http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SpotlightStealingSquad



About Jim and Michelle, it's rarely treading

A better title — I'll have a go:

The Motherfucking Stifler Show" MikeJ on on American Wedding "This film shouldn't be called American Pie: The WeddingAbout Jim and Michelle, it's rarely treadingA better title — I'll have a go:The Motherfucking Stifler Show"

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Most works have a main character or a set of main characters who are supposed to be the main focus of the story. But sometimes this doesn't work. An actor might give such a set of performances that he or she will dominate whatever scene they're in; the creator might have such a connection, conscious or unconscious, with a character or group that that he or she forgets that they have an incredibly diverse and powerful cast; or the characters that supposedly should have the focus might just be uninteresting.

If left unchecked, this may lead fans to complain about how They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot, let the less fantastic characters fall behind, never did anything with Hufflepuff House, and Jossed everyone's ships.

Most commonly happens to the Ensemble Dark Horse if lucky and the Creator's Pet if not.

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This trope can, in fact, overlap with the Creator's Pet or Replacement Scrappy. The main difference is that the SSS is not necessarily hated (at least, not at first), in fact, they may be or become one of the most popular characters. Compare Wolverine Publicity, and contrast Out of Focus. If the fanbase agrees (or the marketing team does, at any rate), may lead to a Spotlight-Stealing Title. May become a Breakout Character if they are adored by the audience. See also Adored by the Network, for spotlight-stealing shows, or Poorly Disguised Pilot if the squad consists of new characters that are never seen again. See also Spotlight-Stealing Crossover for crossover works, when its characters or elements from one particular work that are given more prominence over other works in the crossover.

In Fan Fiction circles, Mary Sues are usually deliberately created as this. The very nature of the medium also means fans can make their own squads out of whatever characters they want.

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A friendly reminder that Tropes Are Tools — there are times where the viewers actually like the spotlight hog. Finally, remember, neither the protagonist nor the deuteragonist can be part of the spotlight-stealing squad. The story is about them, after all. See also Decoy Protagonist, which occurs when someone replaces an apparent protagonist in the role.

Examples:

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Comic Books

Comic Strips

Fan Works

Films — Animation

Golden Films tends to do this with their Mockbusters. This causes little development for the main characters, who are overshadowed by the supporting cast. This sometimes forces the romance between the main couple (if one is provided).

The Minions were the breakout characters in Despicable Me, appearing in a few scenes and being the icing on top of an already good movie. In the sequel, they have their own subplot and almost all of the movie's advertising revolved around them. They also had shorts with them as protagonists included in the home releases of both films. And then they had their very own prequel movie. It has gotten to the point where they have practically overshadowed all of the other characters including the protagonist, Gru, and many people know Despicable Me solely because of the Minions.

Mortal Kombat Legends: Scorpions Revenge naturally gives this treatment to the titular ninja. Whilst Scorpion (along with Sub-Zero) has always been a fan favourite, his actual role in the games has never been domineering and initially was little more than a minor antagonist. In the animated movie Scorpion gets the main focus, instead of the original Power Trio Liu Kang, Sonya Blade and Johnny Cage, whom are given supporting roles. Scorpion even has more screen time than Sub-Zero his long-time nemesis. Not to mention hes the one who kills Goro, Quan-Chi and defeats Shang Tsung, stealing the victory away from the Earthrealm heroes.

Films — Live-Action

Literature

The Legend of Drizzt: Drizzt Do'Urden in R.A. Salvatore's later books stops giving the other cast members breathing room. Even before that, he was originally intended as a mentor figure for Wulfgar, to be phased out and only show up occasionally. Instead he stole the entire series for himself.

Tasslehoff becomes rather close to becoming one in the Dragonlance Trilogies of the War of the Lance and The Twins.

In some books of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time, unimportant characters like Galina can get more page time than the hero, Rand; due to the large cast and the length of the series, every main character has books in which they barely appear.

