Stock Characters are heroes who appears in many different media due to being in the public domain - although a Stock Character can be Villainous or Neutral that everybody will, of course, only be focusing on the heroic examples.

The use of Stock Characters is not always a good thing as they can be seen as rather generic if overused or when they appear in media that does not have a storyline to support them, which is an unfortunate side effect of a character being in the public domain.