When your story is about a group of characters working toward a shared goal, it’s important for everyone to contribute. If one character is off doing their own thing, they’ll feel superfluous. Likewise, if two characters offer the same thing, one of them will almost always overshadow the other. Unfortunately, it’s often difficult to make sure each character actually brings something useful and distinct to the table, especially in large casts. So today we’re covering five notable examples of useless characters and looking for the smallest edit possible that would fix it. That’s how I approach content editing, and it’s a good skill for any writer working on revisions.
1. Neelix: Voyager
Neelix is one of the most annoying characters to ever grace speculative fiction TV, and there are several reasons for that. He’s entitled, he flies into a rage at the slightest provocation, and the other characters have to explain jealousy to him like he’s 10 years old. But the quality we’re most interested in today is that Neelix contributes almost nothing to Voyager’s journey through the Delta Quadrant.
You might not expect that because, to hear Neelix tell it, he does four separate jobs on the ship. He’s Voyager’s cook, guide, survival expert, and self-appointed morale officer. How can he not be contributing? The secret is that he can’t actually do any of those jobs. Not even a little.
Voyager’s most prominent running joke is that no one likes Neelix’s cooking. There are occasional episodes that buck the trend,* but they’re overwhelmed by scenes of everyone being grossed out by whatever bizarre concoction Neelix serves up that day. We also have multiple jokes about how gross his ingredients are, and at least one episode where his cheese makes the ship break down. Admittedly, I don’t blame Neelix for that one; it’s not his fault Starfleet built a lactose intolerant computer system.
Neelix can’t guide Voyager through a field of dandelions, let alone the Delta Quadrant. One time, he leads the ship to a dilithium mining site, only for them to discover that there’s no dilithium at all and it’s a trap by organ-harvesting aliens. In another episode, his supposedly trustworthy contact immediately calls the cops on him. When he does have information, it’s usually too vague to be helpful, and it’s not long before Voyager leaves the part of space where he has experience anyway.
He’s probably the worst as a survival expert. This skill doesn’t come up often, but the one time it does, he gets a crewmate killed by not recognizing that a pile of bones outside a cave probably means there’s a predator inside. His problems as a morale officer are self-explanatory: he can’t raise anyone’s morale because he’s very annoying. Most of the time it comes across more like he’s trying to bully the crew into acting happy.
How to Fix Him
Despite everything wrong with Neelix, he’s very easy to fix: just make him good at some of his supposed jobs! Not all of them, mind you, as four separate roles* are too much for any character. But if he were a competent cook and a skilled guide, there’d be no problem.
Making Neelix a better guide would also solve another problem Voyager has: they often say they’re low on one type of supplies or another, but we rarely see them actually replenish those supplies. If Neelix knew where to find those supplies, that would give a lot more weight to the idea that Voyager is operating far from home and without support. Plus, Neelix could still be good at finding replacement parts in scrap yards due to his background as a salvager, something that would be useful even after Voyager left his region of space.
We could even keep the occasional joke about bad food, but they would have to be rare and due to clear misunderstandings, like Neelix not being used to Alpha Quadrant gastronomy. As it is, Neelix often deliberately sabotages the crew’s food orders based on what he thinks is best, and that’s just not a good idea. Alternatively, we could actually have stories where Voyager is low on supplies and Neelix is making due with what little he has, but I don’t want to be too ambitious here.
2. Leslie Vann: Lock In
John Scalzi’s novel Lock In is about two FBI agents: protagonist Chris Shane and their* partner, Leslie Vann. Together they fight crimes! Specifically, they unravel a murder mystery involving a billionaire, disability advocates, body sharing, and a virtual-reality world called the Agora. Shane has plenty to do, which is good because they’re the main character. Unfortunately, for most of the book, Vann can best be described as “around.”
Shane handles almost all of the actual investigating, as they are much more physically capable than Vann. You see, Shane can remotely pilot robot bodies anywhere in the world, and they’re rich enough to afford the best. Not only does this mean that Shane can galivant across the globe while Vann is stuck in Washington, DC, but it also means that Shane can get into fights without risking their personal safety.
So Shane does all the fight scenes and physical investigations, but maybe Vann can help with putting together the clues? No, there’s a different side character for that. During the investigation, Shane meets a hacker named Tony. From that point on, Tony is the one in charge of connecting any clues Shane doesn’t have time for. This turns out to be a lot because the bad guy’s plan is absurdly complicated, but that’s another article.
