle Falkenstein backstory tells of Tom Olam, computer game designer, who is summoned into a world of Victorian Steampunk Fantasy by a mighty spell. Although he proves to be of some value, the real prize is the book he brought with him — he picked it up at a used book shop cheap, and it holds the secret to saving the day.
• GURPS Banestorm has a botched attempt at magical genocide result in, among other things, accidental mass teleportation of humans from our Earth. One example NPC used to be an accountant from 1990's Chicago. A somewhat more deliberate example of this trope appears as a plot hook in the Abydos supplement; a professor at a magic school attempts to summon an archangel but gets the PCs (humans from modern Earth) instead.
• Traveler (not to be confused with Traveller) is based on this. The players are sucked into a fantasy/cyberpunk/whatever-genre-the-GM-is-running world with the items within a 10' radius.

Theater

• Sister Act the Musical starts with Mother Superior praying to God to save the convent. We then get a Gilligan Cut to Deloris performing on stage in a nightclub.
• Accidental example in Wicked where Madame Morrible creates a tornado to kill Nessarose and bring Elphaba out of hiding that ends up bringing Dorothy to Oz.

Video Games

• The title character of Astyanax is pulled out of his homeworld by a fairy from a place called Remlia, who promises to send him back home if he rescues their princess.
• In the Battle Isle series protagonist Walter Harris is abducted and brought to the planet Chromos after successfully finishing the campaign of the titular video game which served as a testing program to find a master strategist to help its citizens defend against Titan Net, their own military supercomputer gone rogue.
• Brave Fencer Musashi:
  • Played with: the summon spell summons Miyamoto Musashi, one of history's greatest swordsmen, instead of some average high schooler with no idea what he's doing. He's summoned as a kid, yes, but still one that obviously has some combat training. Princess Fillet tries it again later and accidentally ends up summoning Kojiro, who's similar to Musashi but a Summoned Everyman VILLAIN.
  • The sequel, Musashi Samurai Legend (which takes place in a different setting and different characters) also kind of fits, except that once again he's actually the hero they were trying to summon.
• Cythera, where you're summoned from your home to a strange island by the LandKing. It's implied that the island's human population are descended from ancient Greeks swept there by a storm.
• Disgaea 2: Cursed Memories starts with the protagonist's mother trying to summon Lord Zenon, the evil overlord that took over the planet, so her son could defeat him. What they got instead was Rozalin, the overlord's sheltered daughter, who they have to then protect as they take her back home. The game's huge twist is that they actually did summon the right person — Lady Zenon got tired with the constant battle of her previous existence and reincarnated herself as a baby girl.^note As in, complete with a mother's womb and a blank slate. A little later, an Unknown Rival tracks her down, murders her family (and most of the village) takes over the name and effectively imprisons her while playing the role of devoted (if distant) father.
• The Heroes are summoned this way via Gold Box game Secret of the Silver Blades. Completely naked. Pity the summoners forgot to request their equipment from the previous game.
• Monster Party begins with Bert the gargoyle traveling to Earth to find someone to help his home planet, and ends up just grabbing the first person he sees: a kid with a baseball bat. Said kid even explains that he wouldn't be that useful, to Bert's complete dismissal.
• Myst has you stumbling on a mysterious book and... VOIP!
• This is the basic plot for the Westwood game Nox, though it also features a twist: it is actually the villainess who summons Jack to the Land of Nox. Moreover, it happens accidentally, as she is only after the Orb that he unwittingly possesses.
• While he's not exactly an everyman, Sonic gets this in Sonic and the Black Knight. When Merlina cast the spell,^note "O brave knight, swift as the wind! Heed my call!" she likely wasn't expecting a blue hedgehog with an attitude.
• Spyro 2: Ripto's Rage! has the denizens of Avalar trying to summon a mighty dragon to save their world, and get... well a mighty dragon, but much smaller and younger than they expected.
• The player character of The Summoning is (unsurprisingly) recruited this way. It's not really made clear where s/he came from or what his/her life was like before, but s/he's sent into a vast dungeon full of puzzles and monsters to slay the Evil Overlord.
• The term for this in the Touhou universe is "spiriting away," and Yukari likes to do this with mortals she finds interesting. Also, severely deconstructed; outsiders are considered fair game for more predatory youkai unless they can find protection by nightfall.
  • Even worse however, is that Yukari doesn't just limit herself to people she finds amusing. But she also spirits away people that are easily missed or suicidal. More or less with the express purpose of having them become Youkai food.
• The Avatar/Stranger from the Ultima series. (Not to mention Lord British himself and his friends, perhaps a LITERAL Author Avatar.)
• Player characters in Wizard101 arrive in the game world having been summoned from ours by the headmaster of the wizard school. How they promptly develop magical abilities is never really explained.
• ZanZarah: The Hidden Portal: Amy is lured into Zanzarah by Rafi, who believes that she's a prophesied hero who can save the world. He hides a teleportation rune in Amy's home, and when she touches it, the rune transports her to Zanzarah.

