Basic Trope: A fanfic writer expands a Flat Character.
- Straight: The Troperville Show stars Alice, Bob, Carl, and Diane, and has a large supporting cast. The fanfic Antics Of A Small Town features Emily as a fifth main character, even though she is only a one-time character in the show.
- Exaggerated: Every minor or unseen character from the show is given this treatment.
- Downplayed:
- Emily is a minor supporting character in the show, and becomes a major one in the fic. However, several original characters are also fairly important.
- Emily is seen once or twice in the show, and her name might not even be canonical. In the fic, she has one or two appearances, but those have a strong impact on the plot — like, say, accidentally crashing into a protagonist with her car, and killing them.
- Justified:
- The fanfic takes place about a year after the show itself, and in that time, Emily has become closer to Alice, Bob, Carl, and Diane.
- The writer of the fanfic really likes Emily and wanted to see more of her on the actual show, so they wrote some stories of her themselves.
- Inverted:
- The main characters are Demoted to Extra in order to accommodate the large number of original characters.
- The writer changes the main characters' personalities, thereby contradicting Canon.
- Fanmade but unoriginal characters are used as Suspiciously Similar Substitutes for canon characters.
- Subverted: "Emily" turns out to be Alice in diguise.
- Double Subverted: The real Emily turns up later on, and is a major character for the remainder of the fanfic.
- Parodied: Emily is apparently everyone’s best friend, and also a space pirate who’s saved the world several times.
- Zig Zagged: ???
- Averted: No characters are any more or less important in the fanfic than in canon.
- Enforced:
- The writer's best friend's Original Character is in love with Emily.
- The fanfic was written in response to a challenge which required the author to write a story focusing on a character who received little or no character development in canon.
- Lampshaded: "Is it just me, or is Emily hanging out with us more than she used to?" "It's just you."
- Invoked: Emily starts hanging out with Alice, Bob, Carl, and Diane more often, in the hope of becoming their friend.
- Exploited: ???
- Defied:
- All the minor characters from the show keep their distance from the main ones.
- Alice, Bob, Carl, and Diane opt to invite an Original Character to their group, rather than a one-time character from the show.
- Discussed: Bob (in the fic): "Y'know, I wonder how differently things would've gone if Emily was a pal of ours back when [Canon events] happened."
- Conversed: "You do realize that Frank was only in that one episode, right?" "Yes. That's why I wrote about him: so I could give him the personality of my choice."
- Plotted A Good Waste: The writer is good at creating characters but no good at coming up with names, so he instead applies the personality of his design to a canon character.
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