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{{trope}}
[[File:
{{quote|'''Earl:''' ''"How come we haven't been seen in so long?"''
'''Larry:''' ''"Because the story follows more than one group of people. We're like the 'B' Party."''
'''Detestai:''' ''No, I think that's the soldier and the elf girl. We're more like the 'C' Party."''
'''Larry:''' ''See? No respect!"'
'|''[http://rpgworldcomic.com/d/20020405.html RPG World]''}}
Can't be bothered to remember everyone in a show with [[Loads and Loads of Characters]]? Neither can some writers. The best solution is to [[Cast Calculus|split the cast into distinct groups.]]
This allows for enough characterization, because we always see them together and that's enough ''net'' personality for characters whose physical descriptions are probably longer than those of their personalities.
This can be really obvious when you notice that with the exception of perhaps the main
Shows which allow for the format of a literal team will always use this trope. See also [[Geodesic Cast]] which repeats the structure of the main character's group and [[Planet of Hats]] when this is done with entire worlds/species.
{{examples}}
== Anime and Manga ==
* ''[[Axis Powers Hetalia]]'' has this. Since all the characters are the [[Anthropomorphic Personification|embodiments of countries]], each
** '''Axis:''' Italy, Germany and Japan
** '''Allies:''' Russia, France, China, England and America <ref>Oh, and Canada too!</ref>
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** '''Far East:''' Vietnam, Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea and Macau.
** '''Oceania:''' Australia and New Zealand, but also includes Tonga, Wy, and Hutt River.
* ''[[Baccano!]]'' does this due to having nearly 2 dozen [[Decoy Protagonist|'main' characters]] in addition to the countless other Mooks and crooks. So you get groups such as the Lemeurs, the Martillo, Russo and Runorata Family, Jaccuzzi's gang, and more featured in the light novels.
** ''[[Durarara!!]]'', set in the same universe (although loosely connected) and with the same cast size, follows suit. Mikado's [[Two Guys and a Girl]] gets the majority of focus, though Celty cycles through multiple herds and winds up with at least as much individual screentime, most often as [[Red Oni, Blue Oni|Blue Oni to Shizou's Red]].
* [[Lampshade Hanging|Lampshaded]] in ''[[Kare Kano]]'', where aside from Asaba, Yukino and Arima have mostly [[Limited Social Circle|exclusive friends to themselves]]. Miyazawa's tomboy friend and Arima's friend are left over after everyone else leaves and fall into awkward conversation because they are explained to be "the characters who never talk to each other".
* With more than thirty girls in the class taught by the protagonist, ''[[Mahou Sensei Negima|Negima]]'' makes the most of this, though there is less shifting as the popularity of characters has solidified. Most of the class is divided into reasonably logical Cast Herds based on interests: the jocks, the cheerleaders, and dormmates. Some shift around into the other herds. Naturally, Negi's group is made of the most popular characters. This is lampshaded in a filler chapter involving the quirky but rarely seen 'leftovers', who according to Evangeline are [[Meta Guy|boring and lack sex appeal]].
** In addition, the series takes the concept to the max with the soundtracks for the anime adaptations. [[Image Song
** There is also a truly staggering number of herds outside the class, as well. There's the staff of Mahora, there's Chamo and Chachazero, there's the inhabitants of Mundus Magicus (who are themselves divided into innumerable herds, such as Fate's group, the Government, the Gladiators, the Royal Knights, the Bounty Hunters, Mama Bear, and a random group of adventurers), there's the Welsh mages, there's the non-3A students of Mahora, there's the Kyoto villains, there's Ala Rubra... the list goes on and on and on [[Overly Long Gag|and on and on and on and on and on....]]
** Don't forget the Baka Rangers! More of a plot point than a herd really, but still.
* ''[[One Piece]]'' has about a kajillion characters by now. Luckily, the show's premise allows them to be easily split off into various different ship crews. The captain usually serves as both herd leader and spokesman.
* ''[[Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS|Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha Striker S]]'' has [[Badass Crew|Riot Force Six]] divided as Forward Stars, Forward Lightning, and [[Bridge Bunnies|the Long Arch crew]]. After the group gets split up, they got grouped by [[The Federation|TSAB]] branches, such as [[Sergeant Rock|Combat Instructors]] (Nanoha, Vita), [[Space Police|Enforcers]] (Fate, Teana), Investigators (Hayate, Reinforce Zwei), Air Force (Signum, Agito), [[Emergency Services|Disaster Relief]] (Subaru), and Nature Conservation (Erio, Caro). Also, when the Numbers get a [[Heel Face Turn]], they got split between those that went to the [[Saintly Church|Saint Church]] and those adopted by the [[Sibling Team|Nakajima family]] (and those that didn't turn and are currently incarcerated).