What does Vann actually contribute? Well, in a few scenes, she and Shane discuss what might be happening, which brings her up to the level of a glorified sounding board. She also participates in Shane’s plan to trick the villain, but only after Shane has already set everything up and just needs someone to have a misleading conversation with.
Given all this, you could reasonably assume that Vann is a minor character, but she’s not. She easily has more screen time than any character besides Shane, and the story makes a big deal about her tragic backstory. There’s even a secondary antagonist out to ruin her reputation, though that plot never goes anywhere. Plus, Vann is actually the senior partner, with Shane having just graduated from FBI school.* This raises the expectations for her participation even higher, as she should have more experience than Shane does.
How to Fix Her
The good news is that as an experienced FBI agent, it’s not difficult to find more ways for Vann to contribute. The simplest option would be for her to take over most of Tony’s role in the story. There’s really no reason to bring in a whole new character for hacking when you’ve got a perfectly good FBI agent right there. Just give Vann a few tech skills, say she specializes in electronic investigations, and you’re set. If it’s important for Tony to still be in the story, he can be one of Vann’s contacts.
Another option would be to make Vann’s backstory more important. Before joining the FBI, she was a professional integrator, someone who lets others experience life through her body. That’s a neat scifi concept, and since the mystery plot involves several integrators, it could certainly be important, but it never is. The closest we get is when she tries to build rapport with a suspect through their shared professional experience, an attempt that immediately fails.
But there could easily have been more for Vann to contribute with her integrator expertise. Perhaps she has to go undercover in her old profession, letting the villain integrate with her so she can gather evidence. Or we might just let her actually build rapport with a fellow integrator. Any of these options would still leave Shane with the protagonist’s share of the story’s focus while allowing Vann to be something other than technically present.
3. Xander Harris: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Xander is in a tough position in this vampire hunting TV show. He and Willow both start out as the normal kids who stumble onto Buffy’s team, but while Willow’s usefulness continues to grow until she’s actually overpowered, Xander’s stays almost the same for seven seasons. That is to say, he’s completely useless. Unless the good guys ever find a magical weapon powered by sarcasm, I guess.
The main reason is that there aren’t any obvious ways for him to contribute. The characters’ shared goal is fighting monsters, and all the obvious jobs are already taken. Buffy is the main fighter, occasionally backed up by Angel, Faith, or Spike when they aren’t being evil. Giles does the research, sometimes with Willow’s help. Anya has her old demonic contacts. Willow and Tara handle the magic, and there are a host of characters who’ve got the “monster on team good” angle locked down. Even Dawn, another perpetually useless character, has a side gig as the MacGuffin in season five. There are even entire episodes about Xander feeling useless,* but while they often give Xander more candy, they never give him more to contribute.
The writers seem aware of this problem, and I think their intent is for Xander to be the team’s moral support character, providing insights to help other characters on their journeys. That would make him similar to Guinan on TNG or Iroh for much of Avatar. As evidence, I present this exchange from the season seven episode Potential:
Xander: They’ll never know how tough it is, Dawnie, to be the one who isn’t chosen. To live so near to the spotlight and never step in it. But I know. I see more than anybody realizes because nobody’s watching me. I saw you last night. I see you working here today. You’re not special. You’re extraordinary.
Dawn: Maybe that’s your power.
Xander: What?
Dawn: Seeing, knowing.
Xander: Maybe it is… Maybe I should get a cape.
The problem with this idea is that it’s not actually present in the show. Xander almost never helps another character with their problems. Other than the above quote, the closest moment I could think of is in season four, when Xander tells Buffy to go after her soon-to-be ex-boyfriend Riley. This is terrible advice, as Riley and Buffy clearly don’t work as a couple, and it only seems to be there so Buffy will feel worse when she doesn’t arrive at the helipad in time. There might be a few other instances scattered across the show’s 144 episodes, but when a character actually needs emotional support, they usually go to someone like Giles or Tara.
How to Fix Him
So what would it take for Xander to actually be the emotional support character he’s apparently supposed to be? For one thing, he’d have to be less of a creep. Granted, that’s something I’d change regardless, but it’s even more important if Xander is going to help other characters with their problems. There’s no room for him to get mad over Buffy not dating him if he’s the one she’s supposed to turn to for help.