Terry Pratchett has stated this as an explicit problem of writing the Discworld at times — it's difficult to write a story set in Ankh-Morpork without the Watch getting involved, at which point it is inevitably a Watch story, regardless of the former plot outline. In fact, this trope was the primary reason for the creation of the protagonist character Moist von Lipwig (of Going Postal and Making Money); as a con artist and known criminal, Moist would naturally wish to avoid interaction with the Watch whenever possible. Even this ultimately failed, and his third book Raising Steam ended up being a crossover featuring a team-up. Which is, it has to be said, a tradition going back to the very start of the Watch books, which were originally meant to star Carrot and not Sam Vimes. The Wee Free Men was originally set in Lancre; one of the reasons for the change was that it would be too darn hard to keep the Ramtops witches from taking over. The two series ended up merging anyway, but at least by then Tiffany had developed somewhat on her own.

Take a look at the Honor Harringtons Crowning Moment Of Awesome listing, and you'd be forgiven for thinking the series was entirely about Victor Cachat rather than, you know, Honor Harrington.

The Sisterhood Series by Fern Michaels: As the series goes on, more attention becomes devoted to Jack Emery, Harry Wong, Bert Navarro, Ted Robinson, and Joe Espinosa (not to mention a few other characters). Some reviewers noticed this and complained that this series is about the Sisterhood, not the Brotherhood!

The Railway Series didn't really have a single "Main character", instead being an ensemble based anthology series. Thomas the Tank Engine didn't even appear until the second book, but it didn't stop people from referring to the series as "The Thomas Books" (possibly because he was the sole focus of two of the first four books in the series). As a result of the television series, Christopher Awdry was constantly being pressured into writing more Thomas-focus stories and books.

Sandokan: Yanez had a role as big if not bigger than Sandokan from The King of the Sea to An Empire Crumbles, with The Brahman and An Empire Crumbles actually having him as the declared protagonist. Ironically, Yanez's Revenge is the novel in which Sandokan takes back the spotlight.

Live-Action TV

Music

Pinball

Michael Jordan is prominently featured over all of the other characters in Space Jam, to the point of relegating Bugs Bunny to the background.

Professional Wrestling

Role-Playing Games

Sports

49.5% of all baseball-related news will be about the New York Yankees. 49.5% will be about the Boston Red Sox. The other teams are evenly divided among the remaining 1%. In Chicago, there's the Cubs and that Black Sox Scandal team on the South Side. Even when the White Sox broke their lengthy drought first in 2005, and even with a Big Name Fan in Barack Obama, the Southsiders were regularly overlooked in favor of the Cubbies, to the point where even Obama rooted for them to finally break their drought in 2016 (which they did).

In Ireland, GAA news is divided 60% Dublin Gaelic football, 30% Cork hurling, 10% the rest. Neither is the best team, but they have the highest populations and can thus boost newspaper sales more.

Notre Dame's football team last won a national championship when Ronald Reagan was president, yet they have enough clout that they're the only school (as opposed to conference) to have an exclusive deal with a major television network. Michigan head coach Jim Harbaugh has had a solid career, though plagued with Every Year They Fizzle Out syndrome, but his brash style, NFL experience and love of the spotlight make him easily the most-covered coach in college football.

Hockey Night in Canada, due to various licensing agreements with teams and broadcast agreements, was widely seen as "The Toronto Maple Leafs Show" with the occasional spinoff "The Montreal Canadiens and Someone Else". This problem eased significantly when the show went to a two-game format, the later game finally allowing the western Canadian teams to get regular national airtime. It's STILL the "Toronto Maple Leafs Show", not just on Hockey Night but on every Canadian-produced sports show/channel, because essentially all of Canada's media is located in Toronto and they hammer that fact in every single moment they can. A fun game is to take a shot for every time the Toronto Maple Leafs are mentioned during a game they are not even in! Even more irritating is during the playoffs in years they don't qualify, or are already eliminated (they haven't won a playoff series since before the 2004-05 lockout, and failed to qualify for seven years in a row and ten out of eleven afterward). That certainly does not stop HNiC from bringing them up.

In the Philippines, most news about the NCAA/UAAP will involve men's basketball. I heard there were other sports, but...

