Loads and Loads of Characters: Difference between revisions

== Advertising ==

* [[Orangina]] itself already have a bunch of characters in their commercials, but they have many models (mostly female) in their [http://orangina.fr website] (although their old website had MORE females, including a female penguin!).

 

== Anime and Manga ==

* The cast of ''[[Maji de Watashi ni Koi Shinasai!|Maji De Watashi Ni Koi Shinasai]]'' may not be as extremely numerous as many other examples on this page, but the very ''first'' episode of the anime introduces almost all of the most notable characters in short order. Unless you've played the [[Visual Novel]], it's going to take a few episodes to get most of them straight.

* One look at [http://filmdump.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/summer-wars-2.jpg this] should tell you how big the cast of ''[[Summer Wars]]'' is.

 

== [[Comic Books]] ==

* ''[[Sonic the Hedgehog (comics)|Archie Comics Sonic the Hedgehog]]'''s character roster, taking from both the games, the [[Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog|TV]] [[Sonic Sat AM|series]] and original characters, number in the triple digits.

* ''[[The Avengers (Comic Book)|The Avengers]]'' have issued "Avengers Assemble" calls to the entire roster several times, resulting in anywhere from 30 to 100+ members showing up. After Heroes Reborn, when the team was assembled to fight Morgana, the issue after showed 30 Avengers attempting to take down one B-list villain, with disastrous results. Typically these assemblies also show one time Avengers [[Incredible Hulk]], [[Spider-Man]], or the [[Fantastic Four (Comic Book)|Fantastic Four]] making an excuse not to tag along. (Although Spider-Man later became a full time member)

* ''[[Usagi Yojimbo]]'' had a big group photo of all its featured characters (good and evil, living and dead) as of vol. ~15, roughly about three-dozen characters.

* The Western record probably goes to the DC and Marvel universes themselves, as evidenced by various ''[[Crisis Crossover]]'' events. ''[[Crisis on Infinite Earths]]'' put together every version of every major hero at once while throwing in a couple of unique characters. That's just counting the main story line, side stories eventually pulled in virtually every single character in DC history.

* [[Pride High]] has its reader characters on its message boards, which has more characters than one may be willing to count—and many of these have made cameos in the comic itself.

* ''[[Love and Rockets]]'', particularly the Palomar stories, which follow the intertwining lives of residents in a small town and their descendants.

 

== Fan Works ==

* ''Breakaway'', the first installment of the ''[[Buzz Lightyear of Star Command]]'' [[Fan Verse]] ''[[For Good]]'', introduces an [[OC]] protagonist and just a couple of supporting females throughout the first few chapters... and then the story hits Chapter 10 and turns into a [[Next Gen Fic]]. Enter three [[Action Girl]] stars and four male [[Good-Looking Privates]]... and the distinct possibility of more cadets on their way.

* The ''[[Deliver Us from Evil Series]]'' starts out with eight (or nine, depending on how you want to categorize Sean Youghal) Scotland Yarders, [[Ascended Extra]] Davy Wiggins and an indeterminate number of [[Street Urchin|Baker Street Irregulars]] making screentime (full Irregular count is 50), plus [[Aloof Big Brother|Mycroft Holmes]], [[Like Brother and Sister|Mary Watson]], and [[Team Mom|Mrs. Hudson]] getting more screentime. That's not even mentioning the bad guys, or the [[OC]] supporting cast. All this in [[Up to Eleven|''one book'']].

 

== Film ==

* The [[Guy Ritchie]] movies (at least ''[[Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels]]'', ''[[Snatch]]'', and ''[[RocknRolla]]''). And most characters [[Anyone Can Die|get killed throughout the movie]].

* Likewise the Guy Ritchie-esque ''[[Smokin Aces]]''.

** [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3sV4k-mNa0 This video] parodies the phenomenon.

*** [http://www.adultswim.com/video/?episodeID=8a2505951c8b78da011c9b6c75090094 As does this] ''[[Robot Chicken]]'' sketch.

* ''Recount'', an HBO [[Made for TV Movie]] about the 2000 US presidential election, has many characters on both sides, with the Democrats being led by Kevin Spacey and Dennis Leary (with help from [[Nineteen Eighty-Four|Winston Smith]]). Oh, and they're all based on real people. Tom Wilkinson leads the Republicans.

