Quote Originally Posted by sithlordnergal View Post
To add to what Vhan said, this statement is untrue in a literary sense. Unless you're looking specifically at an underdog type of story, very few beloved characters are plain jane humans with no special powers. Be it in literature, movies, video games, and more. A majority of well beloved characters are exceptionally special. Luke Skywalker is not a "plain jane Human", Harry Potter is not a "plain Jane Human". John Wick, James Bond, Batman, Superman, Spider Man, Hulk, The Master Chief, Doom Guy, Link, all of them have special powers of some sort that set them above and beyond the rest. In fact, I'd go on a limb and say most of them are mary sues in their own little way. But you could never say they're regular Humans, because none of them are. Not a single one.

In fact, off the top of my head, the only character that would come close to being a main character with no special powers is Frodo Baggins. But he's sort of an exception to the rule because the entire point of Frodo is that he is just a regular guy. He is just some regular guy with nothing special about him, that was given the responsibility of saving the entire world, and is surrounded on all sides by insanely powerful heroes and villains. Which is the entire point of that narrative.


And all those powers, or lack there of in the case of Frodo, are used in tandem with their personalities to make each character distinct. Personality is only half of the coin, and the application of what makes a character special is the other half.
You're overlooking whole genres of humans:
The entire romance genre. 1000s of books, people who bought dozens of them and could tell which characters are in which books
The "Soap Opera"
Most Sitcoms
Most Sims and most Sim games (eg SimCity)
Historical(ish) games like Civilization and Europa Universalis are all about people
The overwhelming majority of police procedurals like NCIS (OK, not actual cops as such in this case)
Most Sci Fi - Star Trek, Bab-5, stargate. Normal humans are central. Aliens etc are generally normal for their people and are mostly secondary characters
While Luke isn't a normal human, Han and Leah are.