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@a_nna This is something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately, as my WIP is centered around a crew of nine people. I have yet to figure this out application to my story, but I think it largely depends on how you pull it off. Like @taylorclogston pointed out there’s a difference between whether they are part of the main cast of POV-providers or just characters that are found by the main handful of characters as the story progresses. @allertingthbs mentioned Endgame, which does a great job pulling off a large cast, though to be fair it’s part of something that has been building up for over a decade. (Note: just like Toy Story 4, which by the way has a overwhelming amount of parallels to Endgame. It’s actually most amusing to think about. 😆 )

If the you’re looking for examples more along the lines of a big group of characters that follow through a story, (like a big family or support group) I was reminded through this conversation of an introduction I read to the book, Speaker for the Dead, by Orson Scott Card (not necessarily recommended for all ages of readers) in which he talks about five(six?) siblings in his book’s first draft bogging it down because there were so many of them. Instead of cutting them out, however, he instead went back and made them all unique and made them their own beings. The story turned from being muddled, to be clear, concise, and the reader isn’t distracted thinking about how many kids in this group there are and how it seems like overkill because they all are the same, copy and paste.

So my advice, if these many characters are more in the foreground, maybe even more in the background, walk through and identify why they are there, what they are contributing to the story, and if they all are unique or not. A good test is if a reader can remember them, or not after reading it. (Note: more remember their roles + contribution, then necessarily their names, for example: “Oh, I remember that guy, he was the blacksmith that advised the mc in that one scene to go rob the bank” or whatever.)