More fundamentally, Xander would need to be more emotionally mature, and I suspect this would be the sticking point. In addition to self-deprecating jokes, not understanding how other characters feel is a big part of Xander’s comedy routine. While emotional support characters don’t always have to be wise and spiritual, they do have to be insightful, something Xander specifically isn’t.
That’s why if I were content editing Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I’d make Xander the team’s crafter. This is something the good guys don’t already have, and it would be very useful. We even see hints of it in season seven, when Xander adds some modest fortification to Buffy’s house. These are almost comically useless, but they show what could have been. Buffy and her comrades are in constant need of new weapons, which they currently pull from the ether. But if Xander took up smithing and got serious about carpentry, he could be the one arming the slayer while also making it harder for the bad guys to break in after sundown.
4. Charles Gunn: Angel
Moving on to Buffy’s dark and gritty(ish) spin off, we meet Charles Gunn, a young man who fights vampires on the streets of LA. Originally, Gunn actually leads his own team of vampire hunters, but it’s not long before that gig peters out and he becomes a full-time member of Angel Investigations. That’s too bad for Gunn, as it’s immediately apparent he has nothing to do there.
Like its parent show, Angel’s main cast is clearly delineated in its roles. Angel does the fighting, Wesley and Fred do the researching, and Cordelia has her visions. Gunn’s most obvious skill is fighting, which puts him at war with Angel for screen time. Pro tip: it’s never a good idea to be competing with the titular character for screen time. Gunn doesn’t have superstrength; Angel does. You can guess who makes the real difference in fights, leaving Gunn to throw an occasional backup punch.
However, Gunn does have another skill: knowing what’s happening in LA’s street scene. Unfortunately, he only knows what’s going on in LA’s human street scene. This is an urban fantasy show about fighting monsters; no one cares what the humans are doing! Whenever team good needs to get information, they go to Lorne, the green-skinned lounge singer with his ear to the demonic grapevine.
As with Xander, it’s clear that Angel’s writers know Gunn has a problem. In season five, feeling useless to the team, Gunn strikes a magical bargain to gain lawyer skills. Unfortunately, this turns out to be a temptation arc that resolves with Gunn giving his skills up and going back to being useless. Sigh. It’s always frustrating when writers lampshade an issue instead of fixing it.
How to Fix Him
Like with Xander, the most immediate option is to take the show’s own material and run with it. Giving Gunn lawyer skills is a great idea. It would not only allow him to contribute more, but it would also let Angel expand into more legal drama. There’s a surprising lack of legal drama in this show, considering that the main bad guy is a prestigious law firm.
The trick is that Gunn’s skills need to be genuine, and he needs to get them earlier. The simplest option is for him to simply be a lawyer. Perhaps after law school, he found out that his old neighborhood was under attack by vampires, so he came back to help. That preserves Gunn’s introduction as a street fighter, and then allows him to contribute once he’s joined Angel Investigations.
This leaves us one problem though: the Angel writers probably weren’t interested in legal dramas, or they’d have added some. To make Gunn more useful without disrupting the show’s formula, he’ll need a magic power of some sort, but not to make him better at fighting. Believe it or not, the writers actually add another superpowered fighter in season two, and he’s quickly sidelined in favor of Angel until he leaves in season three.*
Instead, I would give Gunn the power to heal others. It doesn’t matter where he gets the power from; maybe a magical artifact exploded near him and he woke up with healing hands. This would not only give Gunn a way to contribute that doesn’t compete with another character, but it would answer the question of how Angel’s good guys are always ready to fight after getting beaten up in the previous episode.
5. Finn: Star Wars Episodes VII-IX
Poor Finn is one of many casualties from Disney’s inexplicable decision not to plan its Star Wars sequel trilogy ahead of time. Finn does okay in The Force Awakens, where he teams up with Rey to get BB8 back to the Rebellion. Excuse me, I mean the Resistance. Very different. After that, his knowledge of Starkiller Base is useful, in terms of both planning the space battle and rescuing Rey. He even gets into a sword fight with Kylo Ren, which is pretty cool.
Things really go wrong in The Last Jedi, when Finn is sent off on a side quest for half the movie. Most of this side quest is taken up by how unjust Canto Bight’s wealth distribution is, which could be a great story in a different movie. In this movie, it’s got nothing to do with the main plot, which is the Resistance fighting the First Order. After wasting all that time, Finn is finally able to secure a tech expert who can hopefully stop the First Order from tracking the Resistance through hyperspace. This plan completely fails and results in most of the Resistance getting killed as the bad guys pick off their escape ships. Oof.