Coverage of football dominates sports news in the UK both in newspapers and on TV, even during the off season when no games are actually being played (transfer news makes up the difference). Only the Olympics and the Ashes stand a reasonable chance of displacing football off the back pages, and then only during the summer and if England/GBR are doing well.

Brett Favre. He's undoubtedly one of the best quarterbacks to play the game, but the amount of media attention he received in what is ostensibly a team sport bordered on the insane. In 2009, he returned to Green Bay (his old team) to play as the QB of the Minnesota Vikings (their hated rival). Fox dedicated a camera to watch him for the entire game and fans could watch a webcast of that view exclusively. Even though he wasn't on the field for half the game! During one of Favre's retirements, ESPN interrupted SportsCenter for live coverage of him getting off a plane en route to a press conference.

After Favre's (final) retirement, the media fixated on Tim Tebow in the same way. Before his first snap with the Denver Broncos, he was dominating gobs of coverage on SportsCenter and other programs pretty much entirely because of his outspoken personal views... but networks took it to the point where every move Tebow made was being obsessively followed by cameramen, even when he wasn't saying a word to them. It got to the point where, during the 2011 season, pre-season starting QB Kyle Orton was eventually released by the Denver Broncos to allow Tebow to take over at quarterback — not necessarily because Tebow was better, but because the fans stole Orton's spotlight for Tebow. Tebow's situation was actually pretty similar to Anna Kournikova's, of all people. A solid competitor but hampered by serious flaws (weak arm, can't handle speed of NFL/bad control, injury-prone), came along at exactly the right time (fans looking for a role model in troubled league/Internet just starting to really take off) became insanely popular among a certain section of the fanbase (evangelicals/horndogs), genuinely tried to improve, couldn't, finally hit rock bottom (0-7, 1 interception, 0.0 passer rating/clobbered in first round of US Open), and quickly faded into obscurity with little fanfare. There were other openly devoutly Christian QBs before (Kurt Warner and Jon Kitna), during (Philip Rivers) and since (Russell Wilson) Tebow's tenure. but none captured the imagination of the faithful on the basis of his faith like Tebow. And just as Tebow's career flamed out, Johnny Manziel came onto the scene—essentially Tebow 2.0, as both QBs are known more for their ability to scramble than for their passing ability, played in the SEC in college, won a Heisman Trophy earlier in their college careers than anyone before * Tebow was the first to win the Heisman as a sophomore; Manziel was the first to do it as a freshman , and are white. While there are some differences (Tebow wasn't quite as undersized as Manziel, but had less arm strength), the similarities have been repeatedly lampshaded.

Mention to someone not from the UK that you're from anywhere in the vicinity of Manchester and you'll get something along the lines of 'Oh, so you're a Manchester United fan?'. Tell them you're a Manchester City fan, who play in the same league and locally have almost the same level of support (different areas of the city), and they used look at you blankly. That's changed a bit in the 2010s, after the Abu Dhabi oil barons replaced the sacked former Thai prime minister as owner at Man City.

Sidney Crosby and Alex Ovechkin interchangeably serve as the NHL's Brett Favre. Most egregious example coming from Crosby's long injury status. He was out for over a full season, yet all news coverage about hockey still revolved around him. Jeremy Roenick even lampshades this by saying they ought to stop talking about Crosby until there are actual updates on his health. He gets blasted for it by his colleagues!

In India, cricket manages to be an SSS to not only any and every other sport, but even billion-dollar corruption issues and state elections!

Spain suffers from pretty much the same football obsession the UK does, except Real Madrid and Barcelona seem to be the only teams existing in the whole country. Tell anybody that you live in Madrid. Despite the fact that there are five First and Second Division teams based in that Community and three in the city itself, you'll rarely find anybody who doesn't assume you support Real.

Brazil has a football obsession in religious levels - though the Olympics and volleyball also get some love. And nationwide press basically just pays attention to the big 4 of both Rio and São Paulo (being the biggest two cities/states and the headquarters of the big media companies helps the other states being treated as a Flyover Country), getting even worse if one of those 8 hires a big name player or wins a major championship. Things are a bit worse than that. There are 2 teams from that group that gets even more attention. Flamengo and Corinthians are really popular and won some titles but that turns every single national sports news into 45% to each of those teams and 10% to the other "Big Ones". You're talking about Stealing Spotlight in Brazilian soccer without talking about Neymar?

