Shout Outs in your fiction

One of the coolest things about writing fiction? Making shout outs to popular or obscure things that you like. Do you have any ShoutOuts or subtle inspirations in your fiction to things you like? List 'em here.

• My protagonist Skye Stryke has two differently colored eyes. One blue and one green. The color choices were inspired by two favorite characters I couldn't choose between. Danny Fenton and Harry Potter.

• The name of the protagonist's younger brother and the middle name of his best friend come from a book I loved in childhood, Mrs Frisby And The Rats Of NIMH. Their namesakes are the Frisby brothers, Timothy and Martin. This also reflects the relationship between my two characters; the best friend views his friend's sibling as a surrogate younger brother and calls out the hero when his overprotection starts hurting more than helping.

edited 9th Dec '10 9:05:14 PM by JewelyJ

-Shout out to Luc Besson: "Plot 8, Row 30" from La Femme Nikita I put that in there just because he rocks.

-Many, many shout-outs to my LARP brothers and sisters...pity only about five people on the planet will get them, should I ever get published.

• In my story "Across The Universe", The Antagonist named Edward Gorey has top guys whose names are all some shape or form of "Ed". His diminutive General Eddy has two cousins he keeps around, his scientist Dr. Ed'd and his personal bodyguard Ed. They're a Terrible Trio of sorts.
• in the "League of Heroes" series, in one of the later books they encounter a group of somewhat pathetic villains who are named Particle Man, Universe Man, Smaller Man, Person Man, Triangle Ma, and Dr. Worm

edited 9th Dec '10 10:50:38 PM by ACDrawings

And the title itself is a Shout-Out, too!

Some from my recent Shadowrun fanfic

• Hana's avatar in the matrix is a brown haired girl wearing a yellow dress. She typically manifests programs either by singing or light.
• Netheriel uses a skull for the center piece in his magical library.
• Their fixer calls himself Joe Fabulous
• Elias' meditation/prayer before going into a gunfight is the Gunslinger's Creed minus the bits about forgetting the face of his father.
• Reina has a notable fondness for Worcester sauce. It really makes the metahuman flesh she has to eat more palatable.

AC, is Dr. Worm that kind of doctor?

My story:

• follows a colony that lands on the first moon of the second planet of a star called Chiron, which
• is lead by Major-General Tom Sullivan. The main purpose of the colony being there is,
• for the anthropologists lead by a Dr. Anderson to interact with the
• Humanoid Alien natives via remote-control bodies, but this is complicated when
• a Fantasy Counterpart British Empire show up and start evangelizing.

And that's just a plot synopsis.

edited 10th Dec '10 7:21:43 AM by Yej

There will be a man who is head of the mosqueslashchurchslashsynagogue, named Oscar.

He came to the town one day five years ago, by a hot air balloon.

edited 10th Dec '10 7:50:59 AM by MrAHR

^^ Yes, he became a villain with the others becuase he wasn't respected as a doctor. Ooh, and Things Fall Apart? Very nice.

In the script I'm currently working on...

CORP. BURNS (watching Major Stone drive away) Strange, strange man. How did he get to make Major in this man’s army?

LT. PRIEST [[MASH He was drafted]].

edited 10th Dec '10 11:00:31 AM by JWHarding

In The Object of War, the main character's favorite turn ons are egg whisks and wet celery ...Not sure how many Allo Allo fans I know though.

The current chapter of Boy Aurus is going to be littered with The Prince. Though I later learned there are real mobsters who take The Prince very seriously too.

edited 11th Dec '10 11:34:48 PM by Kaxen

Fit in a flying helmet somewhere?

So he's a real doctor, but not a real worm?

As another random shoutout, the computer that runs the ship Discovery is called Gerty.

edited 10th Dec '10 11:46:04 AM by Yej

The New Blood in my latest story are based on the cast of Gunslinger Girl, but it's not all that obvious since both sexes are involved.

I have shout outs to Dir en grey, and Asian Kung Fu Generation, along with Nietzsche and some Lawyer-Friendly Cameo manga titles.

• Orange Flash Ninja

• Spirit Beach.

