"Julie-Su never got to be her own person... She only exists as Knuckles' girlfriend. She has the stuff about being an ex-Legionnaire, but that's woefully underutilized, and it's mostly an excuse to add names to the Legion side of Knuckles' enormous family tree. So having her life continue to revolve around Knuckles even in his absence feels like it just drives that point home."
— Thanks, Ken Penders
on Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics) and Julie-Su
on Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics) and Julie-Su
A type of Satellite Character who exists primarily to serve as the Love Interest for a main character. It doesn't matter what their life was like beforehand; their focus in the story revolves around the sole fact that they dig said main character, and the main character digs them. A staple of the Harem Genre. When part of a movie, it's usually because the plot revolves around a second love interest that is used to show how much better the Satellite Love Interest is for the protagonist. If a non-satellite character turns into one because they've become a love interest, they've been Demoted to Satellite Love Interest. And pity choice D or E who just loves the character because that's what everyone does in the series, not that they have any chance against Betty and Veronica or even the Third-Option Love Interest.
The test, of course, is to ask, "What does this person do when they're not being a love interest?" ...if it's hard to answer, you probably have this.
Despite its negative connotation, this is not necessarily a bad thing. If this character is simply not important in the story at large, then there is no reason to believe that they should have as much depth as the main character who does drive the plot.
Sister Trope to Satellite Family Member. Contrast with Designated Love Interest, in which a character's characterization isn't involved enough with loving another character, thus making the "love interest" moniker seem tacked-on. Not to be confused with the Satellite of Love. If someone's love interest is an actual satellite, see Companion Cube.
Please don't use this trope as an excuse to bash characters whom you dislike for X/Y/Z motives. Being a love interest doesn't immediately equal being a satellite character, and many accusations fit less in this trope and more in Die for Our Ship.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- Bakemonogatari: Karen and Tsukihi both have boyfriends, but they're never seen once on camera, and the only thing we are told about them is that they're both very similar to Koyomi in terms of personality and appearance. Most fans like to make them like Koyomi and pretend like they don't exist, which, considering the only romantic hints that Karen and Tsukihi have been given in series are with their brother or with other girls, may very well be true.
- Billy from Bakugan starts off as a Satellite Character for Julie, until they become an Official Couple, although even before that it was clear there was something between them and had some Belligerent Sexual Tension. That being said, he doesn't have much personality on his own and even when he was under Masquerade's control, he never fought against anyone else besides Julie (well, they're both Subterra users after all).
- Miho Azuki of Bakuman。, whose only goal apart from becoming a voice actress is getting together with Moritaka Mashiro, and even then, those two goals are intertwined because of her promise to only marry Mashiro when they both achieve their dreams.
- Princess Charlotte from Berserk fits this trope to a T. Her only role in the history is being Griffith's Meal Ticket and she seems to only think about him all the time. And for worse, the Crapsack World punishes her for being such.
- Blend-S:
- Dino basically can be summed up by his crush on Maika. This is a weird example as he's actually her and the rest of the cast's boss...but he's hardly ever seen doing anything other than being attracted to her, and everyone else seems to treat him as a bumbling, useless idiot, despite being the reason they all met in the first place.
- Mafuyu's date Itou is even more exaggerated in this regard. The only attribute we know about him is he's a bit of a Manchild. The author doesn't even give him a face.
- Shizuki from Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan. Justified Trope, sorta: every character in that show is a parody/deconstruction of some character archetype. Sakura: Ordinary High-School Student parody, with an embarrassing feminine name to boot. Dokuro: Magical Girlfriend parody, Tsundere deconstruction. Zakuro: Parody of Younger Than They Look and her Eyepatch of Power, which is never even mentioned, let alone explained. Etc., etc.
- In Cesare - Il Creatore che ha distrutto, Cesare and Angelo go to a festival and end up meeting some girls who work in a weaving factory, Emilia and Ottavia. They show up again from time to time, and Angelo spends a night with Emilia. But their personalities are never expanded on. It is, unfortunately, Truth in Television for the historical setting, for rich students (or a Scholarship Student like Angelo) would have relationships with poor town girls without taking them seriously, and when Angelo escapes from her window at dawn, Emilia says "I'll never love a college student again." The musical cuts them — Cesare buys a flower to give to a girl at the festival, gets rejected, and ends up giving the flower to Angelo instead.
- Chii in Chobits is literally this since she's a Robot Girl without an operating system and her entire personality starts from scratch. Later flashbacks to when she wasn't yet a Love Interest show that her personality can be much deeper (and it can possibly become like that again).
- Corrector Yui: In the anime, Shun gets little to no characterization outside of being Yui's crush. Keiko Okamoto, however, expands his character in her manga adaptation, as he serves a bigger role than being just a romantic interest to Yui.
- Subverted in Deadman Wonderland. Main character Ganta is trapped in a prison whose inhabitants are, by and large, not very nice people, when he meets a painfully shy and sensitive girl who clings to him from the word "hello." Minatsuki is actually a psychopathic killer who puts on the nice-girl persona and then gets sexual pleasure from the look of betrayal on her victims' faces right before she kills them. She is starting to get a little better, though.
- Sonosuke Izayoi from Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope's Peak High School has very little character outside of being Ruruka's extremely devoted boyfriend. He even gets expelled from Hope's Peak over his association with her despite doing nothing!
- Digimon Tamers: Despite being The Ace and the longest-established tamer, most of Ryo Akiyama's influence on the story is through his relationship with Rika and how she reacts to him.
- The Disappearance of Nagato Yuki-chan, a spin-off manga of Haruhi Suzumiya, turns the protagonist of the main series into this. Kyon's tendency to be passive stays, while the observational narration is gone, so he has little to show other than caring for Yuki.
- There are two of note in the Dragon Ball franchise, both of them intentional examples. First is Maron, Krillin's first girlfriend in Z (and practically a clone of Bulma) that appeared during the Garlic Jr. Saga, but Krillin broke it off because she thought she was too good for him. Then in GT, Goten was seen on a date with Valese, a girl that got perplexed by ice cream... on a cone. Both are ditzes.
- Nyu in Elfen Lied; like Chii, Nyu is a Blank Slate, picked up by Kouta from a beach. Possibly a subversion, in that Nyu's attraction to Kouta is a reflection of her second personality Lucy, a borderline psychopathic mass murderer with real, complex, and disturbingly heartbreaking reasons for loving him.
- Forest of Piano: It's as if Sae exists almost exclusively for Kai to have someone to relate to and to be his girlfriend, since she doesn't have any plot relevance past the chapters that lead to them hooking up.
- Yuno from Future Diary basically has no personality outside of her devotion to Yukiteru. This is played as straight as possible to make her scary while being a deconstruction of the trope. Her entire world revolves around Yukiteru, and if anyone threatens to take him away from her, she flips her shit and equates it to her entire future being taken away. This is with good reason: before meeting Yukiteru, Yuno had just killed her Abusive Parents, who were sitting dead in her house for three weeks. She had absolutely no hope for her own future, and was deeply moved when Yukiteru's hope for the future was for his family to get along. So when Yukiteru jokingly accepted her offer to become his bride, she was thrilled since she finally had a reason to keep living her life — her life very literally depends on having Yukiteru there for emotional support, he is her future after she lost everything. It gets even more interesting in that Yuno recognizes this fact and basically gives a "The Reason We Suck" Speech about how it was "pretend love" and she would have been fine with anyone as long as she could emotionally depend on them. Fortunately, it turns out that maybe their love isn't that meaningless after all.
- Poor, poor Tamahome from Fushigi Yuugi. In the early episodes of the series, he had hints of a backstory (his Money Fetish was due to growing up poor and wanting to provide for his siblings and ailing father). However, said backstory (as well as everything else about his character) was seen as secondary compared to his love for Miaka. And then Suboshi kills his entire family in cold blood, and he embraces this trope for all its worth. His Money Fetish is now Played for Laughs and everything about his personality shifts to accommodate to Miaka's needs. When he realizes that he is a character from a book, he tells Miaka that this doesn't matter because he "was created solely to love her." This line was meant to come across as romantic, but it actually wound up highlighting just how much of his character revolved around Miaka rather than having any development for his own sake.
- Girls Bravo: It's never said what Miharu's reasons are for liking Yukinari, she just does and there isn't much more to her character beyond that.
- Midori from Green Green. If she weren't allowed to squeal "Yuusuke" every ten seconds, she would lose her reason for existence.
- Hamtaro: Travis is nice, cute, athletic, and popular, but has no real role other than being a potential boyfriend for Laura and the object of her affection.
- The love interests in Mobile Suit Gundam AGE are like this. Emily (first generation), Romary (second), and Wendy (third) have very little role or development outside of fretting that generation's protagonist. Once the generation shifts and they become mothers, their role in the plot effectively ends. Romary probably has the most development, as she's in a mild Love Triangle and gets some expansion in the Memory of Eden OVA.
- Subverted in Battle Angel Alita. In an argument with Alita over her choice to become a Hunter-Warrior, Ido lets it slip that he revived her with the expectation that she would be one of these. Alita, like any sane person, would be upon hearing this, is pissed.
- Koutarou Azumamiya of Hayate the Combat Butler used to be this for Hinagiku originally, and the anime even added a few episodes of this to him, but since the second year started, he's actually gotten some character of his own.
- In Honey Crush it never becomes very clear why the two other girls are so heavily in love with Madoka (one of them even continues to do so after her death, turning her into a ghostly Stalker with a Crush). Sure, Madoka might be pretty, but her personality remains elusive throughout the series.
- Shino from Ichiroh! is a comedic example, as it's a gag series and can get away with it. She's never seen away from Nanako and almost all she does is lust over her. It doesn't help that she's also a mix of Clingy Jealous Girl and Stalker with a Crush with a pinch of Psycho Lesbian at her worst.
- Hojo from Inuyasha is a male example of this. Of course, we don't see him enough for him to have much of a personality. And he exists for the sake of a Running Gag rather than actual romantic tension.
- Tsubasa from Kaguya-sama: Love Is War. There's a reason he's constantly referred to as "Kashiwagi's Boyfriend", even after his Given Name Reveal. Nearly every appearance he makes centers around her in some fashion. Even when he went to the Student Council, alone, he ends up talking more about Kashiwagi than he does about himself.
- Something similar happens in Kamichu!, where Yurie is much closer to Matsuri than her supposed love interest Kenji.
- Kämpfer's Natsuru Senou is the rare case of a Satellite Love Interest who is the main character. He is primarily defined by his rather basic crush on Kaede. When someone asks him in episode 8 why he likes Kaede so much, he first refers to her beauty and elegance. When it's brought up that most of the girls he knows are also beautiful and elegant, all he can do is shrug his shoulders and say that you "don't need a reason to love someone". Seriously, the guy has no personality outside of his crush and his frustration with his new Gender Bender status. On the other hand, Kaede herself has some Hidden Depths...
- The Kawai Complex Guide to Manors and Hostel Behavior introduces two Third Option Love Interests near the end of its run: Usa's kohai and Ritsu's senpai. They hardly have anything else to them except for providing yet another roadblock to the obvious Usa/Ritsu endgame.
- Deconstructed in Kitchen Princess. Sora is supportive of Najika no matter what, and knows just what to say to help cheer her up... and then it's revealed he was told to get close to her to further the director's goals. He later reveals that he did fall for Najika, showing he had hidden depths.
- Kotoura-san: Yoshihisa Manabe's entire personality is built around him being a Chivalrous Pervert Manic Pixie Dream Guy and protective Understanding Boyfriend to the titular character.
- Zero from Kurohime. Hime herself even realizes it. And arguably it is at that moment when we realize that Zero isn't quite what he seems. Also, Yashahime, who seems to have no thoughts or personality beyond being an Ax-Crazy Evil God Yandere.
- Leda: The Fantastic Adventure of Yohko: Yohko's love interest. It's clear that Yohko loves him, and she composed an entire song just to show how much she loves him, but... she's never spoken to him, doesn't really know anything about him, he doesn't do anything besides walk down a road, he never speaks aside from inside Zell's illusion, but that one's a fake anyway, and we never even get to see what he really looks like. He only exists to motivate Yohko to compose the song at the start and later return to Earth. And to establish that she is an Ordinary High-School Student with a crush.
- Yuuno from Lyrical Nanoha is effectively treated this way by the creators, despite actually having a developed personality, loads of plot potential, and plenty of combat power. Beyond his use as a romantic possibility for Nanoha, the writers simply were not interested in developing anything more about him; they don't even explain where or how he gained Raising Heart. So when they decided, as of Sound Stage X, not to Ship Tease Yuuno with Nanoha anymore, he disappeared entirely from the plot and never receives another mention. Even back when he was on-screen he had vanishingly few interactions with anyone else in the cast, even counting the supplementary material manga and drama CDs.
- Naruto:
- In this 2017 Jump Festa interview, Masashi Kishimoto reveals that Sakura's character only exists to be Naruto's Romantic False Lead. He explains that when he created Sakura, he only considered her as just another character, he did not bring her in as a special female character, and she was at the same level as supporting characters like Kiba or Shikamaru. After he decided "pretty early on" and "from an early stage" that Naruto and Hinata would become an Official Couple, he threw Sakura in the middle to create a "messy Love Triangle."
- Karin is one for Sasuke. Even though her heritage has been revealed, her character solely exists as a parody of Sasuke's fangirls.
- Rin Nohara. The only real characterization that she receives is the fact that Obito loves her but she loves Kakashi. This may be justified since she's a Posthumous Character so she isn't exactly around to receive characterization, and the main reason for her existence is in order to become The Lost Lenore for Obito and motivate him to become Tobi. Although she still isn't characterized all that much in flashbacks she's featured in — she's a Nice Girl and a Combat Medic in training, and nothing else.
- In this 2017 Jump Festa interview
- Since the focus is on the girls in O Maidens in Your Savage Season, most of the male characters end up being examples of this trope:
- Izumi is this to both Kazusa and Niina. All we know about him that doesn't have anything to do with either of the two girls is that he's a Nice Guy and that he likes trains a lot. The extent of his development in-story is having to deal with the awkwardness of seeing his childhood friend in a new light and trying to come to terms with his sexual attraction to Niina, who comes onto him after he and Kazusa start going out. He even has his own Satellite Love Interest in the form of Asada, who promptly disappears as soon as he and Kazusa become an Official Couple.
- Amagi is this to Sonezaki. This becomes blatantly apparent right from his first appearance, where Sonezaki asks him to write a report explaining why exactly he confessed to her. The only reason he can give is "because she's cute" repeated over and over. His own distinct character traits of being Book Dumb but laid back and down-to-earth are only ever brought up to contrast him with the straightlaced and high-strung honor student Sonezaki.
- Yamagishi-sensei has one in the form of his fellow teacher Tomita. All that's really ever known about her is that she's kind and caring, and that he's totally smitten with her. The main extent of her in-story role is to give Hitoha someone to angst about being inferior to.