* ''[[Tombstone]]'' has 85 speaking roles (averaging one new character every 90 seconds). It follows the band of good guys, the band of bad guys, the good guys' wives, and the townsfolk, developing characters in all of these roles.

** Speaking of Pixar, the die-cast toyline based on their animated film ''[[Cars]]'' actually consists of toy versions of ''every'' single character from the movie!

* While the [[Disney Princess]] franchise (which is also Disney's biggest and most profitable franchise ever) includes only ten princess characters (with some exceptions, however), the Disney villain franchise on the other hand, actually includes the most characters of ''any Disney franchise ever made!''

* ''[[Casablanca]]'', despite revolving around three leads, has been noted for its [[wikipedia:Casablanca (film)#Cast|large cast of characters.]] It has 22 speaking parts, many of whom play some kind of significant role in the plot (or get at least one moment in the limelight).

* The film "[[Love Actually]]" revolves around a cast of nearly 20 characters to a greater or lesser degree. The original and arguably best ensemble movie that inspired similar movies such as New Year's Eve and Valentine's day.

 

== Literature ==

** [[J. K. Rowling]] has actually stated that she intentionally fleshed out 40 or so classmates (10 in each house in Harry's year plus presumably some that are not in Harry's year like Luna Lovegood and Katie Bell) before she even started writing.

** That's not even counting Beaubatons and Durmstrang students and staff, ministry members, Muggles, student family members, Order of the Phoenix members, Hogwarts staff, Death Eaters, or non-human characters like Buckbeak or Dobby. And of course, this is all shown off nicely in the glorious end battle in ''Deathly Hallows''.

** This is the primary reason why there is so much [[Demoted to Extra]] in [[Harry Potter (film)|the movies]]. When there are ten zillion supporting characters and each book is pared down to a two and half hour film, inevitably some "regulars" will only get a [[Mandatory Line]] per movie if that.

* The ancient Hindu epic ''[[Mahabharata]]'', part literature and part mythology, defined Loads and Loads of Characters for possibly the first time ever, and then ''re''defined it just for fun. For most of the story, it's just the five heroes and their wife having wacky adventures. In the final year of the story, the cast suddenly balloons as the heroes are boarded up with a royal family, which naturally includes the extended family and several orders' staff and servants, all named. Then you get to [[The War Sequence]], and it's the main heroes, miscellaneous friends and political allies, their extended families, and sons and nephews in the double digits ''each'', against the enemy force of ''one hundred'' named villains and ''their'' allies, cousins, sons and nephews. This is just the named characters -- [[Mooks]] are in the thousands. And ''each named character'' gets [[Character Focus|his own story]]. This, kids, is why the ''Mahabharata'' is the longest poem ever written by an incredibly wide margin.

** In 1987, Jim Crockett Promotions took over/bought (Nobody seems to know which is the absolute truth) Championship Wrestling from Florida and bought the Universal Wrestling Federation. This gave them four more hours of TV to fill each week. While there were three distinct and separate crews, wrestlers would move over constantly. Late in the year, the UWF shows stopped having their own crews while CWF kept losing importance. At the end of the year, the UWF shows were the same as the JCP shows with different names/intros (UWF was the same as NWA Pro Wrestling and Power Pro Wrestling was the same as NWA World Wide Wrestling. The announcers would only mention "The Wrestling Network" during the shows.), while CWF's B-show (Southern Pro Wrestling) was cancelled and CWF became a NWA Pro Wrestling with localized commentary and a different name/intro. UWF disappeared as 1988 started, PPW disappeared a few weeks later, and CWF stuck around for a few more months.

** In 1998-1999, [[WCW]] was so bloated that it had over ''two hundred'' wrestlers under contract. Things were so mismanaged that some of these wrestlers were never even used on television and essentially got paid for sitting at home doing nothing.

* In its first series, ''[[Downton Abbey]]'' had twenty major characters who appeared in ''every'' episode, with an additional five recurring characters appearing in two to four episodes. Series two is promised to add a least one new regular and three heavily recurring characters.

