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Affectionate Parody / Literature

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  • Almost Night series is an affectionate parody of Buffy and Twilight.
  • The Antarctic Express, a parodic mashup of The Polar Express and Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness.
  • Backstage Lensman was Randal Garrett's Affectionate Parody of E.E. "Doc" Smith's Lensman series. How affectionate? According to Garrett, Smith spent a whole convention laughing over an early draft and then suggested changes that made it even better.
  • Ben-To is one for the average shounen Fighting Series, taking Serious Business to extreme levels (half-priced lunch boxes), parodying the nom-du-guerres of each character, etc.
  • Bored of the Rings is, naturally, an affectionate parody of The Lord of the Rings. The affection is frequently difficult to spot, but the brilliant extended spoof of Tolkien's foreword and prologue is testament to how the book is genuinely funny only when it takes the original wording nearly word-for-word.
  • Bunnicula crosses into this territory most of the time, arguably providing some sorts of horror at times, and even provides some mystery and comedy.
  • Casabianca: innumerable parodies, especially Casabazonka by Spike Milligan, are collectively vastly better known than the original.
  • Sandy Mitchell's Ciaphas Cain novels are a weird case. While their main purpose is to point out and spoof the more ridiculous aspects of the Warhammer 40,000 universe, they actually take place in it, and are apparently considered canon. So, it's a strange blend of this trope and Self-Deprecation.
  • City of Devils and its sequels Fifty Feet of Trouble and Wolfman Confidential are affectionate parodies of both Film Noir and monster movies, with a lot of the comedy coming from how these two genres interact.
  • Dan the Barbarian by Hondo Jinx is set in the kind of Dungeons & Dragons setting you'd expect from a fairly incompetent and immature Game Master - filled with well-endowed women who are all dying to have sex with player characters, brimming with anachronisms and mismatched elements that the GM crammed into the supposed Medieval European Fantasy setting just because he thought it was cool, with wizards who are all either bumbling comic relief or extremely powerful and insane comic relief. And of course, every problem can be solved by hitting it with a sword. The fact that it's all deeply stupid is thoroughly lampshaded, but in a light-hearted way that makes it clear that the author is a fan of the genre.
  • The Defense of Hill 781 is an affectionate parody of the US Army where the souls of dead soldiers [the Nevada National Training Center for purgatory. With the implication of course that there is no more purgatorial a place on Earth to base it on.
  • Very early Discworld novels were an affectionate parody of fantasy cliches (and some specific settings). As the series continued, elements of this still popped up, but the focus shifted to parodying just about everything, with Pratchett's humanism and humor keeping things fairly affectionate.
  • Documents in the Case of Elizabeth Akeley by Richard Lupoff is a sequel and parody of H. P. Lovecraft's Cosmic Horror Story short story The Whisperer in Darkness.
  • Doon was put out by National Lampoon (a spin-off of The Harvard Lampoon, who put out Bored of the Rings). It's a clever parody of Dune, covering everything from the complex ecosystem of Dune to Herbert's writing style (e.g., "it is a France-like thing"; "Girl-Children Just Want to Have Pleasure-Fun").
  • EarthCent Ambassador is a Government Procedural comedy IN SPACE!, with nary a sci-fi trope left un-parodied and a lot of humor coming from Culture Clash between aliens and humans.
  • The Enchanted Forest Chronicles are affectionate parodies of fairy tales in general. This includes but is not limited to "Sleeping Beauty" (Cimorene's "Great Aunt Rose, who was asleep for a hundred years") and "Rumpelstiltskin" (a dwarf who ends up raising over a dozen children because he always asked the girls to guess his name, but they never could, even after he changed it, so he had to take their babies).
  • The first part of the essay Ernest Hemingway by Dwight MacDonald parodies Hemingway's style of narrative.
  • George R. R. Martin, the author of A Song of Ice and Fire, once wrote a short story where his character Jaime Lannister fights in an Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny against Rand al'Thor, the hero of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time. When writing about his late friend's characters, Martin did an exaggerated, yet fond, pastiche that mocks without being mean.
  • Good Omens spoofs The Omen and other fictional tales of the end times.
  • Goodnight Goon: Of Goodnight Moon.
  • Gonna Be the Twin-Tail!! is basically what you get when you run Super Sentai through as many Light Novel tropes as possible, all the while gleefully poking fun at the general goofiness of Super Sentai (the anime adaptation's screenwriter has experience with Akibaranger, after all).