- Onidere is special because both protagonists could be defined as Satellite Love Interests. Literally no action, thought or monologue in the entire Manga is in no way not connected, even a little, to please and/or become more intimate with their loved one. Hell, the first true show of love in the manga is Saya nearly fainting because Tadashi praised her food while Tadashi fainted because a single spoon of said food can cause pain equally to a full session of torture and he ended the entire meal to make Saya smile.
- Oreimo plays with this one. Kirino starts dating a boy she knows from one of her doujin circles named Mikagami, whose whole character seemingly exists to show how much better of a match he is for Kirino than Kyousuke. Predictably, this pisses off Kyousuke to no extent... until Kirino finally reveals that it was all an act to make him as jealous as possible, to get back at him for making her feel horribly jealous when he was dating Kuroneko. They drop the charade after this: Kirino goes back to Will They or Won't They? with Kyousuke, and as for Mikagami, it's hinted that he's actually gay and in love with Kyousuke as well.
- Saya from Peacemaker Kurogane. She pretty much exists only to be Tetsunosuke's love interest. She fits very much with the question, "What would her personality be if she never met the male lead?" Nothing. Come on, we know she's mute and all, but even mute people have personalities and quirks.
- Deconstructed by Pokémon the Series, of all places. Serena started her journey purely for the sake of joining Ash, mainly acts as support, and cooks him food. Her scenes mostly revolve around her blatantly obvious crush on Ash. As a result, Serena realizes in episode 39 that she's the only one of her friends without any real goals to work towards. This idea is further explored with her mother, who reveals that Serena has never been able to commit to anything due to giving up whenever something got difficult. She eventually overcomes this with her newfound dream of being a star Pokémon Performer, becoming more of her own person outside of Ash and gaining a level of maturity (as emphasized in her episode 47 and Journeys redesigns). Despite this, she never leaves the trope: at the end of XY, she states she is still inspired by Ash and considers him her "goal."
- Kirika Kure in Puella Magi Oriko Magica has no real goals, ideals, or worries beyond "whatever Oriko wants." At one point, she claims to have memorized the names of a bunch of flowers in Oriko's garden, but when Oriko admits to not caring about flowers much, Kirika says she'll forget about it from now on. Even in Magia Record: Puella Magi Madoka Magica Side Story, almost all her lines mention Oriko in some way. Turns out this is actually enforced: Kirika wished to become the right person for Oriko, and it's resulted in her essentially losing all traits that wouldn't make Oriko happy with her. A particularly grim case of this is that she instantly dropped her crushing guilt after an Accidental Murder when she realized she was making Oriko unhappy.
- Miku Nakano of The Quintessential Quintuplets, while generally the most popular character of the series, is occasionally accused of this by her detractors. Most of her scenes in the series revolve entirely around her crush on main character Fuutarou, with the sole exception of her interest in Sengoku warlords, and even that trait sees less and less reference as time goes on. Almost every action she takes usually begins with the question "Will this impress Fuutarou or make him like me more?" up to and including future career paths (in this instance, choosing to try and become a baker, despite being a Lethal Chef, because she wants to show Fuutarou that she can improve and make him happy, with no thoughts at all to her established interests in history).
- Ranma ½:
- Akari Unryu is introduced about three quarters of the way into the manga for the sole purpose of becoming Ryoga Hibiki's official girlfriend. She falls for Ryoga because he defeats her trained sumo-wrestling yokozuna pig, Katsunishiki, and her grandfather said he wouldn't let her marry any man unless he could do so and... that's literally the only reason why she falls for Ryoga. Though she does appear in multiple stories after her debut, her character largely starts and ends at "she's a sweet-hearted Girl Next Door who thinks pigs are adorable", and in those stories she's largely a prop, with the focus being on Ryoga as he struggles to decide between his old attachment to Akane Tendo and his new-found crush on Akari.
- Konatsu is even worse than Akari. After a five-chapter arc to debut in, Konatsu's personality immediately boils down to his overwhelming infatuation with Ukyo. Not helping is that he only appears twice after this debut; in a single-chapter story about Konatsu, Akane and Ranma trying to run Ukyo's cafe whilst she has a cold, and a one-panel cameo showing him weeping over Ukyo choosing to bomb Ranma's wedding rather than reciprocate Konatsu's feelings. Making matters worse, Konatsu appears incredibly late in the story, giving him no real chance to even try and build up as much character as Akari has — the manga ran for 407 chapters, and Akari appeared in chapter 312... whilst Konatsu didn't debut until chapter 372.
- Kyoko from Reborn! (2004). Her main personality trait is... she's a good Girl Next Door. And a huge reason why Tsuna has a crush on her is that she was the only girl who bothered being nice to him in 12 months.
- Inverted by Outer Moka from Rosario + Vampire. This is entirely justified, as she is an artificial person created to protect the true Moka and Outer Moka is aware of this, and she even does her best to put aside her own feelings to pair up Tsukune and Inner Moka, albeit this is far more explicitly done in the manga as opposed to the anime. And, to further the inversion (again, in the manga at least), the two of them have worked together to support each other in regards to Tsukune, while Inner Moka's wishes and intents are kept the primary consideration.
- Tsunetsuki Matoi from Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei Crosses the Line Twice with this. Literally, her whole personality is about stalking her love interest (hence her name). What would she be like if she didn't meet the protagonist? Stalking other guys that catch her interest.
- School Days: In the anime, the two main female love interests get reduced to only being known for their obsession with Makoto. And that is the point, actually: the series shows the psychological strain and the extremes that being completely centered on a single person can bring... especially when said person is a Jerkass who uses both of them and others for his own pleasure. To elaborate, love interests in this series tend to have very thin to no identities because their existences are solely based on Makoto Itou to make him look like a typical saint-like Harem Genre protagonist. In reality, Makoto is far from being a saint, and the heroines' misjudgment and obsession toward him drive them either into despair or insanity when they realize Makoto only thinks of them as sex toys. Add to this the fact that the two main heroines are Yanderes, and things get ugly in short order.
- In Shugo Chara!, Amu's crush on Tadase started out based on looks and really nothing more because she'd never spoken to him. Later on in the series, Amu's feelings for Tadase develop into her liking him based on his personality once she gets to know him.
- For the most part, Alpha Omega Nova of Space Patrol Luluco is just a pretty face over whom Luluco's obsessed. It's later invoked, as his primary goal was to manifest the most worthless thing in existence: the shallow love of an especially foolish girl.
- Tamagotchi: Inverted. While she does have other character traits, Himespetchi is mostly identified by her crush on Mametchi and some of her other characteristics wind up helping her to drive the message home even further (e.g. she shows an interest in robotics and takes the Robotics class in Dream School... to be with Mametchi, who is also in that class). However, the relationship is one-sided, with Mametchi being completely unaware of her affections.
- Fatina from The Tower of Druaga. She spends the first 3/4ths of the first season as a character whose sole character traits were being a bitchy Neeba fangirl. This changes later on, where we get an episode where she and the main character are stranded together and bond a little, removing her from Neeba and giving viewers a bit more insight into her character. She never really goes back to being a complete Neeba fangirl after that. To add to things, Neeba offers Fatina and Fatina alone an invitation to join him and Kaaya after they betray their groups. She turns down his offer and stands by Jil's side.
- Umi Monogatari has Kojima, who never gets much more background than that Kanon likes him.
- Nagisa Shiowatari and Inaba from Urusei Yatsura are introduced extremely late in the manga's run, Nagisa later than Inaba, and their characterization is quite shallow outside of their crushes on Ryunosuke Fujinami and Shinobu Miyake respectively. Nagisa does get the hidden depth of his martial arts training from his only post-debut story, but Inaba's appearances revolve entirely around him being infatuated with Shinobu and him showing that he's a genuine Nice Guy.
- Fumiya from Wandering Son is introduced as having a crush on Saori. Pretty much everything he does is related to this crush of his. Surprisingly when they do begin to date he mostly phases out of the story or appears at the school he shares with Nitori.
- Wedding Peach: You only really learn anything interesting about Yanagiba after he starts his relationship with Yuri, and most of his significant actions or displays of individual personality thereafter have to do with said relationship.
- Welcome to Demon School! Iruma-kun both subverts and plays this straight.
- Azazel Ameri's introduction came surrounded by romance cliches like Crash-Into Hello, Luminescent Blush Crush At First Sight, fangirling over generic shoujo manga, and obvious Tsundere behavior towards Iruma, but as soon after that the series immediately subverts the pitfalls it was signalling. Ameri becomes the most singularly important person for Iruma's character growth by asking him the right Armor-Piercing Question about what he intended to do with his life, which begins to drive Iruma's characterization as the series continues, and her continued roles in later arcs avoid her being Demoted to Satellite Love Interest. Furthermore, she gains several social circles and hobbies outside of Iruma, and even pursues her own ambitions that sometimes run against her desire to get closer to him. Even without her romantic subplot with Iruma, Ameri would remain a pivotal character in the series.
- Eiko falls into this twice, with a Running Gag of never managing to interact with Iruma after their first encounter where he saved her life. All her subsequent appearances are her fangirling over Iruma's newest accomplishments and trying various ways to get her to notice him, and even the hobbies, skills, and friends she later makes all circle back to her crush on Iruma. Even when Eiko gains a crush on Ameri for the same reason, her Running Gag simply switches to her fangirling over both of them simultaneously. She also becomes a Shipper on Deck after finding out that Ameri has a crush on Iruma as well, though to what ends are undetermined.
- Himawari of ×××HOLiC comes off like this for a good while. Then we find out that her, Doumeki, and Watanuki's bonds are far more complex.
- Katie from Yo-kai Watch doesn't have much going for her besides being Nate's crush. She has her own set of friends and worries but most of her screentime is just for Nate to be awkward around her.
Comic Books
- The Disney Ducks Comic Universe: Donald Duck's father, Quackmore Duck, is given very little characterization in his limited screentime in The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck. Basically all we know about him is that he has a Hair-Trigger Temper, pretty good business sense, and rather quickly fell head-over-heels in love with Hortense McDuck. Hortense, being Scrooge's youngest sister, gets far more characterization and focus in Life and Times than her husband does.
- In Ghostopolis, not much is ever revealed about Claire's personality other than her conflicting feelings for Frank.
- Lady Sif from The Mighty Thor is supposed to be a badass Lady of War and the second greatest female warrior in Asgard, but with few exceptions (such as Journey into Mystery (Immonen)), her role in most stories focus purely on her relationship with Thor.
- Robin (1993): Not much is known about Zo besides the fact that she gained a crush on Tim while tutoring him and started dating him, does well in school, is considered attractive by some of the other students, and is heartbroken when he breaks up with her over the phone. She gets slightly more character in Red Robin just by showing her anger at people who've given up on the now-missing Tim while she tries to help find him, her friendship with him, and her acceptance that he's moved on from their relationship even if she gets irritated at hearing about him dating and has to visibly decide to just let it go.
- Steve Trevor, ever since the Golden Age, has been depicted as little more than Wonder Woman's military boyfriend and the designated victim whenever he appears, to the point that several adaptations have poked fun at the character for being Diana's love interest.
- Spider-Man:
- Gwen Stacy was actually this for most of her existence in the original run. Aside from being Peter Parker's girlfriend, she was a fairly shallow character who didn't have much in the way of drive or ambition on her own. She even spent the entire fight that's all most readers remember her for unconscious.
- Marla Madison was a scientist who built a Spider-Slayer for J. Jonah Jameson, who subsequently fell in love with her and eventually married her. Since Dr. Madison stopped building Spider-Slayers, she gradually settled down into this position as few writers seemed to be interested in developing her as a character. As she was one of several characters to be fridged in post-One More Day stories, there is now little chance of that being rectified.
- Cissy Ironwood was a Satellite Love Interest created especially for Marvel Team-Up in the early 1980s so that the writers of that could write stories in which Spider-Man ditched his date in order to fight the villain of the month without having to keep track of the latest romantic developments in the other two Spider-books.
- Carlie Cooper was supposed to be "perfect" for Peter Parker. The problem was, she was kind of quickly introduced and then forgotten about for a significant amount of time while the rotating writers focused on their pet characters. When she reappeared, a lot of her appearances consisted of everyone talking about how super awesome she was--even those who had never met her before. If this weren't bad enough, she appeared in an issue titled "The Many Loves Of Spider-Man" before they were even dating. When they finally got together Peter declared it was "the rightest thing in the world" (despite the fact she was dressed up as his ex). What few personality traits could be assigned to her were seemingly all sewn together from other love interests that were much better-developed characters. She and Peter had a laughable lack of any actual chemistry, she was named after Joe Quesada's daughter, and no one could decide what she looked like. Not to mention, she was quite obviously meant to replace fan-favorite Mary Jane Watson, whom Joe Quesada infamously dislikes. She quickly became The Scrappy and when she and Peter broke up during Spider-Island the fandom rejoiced. She's still in the books, but now they're focusing more on her job as a crime scene investigator, where more of an assignable personality can surface.
- Sadie in Starman has no character outside of her relationship with Jack and worrying about her brother.
- Superman: Earth One: Lisa Lasalle has no characterization outside of her relationship with Clark. Even when she revealed she was working as a prostitute to earn extra money, that plotline only comes at the forefront at the final pages of volume 2 and is solved fairly quickly.
- Laurie Juspezyk from Watchmen was employed by the US government essentially to be one of these for Dr. Manhattan after she quit her old job in the Superhero business. She actually does have a personality, and it winds up conflicting to some extent with her mission of keeping Manhattan focused/sane/human because of the fact that he's too much the first of those and not enough the third upsets her, which in turn upsets him.
- The prequel miniseries Minutemen features Norbert Veldon, Nelson Gardner's "friend" who presumably helped him recover after losing his beloved Hooded Justice. Veldon briefly shows up at Hollis Mason's shop to threaten him with a lawsuit unless he stops writing his memoirs, claiming that the advance copy that he sent Gardner has upset him (we later find out that specifically, Gardner's turmoil stems from the part of the memoirs where Mason confesses to killing Hooded Justice and suggests that HJ was behind the circus kidnappings that Nite Owl and Silhouette had investigated. The miniseries also features Gretchen, Ursula Zandt's partner and personal physician, although she's somewhat more developed, as we learn much of her backstory when Nite Owl gets ahold of her and Silhouette's notes.
Fan Works
- Jack Frost in A Bluer Shade of White. Olaf created him specifically to be anything Elsa wants. Jack says outright that he's not his own person; his love for Elsa is what he is and all he is.
- Maria, a one-off character from Calvin & Hobbes: The Series, provides motivation for a brief Love Triangle and then disappears afterwards with little explanation.
- Navarone and Kumani in Diaries of a Madman, with Kumani having little purpose in the story other than being Nav's girlfriend. Nor is the relationship itself particularly deep, mostly being based around compatibility in the bedroom, which is acknowledged in-universe.
- In-Universe, Hermione spends most of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality worried that she's becoming this to Harry since she'd much prefer to be recognized for her own merits.
- Comes up in Long Con: Marinette realizes that one of the reasons why her classmates have all been ignoring and dismissing her warnings about Lila is because they view her as Adrien's Satellite Love Interest. They see her as so completely besotted with him that they assume she's just jealous of Lila for daring to be a girl in his general vicinity, with no other traits or interests aside from her crush. This serves as one of the reasons she falls completely out of love with him, alongside realizing she was Loving a Shadow.