* ''[[Bleach]]'' after the trip to Soul Society, and especially after the first Rescue Arc. The show already has a [[Five-Man Band]], plus a Captain and a Lieutenant from all thirteen squads, plus at least a few dozen other characters who are at least tangentially important to the plot, and this whole cast can be split into almost any combination at any given time, and almost always is.
* ''[[Infinite Ryvius]]'' splits its huge cast of teenage space refugees into various social cliques. These are helpfully emphasized in the opening sequence, which arranges everyone by their group. Of course, the groups quickly begin to fluctuate, mix and change once the plot gets rolling.
* ''[[Saki (manga)|Saki]]'' easily divides each of its four five-person mahjong teams (not counting side characters like Fujita or Touka's butler) by school. Even then, the more distinct a character design someone has, the more likely they are to be an important character. Kiyosumi (the main characters) and Ryuumonbuchi (the rivals) have the highest amount of important characters.
* ''[[Naruto]]'' (pictured above) has this, with the different four-member '''squads'''. Occasionally the groups do get mixed around to form temporary '''task forces''', but most of the time they work in their original squads. The herding doesn't stop there:
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* Although interaction between the herds is common, ''[[Hayate the Combat Butler]]'' has a few herds. '13s', '16s', outside of school...
** Even the 'bad guys' segmented themselves into a herd, though there's little interaction between them anymore, and one of them hasn't even appeared in the manga yet.
* The opening theme of ''[[Angel Beats!]]'' pulls the characters into herds, though the ones in the show are a bit different and constantly interact.
* ''[[
* By the end of ''[[Dragon Ball]]'' the main herds were the [[The Hero|Son Family]], [[The Lancer|The Briefs]], [[The Smart Guy|Kami's]] [[The Mentor|lookout]]. [[Sixth Ranger|Crane School]], Kais, [[The Mentor|the Supreme Kais, New Namek]], the [[Can't Catch Up|Kame House]] and [[Fake Ultimate Hero|Mr. Satan and Buu]].
* ''[[Fullmetal Alchemist]]'': Roy Mustang and Maes Hughes are close friends, but their subordinates operate largely separate from each other, which is [[Truth in Television]] for many military units.
* The characters in ''[[Girls und Panzer]]'' naturally divide into groups by tank crew, with the main characters crewing the same tank... but some of the crews interact with other crews on occasion.
== Comic Books ==
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== Literature ==
* ''[[A Song of Ice and Fire]]'' has a plot that spans across several regions and continents, and often divides groups of characters by where their story takes place (Jon and the Night's Watch in the North, Dany and her royal party in the Free Cities, etc.) Since most of the plot deals with politics and warfare between dynastic houses, characters are also divided further by their family alliance (The Starks, The Lannisters, The Baratheons, etc.)
* ''[[Discworld]]'' does this between books - most can be classified as Witches, Wizards, City (of which the Watch is the most frequently recurring) or Other, and characters from one herd will never have more than a cameo in another herd's book.
** [[The Grim Reaper|Death]] being the exception - he's in almost every book. (He doesn't personally appear in ''The Wee Free Men''.)
*** Death has his own Cast Herd (Mort, Ysabell, Susan, Albert and a couple of others), and he occasionally stars in his own story (or rather, in stories where events revolve around something he is doing or has done). Though he's in almost every book, most of them are still cameos lasting a single scene (usually, he's only in it because someone has just died- in that sense, he's the one ''least'' likely to interact with another herd, since recurring characters in these stories ''never'' die), which isn't much different from the cameos by other characters. He's just more memorable than most.
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** Then we have the sequel series, Oracles of Fire. Cast members added include all of the Nephlim, the characters from the Arc time period, which somewhat overlaps with the characters from the Tower of Babel time period, more anthrozils, the ten men from Sheol, characters in Heaven... [[Loads and Loads of Characters|the list goes on and on and on.]]
* ''[[Warrior Cats]]'' starts off book one with ThunderClan, WindClan, ShadowClan, RiverClan, StarClan and the Twolegplace kittypets. The story has since grown to include SkyClan, BloodClan, The Dark Forest, The Tribe of Rushing Water, The Tribe of Endless Hunting, The Ancients, Daisy's Barn and Jingo's Clan. [[Loads and Loads of Characters|Now to take a breath.]]
* ''[[Gone (novel)]]'', especially in later books. There's the Sam's group, Caine's group, the Human Crew, and the Island kids, plus whoever the Gaiaphage is using at the moment. People do occasionally switch from one group to another, though, like {{spoiler|Diana and Quinn at the end of Plague}}, and {{spoiler|the Island kids have now kind of merged with Sam's group.}}
== Live
* This was becoming a problem on ''[[Farscape]]'' at one point, the solution of which was to clone the main character and send one of each off with roughly half the cast and then alternate between the groups until enough characters had died to recombine them.