That is a real low point for Finn. Naturally, he’ll get a big moment later to make up for it, right? It looks like he will, as he lines up for a heroic sacrifice to stop the First Order’s army, but then another character gets in the way, which has to be one of Last Jedi’s most baffling moments. I think the message is supposed to be that you shouldn’t be eager to throw your life away, but in the context of that scene, everyone will die if he doesn’t. I also don’t want Finn to die, but that’s the situation the film created. Instead, Finn is left to stew with all the Resistance fighters who died because of his side quest.
Then The Rise of Skywalker rolls around and makes us long for the days that Finn was relegated to unrelated side quests. Finn’s most significant contribution to this film is having something he wants to tell Rey, but then not telling her. Did they think I was gonna buy a tie-in comic to find out about that? Cause I’m not. Okay, to be completely fair, he does also lead an assault on the bad guy’s navigation buoy, but the movie’s almost over by then. It’s also impossible to tell how important the buoy is because Rise of Skywalker’s final battle seems purposely designed to be confusing. If Finn had done nothing, would Lando’s fleet still have arrived and wiped out all the Star Destroyers? I legitimately don’t know.
Other than that, Finn’s main contribution is firing off a few blaster bolts, something everyone else does too. I guess he also yells Rey’s name a lot? Heck, C-3PO has more to do than Finn. That’s really disappointing for a character who was originally pitched as one of the big three in this new trilogy.
How to Fix Him
Why did this happen? Racism probably, but also because neither Last Jedi nor Rise of Skywalker have any room for Finn’s most obvious plot: inspiring a stormtrooper rebellion. As a former stormtrooper himself, that’s where it looked like Finn was going. He even meets others with a similar backstory in Rise of Skywalker. It just doesn’t go anywhere. At this point, doing a stormtrooper rebellion justice would require significant rewrites, so what can we do while keeping the films’ existing shape?*
A common idea is that Finn should also go through Jedi training, as he’s clearly Force sensitive. That’s a possibility, but it would risk making him compete with Rey for screen time and relevance, as they’d be doing the same thing. To avoid that, their arcs would need to either play off or contrast with each other, which requires more significant rewriting. One option that quickly comes to mind: maybe Rey is in danger of going dark, and Finn is the one who pulls her back? Unfortunately, that would likely interfere with Kylo’s redemption* arc. These films have so much going on that it’s difficult to find ways to improve them. If I were hired to do a content edit on them, I’d probably say that the writers need to work on figuring out what their stories are actually about before any other progress could be made.
However, I do have one relatively painless option to help Finn contribute to the plot: give him the leadership arc instead of Poe. Poe is an ace pilot, which means he’ll always have plenty to do in a Star Wars movie. He doesn’t need command skills to properly contribute. Finn definitely does though, as by default he’s just a guy with a blaster. If Finn is the one giving the orders, then his stormtrooper background would also be more relevant, as it would help him predict the First Order’s tactics and counter them. This would be even better if stormtroopers were a real threat and not easily dispatched cannon fodder, but let’s not get too ambitious.
Whew, that was a lot of editorial theorizing for one post. Of course, in a real content edit, we’d also have to contend with the author’s goals and how compatible they were with a good story. Even so, this type of exercise is useful because it helps us look at stories as complex machines rather than unknowable enigmas. If one piece isn’t working, sometimes you can fix or replace it without taking the whole engine block apart. That’s a particularly useful approach for characters who aren’t contributing enough, as often all you need to do is give them a new power or skill set.
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I felt really bad for Rose in TLJ too. It almost feels like they made her useless and annoying on purpose, and then RoS basically forgot she existed.
I disagree about Nelix being useless. It’s been a while since I saw the series but I remember a few times his knowledge of the peoples in the area came in handy. I remember an episode where they’re on-planet looking for supplies and someone hands him “some kind of apple”. Nelix then tells him that one bit could kill him.
And despite the “bad” cooking, no one else stepped up to take over and people were still complaining about the food after he left. Remember the episode Tuvix when there were several crewmen trying to cook and making a mess of things until Tuvix came in and cleared everyone out to do it himself? Nelix was a dang good sport about the insults to his cooking by a bunch of spoiled crewmates who didn’t like their food replicator usage limited. He did a great job given what he had available.