- Regularly pops up in stories by Megamatt09, such as Ascension and Beyond the Veil where most of the women Harry's officially in a relationship with show up long enough to have sex with him then never appear again even when they're allegedly married to him.
- My Brave Pony: Starfleet Magic:
- Starla Shine develops a crush on Lightning Dawn on first sight and we never learn much about her other than her interest in astronomy, which is practically forgotten after her introduction. Starla doesn't even appear in the author's video of character bios for the fic!
- Another example would be Rhymey and Fluttershy, as well as Celestia to the Grand Ruler, in the latter half of the story. Their romances are never developed, it's just said that the couples are in love with no real meaningful interaction or development.
- Deconstructed in Ship War AU; while canon eventually lampshaded it to a degree, the comic fully explores the fact that neither Jackie nor Marco actually knows much about each other personally, despite having been friends since kindergarten. In complete contrast to Star and Marco, who quickly grew close after only a few hours. Jackie decides to break up with Marco for this reason, feeling that he doesn't truly deserve her.
- Discussed in The Stalking Zuko Series, the reason Suki's competition with Zuko escalated to the heights they rose because she felt that everyone only saw her as "Sokka's girlfriend." She feels that since her talents are overshadowed by others and needed to distinguish herself somehow for anyone to see her differently.
- Viktor Beaufort in Your Love Can Do What No One Else Can. Prior to the events of the story, Lila brings in an imposter who claims to be Ladybug. When Marinette insists that she is lying, all her friends desert her, and even Adrien believes the imposter and begins dating her, breaking Marinette's heart. That's when Viktor, a handsome, suave, über-wealthy up-and-coming fashion designer comes into the pictures and sweeps Marinette off her feet. Throughout the whole fic, he is the perfect companion. He spoils Marinette with expensive gifts and trips, never pushes her to upgrade their sexual relationship or talk about her worries, and even keeps her secret when he finds out she's Ladybug. He even tells Marinette that should they continue their relationship, he plans to court her properly and eventually marry her. Because Viktor was so devoted and loving towards Marinette, many readers were disappointed when she ultimately chose Adrien.
Film — Animated
- Taken to its logical extreme in Don Bluth's Anastasia. Bartok the Bat abandons Rasputin near the end, and is rewarded with a pink bat who flies in and kisses him, for no obvious reason.
- Cat City: Chino-san shows signs of being an Action Girl, but doesn't get much more characterization and barely any screentime. Most of her romance with Grabowski happens off-screen. According to the production staff, there was an off-color sex gag planned between her and Grabowski revealing her to be partially robotic, which would have given the two some sort of connection, but it was cut to give the film a lower age certificate.
- Disney Animated Canon:
- The Prince from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. He shows up at the start to fall in Love at First Sight with Snow White, disappears for the majority of the film (though she does get an "I Want" Song about him in the middle), and comes in at the end to wake her from the poison. Word of God is that he had a larger role originally, but the animators were having trouble realistically animating a human male.
- Bambi
- Faline doesn't really have a personality beyond Genki Girl in the first film, especially when she grows up into a doe and sheds even that, and sparsely interacts with anyone besides Bambi. The midquel fleshes her personality out a little more and gives her more screen time with the other characters, although she remains fixated on Bambi and is still often kept Out of Focus.
- Likewise, neither Thumper's nor Flower's love interests have any personality, though they only appear very briefly.
- The Prince in Cinderella only appears at the ball as someone for Cinderella to fall for and escape her stepfamily by marrying. Both the sequels (particularly the third film) and the live-action remake go out of their way to subvert this, the former giving him a Deadpan Snarker and Leaning on the Fourth Wall personality, the latter giving him a subplot of his own.
- 101 Dalmatians. The female characters, unfortunately. While we get to know Roger and Pongo enough to build a character, all we see of Anita and Perdita is that they're homely and motherly. Anita has a backstory regarding having a friendship with Cruella, but the movie never delves deep into it.
- Shanti from The Jungle Book (1967) has no personality outside of seemingly being mysterious and flirty. Considering Mowgli leaves his whole family behind for her, it's a real letdown we don't know much else about her, though the sequel does show her family and gives Shanti a crippling fear of going into the jungle.
- Maid Marian from Robin Hood (1973). She has an interesting backstory due to being the niece of the villainous Prince John and the good King Richard. While she has some scenes with other characters (Lady Kluck, Skippy and his friends), she mostly talks about her love for Robin, even when she's not around him.
- The Rescuers: Bianca becomes this in the sequel (in the first film, she and Bernard are equally important in the story). In the sequel, Bernard is The Hero who saves the day by himself, while Bianca's role revolves around her Unresolved Sexual Tension with Bernard, and being in the middle of the Love Triangle with Bernard and Jake.
- Vixey from The Fox and the Hound has barely any personality, due to being introduced around the time Tod was put in the nature reserve. She is implied to have known Big Mama for some time, but that's pretty much all we know about her besides the fact she and Tod love each other.
- The Little Mermaid. Although Prince Eric appeared more time on-screen than the other princes since he is saved by Ariel, his main purpose is to be Ariel's love interest, which gives Ariel a reason to be even more animated to go to the surface.
- Roxanne in A Goofy Movie has a characterization that amounts to "has some of Max's surface flaws" and "is Max's Love Interest." Oddly enough, PJ's girlfriend in the sequel, who suffers from both No Name Given and limited screentime, is probably the biggest aversion among the movies' love interests.
- In Ice Age: Collision Course, Brooke the sloth is good for one Rousing Speech, and otherwise only exists to get Sid laid. Julian the mammoth is a lesser example, as he actually gets some decent screentime and helps make the final push to save the day, but his character almost entirely revolves around his upcoming marriage with Peaches, which also drives Manny's character arc for the movie.
- Tony in The Incredibles, who shows up at the beginning and the end of the film and mainly exists as Violet's crush. In fact, he only really exists to demonstrate Violet's character development. At the beginning of the film, she's too shy to even remain visible in his presence. In the end, she's able to talk with him and get a date while he's stammering nervously. He only gets slightly better in Incredibles 2; we learn he plays sports and music and works part-time at his parents' diner, but he still exists solely as Violet's love interest.
- Played painfully straight in Vídeo Brinquedo's The Little Panda Fighter, where the female bear is a total Flat Character and is only there to be Pancada's Love Interest.
- Celia in Monsters, Inc. Aside from being Mike's love interest and the company secretary, she doesn't have much characterization. On her date with Mike they don't really talk about anything but their relationship and it is difficult to see why he likes her so much, aside from the obvious.
- Flash Sentry from My Little Pony: Equestria Girls looks nice, helps Twilight twice, plays guitar, generally seems to be a Nice Guy, was Sunset Shimmer's ex-boyfriend, and his equine counterpart is a guard in Cadance's castle. And that's all we or Twilight ever know about him. That doesn't stop the Love at First Sight. The second movie really puts it in lights: his introduction to the film is to come in and nervously ask the Mane Six's human counterparts if Twilight's come back lately. (You know, Twilight, the princess from another world that won't be accessible for months, and who really has no reason to ever return?) It's the one scene where you'd expect his actions would have to come from his non-Twilight-related traits, so it's pretty glaring when the answer to "What is he when not being the Love Interest?" is "that guy who randomly shows up to ask if Twilight has inexplicably returned." He just isn't a character in his own right.
- It's emphasized even further in My Little Pony: Equestria Girls – Friendship Games where his only role is to be shot down by Human Twilight twice, showing how unimportant he is without the Ship Tease. Interestingly, Friendship Games and Legend of Everfree having him get shot down moves him into a new role that lampshades him as this sort of character: now that Twilight's human counterpart is part of the gang and Pony Twilight is not in the movies anymore, and after Sunset Shimmer telling him straight that this Twilight isn't that Twilight and he needs to move on (and then going on with the plot and not noticing Flash trying to get back with her), poor Flash's role in the story is now "generic love-interest-y person without someone to be a generic love interest to." He pops up to fulfill his role in life as the guy who occasionally interrupts the plot to smile cutely and be smiled at in return... and there's no one who needs him for that, leaving him to give the same sad look. It's actually earned him a bit of sympathy from those who'd hated him, and Derpy being the one to pat him on the shoulder in those scenes has given him someone to be shipped with as well.
- Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night: Twinkle exists pretty much to tempt Pinocchio and be a Living MacGuffin for the second half of the movie.
- Rock Odyssey: The men Laura has romantic relationships with exist for that sole purpose. The least developed of all of them is undoubtedly her '80s love interest. His name is never given, nor is he even important enough In-Universe to appear at the end to become part of Laura's "perfect man" amalgamation.
- Princess Fiona from the Shrek series started off as a parody of this trope; she insisted in the first film that her role was to be the stereotypical Damsel in Distress princess who literally just waited until a handsome prince came to rescue her. Subverted later when she grew to love Shrek for who he is. In fact, in Shrek Forever After, we actually get to see what Fiona would have become if she had never been rescued.
- Bo Peep from Toy Story. Sure, she's sweet and has a bit of a naughty side, but both those traits are used in order to demonstrate her affection for Woody (grabbing him around the neck with her shepherdess's crook, for example). She never really interacts with any other toy on-screen and she exists mainly as a sympathetic ear to Woody. Bo Peep's lack of development — and the popularity of the other female characters, Jessie the Cowgirl and the tour guide Barbie doll from Toy Story 2, and the logistics of having Bo Peep actually be involved in the action of the third movie (given that she wasn't actually a toy at all, but a china figurine) — were the reasons why she didn't appear in the third movie. This, however, is averted in the fourth film where we find out that she's been out to roam the outside as an independent toy and has strived to live around nature, though she's so different from the first three movies it can be easy to forget she's the same character.
- In Turning Red, Carter Murphy-Mayhew's characterization boils down to "that goth boy Mei has a crush on", and he doesn't speak or show much character otherwise.
Film — Live Action
- Airborne: Nikki has basically no personality beyond being smitten with Mitchell.
- Irina, the Greek princess in Asterix at the Olympic Games, whose entire personality is pretty much 'I love poetry, I love Lovesix, I don't want to marry Brutus'. The person chasing after her, Lovesix, is pretty static as well.
- Foxy Cleopatra in Austin Powers in Goldmember. Unlike Vanessa and Felicity, whose roles were more intertwined with Austin's; Foxy's character was limited to being "the token female that Austin kisses before the credits run". This may have been a side-effect of Goldmember focusing more on Austin's relationship with his father as opposed to him falling in love.
- Avengers: Age of Ultron has Clint Barton's wife and kids. Their only role in the plot is that the gang uses their home as a safehouse (since Nick Fury had erased the existence of Barton's family from SHIELD's records to keep them safe). Even in later movies, their importance centers entirely around how their presence or absence impacts the sole main cast member they are connected to.
- Jennifer in the Back to the Future trilogy. She appeared very little in the first movie and apparently existed only so that Marty would have someone to spill exposition on in the opening scenes. Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale tried to write her out of the sequels, but the way they ended the first movie made that difficult; she did get some development in the second and third movies.
- Joanna and Elizabeth, the Royal Princess Babes from Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. While this was somewhat justified in the first movie due to their brief screen time, they remain featureless in the second movie, even with their more prominent role in the heroes' lives.
- Marianne from The Boat That Rocked has no consistent personality in her ten minutes of total screen time except to be an object of adoration for the teenage protagonist. She almost immediately breaks his heart by sleeping with another guy on their 'date', but they get back together in the last 15 minutes with practically no apology and no explanation from her.
- This is Dougie's only role in Bridesmaids. In spite of the plot focusing on the build-up and traditions of his and Lilian's wedding, he has very little characterization beyond being her fiance to the point that his sister, Meg, has much more screentime than he does.
- Can't Hardly Wait: Amanda deconstructs this character. She has no identity outside of just being Mike's girlfriend. She ends up with Preston. Good for him, but bad for her.
"If I'm not Mike Dexter's girlfriend, you know, who am I? Nobody knows me as anything else. I don't know me as anything else."
- In Cherry 2000, the title character is a Robot Girl with a very limited AI (she probably wouldn't pass a Turing Test). The whole plot of the movie is the hero's trek to find a body to replace her lost one. She only appears for a few minutes of the movie and is unceremoniously dumped to save the female tracker who the hero fell in love with during the journey. Since she's a sexbot, she's more or less supposed to be this, as dumping her in favor of a real person is character development; if she had a personality it would be more of a Kick the Dog moment.
- Casey in Chronicle is notable in that being a Satellite Love Interest was a cover for her actual role in the film; to provide another camera for the film's Found Footage style. Ironically, she clearly has more depth than he does near the start, and they seem to have some offscreen development of their relationship.
- Colossus and the Headhunters:
- Amoa is almost certainly destined to be Maciste's lover. She doesn't sell it very well, however.
- Prince Ariel's girlfriend Asmyn also qualifies; she has literally zero character.
- Coming to America: Inverted and an In-Universe example; Princess Imani Izzi was pretty much trained to be this trope to Prince Akim. From the day she was born, she was raised solely to become his wife and queen, to have no opinions or interests of her own, and to obey his every wish. Unlike most examples, Akim is turned off by her lack of personality and free will and runs off to the U.S. to find a smart, independent, more developed woman to marry.
- Justin Timberlake's girlfriend in Edison exists only to remind everyone that he's a hip, sexy twenty-something and get beaten to a bloody pulp by the corrupt cops he's investigating.
- Freddy Got Fingered: Played for Laughs, despite being a wheelchair-using rocket scientist, Betty seemingly has no interests besides performing sex acts on Gord and almost every scene has her asking to suck his cock.
- Link Larkin in the original 1988 film version of Hairspray had no personality whatsoever outside of being a love interest to Tracey. The musical adaptation gave him a lot more character.
- Harper: Susan basically exists to give Harper something to feel bad about, and to provide a booty call in one scene.note
- The Iron Horse is a drama about the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad. The hero is an idealistic Pony Express rider and son of a railroad surveyor, who does battle against an evil land speculator and his corrupt engineer sidekick. Eventually, the hero defeats the bad guys and the railroad is built. He also has a girlfriend. Sometimes, this girlfriend is shown onscreen, looking pretty, and occasionally urging the hero not to fight, but mostly looking pretty.
- The Karate Kid movies:
- Ali Mills in The Karate Kid (1984) fits this trope to a T. She basically exists only to be Daniel's girlfriend and to sit pretty.
- Averted (but barely) by Kumiko from The Karate Kid Part II, who is shown to have her own dream of becoming a classical Japanese dancer. She's written out of the third movie, and the in-story reason is that she chose said dream over being with Daniel.
- Meiying in The Karate Kid (2010) remake is very shallow too - and even weaker than Ali.