** If that was the case, then it didn't work - {{spoiler|only one of the Crichtons died, and of the other characters only Stark left the show. Zhaan died at the start of the season, and Crais and Talyn died at the end of it - long (respectively) before and after the split-up)}}
* In the second season of ''[[Oz]]'', the Unit Manager of Emerald City begins to identify his inmates as being in one of ten groups: Muslims, Homeboys, Italians, Latinos, Aryans, Bikers, Irish, Gays, Christians, and Others.
* ''[[Lost]]'' makes use of distinct character groups, though they tend to merge by the end. Season 2 split them into the Tailies (with Ana-Lucia as spokesman and most important, and most appearing character) and the fuselage survivors; season 3 had the herds of the people in the camp and people captured by the Others (and it changed regularly as it went on); and season 4 featured Jack's group, Locke's group, the people on the boat, and the people from the boat. Notably, the latter two were prone to vanishing from the plot often. Season 5 continues the trend: on the one hand, we have the on-island characters, and on the other, the off-island characters. More recently, the division has shifted to {{spoiler|1977 characters and 2007 characters, which in turn splits into the 316 survivors (lead by Ilana) and the people on the main Island. The off-Island plot-AKA Desmond's-vanishes here outside of a flashback and a few brief scenes in "The Variable".}}
** Averted by season 1: A big deal is made initially about who is on the beach and who is in the caves, but this distinction quickly became meaningless as characters go from camp to camp so often that it's hard to remember who chose to go where. This split is ultimately forgotten and the survivors all move back to the beach in early season 2.
** Also early on there was a core group of characters who did everything. If something was going on, it included some combination of Jack, Kate, Locke, Sawyer and Sayid. [[Fan Nickname]] for them was the 'A-Team'. This was because at the beginning Lost's [[Myth Arc]] was just forming. We were treated to a lot of 'life on the beach' subplots with characters like Boone, Shannon, Charlie, Claire, Hugo, Jin, Sun, etc. The writers made several [[Lampshade Hanging|Lampshades Hung]] to this. Characters would drift in an out of the two groups, but it was removed completely later on. Arguably by the fourth or fifth season all the characters were directly involved in the mythology of the island.
** This was also lampshaded repeatedly after the on-screen introduction of the Others, with characters using the phrase(s) "my/your/their people."
* With more than 20 recurring characters, period drama [[Upstairs, Downstairs]] has its two distinct Cast Herds conveniently marked in the title. Upstairs is the well-off Bellamy family; Downstairs is their staff of servants, a sort of family of its own.
* Brazilian primetime soaps, which always have [[Loads and Loads of Characters]], tend to cluster the cast like this, even using an official term: nuclei. There may be the "protagonist nucleus", the "comedic nucleus", the "suburban nucleus", the "favela nucleus" etc.
* ''[[Battlestar Galactica
** Then of course later on there were splits between Cylon-centric scenes and human-centric scenes. This started with the Cylon-centric second season episode "Downloaded," which was the first time we really got a look at how Cylon society functioned, but it became a lot more frequent after that. To complicate things further, there were plenty of Cast Herds in human society as well (Baltar's harem being one of the most obvious ones).
* Happens in ''[[Downton Abbey]]'' with the Earl's family and the Servants
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== Video Games ==
* ''[[Super Robot Wars]]'' can, of course, split characters among their own series (but they may need their usual herds anyway), and occasionally mixes characters into new herds depending on the story. In the [[Original Generation]] games, they're usually divided by their military units (ATX Team, SRX team, Octo Squad, Aggressors, etc...), couples (and there are a lot of them), and sometimes by ship (whether they usually travel with the ''Hagane'' or ''Hiryu Custom'').
* ''[[Fire Emblem Tellius|Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn]]'' involves three separate armies. Only the army leaders wind up talking to each other. When they team up to fight the [[Big Bad]], only the leaders and mandatory characters say anything. [[Justified Trope|Justified]] because of the game's [[Anyone Can Die]] nature - if a character was to say something, and they had died earlier on, there would have to be a different conversation involving a different character, and if that one had died.... It just keeps going on. Using the characters that would net you a Game Over if they died was really the only solution.
* The Subspace Emmissary of ''[[Super Smash Bros.]] Brawl'' has several groups of characters that intersect, divide, and ultimately all converge for the finale.
* The ever-growing ''[[Touhou]]'' cast is often divided by where they live (most endgame bosses work with that principle), their race, their occupation ([[Cute Witch|Team Magic]]), their status (most demo bosses, [[Baka|Team (9)]]), pairing (again, Team Magic) or even all or most of these at once (The protagonists).