  • Haruhi Suzumiya is this for every previous anime set in a high school, and probably a lot of the ones that came after it, too.
  • Hieroglyphics: Preferred to a Deconstructive Parody because "art, you may feel quite assured, proceeds always from love and rapture, never from hatred and disdain". A deconstructive satire, therefore, will lack the ecstasy that would (potentially) be present in an affectionate one.
  • How to Be a Superhero is a sharp but affectionate parody of Super Heroes and their related tropes.
  • The original Howl's Moving Castle is an affectionate send-up of many, many fairy tale tropes, as it's set in a world where the laws of fairy tales are as highly regarded as the laws of physics, and the protagonist is a young woman who, by those rights, ought to be the least successful person in the world (the oldest sister who also happens to be a half-sibling). Interestingly, the movie played the fairy tale elements straight, but kept some of the details without their parodic element — so while heroine Sophie still laments being the eldest and still thinks she's horribly plain compared to her younger sister, she doesn't mention how the Youngest Child Wins or how she thinks she's an ugly stepsister.
  • If Her Flag Breaks is a gentle parody of the Harem Genre, by infusing it with Rapid-Fire Comedy and packing in pretty much every Character Archetype Love Interest ever invented for it, then exaggerating said characters.
  • James Bond in the original Ian Fleming novels was actually a parody of spy thrillers of the time. That didn't last in the public's eye as long as him.
  • Edward Eager's Knight's Castle parodies Ivanhoe and E. Nesbit's The Magic City.
  • The Last Unicorn (Peter S. Beagle) , The Princess Bride (William Goldman) and Stardust (Neil Gaiman) are all affectionate parodies of fairy tale conventions, although the foremost is occasionally taken more seriously.
  • The Miss Marple story The Body in the Library is actually a parody of a then-popular Sub-Genre of mystery stories involving bodies being found in the library of a Big Fancy House. Generally, the library which would turn out to have all sorts of secrets, mysterious passageways, and generally unusual and uncommon features which would then explain how the murder was committed. Christie parodied the form by inverting it; in her story, the library was completely and utterly normal in every way, but the body found within it was very unusual.
  • Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen's first novel, was an affectionate parody of gothic romances.
  • Nyaruko: Crawling with Love! is probably the weirdest infatuated parody of the Cthulhu Mythos ever made. It also makes fun of many trappings of the otaku lifestyle, as well as the Harem Genre.
  • The novel Other People's Heroes is this of superhero comics. Set in a world where superhero fights are staged like professional wrestling matches, the story explains away many of the goofier conventions of the genre as products of this system — superhero team-ups happen when the main hero's back-up has to help him with a performance, characters "die" when the person playing that role decides to retire, and frequent superhero resurrections happen because a retired actor has blown through his savings in a few months and needs to come out of retirement. And of course, it's all driven by marketing.
  • In Paper Towns, Omnictionary is an online encyclopedia which attempts to be a go-to source for everything but tends to suffer from narrow interest pools and vandalism, which should put one in mind of a certain website that we are not. Similarly, Radar is an obvious Affectionate Parody of the sort of people who use said site.
  • C.T. Phipps is fond of doing these for multiple genres:
    • The Cyber Dragons Trilogy: The series is a lot less serious than Agent G and involves copious amount of snark, lampshade hangings, and ridiculous situations that our heroes have to fight their way out of. Multiple references are made to other cyberpunk series and how weird it is the world ended up identical to them.
    • Moon Cops on the Moon: Moon Cops is one to the Cyberpunk genre and Hard Boiled Detective stories in general, being set on a dystopian corporate-run Wretched Hive where robots as well as humans interact but its protagonists are all By-the-Book Cop types trying to do good.
    • Space Academy is one long extended parody of military science fiction and Star Trek in particular with a focus on all the various things necessary to have the setting work. This included Transplanted Humans, Starfish Aliens, and the struggles between idealism vs. pragmatism with just a...wacky wacky crew that includes a sexbot, bounty hunter, lizardman, and psychic spy.
    • The Supervillainy Saga is much of the same with the series being a parody of virtually every single era of superhero comics ranging from the Golden Age to Iron Age to Modern Marvel Cinematic Universe as all having taken place in one world. It also handles everything from impractical superhero outfits to the revolving door of death.