- Katie Deauxma in Kick-Ass, who is every bit Dave's dream girl to the core, even to the point of immediately forgiving him for pretending to be gay and having sex with him right afterward, plus having sex just about anywhere — including on a dumpster. She is given an occupation and her interest in comics is touched upon, but her entire character ultimately centers around being Dave's perfect girlfriend. The most important role she plays aside from that is sending Dave after Razul, which leads to him meeting other important characters.
- Jocelyn in A Knight's Tale. She's beautiful, rich, likes clothes, loves William... and that's it. All the poor girl gets to do is stand on the sidelines and then have either a love scene or a fighting scene with Will. Though she's lucky enough to even get moments of witty lines and displays of spunk. She also kind of lampshades this. Her initial rejection of Will is based on him treating her like this, as every knight who was smitten with her pretty face has done. She asks him to think of her as a person, not a prize, and when he does she falls for him. Not that the audience gets to know her very well, she still fits the trope for us. And the fact that the ones who point it out the most among fandom are Kate and Will/Kate shippers says a lot...
- The Magnificent Seven (1960) only has one female character in Petra - whose function is to be a love interest of sorts for Chico and convince him to abandon the gunslinger lifestyle to stay with her.
- The Mask: Tina Carlyle for Stanley. To the point that the movie has to reveal that the other half of the Betty and Veronica dichotomy was The Mole for the Big Bad in order to find a good, non-sexual reason why Stanley should prefer her in the end.
- Aaron from Mean Girls plays with this. He exists mainly for Cady and Regina to fight over him and doesn't seem to have many independent goals of his own (a deleted scene states that he lives with a Disappeared Dad and has to help his mother a lot). He does, however, chew Cady out for flunking math on purporse just so he can be her tutor, and refuses to get with her once he sees how she's become "a clone of Regina". They hook up once Cady's undergone a Heel–Face Turn.
- Bonnie in Only Angels Have Wings. The story is about Geoff the studly pilot and his fellow studly pilots, and their dinky little airline that makes highly dangerous flights over the Andes and back. Bonnie arrives in town for...some reason the movie never specifies. She has a job doing...something the movie never specifies. She falls in love with Geoff. The pilots continue to make perilous flights into the interior of South America and back; tragedy strikes and new friendships are formed. At the end Bonnie is—still in love with Geoff, having hung around throughout the movie but hardly affecting the story at all.
- Save Your Legs!: The only personality traits Anjali displays are her interest in Teddy, and her love of cricket (although the latter does play a role in the film's resolution). Tellingly, she is a character created for the dramatization and had no equivalent in the real-world events that inspired the film.
- In Stardust, Tristan would do absolutely anything to win Victoria's heart, though she's due to marry another man. And that's pretty much all we know about her. As his relationship with Yvaine the fallen star grows, Yvaine even points out that she's not exactly proving her love to him the way he is to her... and eventually, he figures this out himself and dumps her for Yvaine.
- Whatsherface, Joan, from The Starfighters. The whole movie is an endless stream of nothing of interest happening to incredibly uninteresting people, and she does not disappoint.
- In TRON: Legacy, Olivia Wilde went out of her way to ensure that her character Quorra didn't get saddled with this. We see the beginnings of an attraction between the Sam and Quorra once they get to know each other a bit better on the Solar Sailer, which is probably a more natural true-to-life progression than this trope: they only recently met.
- In-universe in The Truman Show, Truman's wife Meryl doesn't really love him and is only acting the part of his love interest. At one point, he even asks her "Why did you marry me? You can't stand me." After she leaves the show, the studio is set to have Truman start a new relationship with a hot new co-worker. All along, Truman is pining for the lost Sylvia, who only qualifies as this trope out of universe because Christof pulled the extra from the show so the relationship with Meryl can begin, meaning they never got to really know each other. Christof even mocks what little connection they were able to make, saying Truman wouldn't want to leave the show just because she "batted [her] eyes at him". Of course, Sylvia's agitating for Truman to be freed is not only motivated by love, but also because of the inherent cruelty of what is being done to him.
- Audrey, David's wife from Unbreakable barely gets any focus in the plot aside from explaining the presence of their son Joseph. She's Killed Off for Real in the sequel.
- Oliver from Whip It acts like the very definition of this trope, since his scenes mainly consist of him digging Bliss, and Bliss digging him right back. The trope is deconstructed a bit, however, as he only acts this way in order to get into Bliss' pants. And she falls for it.
Franchise
- Ken from the Barbie franchise is arguably the original satellite love interest. He was literally invented to be Barbie's boyfriend, and for most of his existence, his entire personality and interests depended on what values and fads Barbie reflected at the time.
- His Satellite Love Interest status is even parodied in the Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse shorts, as his entire purpose in life in the shorts is to basically worship Barbie like a goddess.
- Barbie (2023) deconstructs this with Beach Ken. His only purpose in life is Barbie, and she doesn't love him. This leads into his fall to accidental villainy when he brings patriarchy to Barbieland because the Real World was the first place he felt seen, and later breaks down crying and admits he doesn't know who he is without her. Barbie encourages him to be "just Ken" and grow beyond his role, and he eventually throws off his obsession with being Barbie's boyfriend.
Literature
- 4 Kids in 5E and 1 Crazy Year: While Giovanni and Ashley's mutual crush grows throughout the book, Ashley gets more prominence as fellow narrator Destiny's friend than as Giovanni's girlfriend. They rarely, if ever, talk to each other until the last fifth of the book, and most of their interactions are Giovanni admiring light shining off her hair from a distance.
- In The Adventures of Caterpillar Jones, Cat doesn't get much characterization other than liking C.J., and Sammy's wife Sandy gets even less characterization.
- Bart and Robert in The Baby-Sitters Club series, whose only purpose is as love interests for Kristy and Stacey respectively. By contrast, Mary Anne's boyfriend Logan was a much more rounded character and was part of the club himself.
- Will Yamakawa from the book Babysitters Summer Vacation was a Satellite Love Interest for Claudia. This also counts as a Token Minority Couple.
- Ada from Dickens' Bleak House falls under this trope. She is sweet and so beautiful that Even the Girls Want Her and completely in love with her cousin, Richard. And that's it. Ditto for Lucie in A Tale of Two Cities. Dickens was at such a loss to develop her that her most memorable attribute is her ability to arrange furniture nicely.
- Kathein, in Courtship Rite, the woman the maran-Kaiel were originally planning to marry. She's a brilliant scientist, whose research becomes important to the plot more than once, but since they were ordered to marry someone else, the maran-Kaiel have been forbidden to see her, so she gets only a minimal amount of screen time and character development.
- Lin Carter's Cthulhu Mythos tales have a variant of this in the form of the Great Old One Idh-Yaa, whose only purpose is to be Cthulhu's mate and the mother of his three sons. This may be one of the reasons why some fans disregard Lin Carter's Mythos.
- Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Holly Hills doesn't receive a lot of characterization in the books. Justified, since it is all from Greg's perspective.
- Male examples in Dracula. Lucy's suitors function in the story as little more than that. Arthur (who is the one that gets the girl) only hopes for Lucy's affections and then mourns her death. Quincey doesn't get the girl and only contributes owning a hunting knife to the fight with Dracula and getting killed off so Dracula could kill someone. Lucy's third suitor Jack avoids this. He is more developed, as he works in a mental hospital where the patients sense Dracula's presence and it's he who first notices something wrong with Lucy.
- Cimorene's fiancé Therandil in the Enchanted Forest Chronicles. They're only in a relationship because their parents decided to betroth them, and she can't stand him because he's utterly shallow. Most of their interactions consist of her trying to get out of the marriage or trying to convince him to go away after she moves in with a dragon to get out of the marriage and he tries to rescue her. Once she finally gets rid of him (by convincing him to rescue an equally shallow princess being held by a different dragon instead) he only ever gets mentioned when she's explaining to other people how she got him to leave.
- Played with in the Eternal Champion story by Michael Moorcock. The hero, Ekrose, wins a battle and becomes betrothed to the beautiful princess Iolinda, even though he just met her. Over the course of the story, he starts developing a much deeper connection to Ermihazd which develops into more genuine love. This has far-reaching consequences by the end of the story.
- Bryce Loski of Flipped is a subversion. Juli is only interested in him for superficial reasons, and her family sees him as a pretty shallow person. In reality, he's got lots of Hidden Depths, he's just also a raging Stepford Smiler who deliberately projects his shallow image to cover up how bad things are at home. A major theme of the book is Juli learning to look past appearances and Bryce learning to act like a decent human being.
- In Aaron Allston's Galatea in 2-D, Kevin had divorced because Donna was not this, and painted Julia this way. In the end, after he killed Kevin, Roger paints Julia a new Kevin, who will treat her better — it wasn't after all her fault.
- Daisy from The Great Gatsby is actually pretty well developed, she's just actually genuinely static. Jordan Baker acts this trope, but hints at Hidden Depths frequently (not to mention some believe her to be a lesbian).
- Deconstructed in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix where Cho latches on Harry due to serious psychological problems, rather than merely being smitten; also, Harry only knew her on a shallow basis before dating her, and neither could handle the stress.
- In A Harvest of War Queen Thyll's lover, Penda Mortimer, is this. His life and career literally revolve around her. Still, he ends up doing a lot more than usual for this trope due to said career being "high-ranking knight".
- A Princess of Mars has John Carter do things beyond the impossible all for his relatively basic love for Dejah Thoris. In the entire ten-book canon, Dejah Thoris' characterization never really gets much beyond "beautiful princess who loves John Carter." The only books in which she actually gets to do anything are the first (Princess) and the eighth (Swords). In books two and three (Gods and Warlord) she's essentially a MacGuffin, she spends almost the entirety of book nine (Synthetic Men) in a coma, and in the other five, she makes only a cameo appearance at the end (and sometimes in the beginning as well), with the bulk of the story being about a different couple (Carter himself is a significant character in only one of the five, Llana of Gathol).
- Gammla in Quest for Fire does not utter a single line of dialogue and is treated like a literal trophy for bringing back the titular fire.
- In A Song of Ice and Fire, Jeyne Westerling is Robb Stark's Satellite Love Interest. Her entire role in the plot is for Robb Stark to first sleep with her when mourning the supposed deaths of his brothers and marry her to preserve her honor and in the process break his vow to Walder Frey, and all she talks about is how to be a good wife to Robb. (The fact that there are no point-of-view chapters for Robb explains this somewhat; we never see the two of them interact one-on-one, so we don't know what their relationship is really like.)
- Jeyne's simplicity is most likely one of the reasons why the Game of Thrones writers cut her out and replaced her with a new Love Interest for Robb who, admittedly, is a better-developed character: a field nurse who maintains a strong opinion against the war and is quite intelligent in her own right. It's easier to buy that Robb would break his engagement to a girl he's never met for her.
- Many of these in Sweet Valley High and its spin-offs. It was almost guaranteed that once a book Elizabeth, Jessica, or both would meet a new love interest who led her into some sort of scheme or caused her to become torn between him and her loyal regular boyfriend. Steven and other supporting characters got Satellite Love Interests too.
- The White Queen in The Unexplored Summon://Blood-Sign plays with this. While she is indeed Kyousuke's love interest, and all of her thoughts are related to him in some way, she's also the Big Bad of the series. Due to her actions in the past, Kyousuke absolutely refuses to be with her again and is devoted to trying to kill her. The story is essentially all about her attempts to make him fall in love with her again, no matter the cost.
- The Twilight Saga:
- One of the most bizarre examples of this trope can be found in the concept of "imprinting", in which males "recognize" the females that they are destined to fall in love with — which can occur as early as childbirth (in fact, Jacob imprinted on Bella's child before she was even conceived). Many of these female imprintees are "basic" by default considering they're infants or toddlers and thus have no fixed personalities at all. Their lives revolve entirely around their future husbands, considering the teenage boys appear to become their caregivers until they're of marriageable age, and whether the girls ''want'' to be in these relationships is treated as somewhat irrelevant in the text. They are future wives, nothing more. In-universe, it's explained that the boys become anything and everything that the girls want. They literally live and breathe to make their imprints happy. So they're satellites as well.
- One example of this was when Jacob came across his friend Quil (a teenage boy) on a date with Claire (a two-year-old) at the beach, which involved Quil just watching as Claire played in the sand.
- Also, Bella Swan, our romantic heroine and POV character herself. We never learn much about her life in Phoenix, and although she easily makes friends at the beginning of the first novel, she immediately dumps them to be with Edward. Her whole life revolves around Edward, to the point where she actually goes catatonic when he leaves her, and in the last book she turns into a vampire, and completely leaves her human life behind her for a life with her Edward. She also has no character development at all throughout the books. At one point her mother literally compares Bella to a satellite around Edward—always orientating herself to always be near him—and Bella can't give even one excuse as she even admits that Renee is totally correct.
- Tate Collins is this for Miles Archer in Ugly Love. Despite being one of the story's main protagonists (with half the chapters narrated from her POV), Tate doesn't get much of a role or characterisation outside of her romantic interest in Miles; her character revolves almost exclusively around their relationship and the story is really more about Miles dealing with his tragic past, with even the chapters from Tate's perspective being focused mostly on exploring and advancing Miles' character.
- Ramandu's daughter in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader only appears in one of the last chapters and exists largely to be beautiful, be the group's host, and provide exposition on the curses that affect both her father Ramandu and the three lords that still remain alive. She isn't even named in the text, though Word of God says she's called Lilliandil. She marries Caspian when it's all over, and we're informed that they live Happily Ever After until poor Lilliandil gets nommed by a snake and provides the inciting incident for The Silver Chair.
- Silverstream from Warrior Cats. She never appeared in Into the Wild (not even as an apprentice or at least in the allegiances), and her first appearance in the second book was only to rescue Graystripe from drowning. She never had an appearance where it didn't involve another more important character, and the only notable thing she did outside of bearing Graystripe's kits was getting Firestar in touch with cats who knew something about Redtail's death.
- Jorge Luis Borges wrote that Teodelina Villar, one of the characters of his short tale, The Zahir, was this trope for him. Then he states that in Real Life, this trope is a deconstruction of the Artifact of Attraction: After all, a Shallow Love Interest is someone who nobody (not even the guy who is in love with her) can define why is he in love, Borges cannot justify why he is in love (fascinated by) Teodelina: Teodelina was described by Borges as a Rich in Dollars, Poor in Sense Rich Bitch when she was younger, and then she was a Fallen Princess. Even when Borges describes her as pretty stupid, he claims to love her, even when he cannot justify why except because Borges admits he is a snob.
- Sandokan: Baronet William Rosenthal, a character in The Tigers of Mompracem, exists only to be Sandokan's rival for Marianna's love, and his only chance to marry her was to have lord Guillonk force his niece.
Live-Action TV
- Borgen's final series introduces Jeremy Welsh, a character who unfortunately has no role or personality beyond "supportive boyfriend" to main character Birgitte.
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
- Kennedy from season 7 appears to be interested in Willow for two reasons: she's cute, and she's willing to have sex with girls. At one point Willow asks her flat out what Kennedy knows about her, and Kennedy is barely able to come up with anything. But by the next episode, they're in a relationship.