** The cast is somewhat of a [[Geodesic Cast]], where all the final bosses tend to have similar sets of servants that form cast herds, as well. It's only the characters outside of those cast herds (like the low-level bosses that make up the (9) squad) that form cast herds elsewhere.
** The witches trio actually has a member, [[Hot Librarian]] Patchouli, that belongs to two separate cast herds - she's a live-in member of the Scarlet Devil Mansion, and a partially-willing inductee of "Team [[Memetic Sex God|Marisa's Harem]]".
* ''[[Kingdom Hearts]]'''
* ''[[The King of Fighters]]'' is also notable for this. Although already has team separation; more and more teams came later on. Considering the unstoppable climax of sequels flowing and flowing all time, the entire list of teams is too long to specify here: if you're a KoF fan, you already must [[Gotta Catch Them All|know 'em all]] by heart.
* The ''[[Sonic the Hedgehog]]'' series from ''[[Sonic Adventure]]'' to ''[[Sonic the Hedgehog (2006
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== Web Original ==
* At [[Super-Hero School|Whateley Academy]] in the [[Whateley Universe]], people get split off by their 'team'. Team Kimba has the core protagonists. Outcast Corner has four more main characters who mostly appear together. Carmilla has split off from Team Kimba and has her own team now: The Pack. Aquerna mainly appears with the Underdogs. The Whitman Literary Girls have their own stories. And even the school villains usually stick to their own teams.
* In ''[[The Gungan Council]]'', the factions group like minded characters (Lightside characters joining Jedi, darkside character joining Sith) together and instill a sense of galactic conflict, due to hundreds of characters being written at once.
* [[Protectors of the Plot Continuum]] usually work in pairs or trios.
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== Western Animation ==
* ''[[Justice League (animation)|Justice League Unlimited]]'' does this with the many [[
* ''[[The Venture Brothers]]'' does this, but not for lack of characterization. If anything, it's because the ancillary characters become ''too'' well-rounded, so now we have to check in with 21 and 24, even if nothing's going on. Lesser villains like Phantom Limb and Underbeidht get less screen time.
** This is also by design: almost the entire recurring supporting cast is voiced by either Doc Hammer or Jackson Publick, and they try to avoid [[Talking to Himself]].
* ''[[Thomas the Tank Engine]]'' has the standard gauge engines and the narrow gauge engines, who rarely interact.
** However, that didn't necessarily hold true in either the novels or the early seasons. Gordon and Sir Handel could often be found bitching about being underappreciated, Peter Sam and Henry did not much care for each other, and Skarloey and Edward were best friends.
* The original ''[[Transformers]]'' series has herds within herds, which is to be expected of a show that is trying to sell toys. The entire original G1 toyline, by one rather rough estimate, contained 314 toys.
* ''[[Bionicle]]'' splits the cast into numerous different species and organizations. The Toa, Matoran, Turaga, Skakdi, Vortixx, Zyglak are the species, and the Dark Hunters, Brotherhood of Makuta, and the Order of Mata Nui are the organizations. Some species have a tendency to join specific orders.
* ''[[Avatar: The Last Airbender]]'' does this with the Avatar group and the Zuko/Iroh group before they meet up.
** The second season also added Azula, Mai, and Ty Lee into the mix, and occasionally showed glimpses into what Suki and the Kyoshi Warriors were doing, as well.
* ''[[My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic|My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic]]''. First off, you've got the main six ponies and Spike. The Cutie Mark Crusaders form a [[Power Trio]] with a smaller version of the main group, having an earth pony, pegasus and unicorn, with the latter also falling into [[Tomboy and Girly Girl]]. Then you have Celestia and Luna. The Apple family, with Big Macintosh and Granny Smith, is also very prominent, especially in season 2. Even the background ponies fall into this, with Derpy, the Mayor, Doctor Whooves, Rose, Daisy and Lily, Daisy and Colton Vines, Mr. and Mrs. Cake, and also Lyra and Bon-Bon, tending to show up around each other.
** Many of the background ponies aren't really characters, as much as they are scenery. Lyra, Bon-Bon and Doctor Whooves, for example, have no real personality (And don't even have consistent voice actors) in the context of the show. However, recently, they have begun to be more scripted (if still unimportant to the plot) as a fan-service.
** [[Incredibly Lame Pun|They are also a literal]]
* In ''[[Total Drama Island]]'', there are 22 campers, plus host Chris and Chef Hatchet. In Season 1, they are divided into two teams, The Screaming Gophers, and the Killer Bass. In Season 2, they are the Screaming Gaffers and the Killer Grips. In Season 3, there are three teams, Team Amazon, Team Victory, and Team Chris Is Really Really Really Hot.
{{reflist}}
[[Category:Ensembles]]
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