Semi-counterpoint, real life is often filled with people that are useless in a given situation but can’t just leave for one reason or another. Many of us might have been this useless person at one time or another. Having a useless character does add a certain realism.
Counter-semi-counterpoint, as has often been discussed including on this very blog, realism is rarely if ever a good justification for doing something in a story, because stories should be narratively satisfying but real life rarely is.
I’m with Arix on this one! Even realistic art tends to act as a focused facsimile of real life, with a message or an impression.
Having a useless character works when it’s done with intention and payoff. Sokka from A:tLA frequently laments how useless he feels, and is often relegated to “sarcasm funny guy,” but he’s also given a character arc that shows he’s more than that, as well as direct contributions to the plot, comedy relief, and character interactions — and not through contrivance, like the above examples!
Sokka may feel useless because he doesn’t have cool powers like his fellows, but as you mentioned, he actually isn’t useless since he makes plot contributions – logistics, planning, even inventing devices sometimes. Those contributions are what we’re talking about in posts like these.
Easy way to fix a useless character:
Get rid of them altogether
Kill them early or just never introduce them. Or just have them not show up and nobody misses them
The more useless the character is, the easier the rewrite will be
I know this isn’t always an option, but sometimes a character just isn’t worth fixing
Of course, if the useless person is the only, or one of the few, POC, (as in two out of the five examples) then, yeah, maybe try a different fix first
You could have the character be in a certain situation useless or in the beginning not really that useful and they develop a new skill to become more useful. Take for instance Superman, he cannot do anything with Kryptonite and needs the help of others to save the day. This also works with the many He-Man shows , where He-Man has not the power of Grayskull and his friends have to help him. Speaking about He-Man, the recent Netflix show “Masters of the Universe:Revelation” has a character named Orko, who was so bad at magic, every spell failed and ended up causing more trouble. Then he became much better in magic and actually saved the group. I won’t spoil much,, but just watch it.
Another good example is something of both like Rutherford in Lower decks, where he no longer wanted to be engineer and wanted to do a new job on the ship. He failed at being a ships Captain and doctor, but found out that he was good as a security guard. The episode ends with him returning to his old job, but in a different story, this would be the start of something new.
I said it at the beginning. Poe and Finn can easily be combined into one, main character. In TFA, Finn could’ve done it all from the beginning. Absolutely no need for Poe in any part of that film. Actually, I would say that Poe, and not Finn, is the useless character in the story. Finn and Rey actually had chemistry.
Why Disney had to switch directors is beyond me. Abrams, Johnson, Abrams again– what was the thinking there? Two different directors means two different visions means two different plots means that there’s no way they’re keeping track of the side characters’ arcs. Poe suffered from a lot of FInn’s same issues, too, in TLJ his job is primarily to cause problems for Holdo.
As best I can figure they imagined that each director would build upon what the previous one did (originally Episode IX was supposed to be Colin Trevorrow) while bringing their own style. That can absolutely work but there needs to be a unifying thread to keep them together and the new trilogy simply doesn’t have one.
That’s true. I did like some of the things Rian Johnson brought into the Star Wars world (making Rey’s parents nobodies felt a little more rewarding than another magic force dynasty), and Kylo’s redemption felt much more real the first time– but he tried to hard to make a different show than J. J. Abrams did, forcing Abrams to re-remake the trilogy…
Rey Nobody was a great decision.
The point of Finn’s side quest was to transform him into a true rebel. He almost gets there on his own – but still wants to hurt the badguys for the sake of causing pain to those who hurt him and his friends. Rose’s final line mirrors the message the film wanted to give – Luke wins through sparing every life present rather than tearing their machines all apart or killing Kylo Ren. Or a single trooper.
I could agree it’s not handled smoothly, but that was my take from it. The most offensive scene to me in the whole of RoS was Finn and Poe blasting troopers as they race to escape Kylo Ren’s destroyer. No sparing of life. Message lost. No plan amongst the directors or other creators. Oh well…
They blew it. TLJ wasn’t perfect, but it was a story with a direction– ROS tried to change that direction when it was too late.
Can I add my list of useless character?
It’s Clay from Xiaolin Showdown:
In this avatar-esque show with children having each power over 1 of the 4 elements in a setting that takes inspiration from east asian (mainly Chinese culture) culture and aesthetics with a lot of western flare as well. It is basically a show that revolves around McGuffins called Sheng Gong Wu with amazing power like twisting your body parts, creating storms or shooting lasers and enhancing elemental powers. They are won in a contest called Xiaolin Showdown, which is basically Kung Fu Mario party, it’s very entertaining.