- Scott Hope, Buffy's incredibly forgettable high school boyfriend. They flirt and exchange a few gazes in Season 3...until he breaks up with her for being too disinterested. Season 7 has another character reveal he later turned out to be gay.
- Oz began like this - entirely as a love interest for Willow. But when he became a werewolf, it allowed him to have plotlines that didn't involve being Willow's boyfriend.
- Buffy's season 4 boyfriend Riley Finn existed on the show to only be Buffy's love interest after Angel, and while he did play an important role in the Initiative Plot, that role was just to give their relationship more "drama". It's really not that surprising that, come season 5 when the writers realized he had nothing interesting to do, they promptly got rid of him.
- Charmed:
- Dan initially began as an aversion - as he was taking care of his teenage sister while living next door to the Halliwells. But when Jenny was Put on a Bus to live with her parents again, Dan's only role was to be part of a Love Triangle between Piper and Leo. Even when he and Piper split up halfway through the season, he spends the rest of his time getting jealous and suspicious of Leo. He moves away at the end of the season.
- Some of Phoebe's boyfriends exist only to give her someone to go on dates with. Leslie was probably the most notable long-term example. Season 8 both lampshades and deconstructs this. Her boyfriend Dex - when he finds out she's a witch - questions whether she actually fell in love with him or just pursued him because she had a premonition of them getting married. It's later revealed that the endless series of failed relationships has left her broken and terrified of love. But she marries a cupid called Coop, who was actually sent by the Elders to be her perfect match.
- Cooper Barrett's Guide to Surviving Life: Josh's wife Leslie and Cooper's neighbor Kelly are both this in the first episode. They only interact with their love interests and don't mention anything that isn't directly related to those love interests. Averted from the second episode on; Leslie and Kelly end up becoming fast friends and we find out more about their lives that don't have anything to do with men.
- Crash & Bernstein: Wyatt's best friend Pesto has only one defining trait: he has a massive crush on Wyatt's older sister Amanda.
- CSI: NY:
- Dr. Peyton Driscoll has hints of this. She had the potential to be a great character, as a medical examiner she was obviously smart, but the writers ruined this by making her very first scene one of her in bed with Mac. Later on, it seemed virtually every scene with her had to be connected to Mac in some way.
- Christine. Some feel she hasn't been fleshed out enough or given enough personality to allow people to relate well to her, and she's a bit too perfect to seem real or that she's written a bit too much like Mac's perfect woman. She's quick to forgive Mac for initially shutting her out somewhat from his aphasia problem and that in several scenes, she's been sitting in her restaurant with the door open after hours, even in dangerous New York, as though just waiting for Mac, even the time when she hadn't been answering her phone and wouldn't have known he would be coming over.
- Downplayed to a certain degree in The Devil Judge. Soo-hyun is a virtuous cop who fully trusts the system but aside from a few personality traits like being honest, kind, and her distrust of Yo-han, her character mostly revolves around Ga-on and she barely have meaningful interactions with the rest of the cast save for Yo-han and Elijah. The fact that she's the least fleshed-out recurring female character with little to no background doesn't help either.
- Doctor Who, thanks to its unfortunate habit of writing out female companions by marrying them off, ended up resorting to this on occasion - great examples are David from "The Dalek Invasion of Earth", who is just there for a romance with Susan, and Troilus from "The Myth Makers", who does not have a single line of dialogue which is not about how much he loves Vicki, how happy he is loving Vicki or about how angry he is when people try to hurt Vicki.
- Danny Pink in the 2014 series qualifies. Although he has a rather well-developed backstory (an Afghanistan war veteran with PTSD and one episode features the Doctor and Clara meeting him as a child when he lived in an orphanage), in terms of his relationship with Clara we don't see very much of what he does outside said relationship other than giving Clara a shoulder to cry on when things get a bit rough with the Doctor and occasionally letting his PTSD get the better of him in front of his students. Primarily, he refuses to go on any adventures with her, which enforces his satellite status as this prevents him from becoming directly involved in the mandate of the series - except for two key exceptions, one of which doesn't end well for Danny.
- Dollhouse: Mellie starts out like this as she is just Paul's neighbor/girlfriend. Later it is revealed that she is a doll and the whole Mellie personality was made just to be Paul's Love Interest. Her real persona, Madeline, actually has much more going on in the story.
- In Downton Abbey, most suitors for the Crawley girls (with the exception of Matthew Crawley and Tom Branson) turn out to be this. Matthew had his own in the form of Lavinia Swire.
- Sam from Fate: The Winx Saga. His only role is being Musa's love interest. We learn virtually nothing about him except for the fact that he is Terra's brother.
- Freaks and Geeks: Cindy Sanders was sort of an unrequited one of these for Sam Weir. Then they actually started dating, and she turned out to be something of a Bitch in Sheep's Clothing.
- On Gilmore Girls, this trope applies to many of the girls' love interests, particularly in the first couple of seasons. This is made super obvious in season 2 when Rory gains a Love Interest who isn't this trope, and it makes it very clear that her boyfriend, who had existed since the pilot, exemplifies it. Jess is introduced first as Luke's nephew, then as Rory's Love Interest, and remains the only one of her love interests to be a character on the show in his own right. Even in the 2016 reboot, in which she and Logan are having an affair, his plotline and Dean's brief cameo are connected only to her, while Jess is in town to help Luke and save his mother from a vegetable cult. The other exception, of course, is Luke himself.
- Glee:
- Blaine Anderson; his primary role being Kurt's boyfriend. He rarely gets any real plots or scenes for himself; even the few that don't directly involve Kurt nevertheless end up being more about Kurt than Blaine. In the third season, he had a few Kurt-free plotlines such as friction with Finn and Sam, and his relationship with his brother. Season four, however, sees him become almost completely independent from Kurt. He has plenty of his own storylines and scenes.
- Grimm: Nick's girlfriend Juliette only seems to exist in his presence. She has no family and her only friends are Monroe and Rosalie who she met through Nick. The one friend who appears from her pre-Nick past only appeared because she needed Nick's help and disappeared never to be heard from again afterwards. Juliette is bilingual but only uses it for Nick's cases. Despite being a licensed veterinarian, she only goes to work when it ties into a case Nick is investigating. When she finally got an independent plot involving amnesia that made her forget Nick she decided she was in love with Captain Renard, Nick's boss! When fans had had enough, she was Put on a Bus until the writers could retool the character and bring her back as "Eve" who is a reprogrammed with Juliette's memories and powers, but stripped of her feelings for Nick.
- In Graceland, Mike's girlfriend Abby is never seen without Mike around.
- H₂O: Just Add Water: Both of Emma's love interests Byron and Ash were this. Both were hunky guys who Emma was attracted to, the main difference between them being that Byron was a Surfer Dude and Ash was an equestrian. Neither one has an appearance in an episode that doesn't involve Emma in some way. Bryon suffers from Chuck Cunningham Syndrome after the first season and isn't mentioned again, and Ash disappears from the show after Emma's actress left the series.
- Mako Mermaids: An H₂O Adventure: Mimmi's boyfriend Chris similarly has no plotline that doesn't involve her, most of which are the same recycled "mermaid girl runs away from a date with her Muggle boyfriend when she gets splashed so he doesn't see her turn into a mermaid" plots that had been going on since the first season of the parent series. The only non-Mimmi aspect Chris has going for him is his friend Karl and his unrequited crush on Weilan.
- Heroes: West, Caitlin, Yaeko, Simone. Most of these examples are so egregious as to be almost Bond girls (boys?) with how little we see of them (if anything) after the season they're introduced in. One of these lucky ladies is even retconned out of existence.
- Horatio Hornblower: Mariette from "The Frogs and the Lobsters" is given very little personality. She is there just so Hornblower can fall in love with her and she reciprocates. Nearly everything she does in the episode is related in one way or another to Horatio. For example, when she's insulted by the chauvinistic Marquis, it's just a set-up to show that Horatio acts like a gentleman even to a French peasant girl.
- Inspector Lynley: Helen Clyde, who exists almost entirely to serve as Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley's love interest. When compared to the other woman in his life — his partner Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers, who is about as three-dimensional as it gets and has her own storylines, quirks, and foibles — Helen appears practically cardboard by comparison. Throw in a very healthy dose of UST and a reciprocal case of The Not-Love Interest between Lynley and Havers, and there's a reason Lynley/Havers is the show's Fan-Preferred Couple by an overwhelming margin. This isn't the case in the novel series from which the show was adapted, where Helen is much more three-dimensional — the show, although quite beloved in its own way, is treated as an Alternate Continuity by fans with good reason — but Lynley/Havers is still the favourite by a considerable distance.
- Interview with the Vampire (2022):
- Levi Freniere is a Flat Character whose role is limited to being Grace's fiancé/husband.
- Antoinette Brown's sole importance in the story is that she's Lestat de Lioncourt's mistress. Outside of that, we don't really know anything about her other than she's a singer.
- Although Jonah Macon gets a little bit of a backstory (unlike Antoinette), his main purpose is to establish that Louis de Pointe du Lac has loved another man before Lestat, as Jonah is Louis' childhood sweetheart, and they still harbour feelings for each other at least two decades later.
- Charlie is a horse carriage driver whom Claudia has a crush on, and not much else can be said about him.
- In the first two seasons, Nicolas de Lenfent is significant only because he was Lestat's First Love. The lone detail we're given about his background is his occupation (violinist).
- Kamen Rider:
- Kamen Rider Fourze: Nadeshiko Misaki. Although she fights as a Rider herself, her primary purpose is to fall in love with Gentaro and to give him the Rocket States upgrade.
- Kamen Rider Blade: Mutsuki's girlfriend Nozomi Yamanaka. We're told that she has other interests and is a tennis player, yet she is only ever seen in the context of her relationship with Mutsuki.
- In Kamen Rider Agito, Ashihara had two Satellite Love Interests who only appeared briefly before being killed off. A third left town for her own safety.
- All of Janelle's appearances on Lab Rats to date have revolved around Leo's crush on her.
- Subverted in one episode of Malcolm in the Middle. Malcolm accuses his then-girlfriend of only dating him for the thrill of sneaking around. She retaliates by explaining why she genuinely likes him, citing reasons that actually make sense (e.g. he's funny, even when he's complaining.) Malcolm then figures out that he actually likes her as well, again citing reasons that she actually demonstrates. Double Subversion two episodes later, when she dumps him for being self-centered.
- Marvel Cinematic Universe:
- Daredevil (2015): A lot of the women in the show outside of Karen tend to fall into this trope. This is pretty prevalent in season 3 where the only women who are more than just love interests to anyone end up being Karen, and Nadeem's boss Tammy Hattley.
- Foggy's girlfriend Marci Stahl has shades of this for the first two seasons since she only ever interacts with Foggy, and the only time she has interactions with someone who isn't Foggy is in her intro scene, where in addition to Foggy, she also gets to interact with Karen; as well as a few lines with Foggy's family in episode 9 of season 3.
- Elektra gets shades of this in season 2, since a lot of her characterization is built around her relationships with the male figures in her life, namely her ex-boyfriend (Matt) and her surrogate father/sensei (Stick), and those are the two people she primarily interacts with. This meant other character traits, like the whole matter of her being the Black Sky, never got the focus they needed.
- Luke Cage: In the second season, a lot of Claire Temple's presence revolves around her role as Luke's love interest. She eventually breaks up with him in the third episode after a heated argument. This is arguably because Rosario Dawson had to leave the show so she could fly out to California to film Jane the Virgin.
- The Defenders (2017):
- Understandably, due to time constraints and the large cast of leads and supporting characters from the solo shows being juggled around, there were going to be out of focus and sidelined. But this is most apparent with Karen Page, as outside of a single interaction with Trish Walker, her interactions are primarily with Matt or with Foggy. The same goes for Malcolm and Trish, who only interact with each other and with Jessica.
- Claire Temple gets hit a bit with this. After having been integral to linking the standalone shows together, The Defenders treats her primarily as Luke's love interest, and never allows her to do her medical work onscreen. The show barely even acknowledges until a conversation between Claire and Foggy that she had past romantic history with Matt for a bit back in Daredevil season 1, and no acknowledgment of the role Jessica played in the season 1 finale of her show in bringing Luke and Claire together.
- Daredevil (2015): A lot of the women in the show outside of Karen tend to fall into this trope. This is pretty prevalent in season 3 where the only women who are more than just love interests to anyone end up being Karen, and Nadeem's boss Tammy Hattley.
- Merlin:
- Deliberately an Invoked Trope between Arthur and Vivian, the latter being a Royal Brat who only exists to flounce around in pretty clothes. The two of them are put under a Love Spell that makes them act like Sickeningly Sweethearts, much to the bafflement of everyone else.
- But notably subverted with two more of Arthur's Romantic False Leads: Princess Elena and Princess Mithian. Both are brought to Camelot (at different times) to join in an Arranged Marriage to Arthur; but instead of treating them as mere impediments to his happiness with Guinevere, both are likable and developed characters. Elena's importance to the narrative has less to do with her relationship to Arthur as it does her role as an Unwitting Pawn in The Fair Folks' attempt to take over Camelot, and though Mithian's function was simply as a Love Interest for Arthur, she was also a three-dimensional character who ended up being popular enough to return to the show in the next season.
- Played straight with Freya, Merlin's Lost Lenore. She gets one scene in which she's permitted to share details of her past (and even that is more of a Mythology Gag that establishes her affinity for lakes), the rest of the time she only exists so that Merlin can be her Caretaker, enjoy openly using his magic in front of her, and experience manpain when she dies. It's especially glaring when he takes her to a lakeside in order to Let Her Die Happy and she mutters, "You remembered..." Well, of course, he remembered - her love of lakes is the only personal detail she ever shares with him!
- Once Upon a Time (2011):
- Robin Hood is introduced solely as a potential Second Love for Regina. For all his interesting backstory, all his plots and storylines revolve around his relationship with Regina.
- Hook is a similar offender. Around midway through Season 4, he becomes defined almost entirely through his relationship with Emma.
- Belle goes through the opposite. She began as this for Rumple, and only existed to be a Morality Pet preventing him from being completely evil. But around Season 4, she started having more storylines of her own and far more agency in them.
- The love interests of Finch and Reese from before the start of Person of Interest, Grace Hendricks and Jessica Arndt, fall into this. With Jessica, this is because she actually died before the start of the series, so her only relevance is how her failed relationship with John and eventual death impacted him. Grace is still around, but even then, most of her appearances are flashbacks to when she and Harold were dating, and the majority of her present-day scenes center around people using her to get to Harold.
- Grace is a relatively developed example of this, however. While she still primarily exists to further Harold's story, she does have her own established personality and interests (sweet, intelligent, awkward, and quiet, loves art and works as an illustrator), and she even has a bit of backstory (she had an emotionally abusive father and as a result has trust issues).
- Robin Hood (BBC): Kate. There was an early attempt to characterize her as someone who would question Robin's authority and tactics, but three episodes in and she wasn't doing anything but wandering into trouble so that Robin could rescue her, and serving no other purpose but to be his rebound girl. Or more accurately, the rebound of his rebound girl. Her presence also turned Allan and Much into Satellite Love Interests to her, since they were given no significant screen time in the third season that went beyond their Love Triangle with her.
