Fan Fic Magnet

Fans! Want to write your own original fiction set in our 'Verse, but don't want to tread on the toes of Canon too much? Fear not, we have just what you need. Here's a kick-ass one-shot character who's just begging for you to write her continuing adventures!

Compare with Canon Fodder, OC Stand-In.

Anime and Manga

 * The adventures of Ryouga Hibiki, he might be an important recurring character, but he also has an ability to cross oceans and dimensions as easily as walking through a door and more than once makes reference to his own adventures that don't revolve solely around Ranma. Where does he go, and who does he meet, what wacky adventures does he have on his own. Only fanfic writers know for sure. All we know is he often wears Leather Pants during them.
 * At the end of the Kyoto Arc of Rurouni Kenshin, the popular Dragon Soujiro Seta decides to wander around Japan for ten years, much like the title character. Many fics have centered around his adventures during this time.

Literature

 * The children (Albus, James and Lily II, Scorpius, et al.) who appear in the epilogue to Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows, because while Harry's time at Hogwarts is over, it's a whole new adventure for the kids.
 * Not to mention the adventures of Harry's parents' generation, which has been a staple of fanfiction since Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban established the broad strokes of their Backstory.
 * Any of the books (or, for the more ambitious, the whole series) retold from the perspective of a character other than Harry. Some of the more common choices:
 * Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets from Ginny's point of view - Arabella's The Very Secret Diary is one of the oldest and easily the most famous take on this plot, but fan writers are still coming out with new versions today.
 * Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets from Luna's point of view - Basically, an origin story for her, since it's before her first appearance in canon, but we retroactively know it would be her first year at Hogwarts.
 * Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban from Lupin's point of view
 * Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows from Neville's point of view - Dumbledores Army and The Year of Darkness follows this, of course.
 * Bill Weasley. It's mentioned that he is more-or-less an Adventurer Archaeologist, but this is never actually shown.
 * The Hogwarts founders. These fics are mostly a vehicle for demonstrating that fanfic writers have absolutely no concept of how different life in 1000 A.D. was.
 * One particularly Egregious example had Ravenclaw's Mary Sue daughter catching a train to America, renaming herself Granger and becoming Hermione's ancestress. Where to start?
 * Characters who are little more than named, providing perfect Self-Insert material, especially among the Slytherins. Aside from Blaise Zabini (who fan writers made a porcelain-skinned girl for years, until he was revealed to be a black boy), we have Astoria Greengrass. Name known only by Word of God, she's . Cue Possession Sues.