There we have the only White team member of the good guys, Clay Bailey! He can control the Earth and is generally characterized as a strong musclely big guy from Texas, who can penetrate a valley and shake the Earth. The problem is that his physical strength is outshines by his other teammates like Omi, who is in generally the most experienced and perhaps strongest fighter, something he has not been humble off at all. Kimiko is also more gifted in Combat and a tech genius, who can come up with clever plans. Then we have our wildcard Raimundo, who while starting out as quite rebellious became such a competent teamleader, he upstaged Omi’s role as the central protagonist of the story in the end and was before that a skilled and cunning fighter, which made him more dangerous than Omi. Clay’s strength came only in some episodes handy and in comparison to his teammates, he falls much quicker in battle and has overall the least amounts of victory, only having participated in like 3 Xiaolin showdowns alone and won, whereas his friends won more than that. He also was a bit of a sexist in the beginning, refusing to hurt girls, even if they are evil. Overall a mediocre to useless companion to have.
They could have fixed that by giving him more victories and plot relevance. They could have made him participate in strength based contests more, where he is undoubtedly unmatched in such battles or where they need to get rid of huge obstacles. This would have cemented his role of the big guy, which is what the show was poorly attempting to go far with him.
Now we have Quinn from Final Space.
In the first season, she was relatively useful and actually helped in the final season to stop the rift from the final space to open by sacrificing herself with a piece of final space and ended up in said space, thus starting the story arc of the second season to get into Final space to save her. Once Gary and his friends found her in Final space in season 3…she hardly contributes to the story at all. Most of it revolves around Gary and Ash with their personal conflict and thus she had very little to do in the story. She tried to stop the evil Invictus to break free from his prison, while almost undoing the sacrifice of Clarence, who sacrificed his life to help the crew to leave this dimension as repentance for his betrayal of that group in season 2. Thus they do not leave final space and activate the KVN net, but it fails and after she tried to recharge the dimensional gate, it ends in a failure, which contributed to Ash’s growing dislike towards her.
They could have made her a bit more competent or better, having the KVN net work and dealing a huge blow to Invictus instead of failing. The true problem is something different and this should be discussed on a different article.
And finally almost every dragon ball character ever and it needs no explaining why it is that way and how to fix it, due to cultural osmosis and simple logic telling you everything you need to know.
How did you find that list? Was is good or did I missed something? Tell me in the comments below!
Thank you for bringing up the issues with Gunn. He was the reason I wanted to even watch Angel, and watching the creators just drop the ball with him constantly is still a sore spot.
While I agree that LA’s human street scene clearly wasn’t important to the writers, it still had a lot of potential. Having occasional human antagonists would out Team Angel on a whole different playing field.
Even the fact this was Los Angeles (a major metropolitan area vs a small town like Sunnydale) could have lead to a lot more possibilities and threats to Team Angel. In fact, if I’m not mistaken, none of the main cast besides Gunn and Lorne would even be familiar with LA all that much. So why not make him a guide? Hell, use the same “survival expert” fix from Neelix, since he’s shown as not only a resident but from the wrong side of the tracks as well.
Hell, even his initial backstory as a leader of vampire hunters and his status as a regular human fighter could still work if they had him lean more into strategy and guerilla warfare. Have him be the Lancer to Angel, pointing out flaws in the latter’s dependency on his vampire physiology to muscle his way through challenges. Make him the guy who is used to fighting physically stronger opponents, who find more asymmetrical paths to victory. This would even help tie him into the legal thriller aspect, because it would highlight how the situation just can’t be solved with punching sometimes.
I would disagree about Xander. He does a few things.
First, he’s a normal person, with a normal person’s understanding of the world. He doesn’t understand demons, vampires, Slayers, magic, etc. So he serves a narrative purpose by presenting the writers with a way to explain things in-universe. This is a common enough use for a character–see Tolkien’s explanation of the hobbits. Willow and Buffy did the same thing, but they have different perspectives (Willow as a mage and Buffy as the Slayer); neither could give the perspective of the average every-day person.
Second, he creates drama. His attraction to various characters creates inter-personal drama, which affects the fight-bad-guys bit and creates tension during non-combat periods. Okay, it’s not a great purpose to have, but without Xander the show could have easily devolved into a plodding supernatural procedural drama. The show focused a lot on interpersonal drama as much as on beating up monsters, so it fit narratively.