In the 2010-2011 NBA season, the Miami Heat got to near Creator's Pet levels of coverage after LeBron James and Chris Bosh joined the team. Fortunately, the hoopla over the Heat was greatly reduced the following season, mainly because there were more intriguing stories to talk about (i.e., the lockout, the Knicks' extremely erratic season with coach shakeups and Jeremy Lin, injuries galore, Dwight Howard's will-he-or-won't-he stay in Orlando). The Lakers, early favorites to three-peat, were a SSS in that same season, to the point that Fox Sports had a section on their website devoted to both the Lakers and the Heat called "Heat or 3Peat", essentially scheduling the NBA Finals before the season even started! Funnily enough, the NBA champions that year were not either of these teams, but the Dallas Mavericks, who beat both teams en route to the title.

National soccer news in the Netherlands has a tendency to become "AFC Ajax and some other teams". Granted, AFC Ajax is the most successful team in the league, but it irks people when "their" team wins the league and then it's still about how Ajax didn't win it.

With the return of the Winnipeg Jets to the NHL, the focus from all Canadian sports outlets seems to have shifted to the team formerly known as the Atlanta Thrashers.

The Vegas Golden Knights stole the NHL's spotlight in their inaugural season of 2017-18, as they shattered the records for a first-year team and made it all the way to the Stanley Cup Final with home-ice advantage over the Washington Capitals. The more experienced Caps won the Cup, but Vegas far exceeded expectations.

The quarterback position in American football and the pitcher position in baseball are especially prone to this and will always get a greater share of the credit or blame than they deserve. The goalkeeper position in hockey and soccer/football are often this trope as well.

In the tennis world, try watching an ATP match between two other players than Roger Federer in a tournament he's in and take a shot every time the commentators mention him. Or a tournament he's been knocked out of. Hell, even a tournament he never entered in the first place. Or women's tournaments. Or wheelchair tennis. Or any article on men's tennis written in the past nine years. You will die.

Michael "Air" Jordan stole the spotlight from Earvin "Magic" Johnson and Larry "Legend" Bird during the late 80s and into the 90s. Came back big time when he came back from baseball and the Bulls dominated, to the point commentary on other sports events were ignored to focus on Jordan, he was a bigger merchandise seller than all the other big names combined, and even Bill Clinton said he would kick start the economy and employment, his spotlight and popularity was that big.

ESPN, especially its flagship program SportsCenter, usually gets accused of basically just being "NFL Live", with the NBA (especially LeBron James) getting the majority of the rest of the attention and everyone else being Demoted to Extra.

F1 news in Italy are Ferrari-centric. It's fair enough when Ferrari are title contenders, but it was rather awkward during their dry spell during the early 90s, when they were the 3rd/4th best team and rarely won. Still, news only mentioned the race winner and the Ferrari drivers, often ignoring important details like who had finished in 2nd or 3rd (if they weren't driving a red car).

In a double subversion, most football news in Norway are about the English Premier League! It's not uncommon spotting fans walking around Norwegian cities wearing Manchester United, Arsenal or Liverpool merchandise, while domestic sides barely get attention on matchday. Provided there isn't a fixture clash with the EPL.

During the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games, Fatso the Fat-Arsed Wombat, an unofficial mascot created by comedians HG Nelson and Roy Slaven, stole the spotlight from the games' official mascots.