My main character's mentor wears a helmet like MagnaAngelmon's when in battle, He has light and holy based powers.

edited 11th Dec '10 3:57:41 AM by americanbadass

I have far too many to count. At least seven in the first chapter alone, but even then a lot of them are hard to find/are obscure. There are much less in more serious chapters, though.

There's this one irritating, incompetent actor character that shares several of his catchphrases with Tommy Wiseau.

When a sentient computer overexerts herself, her Non Sequitur, *Thud* is quoted directly from Time Cube. Poor girl.

Later, the chief medical officer of the ship she's on worriedly reports that she's started singing 'Daisy Bell' to herself. Her sedative dose is immediately increased.

Most of my work is Reference Overdosed... since all the characters and buildings in Music City are named after songs, musicians, albums and bands, everything in that one is a Shout-Out so I won't be posting any specifics from there because then I'd still be typing on Wednesday. As for others:

• One of the main antagonists in Side Effects is named Willis Anderson. During the course of the book he gets both a "Mr. Anderson" (from a character named Agent Smith, no less) and a "Whatchoo talkin' 'bout, Willis?".
• From the same book, one of the main characters is named Savini. Yes, as in that Savini.
• In the Mythology 101 Cycle, we have the following lines of dialogue:
  • "Come with me if you want to live."
  • "Got milk?"
  • "I have a bad feeling about this."
  • "I have had it with all those motherfucking snakes in your motherfucking hair!"
  • "You can't handle the truth!"
• That same series also has a recurring Wedge Antilles reference, a Shout-Out by author name to Aaron Allston, and another to Quentin Tarantino.
• Also, all the fantasy kingdoms in the Mythology 101 books are named after characters from other fantasy series: Aberforth, Aensland, Balazar, Belacqua and Nakamura.
• The Whiskey Tango Foxtrot series has several shoutouts to The X Files, Torchwood and other similar shows that served as inspirations for it, and also references Hentai a couple of times.
• It also contains characters named George and Lenny, who are similar to their Steinbeckian counterparts in size and intellect.
• Some of the snarky book titles from WTF also reference other people's works, for example Whatever You Do, Don't Call Me Ishmael and Hope Floats. No Really, She Does (which is about a levitating woman). There's also The Cliche In The Machine, a riff on the concept of the "Ghost in the Machine" first popularized by Isaac Asimov and later ripped off by pretty much everybody before being turned into an X-Files episode title.
• The Gamer, a story I'm working on about a nerdy slacker who discovers he has the power to duplicate in real life any action that he performs in a video game, has pretty much every video game Shout-Out imaginable, and even has some shoutouts to TV Tropes with invoked trope titles like Doom Doors and Scrappy Level.
• My short story Eat the Rich features a scene where the Villain Protagonist has to use a psuedonym. He picks "Roland Deschain". The story's title is also a Shout-Out to both an Aerosmith song and my zombie group from Urban Dead.

edited 13th Dec '10 3:31:53 PM by Pinata

In Time Immemorious, between the two main-est characters, Jennifer is a bit of an English Literature enthusiast and Elliot is an unabashed SF geek, so between the two of them all sorts of references get brought up in text; their Time Travel Trust Passwords are, respectively, "With Love From Prufroch" and "Hello, Rose. Run for your life."

While the two names are never mentioned next to each other, the town Jennifer and Elliot grew up in is called Einstein and they attended Rosenbridge High School.

A family of Defective Detectives with a congenital growth disorder is fond of using somewhat contived pseudonyms, including Laliette, John Truant, Yvy Truant, Luna Pons, Luna Croft, Wilks, and Oberon Quinn.

Elliot briefly disdains the amount of trouble he could cause with his new toy by claiming "I'm reasonably certain that I will not destroy the universe with a machine someone could build in their garage.

Two minor police characters are named Sergeant Gilks and Captain Richard Madden; similarly, the excursion to Woodshead Asylum encounters Ireneo Funes and Jaroslav Kubin.

Morgan insists that she's sorry shortly before stealing a time machine and undoing all of their work, and the revelation of her motives appears in The Plot-Explaining Chapter.

Well, in my Massive Multiplayer Crossover work The Animation Crossroads, both the traveling circus my main character Dedra's mom is head of and a tarot card that Dedra gets called The Carnival of Rust.

edited 13th Dec '10 9:05:14 PM by PumpkinLore