Quote Originally Posted by Duff View Post
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.
So while there are genres that include regular humans, such as the ones you listed, I would contend that the number of genres that include a main cast that are above and beyond regular humans relative to their world is greater. Additionally, I would say that most sci-fi actually do contain humans that are "plain jane humans with no special powers". Now, keep in mind that everything is going to be relative to the world they're from. But for example, I couldn't really call most main characters from something like Star Trek "plain jane humans with no special powers". The show tends to focus on the best of the best, with the most average of all being, weirdly enough, the captain. But even then? I can't really call Picard, Janeway, Kirk, or Sisco average.

Though I guess Star Trek does have a way to writing their characters in such a way to seem pretty average despite being well beyond the average character for the universe.