Third, he sometimes acted as a damsel in distress. He didn’t have supernatural powers, so he got beat up, captured, and otherwise tormented quite a bit. Again, this created drama and tension that would otherwise be lacking. It allowed relatively low-level threats to actually have consequences. Let’s face it, the monster-of-the-week isn’t going to do much against the more powerful people; by focusing on Xander the random mooks could realistically attempt to hurt the Scooby Gang. It limited the options of the more powerful characters in ways that didn’t appear forced.
Fourth, he was an effective member of the team in many situations. He had a perspective the rest lacked, which often did help (“This isn’t riding around with your friends dead” is a great line). And he had the most room to grow. Xander of later seasons was not Xander of Season 1 by an stretch. Again, this creates narratives that would otherwise not be possible.
Maybe the show didn’t use Xander effectively. I was never a huge fan, so I don’t really remember. But I don’t think it’s fair to classify him as useless.
If Finn is the one giving the orders, then his stormtrooper background would also be more relevant, as it would help him predict the First Order’s tactics and counter them.
That sounds good. It’s also a way of letting him partner up with Leia as a general without one of them overshadowing the other, because it accounts for different knowledge bases.
Interestingly/even more frustratingly, the Last Jedi included what looks like the beginning of an inspiration arc. At the beginning of Finn’s confrontation with Phasma, she’s accompanied by four troopers – Finn calls her on the fact that she sold out Starkiller base once her own life was on the line – Phasma sees the troopers exhanging glances and shoots them all. But this was cut in the theatrical release.
(A moment I really really wanted in Rise of Skywalker was something like this; Finn and Kylo Ren fighting in a First Order facility, with Kylo getting upper hand, until:
Finn: “It doesn’t have to be this way. You can choose better, like I did.”
Kylo: “My father couldn’t turn me. Rey couldn’t turn me. You think you’ll be the one?”
Finn: “I wasn’t talking to you.”*
Stormtrooper shoots Kylo: “We’re with you, sir.”
As well as where Finn seemed to be going, it would also fulfill the democratisation that was going on in Last Jedi – with Rey Nobody and Broom Kid – a redemption arc for (some of) the stormtroopers suits better than reserving it for the “officer class” or members of important bloodlines – plus the climax of the Last Jedi looked like it was slamming the door pretty hard on Kylo being redeemable (using a literal door to underscore the point).
And Kylo going down to stormtroopers would be a parallel to Palpatine going down to Vader. (Even if he did come back, which I think I’m one of the five people in the world to actually like).
* I’m a sucker for that line.
Re Charles Gunn:
Something else he could have been is an investigator. True, they are all investigators on one level, but they’re investigators in the sense of knowing about demons and having contacts in the demon demimonde. But Gunn could have been someone who knows how to work a crime scene, and knows the layout and history of the city. Investigation is a skill set rather than just intelligence (even Sherlock Holmes described his mind as quite ordinary).
I like that stormtrooper redemption arc instead of one for Kylo (who had oodles of choices and blew them). I think it would work especially well as the stormtroopers, like Finn, were essentially child soldiers who grew into their job. It’s not as if they were adults who decided that they’d rather serve the first order. Finn gives them a way out, an inspiration for a better life, so why wouldn’t at least some choose that?
One way to fix a useless character is to take his most interesting traits and composite them into another more purposeful character
Rey and finn being one character would have solved so many problems with TFA and TLJ that it wouldn’t even be funny.
Rose tico and Poe Cameron would go to canto bight, where Rose reminds Poe about why they fight the first order, while finn develops feelings for Kylo
It’s interesting that you would combine Rey and Finn into Finn, not Rey…
I have only seen the first movie of the new trilogy but from that I would say that Finn was interesting due to his stormtrooper background and him having to adapt to a completely oposite role, gaining trust of the resistance, proving himself etc. Rey was just sort of … there – not a bad character but overshadowed by Finn in terms of viewer expectations. At least that was what I took away from it.
There are additional female stormtroopers to Plasma, so why not have a female stormtrooper? Finn’s background, but another level by having a woman in the role.
I don’t believe most of the girls aside from Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter series had that much to do. To fix that, I might try cutting down on the number of characters in that series and have more girls doing something in the battle against Voldemort. That would include both big and small roles. That might work well with someone like Ginny Weasley.