Tabletop Games

Warhammer 40,000 is this trope, with the Space Marines being its most pure example... if you ask many Warhammer players, anyway. The latest Marine release saw a White Dwarf giving them coverage equivalent to a Catholic newspaper during a papal visit. It's not that Warhammer and The Lord of the Rings players mind Games Workshop focusing on 40K because that's where the money is, but being treated as ablative shielding? White Dwarf does that with every new release. The Stompa, a single model, got 1 1/2 issues devoted to it. White Dwarf has an annoying tendency to overhype every single new release, but nowadays it seems like the entire magazine is either about Dark Eldar, Blood Angels, or Skaven. TSOALR reports this has been reversed. The Games Workshop website prefaces going on it with a selection of countries to be redirected to a corresponding variant of their website. Underneath this selection is a large image of the double-headed Imperial Eagle icon from Warhammer 40,000, and not really anything else. Several armies have some sub-factions that qualify for this trope. Especially the Ultramarines for the Space Marines. Just look at the latest Space Marine codex, in which the majority of chapters get one named special unit each, specifically in the HQ slot. The Ultramarines get about six. And that's only scratching the surface of the codex, since it has several sections devoted to only the Ultramarines, 90% of the artwork in the codex is of the ultramarines, and as if that is not enough, there are just as many Ultramarines miniatures on displayed in the codex as all the other chapters combined, if not more. Indeed, many fans did not like this at all due to the fact that their favorite chapters being pushed aside in favor of a chapter only some people are fans of. Matt Ward, the writer of the codex, even admitted himself that he was a die-hard fan for the Ultramarines, and sincerely apologized for this. At least one should be thankful that several other chapters have their own separate codices, so they don't get pushed aside in favor of another chapter, but geez! Similarly, 90% of the artwork is always about the Ultramarines, because GW doesn't want to mix up the box art and confuse customers. Those of us who remember 2nd edition find the idea that the Ultramarines have steadily got more prominent somewhat amusing. In 2nd edition there wasn't actually a Codex: Space Marines for the standard chapters, there was just Codex: Ultramarines, which could be used to make armies from other chapters if you wanted to paint them in some other way. The background was entirely focused on Ultramar and the Ultramarines, ALL the special characters were Ultramarines, and funnily enough nobody complained about it. Indeed, long-term Ultramarines players who date from this era often consider the other Codex chapters as something of a spotlight-stealing squad, forcing their Ultramarines out of their own codex and trying to make it more of an ensemble piece. The other three major chapters - Dark Angels, Blood Angels and Space Wolves - have not had their books usurped in this manner! It Got Worse. He has taken to writing every Space Marine codex since then and small notes have been taken. Such as the Grey Knights being cut down from 3,000 to 1,000 marines making up their chapter and suddenly becoming codex adherent. Making this statement in an interview didn't help cheer up many Blood Angels players either: "Indeed, it was Guilliman who would have the greatest lasting effect upon the now leaderless Blood Angels. Through the Codex Astartes - that great treatise on the restructuring and ordering of the Space Marines - Guilliman's legacy would reshape the Blood Angels Legion into the Chapters that defend the Imperium to this day." The real issue is that Space Marines in general get too much support (model-wise and rules-wise) and are generally treated as the protagonists of Warhammer 40,000 to an excessive degree. Who else gets modular plastic HQ characters (Chaos doesn't count, they're still Space Marines)? Who else can build a competitive army entirely from the plastics? Who else can build an army that does anything and does it nearly as well as the specialized armies? Who else has bleeding special characters who make all your guys Fearless, except when you want them not to be? Warhammer doesn't have a single army that is the focus of everything like that. Every army is competitive, has a decent selection of plastic models, and has a significant presence in the population of players, but when you go to a 40k tournament it is a safe bet that three in four armies you face will be some variant of Space Marines. This tendency to face Space Marine armies in competitive tournament play has also caused Complacent Gaming Syndrome among those competing. An army's success depends on that army's commander's knowledge of the units and rules of Space Marines and their own army's ability to effectively counter and kill those Space Marines. This is fully noticeable in the lineup of codex releases. Prior to 5th edition, Space Marines would be released at the start of the edition, with maybe their Chaos Counterparts getting a later release. After that all of the other codex releases would be of the other races and factions. After 5th Edition, there appears to be an unspoken rule that there must be at least one space marine codex release between each other "non space marine" codex. When they actually ran out of codexes to update, the Daemonhunters got demoted into the aforementioned "Grey Knights" and was now deemed a "space marine" codex. Due to the aforementioned Space Marines all getting Standalone Codexes from each other (where before they relied on a supplementary codex that required the basic Space Marine Codex to use), sometimes one Space Marine army did this to another. The most notable of this happened with the 4th Edition Dark Angels, who had the newest book with cheap dedicated transports. Come 5th Edition, these ended up becoming standard to all Space Marine Armies. As if to collect on the "interest", the OTHER space marine armies started getting ways to field all-biker armies and all-terminator armies, which were historically something unique to the Dark Angels. To kick the dog even further, right after the Dark Angels finally caught up to all of these shenanigans in 6th edition, the vanilla space marines then got re-released afterwards with a new Centurion unit, new Tanks, and a new weapon type, effectively rendering the Dark Angels a niche army for the duration of 6th edition. This juggling act continued into the 7th edition, where the Space Marine Codex and Dark Angels codex were released back to back, with them mutually stealing stuff from each other's previous dexes (taking the Librarius Conclave from the Dark Angels while the Angels took the Grav Weapons). Did you know there are four Chaos Gods, each with their own followers and themes? If so, congratulations on knowing more about 40k than some people at Games Workshop. Khorne seems to get more attention from the higher ups than Tzeentch, Nurgle & Slaanesh ever will. The video games are even worse, Dawn of War being especially guilty of this. A lot of this is the simple fact that you can build a decent Khornate character by having them yell "Blood for the Blood God!" and charge, while the others tend to have much more complex plots and deeper goals. Between Warhammer 40,000's 4th and early 6th editions, Slaanesh was arguably as much of a spotlight-stealer as Khorne, especially when it came to releases for the Chaos Daemons faction. Slaanesh's fall Out of Focus in more recent years (which may have to do with his/her/its very un-family-friendly image, and Games Workshop trying to appeal to a younger audience) has led Nurgle to take up dual spotlight-stealing duties with Khorne, as evidenced by his increased focus in Warhammer: The End Times and 8th edition 40k.