Web Animation

• Geo from Gwain Saga was an everyman hero, but things changed fast for him pretty quickly.
• In Turnabout Storm, Twilight Sparkle summons Phoenix Wright to Equestria because Rainbow Dash has been accused of murder.

Web Comics

• Axe Cop features Mr. Stocker, a superhero with no powers. Immediately after being summoned to assist in a battle, he's bitten by an evil robot and turns into one himself, and is presumably destroyed. He later popped up to offer his help in fighting evil cats, only to be killed again.
• Captain N's spiritual successor, Alex Williams of Captain SNES: The Game Masta.
• Parson from Erfworld. The trope is even lampshaded when he outright states he wishes he could be transported into a tabletop game, just before vanishing (complete with a "PLOT!" sound effect when he disappears and rematerializes in said world). Of course, he's exactly the Turn-Based Strategy master they need, but he has to learn the local rules first... It's also deconstructed; he's not really an everman, but rather so obsessed with his gaming hobby that it completely dominated his life as he let everything else fall apart out of sheer disinterest. One of the people who saw him disappear remarks that it's the first plan he's ever followed through on.
  "Dibs on his dice."
• Counter Isekai Corps is a deconstruction of this concept of the "killing them to reincarnate them" variety. Other worlds constantly doing this has led to Earth becoming crime riddled as people with heroic potential leave rather than help their own world. Furthermore, after hitting him with a truck fails, the truck transforms into a monster/robot and tries to kill the woman who saved him and the boy, pointing out how doing this willingly is a murder with extra steps.
• Nedroid has played with this several times, perhaps most notably in "At Least I Have a Great Story to Tell My Plant."
• Torg from Sluggy Freelance gets this during the "That Which Redeems" Story Arc. Justified since, while Torg is ordinary (if kinda stupid) by our world's standards, in the dimension he's summoned to, he's unique in being the only person who's not a complete, totally dedicated pacifist. So, while there are plenty of other people in that world who could fight off the Demonic Invaders, Torg's the only one actually willing to. He picks up some Badass Normal abilities along the way, too. The magic demon-killing sword powered by the blood of the innocent certainly helps.
• A problem for the returning hero is pointed out by an xkcd strip.

Western Animation

• Captain N: The Game Master. In the first episode the Ultimate Warp Zone summons perfectly average Kevin Keene to save Videoland using his skill at video games.
• Cyberchase and other similar normal-child-becomes-the-hero cartoons. Partly subverted in that it's partially their fault in the first place.
• Inverted in the Darkwing Duck episode "Planet of the Capes", which featured a planet full of superheroes with exactly one powerless "ordinary guy" living there, whose job is to be constantly rescued by the supers. However, he's gone missing, so they fetch Darkwing Duck to replace him since, although he's a "superhero" on his own planet, they know he has no actual superpowers and thus should make a perfect ordinary guy. Turns out the last ordinary guy got sick of the job and became a technology-powered Super Villain, whom Darkwing ends up defeating while all the supers are useless.
• The Dungeons & Dragons (1983) cartoon, where five kids get called by Dungeon Master to defeat Venger.
• Done en masse in King Arthur & the Knights of Justice. The Knights of Camelot are imprisoned by Morganna le Fay so Merlin summons an entire college football team named the Knights from modern day America to replace them. They get by entirely by being ridiculously huge. And, on more than one occasion, using modern techniques, technology (which they ramshackle themselves), and science to defeat Morganna's magic.
• My Little Pony: Rescue at Midnight Castle: More like Pick Up Every(wo)man Hero: Firefly goes to our world and asks Megan's help. Megan subsequently becomes a regular visitor to the fantastical world where the Little Ponies hail from, in times of crisis and peace alike.
• In Teen Titans (2003), this happens to Cyborg when he is pulled back in time to the Bronze Age by a witch to help save her master's people from monsters. Subverted twice in that Cyborg is not an "everyday" hero (he does begin to lose his powers, from lack of electricity, though) and in that the summoning was part of an evil scheme all along. It does otherwise fit the trope, however, including the part about falling in love with someone you cannot stay with.

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