Live Action TV

 * Doctor Who has been doing this a lot since the 2005 revival. Jenny from "The Doctor's Daughter", and Lady Christina de Souza in "Planet of the Dead" (last seen flying off into the night in a flying London bus) are perfect examples.
 * Not to mention Meta-Crisis 10th Doctor, who, depending on if you count the deleted scene (it's up in the air as to if its canon) will have a TARDIS soon and has Rose with him.
 * Also Sally Sparrow from Doctor-Lite episode "Blink", and now even Amelia Pond (the 7-year-old version of Eleventh Doctor companion Amy Pond, who doesn't actually travel with him until age 21). This last is possibly because the BBC created a genuinely believable companion character, but then could never get away with having a 7yo girl running off in the TARDIS in the dead of night without even so much as a goodbye note to her aunt Sharon. So the fans wrote the stories instead.
 * Madame Vastra and her Ninja Maid Jenny from "A Good Man Goes to War". From the day the episode aired there has been an active Facebook group petitioning for them to have their own spin-off show.
 * In The Sarah Jane Adventures episode Death of the Doctor, Sarah Jane mentions that she's been looking up other companions online. She mentions Ben and Polly are running an orphanage, Ace is running a charity, etc. Fans assumed that, "running a charity" or "running an orphanage" are like Sarah Jane's title of "Freelance Journalist," a small part of what they do, and possibly a cover for other things. That scene was ripe for a blossoming of SJA-like fanfic spinoffs, with every single companion up for grabs. (Also, the one-time return of Jo Grant and her grandson is a more direct example.)
 * Captain Kirk's nephew Peter Kirk, who appeared in an original series ep but then was never even reffed again outside the Expanded Universe, is easily used by fic writers. Usually, he seems to join Starfleet, and rarely does he have anything even remotely approaching the career of his famous uncle. But he could be a farmer, a Locarno/Paris-type, an S31 agent, or the builder of the later Enterprises, because he has no canonical fate beyond being sent to Earth to live with his grandmother in Iowa, and that came from unshot scenes.
 * Gary Seven and Roberta Lincoln, who were actually designed to go off on their own adventures, but never did.
 * So why did Yeoman Rand leave the Enterprise anyway? One Star Trek Expanded Universe novel explained she had been pregnant, possibly with Captain Kirk's child.
 * Vash, the Adventurer Archaeologist on Star Trek: The Next Generation, eventually became a major character in the Millennium novels.
 * Mini-Jack, the clone of Jack O'Neill who appeared in one episide of Stargate SG-1 and was never mentioned again.
 * The Noodle Incident mentioned in the episode "Emancipation" in which Carter drank something which apparently caused her to partially or completely strip. Fuel for shippers, naturally.
 * iCarly featured a one-episode, badass, smoking hot Gamer Chick named Sasha Striker. She's kinda like Lilah from Ctrl+Alt+Del, shares some Foe Yay with Spencer, and finishes the show by giving him a big sexy kiss before leaving.
 * Recent Power Rangers biggies include: The Retro Rangers' extended offscreen period of action, Conner's brother, previous teams After the End in the Power Rangers RPM universe, and any departing team to keep their powers.
 * X1 Mask, the Ranger who appeared only once.
 * Irene Adler and her assistant Kate from Sherlock, who are very much a Gender Flip equivalent of Sherlock and John (only with the white-hot Ho Yay actually being acted upon.) Thanks to Irene's line about "liking detective stories, and detectives," it's not hard to assume she wriggled her way into Scotland Yard on a freelance basis the same way Sherlock did.

Toys

 * The Hero Factory Recon Team was specifically set up by LEGO as a place where fans can insert their own Hero into the Hero Factory 'verse. (And where ["LEGO can sell custom action figures of said fanfic Heroes, natch."])

Web Animation

 * Red vs. Blue: Pick a Freelancer agent. Any of them. Even the ones that technically haven't been named in the series yet - they're all named after states.
 * Except Florida. Poor Florida.

Western Animation

 * Koh and the Spirit World in Avatar: The Last Airbender? Visited once and vaguely alluded to several other times in ways that seemed to foreshadow a return visit and... nothing. At the end of the series absolutely nothing came of any of it, making things perfectly open for fanfic writers to speculate like crazy on what all of that build up led to.
 * In addition to this is the backstories of Iroh and Bumi, who are both old and have had major influences on the world. Bumi for being Aang's friend before he got frozen and Iroh for being a former General and having actually traveled to the Spirit World.
 * The two can be combined, as it's explicitly stated that Iroh went into the Spirit World and failed to accomplish something there, but it was never stated what that something was. Most speculation suggests he was trying to recover the soul of his son.
 * Technically, there was an online game between Seasons 2 and 3 where comatose Aang revisited the Spirit World and had to fight Koh; the creators consider it canon, but it certainly doesn't satisfy as much as watching an episode on DVD would.
 * What about Ursa? She gets a million fics explaining what happened to her, because we as viewers have absolutely no clue.
 * Avatar: The Legend of Korra even has a Shout-Out. It's likely to never be explained.
 * Tale Spin has more than its share of interesting one-shot characters. Many of these have become popular with fan writers and artists, including Adventurer Archaeologists Myra ("In Search of Ancient Blunders") and Katie Dodd ("For Whom the Bell Klangs") and spunky Princess Lotta Lamour ("The Road to Macadamia").
 * South Park: One-shot characters Damien, Gregory, The Mole, and Thomas (the Tourette's kid) are featured in a number of fanfics - but 99.9% of these are for shipping purposes only.
 * Red X (as his own character, not, who was X in his first appearance) appeared twice in Teen Titans, and is the show's Ensemble Darkhorse with many fanfics. It helps that he's an Anti-Hero / Anti-Villain whose identity is still a mystery.