- Clara from Sanctuary is the last descendant of the original Invisible Man, so the Sanctuary team has to recruit her to complete a mission. She and Will hook up pretty quickly despite the fact that they have absolutely nothing in common and she really has no purpose in the show other than Fanservice (she has to be naked to turn invisible). Despite the fact that their relationship lasts all of four episodes, Will later describes it as one of only two "serious" relationships he's ever had.
- Scrubs: Elliot's boyfriend Jake, who existed only for Elliot to pine over him and be her perfect match for a few episodes. In the transition from Season 4 to 5, he abruptly disappears.
- The Secret World of Alex Mack: Scott, Alex's first crush. He doesn't really have any personality beyond sending mixed signals to Alex, dating the Alpha Bitch, and being a Big Man on Campus. In fact, when Alex gets closer to him, she realizes that his actual personality isn't a very nice one, and she gets over her crush.
- Once per Episode in Seinfeld, though sometimes subverted as many of the dates are complete and utter weirdos.
- Silent Witness: Nikki and Harry both had a number of these, ostensibly to ramp up the Ship Tease between them when all of these relationships prove to be short-lived. Nikki continues to have them every so often after Harry leaves and Jack Hodgson arrives.
- Supernatural:
- Jessica Moore. Jessica's only scenes are about supporting or feeling concerned for Sam. Then she is Stuffed into the Fridge to motivate him to go back to hunting. After that, all references to Jess are about how much she and Sam loved each other and how much he misses her. The only platonic characterization she's given is knowing how to bake cookies, a stance that roses were lame, and her gravestone which indicates her parents were still alive when she died. Even her death is about Sam. A season 5 Retcon establishes that their friend Brody was possessed by a demon who manipulated the two of them together purely to kill Jessica off to make Sam start hunting again.
- An interesting subversion with Jo Harvelle. She was initially introduced as an obvious love interest for Dean, complete with an "adorably" feisty demeanor and a tragic backstory that mirrored the Winchesters'. However, per Word of God, there was heavy backlash from the fanbase that did not want Dean paired up for fear of interfering with the Winchesters' very popular sibling dynamic. In Jo's final appearance that season, her feelings for Dean were clarified to be unrequited. She returned in the fifth season to a much warmer reception, as she Took a Level in Badass and had outgrown her one-time crush on Dean. When he tried to hop into bed with her the night before a dangerous mission, she dismisses him, saying she has more self-respect than that.
- Deconstructed Trope in "Wishful Thinking". A guy uses a magic coin he inherited to create a wishing well, so he can make the girl who he's been in love with since high school, but is oblivious to him, love him more than anything else. At first he's happy with the new situation, but eventually gets disheartened from the fact that she literally has no personality other than pleasing and loving him, even killing others for him to maintain their "love".
- Super Sentai: Has had many instances of this trope in the course of its 38 series history, most of them being one-shot interests to the resident playboy on the team.
- The Thundermans: Link is the son of Phoebe's dad's arch-nemesis, which would have made a decent superhero genre Romeo and Juliet situation, if the writers hadn't rushed the two of them into a relationship within two minutes of Link's debut. He has absolutely no function in the show other than being the first of Phoebe's boyfriends who she doesn't have to hide her superpowers around. He has only appeared in episodes that are about him and his relationship with Phoebe; otherwise, his name is never even mentioned.
- Ugly Betty: Austin has no last name and is more of a plot device to get Justin to realize his sexuality than an actual character.
- Victorious: Beck, though a slight aversion as he gets more characterization in season one than most do of this trope, but whenever he figures prominently in a plot, it's always either relationship drama with Jade or ship tease with Tori and other cast members, and he's almost always seen through Tori's, Jade's or even Robbie's(!) point of view.
- Wednesday: Ajax doesn't have much character beyond just being the object of Enid's affection. He is almost always seen from her eyes, and the only other thing we learn about him is that he is a nice guy. His only real impact on the plot is also related to their romance, as his accidentally standing Enid up indirectly leads to the dance going wrong.
- Women's Murder Club: Due to being introduced late in the season, we learn nothing about Pete beyond his mutual interest in Lindsay, with the only real drama coming from him being in town for such a short time.
Music
- Discussed as a trope endemic to Country Music's "bro-country" era in Maddie & Tae's "Girl in a Country Song," which is a Deconstructive Parody that points out the girls in these songs aren't actually people, but an amalgamation of hackneyed tropes whose only function is to be the singer's Love Interest.
Mythology and Religion
- There is very little to know about Eurydice, Orpheus's wife that died and he went to the Underworld to rescue.
Newspaper Comics
- Denise in FoxTrot doesn't have much to do in the story aside from being Peter's girlfriend. She doesn't get much personality, aside from being more sensible than Peter (which isn't hard to do) and acting as the voice of reason to him.
- Luann:
- Aaron Hill, Luann's longtime crush object. Very pretty... and that's it. Even attempts at giving him depth (the revelation of his relationship with legally-adult Dianne) only served to underline what little personality he had.
- There was an arc where Luann was spending a lot of time with Gunther, only for the end of the arc to reveal that it had been Aaron in disguise the whole time, trying to teach her a lesson about judging on appearances vs. actual merits. It's telling that, aside from disguise time, the most interaction the two had was Aaron berating Luann for missing the point when she asked to try on the Gunther mask.
- Aaron ended up getting more depth with later stories, though that ended up being negated when he was Put on a Bus. But he has nothing on the blandness of Quill, who is handsome and... Australian. And that's about it.
- And when Quill finally gained some personality in the form of a love of theater, Luann ended up dumping him for not paying enough attention to her.
- Both of Bernice’s major love interests, Zane and Piro. Made evident by the fact that each of them vanished from the strip altogether the second Bernice was done with them, as they had no personality or function other than serving as her object of obsession.
- Kip is one for Stef. He's attractive, Asian, plays football, gets lusted after by Tiffany, is kind of a jerk (never apologizing to Tiffany for him and Stef borrowing her towel without her permission and using it for post-sex cleanup, making mean comments with Tiffany about Dez) and... that's it.
- A prime example is The Little Red-Haired Girl from the Peanuts comics. We hardly know a thing about her, she didn't appear onstage in the strip (her first on-screen appearance was in an animated TV special in 1977) or even her name (the specials called her "Heather"). Of course, the whole point of this romance is about Charlie Brown's one-sided affections and inner emotional turmoil for her, rather than actual interaction. Which actually makes her essentially the opposite of this trope: her life emphatically does not revolve around Charlie Brown, and she presumably has her own interests; we just don't know anything about them.
Theater
- Justified in Hamilton where the three main female characters—Hamilton's wife Eliza, his sister-in-law Angelica, and his mistress Maria—are all defined by their relationship with him and/or other men, due to women being unable to take an active role in American politics in the 1700s. Subverted at the end though, where Eliza recounts her career as founder and headmistress of an orphanage, an endeavor she undertook on her own accord (though still inspired by Hamilton's past as an orphan).
- In How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, Rosemary's arc and featured songs are all about how she wants to impress Finch so he will marry her and she can become the idealized '50s Housewife.
- In Neil Simon's play Jake's Women, the characters of Maggie and Julie are really only explored through the lens of their romantic relationship with Jake.
- Papagena in The Magic Flute is one of the most blatant examples ever - having literally the same personality as Papageno but as a woman.
- In Mamma Mia!:
- Sky, Sophie's fiance. He works for Sophie's mother's business setting up a website; despite being the groom, his family's contributions and attendance of the wedding is never mentioned, not even when Sophie decides to cancel the wedding on the day; and his major song is about how possessive he is of Sophie.
- Pepper also qualifies; though he's Sky's groomsman and helps out a bit with the wedding preparations, his main role in the show is to flirt with Tanya.
- Lia in Cirque du Soleil's Zarkana. The whole show is about her sweetheart, Zark, going on The Quest to find her after, sometime prior to the beginning of the show, they were separated for reasons unknown to the audience. With this in mind, she only appears in the final scene.
Video Games
- Advance Wars: Days of Ruin: Isabella/Catleia derives her entire character around being an amnesiac Mysterious Waif who is (going to be) the girlfriend of main character Will/Ed. Consequently, despite being one of the best commanders in the game, she is never used in any Campaign mission.
- Aquaria: Li due to the fact that we only ever hear Naija talk, and in the past tense. Naija to Li, as well. When she was on her own, her desire just to figure out what the hell happened to everyone made for a pretty compelling motivation; when she meets Li, the story utterly derails as she loses all interest in solving the mystery or exploring; she's so happy that she's not completely alone anymore that as long as she doesn't have to be alone ever again, the game could end right there for all she cares. She literally only continues along to find the answers and beat the final boss because there's a mouse cursor telling her where to go and what to shoot.
- CONV/RGENCE: A League of Legends Story: Red serves as a Damsel in Distress for Ekko to rescue in the penultimate chapter. Apart from that and dating Jerkass Inx leader Chadd, she has no other characterization.
- Devil May Cry: Kyrie is barely given any characterization at all besides the usual "kind and caring" shtick and for being Nero's romantic partner and emotional support. She spends a significant portion of Devil May Cry 4 being a Damsel in Distress for Nero to rescue, and she is also completely offscreen for the entirety of Devil May Cry 5. For what it's worth, she is one of the few people who tells Nero that she likes him the way he is. Her role in the series is inherently tied to Nero, and if he didn't appear in a game, it's unlikely that she would. Beyond these, the only other thing established about her is that she runs an orphanage on Fortuna after the events of DMC4.
- Final Fantasy IV: Rosa Joanna Farrell is often criticized for her only noticeable character trait being her dedication to Cecil. Ultimately subverted in that she does have reasons to oppose Baron that are unrelated to Cecil. The DS version, in particular, allows the player to view her thoughts on the game's events; they have remarkably little to do with Cecil.
- Final Fantasy IX has Sir Fratley for Freya. He's her motivation for leaving Burmecia and travelling the world, and he shows up with amnesia to add even more trauma for her. While Freya helps save the world, Fratley is there entirely as her love interest. He disappears after the second disk, only to reappear in the end. Perhaps in acknowledgment of the trope, Freya's inner monologue expresses doubts over whether they can pick up where they left off (as he still does not remember her).
- Final Fantasy XV had one of the main criticisms concerning Lunafreya Nox Fleuret outside of the controversy concerning certain production decisions is that Luna's character literally revolves around Noctis and that she has little agency or character outside of helping him achieve his destiny. While this isn't so bad in itself, the problem most have is that she and Noctis have little chemistry and share almost no scenes together when they are both adults when both are alive, so the audience doesn't get a good read on what the two would actually be like as a couple.
- Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water: Rui has little personality to her character, with her main aspects being Ren's assistant and having a crush on him. Even her journal revolves mostly around talking about Ren, complaining about his lax attitude when it comes to keeping things tidy, and further hinting that she's falling more and more in love with him. And her main purpose as a character accompanying Ren is to keep falling under the influence of spirits and needing to be rescued.
- In the Fire Emblem series:
- Ultimately averted by Ninian from Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade. She can be one of Eliwood's brides and is the only one who develops feelings for him whether her love's requited or not, but she also has Hidden Depths regarding her her loneliness, her relationship with her little brother Nils, the isolation she feels due to her heritage as a half-Dragon woman and her Survivor's Guilt regarding the death of Eliwood's dad while trying to protect her and Nils. But since she's a Shrinking Violet and White Magician Girl, the fans of Eliwood's other brides Fiora and Lyndis often accuse her of fitting in here to make the other girls look better.
- Fire Emblem: Awakening:
- All of the playable characters can marry each other at any time in the game, while The Hero Chrom must marry at the end of Chapter 11. He can get good development with any of his five love interests (including a Female Avatar), and though pairing with Olivia is more or less forced if you chose to do it (she joins the same chapter Chrom has to marry), he can support with her after the fact, and many fans consider said supports to be pretty cute on their own. And there's a rather popular Alternative Character Interpretation about Olivia and Chrom's deal being a Love at First Sight that later developed into true affection. However, if all of Chrom's choices are married off, killed off, or have no affection points with him before then, he marries a generic village girl who only appears in one scene and isn't heard of after that.
- Out of Chrom's love interests, Sumia is the one who's more frequently accused of being this to him, since she has no prevalence in the story beyond being his love interest, yet she is the only one who receives extra scenes that serve no purpose other than hinting at her to be the Implied Love Interest. Even though choosing Chrom's wife is optional, the game's mechanics and her extra scenes (one even titled "lovebirds") do push you to choose Sumia, and she's the only one who receives a cutscene for the proposal, not to mention she has an extremely shallow pool of potential suitors to choose from (Chrom, Frederick, Gaius, Henry, and the Male Avatar). However, she vanishes from the narrative after Lucina joins, instead just becoming just like any of the other units.
- In Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia:
- Faye is this to the point of Deconstructed Character Archetype. Her entire personality and characterization revolve completely around her one-sided crush on Alm; her support with Silque (the only character she can have support conversations with besides Alm himself) actually sheds light on this by showing she has trouble relating to other non-Alm people and that her obsession with him is considered strange even by her parents. In an interesting subversion, she also cannot end up with Alm under any circumstances since he and Celica are the game's primary Official Couple.
- Rinea, who has absolutely no impact on the story's plot except to be Berkut's Morality Pet - she notably has no dialogue with other characters and is ultimately sacrificed by a completely broken Berkut in order for him to gain power.
- Friday Night Funkin': Exaggerated with Boyfriend and Girlfriend. They're identified solely by their relationship to each other, and not much is known about them aside from their desire to stay together against Girlfriend's Knight Templar Parents' demands. What little is known of Boyfriend's life before meeting Girlfriend involved being someone else's boyfriend — he was an ex of Pico's — and served to further characterize Pico's actions towards him throughout the game. Similarly, Girlfriend is never seen without Boyfriend, and much of her story is tangential to what happens to him.
- In Grand Theft Auto V, the film-within-a-game Meltdown parodies these sorts of characters with Miranda, who only shows up in two scenes (one of which is the ending) and has about as many lines of dialogue. The film even refers to her as "a hot, brainless woman to act as a plot device." All of this is part of the film's (and the game's) vicious parody of summer blockbusters and modern Hollywood filmmaking.
- Last Scenario has Valentin, Matilda's husband, who's only relevant in two scenes in the entire game, has very little chemistry with his wife, and in fact very little personality at all beyond just being the wimpy Non-Action Guy to Matilda's tough, intimidating Action Girl. He seems to exist solely to prematurely sink any ships revolving around Matilda or Thorve/Drakovic (she even warns Drakovic that she's a married woman at one point.)
- Senbei of the Lonely Wolf Treat series has very little presence as a character, appearing only in one scene and saying a total of six words of dialogue. The fact that Juju has feelings for him is nevertheless a major plot point in the sixth chapter, since Juju's desire to be with her crush causes her to abandon her initial goal of helping Mochi with her investigation. Mochi and Juju were not on good terms to begin with, so this moment ends up utterly destroying whatever faith Mochi still had for her cousin.
