incidental to

It was almost as if the goal being score was incidental to his overall plan for the game.

Instead, the riots feel incidental to the story.

If and when the network does boost particular politicians, it generally does so in a manner that is incidental to its main mission, which is to demonize the left by peddling an unbroken narrative of its decadence and corruption, thus fostering a tribal mentality in which outsiders start to seem like existential threats.

I wasn’t after infants who are incidental to the plot; I wanted babies whose babyhood was essential to the story.

But the authors concluded this has led to the misclassification of many deaths as due to pregnancy when they were in fact incidental to it.