* ''[[Doctor Who]]'' is fifty years old and has a ''ridiculous'' amount of characters. Thankfully, at one time you'll only need to know about maybe five or six max (the Doctor, his companion(s), and any family/friends/recurring characters), plus the one-shot characters for a single episode. But if we were to list every 'main' or major-supporting character the show had ever had, we'd be here all day.

 

 

* ''[[Warrior Cats RPG]]'' has had, over the course of its history, as many as ''100,000'' different characters.

 

** If you believe some of the comics that came with the toys, some of those [[Faceless Mooks]] were also sentient.

* ''[[G.I. Joe]]'' is a prime example, due to its [[Merchandise-Driven]] nature. The action figure line featured dozens of characters, almost all of whom appeared on the TV show at some point.

 

 

** A simple example is the "relations" chart put together in ''Radiant Dawn'', which showed the given relations between most of the major characters. It also served as the titular scorecard by which you could know the players. Warning, MASSIVE spoilers [https://web.archive.org/web/20111114035802/http://serenesforest.net/fe10/relation.jpg here] Keep in mind this is only the playable characters and super-major NPCs.

** This is actually zig-zagged in the Jugdral series, at least Genealogy of the Holy War. There is no [[Arbitary Head Count Limit]], and while the cast of (playable) characters looks about the average size of a Fire Emblem game, you only get to use about ''half'' at once due to the game's narrative. And even then, of the second half, a good portion of the characters you see on a list are merely substitute characters.

* Squaresoft's (now Square-Enix) ''[[Chrono Cross]]'' featured a cast of 45 playable characters - requiring the player to play through the game at least three times to get them all. Alas, the game only allows 3 characters to fight at a time. That also leads to ending up with a core group you like to use in battle all the time during the later parts of the game to the exclusion of most of the rest of the characters you collected along the way. And it makes outfitting the redundant characters an expensive proposition.

* By the time you get to the end of the final chapter of ''[[Final Fantasy IV: The After Years]]'', you'll have a party of 22 characters to choose from, although nearly half of them won't join you if you skip their chapters, up to 6 of those can be [[Lost Forever]] or [[Killed Off for Real]] even if you ''don't'' skip their chapters, and [[Creepy Doll|2]] of them have next to no dialogue to begin with and are optional anyways.

* The ever-growing [[Geodesic Cast]] of [[The Trading Post]].

* ''[[The Gungan Council]]'' has had over 8,000 members, each creating at least one character, with many forever lost due to the site's transfer to Yuku and the ezHack. But that's just the entire site's twelve year history. At any one moment, the current number of characters per faction averages at at least 25 active at the time, not including lurkers, bumping the character count at the time to around 200.

* Being a universe made by dozens of writers, and including the ''entire world'' in that setting, ''[[Metamor Keep]]''.

* ''[[RWBY]]'' from [[Rooster Teeth]] -- as of the end of Volume 3 in 2016, there were 56 named characters with speaking parts.

 

== [[Western Animation]] ==

* ''[[Recess]]'' has had about 105 characters appear in the series (and only a few of them are included on the character sheet!)

* ''[[Adventure Time]]'' is quickly becoming this trope. The majority of the cast includes one episode appearances like Penny and the Magic Man and background characters like Lollipop Girl and Gumdrop Lass. The show also had the distinction of nearly doubling the entire cast in ''just one episode''. That episode was "Fionna and Cake", in which the main cast and Candy Kingdom residents were all [[Rule 63|genderbent]].

 

== [[Real Life]] ==

** Speak for yourself, [[wikipedia:Eukaryote|multi-cellular scum]]. [[wikipedia:prokaryotes|We]] are vast and [[All Your Base Are Belong to Us|we are in your digestive tract]].

* If you go to a service in a Catholic/Orthodox church, you will hear lots and lots of characters being mentioned. Visit a Protestant one, and you will often hear just about one. This can be pinned down to Protestant churches mainly focusing on Biblical characters, whereas Catholic/Orthodox churches also focus on the saints who lived in the years after the timeline of the New Testament canon.

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Acting for Two]]

[[Category:Ensembles]]