- Diana Allers from Mass Effect 3 is the most shallow love interest in the series by far, a title formerly held by Kelly Chambers. She initially joins the Normandy crew to help drum up support for the war effort, but as she interviews Shepard, she makes increasingly flirty gestures at him/her; if the player has Shep reciprocate, it's treated as an incredibly brief fling and never referenced again. You're not even admonished or locked out of pursuing a legitimate romance for giving Diana an exclusive. Particularly telling is that she is the only love interest who will even attempt to hit on Shepard if a true romance has already been locked in.
- Akane Kurashiki of Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors is The Hero Junpei's Childhood Friend Romance, flirts with him while they're in a dangerous situation, and her personality is largely built around that. Sure, she has some Cloudcuckoolander Agent Mulder tendencies, but by and large Akane is a textbook flat Love Interest...right up until the True Ending, where we learn that she is neither of those things.
- Sunny Funny from PaRappa the Rapper. Her role in both games revolves around her being PaRappa's crush.
- Persona 2: Innocent Sin initially presents the Lisa as one to Tatsuya. Her main features are that her parents are American Japanophiles (making her a Phenotype Stereotype), she's interested in Chinese, and she really really wants Tatsuya to date her. Even when showing off her knowledge of Chinese, it's to hit on Tatsuya. Then the backstory comes in and the trope becomes massively deconstructed. By the time you have the option of choosing her as a genuine love interest, she has gained a lot of depth and thoroughly subverted the trope.
- Persona 3 has Aigis, whose development leads her to become a Satellite Love Interest as part of her Become a Real Boy plot. Her role in FES expands on this, but her relationship with the protagonist is still the core of her character. Justified: She is a Shadow-destroying robot. The protagonist fights shadows and has the worst one sealed inside him so naturally, she joins him.
- Carmen in Punch-Out!!, the only character with both a name and physical appearance who cannot be fought, has no known character traits beyond being the love of Don Flamenco's life.
- In Puyo Puyo, Oniko's only major characterization is that she is Onion Pixie's love interest, and impressing Oniko is his sole motivation for trying to prove his strength.
- Mist, Mana, and Shara are considered the Canon love interest in their respectable Rune Factory games. Unsurprisingly, they also tend to be the ones least likely picked by players for marriage due to the much more interesting choices the game gives for other bachelorettes. Rune Factory 4 manages to subvert this by throwing away the idea of a canon love interest altogether. And before that, Rune Factory Frontier, due to the expanded characterization for the returning characters, also rescued Mist from this trope as she became known more for being a Cloudcuckoolander.
- Beth in Shin Megami Tensei II was intended as such for the hero, but she also proves useful in battle, thus giving her a useful purpose. Is totally subverted because she also does a Heroic Sacrifice and gives you her power in death, as, even though you find out she was created to serve you, her love for you was quite real.
- Maria from Silent Hill 2, outside of the prequel bonus scenario "Born from a Wish" (set before she meet him), displays little personality beyond being an attractive woman who wants James to love her. Tragically justified when it's revealed she was literally made that way by Silent Hill itself. She's a manifestation of James' desire for a healthier version of his wife Mary, him having developed intense sexual frustration after her illness and hospitalization. She's implied to be partially aware of this fact, but unable to do anything about it. In one ending James does fall for her, but this is a very bad thing, as it means he's refused to accept his faults, and this ending implies she's contracted the same illness Mary did and James will respond the same way.
- Zig-zagged with Amy from Sonic the Hedgehog. She was initially designed almost solely as a girl with a crush on Sonic. Later games have attempted to give Amy a more nuanced personality and chemistry with other characters, but how successful they are at this varies due to the series' rather inconsistent writing; her other character traits are sometimes downplayed to the point of being nearly subliminal, and she's been everything from a sweet, empathetic, adventurous friend of Sonic who may or may not have a Hair-Trigger Temper, is readily accepted by her fellow protagonists, and happens to have a small crush on Sonic, to a violent, obsessive fangirl with stalker-like tendencies who the rest of the cast - including her supposed "friends" - are scared of and would rather avoid.
- Decus in Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World is pretty much motivated only by his love for Alice. Of course, she did save his life, but it does come off as rather extreme nonetheless. Similarly, Aqua is almost entirely defined by being an infatuated fangirl of the Big Bad Richter, though she has understandable motives for her loyalty since she watched her nominal master Ratatosk murder his best friend and declare his intent to wipe out humanity, while Richter was trying to stop him from doing so.
- Aggra from World of Warcraft, who seems to have been invented solely for the purpose of getting Thrall laid and ensuring that he procreates. Or, perhaps more maliciously, sinking the Thrall x Jaina ship.
Webcomics
- Molly in Achewood semi-averts this at first, with her introduction giving her plenty of reasons to find interest in Roast Beef. However, this development (such as her interest in computer programming) was more or less dropped when she moved in with him. She then pretty much played this trope to a tee, getting defined only by her relationship with Roast Beef to the point where she almost never even interacted with the other characters. As of recently, though, she's been getting more development.
- Alex in Candi. He seems to be getting more static and more dense with every appearance. Not that he was ever much more than "Candi's boyfriend" before.
- Dorothy from Dumbing of Age dumps Danny due to fears that his life is increasingly revolving around her, turning him into one of these.
- Paz from Gunnerkrigg Court. While her relationship with Kat is cute, we don't learn anything much about her other than that she used to have a crush on a boy before developing feelings for Kat, she's generally cheerful, and she can talk to animals. After her hook-up with Kat, she's only had one big, plot-relevant scene of talking down a monster that wasn't some variation of "she's happy to be with Kat". Whenever the main characters have to go on some adventure or quest, Paz is conspicuously absent from it and we never even get to see her reactions to Kat and her other schoolmates doing potentially dangerous things or Kat telling her about them. Her main role in the plot so far has been to just occasionally appear to remind us that Kat has a cute girlfriend. Later on Paz realizes this and decides she is going to break up with Kat after she hooks a brain interface into her computer system. Paz states that their lives are just to different and she will move back with her family when she is finished.
- Layla the butterfly from The Legend of Spyro: Zonoya's Revenge does not affect the plot at all except to be Sparx's girlfriend.
- Ping of MegaTokyo was programmed to start like this, and then slowly become an amalgamation of the favored love interests of her end user. But since no one has been "playing" with her (except maybe Miho), she's forced to grow naturally. It's actually a little beautiful when you think about it.
- Regardless of whether or not it was intentional, Yosue Makoto from Red String ended up like this by the end of the comic's run. From his first appearance and throughout the comic, all he has ever wanted was Miharu, even while she was engaged to Kazuo (and while he was engaged to Miharu's cousin Karen.) He never gives Miharu (or the audience) a reason why he's in love with her, he just is. The most insight we've gotten into his single-minded desire to completely possess Miharu is that he fell in love with her image in a photograph. Aside from his obsession with her, we don't know much else about him aside from a few throwaway traits. All of which completely vanish as in the final ten pages of the comic, he literally makes a phone call to his parents to arrange things so he can safely quit his job, explicitly so he can date Miharu full-time, and then travel the world with her doing...apparently nothing but eating, given his description of their future activities as "I want to taste food...together."
- Pretty much every female character in Sonichu, but the most obvious is Rosechu, who mostly cooks, cleans, and has sex with her titular boyfriend (later husband)... despite issue 8 showing off The Incredible Lioness, who would definitely aid in some later issues, but is never brought up again, and pretty much only exists to show that Sonichu is STRAIGHT. Ivy O'Neil in the comics can be considered this too. She's told by God and Jesus that her true love is to be Chris himself once he escapes from the mirror, and she accepts this without question or protest. She's pretty much not characterized at all beyond that.
- Rosey in Weenie Licked, to Paul. Justified as she is created by Paul specifically to be his girlfriend and he doesn't think of any other traits for her until after the fact. She seems to be developing away from this.
Web Originals
- Darwin's Soldiers has Aydin Marcos. His only defining personality trait is the fact that he loves Aimee.
- The Gumdrops has two male examples: Pete and Robbie are both there as boyfriends of Lindsay and Laura respectively. While they have defined characteristics, they don't appear in episodes that don't feature their respective girlfriends.
- Happy Tree Friends: Downplayed with Giggles. While she does have characterization, we know enough about Cuddles, Toothy and Lumpy to build a character while all we know about Giggles is that she's either Cuddles', Russell or Flippy's love interest. The TV series attempts to flesh her out more by giving her a Granola Girl personality but after that episode, she returns to her actual role in the show: Be either Cuddles, Russell, or Flippy's love interest.
- Millie of Helluva Boss has most of her character centered around her husband Moxxie. Most of her screentime and interactions are often dedicated to Moxxie or indirectly about him. One of the most jarring examples is "The Harvest Moon Festival", where despite I.M.P. going to the ranch that Millie's family owns and being introduced to her family, the episode primarily focuses on Moxxie trying to gain approval from his in-laws, leading to him and Blitzo fighting off an assassin hired to kill Stolas. Another example is "Exes And Oohs", where we meet Chaz; a shark demon that Millie and Moxxie both used to date at separate times, but all of the focus is laid on Moxxie's former relationship with him. Not helped is that, despite being a main character, Millie is the only one so far not to have A Day in the Limelight during the first season. This leads to her being the least fleshed out of the main cast (even less than more minor characters such as Octavia, who has had two episodes worth of screentime). In the next episode, even Blitzo, who otherwise loves to intrude on their marriage, complains that Millie's always so close to Moxxie all the time.
- LPS: Popular: Sage and Tom, the only male members of the main cast, contribute little to the plot on their own. Sage only exists to be in a Love Triangle between Brooke and Savvy, and Tom is merely a boyfriend for Savvy to shake up the status quo.
- In Noob, Arthéon and Kary bonded over both being The Roleplayer, but Kary's role in the story seems to limit itself to dating Arthéon long enough for him to get deeply attached to her, then choosing the discovery of new game content over their in-game wedding that Arthéon viewed as the first step towards a real-life one. This causes the Rage Breaking Point that ends up pushing Arthéon's storyline in a new direction and Kary is out of the picture after this.
- Sugoi Quest For Kokoro: Exaggerated with Karkat-kun. Literally every appearance he makes is based around Sakura-chan's obsessive crush on him. He only has two lines in the whole show, one of which is seconds before his death!
Western Animation
- In Adventure Time, Betty Grof's entire role in the plot is to be Simon Petrikov's former love interest. The only reason she even appears in the present time of Ooo is to find a cure for her insane fiancé. This gets deconstructed in one episode, where she is shown all of her own ambitions that she simply gave up the day she met Simon, in an effort to try and get her to move on with her life. She ignores this in favor of doubling her efforts instead.
- In All Grown Up!, Rachel (Tommy's girlfriend) is this to a T. Not only doesn't she receive any character development, but she has no close connections with any of the Rats, nor is she seen with anyone else aside from Tommy. Compared to more popular fan pairings such as Tommy/Kimi and Tommy/Lil, Rachel generally contributes nothing to the series. In addition, their romance has had its share of complications. In the end, because of her family moving away, she generally breaks up with Tommy. But to make matters worse, when Rachel sees Tommy with another girl, she tells him that she never wants to see him again.
- The Amazing World of Gumball: Alan, a side character known for being The Incorruptible, gets a couple of episodes focused on him. His girlfriend, Carmen, is rarely seen on her own and it took until season 5 for her to get any distinct roles that didn't involve her being around Alan. Said episode, "The Best", highlighted her as someone who can come off as a bit condescending, but often does have legitimate points to make.
- Amphibia: Almost every episode featuring Ivy Sundew centers around Sprig's crush on her. It's not until the latter half of season two that she finally gets a focus episode, "Ivy on the Run", that does not revolve around her and Sprig's relationship.
- Subverted and deconstructed in the Archie's Weird Mysteries episode "Something is Haunting Riverdale High". Moose's girlfriend Midge gets angry at Archie and Jughead at one point for treating her as if her only role is to be Moose's girlfriend. Later, as she and Archie wind up getting affected by Dilton's latest invention, Archie ends up learning about Midge's goals and dreams and realizes that he doesn't actually know her that well since he hangs out with the same group of friends most of the time. It's part of the episode's Aesop that there's almost always more to people once you get to know them.
- Batman Beyond has Dana Tan. The Masquerade Will Kill Your Dating Life, and for Terry, that means Dana Tan is the girl he's always missing dates with. She ends up being little more, which ends up making her none too likable as The Obstructive Love Interest, which is sad - her first season appearances give her plenty of qualities that could have been expanded upon. But, aside from one focus episode where she got to be a fairly proactive Damsel in Distress, she was never given enough attention to develop and almost disappeared in the third season.
- Julie from Ben 10: Alien Force. Initially appeared out of the blue (not helped by the fact many fans felt she was introduced just to get rid of the Incest Subtext between Ben and Gwen.). Unlike other examples, she gets better over time.
- Queen Rapsheeba, Snap's love interest in ChalkZone. Besides her only shown personality traits being that she's nice, she's ChalkZone's local celebrity, and that Snap has a crush on her, she also rarely ever appears without Snap in the same scene.
- Panini from Chowder, her only real character trait is that she has a crush on Chowder. Her whole character revolves around Chowder to the point that not much is known about her personality (besides having a crush on the main character).
- Daria:
- One reason why Tom is The Scrappy (aside from the Love Triangle drama) is that he has little characterization outside of being Daria and Jane's Spear Counterpart; throughout the series, the number of scenes where he's not with them (or talking with them on the phone) could probably be counted on one hand. Aspects of his character that make him unique (his Old Money background or private prep school) don't really get explored outside of some providing light class drama with Daria. We meet his family and he apparently has other friends, but these relationships are only hinted at. Also, since he was created specifically to push along Daria's Character Development (as per Word of God), their relationship winds up formulaic: she gets upset for a trivial reason, they fight, Daria apologizes and Tom is instantly forgiving when she explains her feelings. Tom is always right because his whole purpose is to correct Daria's flaws (at least until the Grand Finale when she's the one to realize that their relationship won't work out).
- Mack is another example, though he at least gets characterization as Kevin's Satellite Best Friend (semi-willingly) as well as being Jodie's often put-upon boyfriend.
- In DuckTales (1987), Gandra Dee would never get much characterization other than being Fenton Crackshell's love interest and girlfriend (except for how she could be really rude and ungrateful to Fenton). She only appeared in six episodes though, but she would seldom be the main focus of the plot even within that limited screen time.
- In The Fairly OddParents!, Trixie Tang and in the opposite way, Tootie. Neither have much personality outside of either being liked by or having a crush on Timmy, barring some depressing backstory for Tootie, and some Hidden Depths revealed in one episode for Trixie.
- Loretta Brown from Family Guy didn't have much of an identity outside of being Cleveland Brown's wife. Her only real time in the spotlight was in "The Cleveland-Loretta Quagmire", in which she cheated on her husband and he divorced her. The writers actually realized how boring she was, as her appearances were scarce ever since that episode, and in the spin-off series The Cleveland Show, she gets Killed Off for Real.