The Munchkin would love to be this in any tabletop RPG game.

A bad or inexperienced GM can bring this trope to any RPG. Either by bringing out the dreaded GM PC, overemphasizing an NPC (either canon or homemade) to the exclusion of the players, or even playing favorites within the players. This is one of the worst features of the otherwise pretty good Forgotten Realms setting: the canon NPCs are so prominent and so godlike that PCs faced with a tough (for them) problem are likely to find themselves thinking "You know, we could just go home and have a beer, and let Elminster snap his fingers and fix this." Greyhawk had some insanely powerful mages also, but they're treated mostly as being ancient history rather than still active in the world (some of them are still alive, but retired/gone mad/so focused on their own esoteric concerns that just getting their attention can be an adventure in itself).

The Old World of Darkness had similar problems to the Forgotten Realms, in that far too many modules came down to watching the uberpowerful canon NPCs doing things. Even more so, though, were the Tremere, Salubri, and Tzimisce clans in Vampire: The Masquerade, who received far more emphasis than any other. The nadir of the line was the final supplement, Gehenna, which presented a "grand finale" option for the entire Old World of Darkness that amounted to the player characters surviving to be the last survivors of the Kindred so they can witness the Salubri kill the Tremere and then fight the Tzimisce .

Theater

Visual Novels

Amnesia: Memories makes it appear like Shin is the 'True Route' of the game (actually, that would be Ukyo) and entire series because he gets featured prominently ◊ or even solely ◊ on the series' covers. Part of this might have to do with his being the Heart motif, and part of Ukyo having been a secret character. However, the latter only applies to the first game, as Ukyo is a well-known character in the other games.

Web Animation

Thanks to Strong Bad Emails being the most popular segment on the site, Strong Bad tends to appear in more Homestar Runner toons than the title character. This is even lampshaded when Strong Bad tells Homestar that no one comes to HR.com site to see Homestar. For the 200th sbemail, however, it was revealed that Homestar had been running his own "hremail" show behind Strong Bad's back, and Homestar briefly took over the email show.

The third "episode" of Funny Horsie attempted to introduce a new co-host, Socky the Sock Puppet. However, it was constantly interrupted by the narrator, who constantly reminded everyone that it was, in fact, "episode three".

Webcomics

Web Original

Real Life