    • The Wraith Knight is an Affectionate Parody of The Lord of the Rings but with a subtler take than most. It's a Downplayed Trope example, as the story is entirely serious and really you need to know J.R.R Tolkien intimately to get all the references, but the entire book includes innumerable digs at the typical Tolkien pastiche as well as assumptions of the original work. These include Always Chaotic Evil races, the omnibenevolence of supernatural beings, the "Return of the King" being anything other than a usurpation, Can't Argue with Elves, and that smaller weaker races wouldn't get swept up in events.
  • Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain pokes a lot of fun at superhero comics. However, at the same time, there are darker elements; apparently one of the reasons that hero/villain fights remain nonlethal is because whenever a villain starts getting too violent, the other villains provide their name to the hero Mourning Dove, and the offender "accidentally" gets killed in a fight with her.
  • James Thurber's story "The Scotty Who Knew Too Much" is an affectionate, but unflinching, parody of the Hard-boiled detective genre.
  • The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System: Ren Zha Fanpai Zijiu Xitong pokes fun at the transmigration and harem genres in a light-hearted fashion.
  • A Series of Unfortunate Events: Handler started off trying to write the sort of gothic, bloodthirsty children's stories he wanted to read when he was a child, and most of the books take off one genre or another, occasionally straying into Deconstruction territory)
    Handler (At a Book Reading at Washington College): "Is it so wrong that I wanted to read books where terrible things happened to small children over and over?"
  • Slayers is a good-natured send-up of Heroic Fantasy novels, games, and anime.
  • Snooze: The Best of Our Magazine (1986) is supposed to be a collection of writing from The New Yorker. (It even includes parodies of the kind of cartoon found in the magazine, and also things like filler paragraphs and drawings.) It qualifies as an Affectionate Parody because only people who read the New Yorker would relate to Snooze, and at least two New Yorker writers contributed to it.
  • Snow Crash takes just everything associated with Cyberpunk and makes it so insanely absurd that it can't be taken seriously. Only it can. The novel with the protagonist whose name is Hiro Protagonist best hacker, pizza delivery mafia hit man, world's greatest katana master, and freaking gatling railgun wielder nonetheless is the star of one of the most exemplary cyberpunk books ever written.
  • Space Force by Jeremy Robinson: Of high big-budget action scifi action movies like Independence Day and Battleship where America Saves the Day and a Ragtag Band of Misfits comes together to save the world. Our protagonists are the absolute last people in the world who would be chosen to defend the Earth and bumble through the situation mostly through luck. They also get a substantial amount of help from other nations that are better qualified and more capable. Also, who would have been able to have helped greatly if our heroes hadn't killed most of them.
  • The Tough Guide to Fantasyland is a fictional "tour guide" to a fantastic kingdom known as Fantasyland, implied to be the setting for every fantasy novel ever. It reads a bit like TV Tropes itself in potentia, and is full of snide, snarky, and sideways humor at the expense of some of the more exhausting tropes. According to some reports, Diana Wynne Jones wrote some of the book after judging an amateur fantasy contest, which would explain a few things; however, it's more likely that someone was confused and, as the About the Author section mentions, the book was actually a result of working on the The Encyclopedia Of Fantasy.
    • Her novel Dark Lord of Derkholm, although never explicitly stated as such, seems to be set largely within the "Fantasyland" universe, and spends a lot of time skewering perceptions of what a fantasy kingdom must be like. However, it also becomes a Deconstruction of the concept, because Fantasyland is being forced into complying with many of these rules. Having a Medieval Stasis and a land constantly ravaged by a Big Bad is not particularly natural, or healthy for the economy or culture of the world.
    • Topping off the "trilogy" is Year Of The Griffin, which turns the skewers on the Wizarding School genre. In addition to having a stable of students with comically over-the-top backstories and insane amounts of talent, the majority of the staff are also quite literally incompetent (not precisely by their own fault; they were trained in bad circumstances) and the main character is, of course, a talking griffin in a school full of humans. One of the characters is also a short, squat, bone-wearing, immensely hairy, squeaky-voiced and pubescent dwarf.
  • The Tumbleweed Dossier is an affectionate parody of The X-Files.
  • Lisa Papademetriou's The Wizard, The Witch, and Two Girls from Jersey is an affectionate parody of children's/YA fantasy tropes. Two girls from the real world end up in Galma, a land that bears more than a passing similarity to Narnia, Middle Earth, Oz, and other beloved fictional settings. Even as fun is poked at each element, they are also taken seriously on their own terms.

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