- Angela from Fish Hooks really has no character outside of being Oscar's girlfriend and having a lot in common with him.
- One-Shot Character Marianne from the Futurama episode "Stench and Stenchability" has very little characterization beyond loving Zoidberg and being unable to smell. She primarily exists to make him happy.
- Grojband: Nick Mallory has little role in the series beyond being the object of Trina's unrequited affections, and is characterized as being an idealized-to-exaggerated-levels version of a stereotypical hunky high school Chick Magnet. While he does interact with the eponymous band and other characters several times, it still usually has something to do with Trina's crush on him.
- Harley Quinn (2019):
- Defied. Harley is fed up with being written off as "the Joker's girlfriend" and is aiming to become a competent, terrifying villainess in her own right.
- Kite Man on the other hand has his role and participation in all episodes he appears in focused on his romantic relationship with Ivy. Whenever he helps Harley's crew, it's to do Ivy a favor.
- Hey Arnold!:
- Deconstructed. Throughout the first season Arnold had a crush on an older girl named Ruth MacDougal, but she was rarely developed outside of him pining for her and Helga being jealous of her. The Valentine's Day episode is the first time that Arnold really talks to her, realizes that she's kind of a Brainless Beauty, and subsequently loses interest.
- Lila, who takes Ruth's place as Arnold's crush, could be considered this as well. She is ever so much more developed than Ruth, and develops a few relationships beyond the Love Triangle, but she's still treated this way by the story, getting Demoted to Extra once Arnold gets over her and the inevitable Arnold/Helga Relationship Upgrade appears on the horizon.
- Vaggie of Hazbin Hotel is primarily defined by her relationship with Charlie. She has no goals of her own (as both of them are trying to get Charlie's rehabilitation hotel to get off the ground), and she is rude, hostile, and aggressive towards anyone who isn't Charlie. One of the things we do learn about her is that she used to be an angel who worked for the exorcists, and lost her job (and one of her eyes) after not killing a child demon.
- In Jimmy Two-Shoes, Jez and Saffi exist mainly to be girlfriends of Lucius and Beezy, respectively, and are ignored when these connections aren't important. This is notable in one episode involving Beezy being put in an Arranged Marriage, when he points out he has Saffi, she's wheeled out to say "I don't mind," then proceeds to disappear other than a cameo near the end.
- KaBlam!:
- One-shot girly girl Dawn who showed up in the episode "A Nut in Every Bite!". As soon as he saw her Henry fell in love with her. However, she was rather boring personality-wise, especially compared to the snarky tomboyish June, and other than finding him hilarious, she didn't return his affections. He forgets about his crush on her at the end once he realizes that she wasn't worth it.
- As cute as a couple they were, Larry's girlfriend Stacey from the Life With Loopy short "Larry's Girl" was one of these, with her only shown traits being that she fell in love with Larry and sharing interests with him. This was inevitable, though; she only appeared in the last minute of the short (which normally runs for four minutes), had only one line of dialogue, and never appeared again for the rest of the series.
- Kaeloo: Eugly the rabbit is Quack Quack's girlfriend... and that's pretty much all we know about her.
- Parodied in Kim Possible, where Senor Senor Junior kidnapped a computer expert so he can find the perfect girl that matched his shallow requirements. Turns out it's Bonnie.
- Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts: it’s very clear that Troy was introduced to be Benson’s love interest.
- Lilo & Stitch: The Series:
- Angel (Experiment 624), an experiment who is designed to make experiments made before her evil with a siren song, was primarily introduced to give Stitch a love interest. She even looks a lot like a pink, female version of him. After she broke out, however, the subsequent Stitch! anime wore down the "satellite" part and gave her a more distinct personality.
- Lilo has a crush on a local skateboarding boy named Keoni Jameson, who is the son of her older sister Nani's employer. According to executive producer Jess Winfield, Keoni was also designed to be an Audience Surrogate, as he's a generally Nice Guy who accepts Lilo for who she is, though he still doesn't have that much of a personality.
- Littlest Pet Shop (2012) has Josh Sharpe, whose only known traits are limited to, he's nice and is in a band. The show had several crushes for the pets who only appeared in one single episode (Delilah was in a two-parter) and they were all developed much deeper. Except for the polecat Captain Cuddles who also didn't have very much characterization aside from being charming. And Philippe Boudreaux who was a Dog Mime, nothing more.
- The Loud House:
- Up until his transition into The Casagrandes, Bobby Santiago didn't get much characterization other than being Lori's boyfriend. Even his little sister Ronnie Anne, who appeared less often than he, was a much more three-dimensional character.
- With the exception of Luna's girlfriend, Sam, all of the Loud kids' crushes in "L is for Love". Outside of being their DistaffCounterparts (the only exception being Chaz), they have barely any personality traits outside of being the Loud kids' Love Interests.
- Luan's boyfriend, Benny, is a Nice Guy who has a passion for theatre, is emotionally sensitive and carries around a marionette doll that he named Mrs. Appleblossom... And that's about all we know about him. Downplayed in later episodes though which give him more characterization.
- Miraculous Ladybug has one for each of the main characters outside their Two-Person Love Square
- Adrien has Kagami Tsurugi. They have a lot in common. They’re both being raised by cold and distant single parents in wealthy households, both are skilled fencers, and both have a lot of expectations from their families. Kagami is first written as an Ice Queen who seems to be willing to trample on Marinette’s chances with Adrien knowing of her affections. But later down the road, she’s shown to be lonely and not very capable of being friendly thanks to her mother’s strict and emotionless rules, and hinted to be more than Adrien’s love interest.
- Luka Couffaine, as 95% of his screentime revolves entirely around his blossoming romance with Marinette. His only characterization other than that is pretty much just being a Nice Guy who plays guitar and happens to be Juleka's brother, though he interacts with her very little. He also seems to have no character flaws whatsoever, and is supportive of Marinette’s feelings for Adrien, even encouraging her to go after him. It comes to the point of him being a doormat when it concerns her, especially considering how many times she’s left him in the cold chasing after Adrien. He does get a bit more characterization in the episode Truth, which reveals he's unhappy about not knowing the identity of his father, who is later to revealed to be Jagged Stone, and the two do end up meeting and bonding at the end. But the episode still largely focuses on his relationship with Marinette, with the two breaking up at the end of the episode.
- Moral Orel: As adorable as their relationship is, Christina is pretty hard to characterize outside of being Orel's crush and eventually, his wife.
- Don Prima of My Life as a Teenage Robot for Jenny. He mainly just appears whenever Jenny's crush on him is relevant to the plot of an episode and is otherwise a typical stock teenage hunk.
- The Powerpuff Girls (2016) gives Blossom a crush on a boy named Jared Shapiro. He's around her age, goes to her school, is nerdy, and likes her but can't tell her... That's about all there is to Jared Shapiro.
- Phineas and Ferb:
- Jeremy Johnson initially had no purpose other than being a bright spot in Candace's life, but later episodes develop him a bit more. He's shown to have his own life and friends, is savvy to Candace's freakouts, and got some interaction with other characters like Dr. Doofenshmirtz. In terms of personality, he's pretty much a chill, relaxed, mature, responsible Workaholic. The answer to what he's doing when not being a love interest is "Probably working, usually at Mr. Slushy Burger, or maybe teaching guitar lessons, or being a lifeguard."
- Isabella is a downplayed example of this. She has a huge crush on Phineas and is usually involved in the boys' projects because of this. She's not truly a flat character, though, and has received a decent amount of characterization, but her role and actions in the show largely revolve around her feelings for Phineas.
- In The Proud Family: Suga Mamma is attracted to Lasienaga's Grandpa, although the latter not only has no interest in her, but also seems to insult her every time, and in at least one episode also wished for her to disappear. Literally, the only reason why she continues with her crush is that she doesn't understand Spanish (he always speaks in Spanish). Then again, in this case, it's just a Running Gag so that the grandfather can insult her and laugh maniacally afterwards.
- AndrAIa from ReBoot has this problem, especially after she grows up & loses the naive Fish out of Water characteristics that made her so endearing at the beginning. She was originally created to do nothing more than try to kill a guy in a submarine, so it's not like she would have needed much of a personality. Also, she's a bit of an Action Girl, so it's not like she's totally useless.
- Johnny V. from Recess only existed to give Spinelli a Temporary Love Interest, to the point where he appears only in the episode where she likes him.
- Simba: è nato un re: Buckshot's wife, Bambina, was raised in an isolated valley with the express purpose of marrying him someday. She has next to no personality.
- Several minor characters from The Simpsons can come off like this, defined entirely by being the wife of a more prominent character. Sarah Wiggum, Bernice Hibbert, and Brandine Spuckler all come across as this at times, although to some degree they have all developed to a limited extent. Averted with Helen Lovejoy, whose personality of being a gossipy Moral Guardian is more than enough to stand on its own.
- Sonic Boom has Zooey the Fox, Tails' girlfriend. She's a nice girl, and the two do make an adorable couple...but outside of being Tails' girlfriend very little can be said about her.
- South Park:
- Wendy Testaburger is mostly defined as Stan’s on-and-off girlfriend. While there’s a few episodes where she gets more screen time ("Stupid Spoiled Whore Video Playset", "Breast Cancer Show Ever" and "The Hobbit") that show her being more than just Stan’s girlfriend, her primary role in the show is to be Stan’s cute Love Interest who can be a Clingy Jealous Girl.
- Heidi Turner has also become this after she was turned into an Ascended Extra in Season 20 and Season 21. In most episodes of Season 20, her main role was being Cartman’s girlfriend. While Season 21 gave her slightly more Character Development, she is still defined as Cartman’s girlfriend and after she breaks up with him, she returns to her old role as a background character
- Sophie Gray, Scott's love interest, is a Nice Girl who has diabetes, is around Scott's age, goes to the same school as him and her favorite show is The Mandalorian... and that's about it.
- Lola serves as this role in Space Jam to Bugs Bunny and otherwise had very little characterization to herself. The Looney Tunes Show revamps her into a character that does date Bugs, but has a defined personality, family life, and interests that make her a unique character as well. To a smaller extent, she also has a defined personality on Baby Looney Tunes outside of Bugs, though largely because everyone are infants, there is no romance going on.
- Squilvia, a one-shot character from SpongeBob SquarePants, doesn't have much to her outside of being attracted to those who are Enraged by Idiocy.
- Star vs. the Forces of Evil: There are two characters whose defining trait in the show is to be the person that the two main characters, Star and Marco, have their respective crushes on.
- Jackie-Lynn Thomas to Marco. In the first season, Jackie doesn't have much of a role besides being the girl Marco's crushing on. This is even lampshaded by Marco in the season two episode "Sleepover" when he admits he never truly to got know Jackie beyond the image of her he built up, but he would like to try. Jackie is slowly given a more fleshed-out personality in her following appearances, as she graduates to becoming Marco's girlfriend, but even with the expanded characterization, her primary role in the show is as Marco's love interest. She promptly disappears from the series as soon as she dumps him but returns in Season 4 where it's revealed that she now has a French girlfriend.
- Oskar Greason only ever gets focus relevant to Star's crush on him. Like Jackie, he does have some Hidden Depths but is ultimately defined as Star's crush. In fact, Oskar actually goes Out of Focus at the same time that Star's crush on him fades away and she starts to fall in love with Marco. When he does reappear one last time in the Season 2 finale, his role is as the guy Star used to have a crush on.
- Averted with Tom, Star's half-demon on-again-off-again boyfriend. Even after winning back his girlfriend, he received a large amount of characterization and become one of the main characters in the show. Notably, he initially dislikes Marco due to being jealous of his friendship with Star, but over time the two bond, and by the season three finale, Tom confesses to Marco that he now thinks of him as his best friend.
- Super Robot Monkey Team Hyper Force Go: Practically all of Jinmay's characterization comes from her relationship with Chiro. She gets a bit of development in Season 4, but her character is always mostly defined as Chiro's robot girlfriend.
- Total Drama:
- Trent does have characterization but never gets a plotline that doesn't involve Gwen. The writers don't seem to have much else to do with him, at least in the context of the Show Within a Show - he's voted off as soon as they break up in season two and he's not a contestant on season three, though there is a minor subplot about him forming a boy band with Cody, Harold and Justin.
- Bridgette has the same problem as Trent. She has characterization, but she never really gets any focus from the writers except for her role as Geoff's girlfriend. The one season she participated in without Geoff (season three) still revolved around their relationship when it enters troubled waters due to her falling for Alejandro's charms and trying to get Geoff to accept her apologies for it.
- Tyler had no role in season one except being part of the show's first couple with Lindsay, and his only character trait was that he was terrible at sports. Once he was eliminated, both Lindsay and the writers completely forgot about him, with Lindsay's inability to remember who Tyler is becoming a Running Gag. Season three rectified this by giving him more focus and characterization.
- Zoey's label and biography describe her as an "indie chick", but this never comes up in the show itself. Instead, her defining trait is her mutual crush on Mike, who has multiple personalities and is trying to hide this from her.
- On Total Drama Presents: The Ridonculous Race, Devin serves as Carrie's oblivious target of affection, and the majority of his dialogue is dedicated to either fueling or denting her feelings for him. His satellite status is made all the more apparent by his lack of interaction with anyone other than Carrie, as nearly all the other characters (including Carrie herself) had managed to gain at least one friend or rival by the midpoint of the competition.
- Caleb gradually became this in Season Two of the 2023 revival. While the season initially portrays Caleb as a capable manipulator and briefly has him show Hidden Depths like being intelligent like Priya and having a similarly strict upbringing, these traits are quickly forgotten and by the second half, he’s little more than a typical Nice Guy who’s solely defined by his relationship with Priya. It’s to the point where the only other contestant he has any substantial interactions with is Julia, and that’s only because of the treat she poses to his and Priya’s relationship.
- Another male example: David of Totally Spies!, who is good-looking, a book smart genius, an artist, and an athlete — something that appeals to each of the three spies (and sometimes the Alpha Bitch too!), making him a universal love interest who exists solely to provide romantic B-plots.
- X-Men: Evolution has two examples:
- Taryn Fujioka, who's apparently one of Jean's friends, one that appears once or twice for a few seconds standing next to Jean, then doing nothing until suddenly being interested in Scott. In Season 3, she reveals herself to be a False Friend who cold-shoulders Scott when he's outed as a mutant.
- Jean, meanwhile, got Duncan; however, the writers brought him in as a Jerk Jock to give him something besides dating Jean (IE, making him pick on Toad and, to a lesser extent, Blob, and giving him a rivalry with Scott), before he developed during seasons 3 and 4 into a mutant hater with a penchant for grudges who's smart enough to avoid antagonizing the mutants that will fight back with their powers.
Other
- The Block Buster Buster refers to them as "F.R.I." - Forced Romantic Interest.
- Limyaael refers to both male and female versions under the title "Designated Love Interest" (no relation to the trope besides the name).
- The Nostalgia Chick describes this as "LINETS" (Love Interest Non-Essential To Story) in her Dragonheart review (though Kara isn't used as a love interest in the movie — only a throwaway line at the end implies she and Bowen Hooked Up Afterwards).