Misused: Expy

Gah, seems I have forgot to add this to my watchlist after my first post here.

<reads Noaqiyeum's summary>

... Yikes, this problem is a lot bigger than I thought.

And for the record: I never liked the attitude of ditching a proposed solution just because it involves fixing "too many" wicks. There is one possible and simple yet admittedly ruthless solution to that: Give an ultimatum to editors who strictly stay on the wiki side and don't bother coming to the forums that if they don't pull their weight, they might see a good portion of those aforementioned wicks purged outright.

Actually, you might to consider this one discussion here. Possibility for definition fix, and maybe a rename due to "celebrity" being too restrictive; alternatively, split off a new trope for non-celebrity historical domian characters.

How do we differentiate between the intentional cases and the fan perception ones? Take Fountain of Expies, for example; more often than not the intentionalness of the similarity is implied by the uncannily high resemblance (i.e. so suspicious that it being coincidental is highly implausible/improbable") rather than explicitly stated by Word of God (e.g. interviews with the author/character designer).

edited 14th Jul '13 1:24:04 PM by MarqFJA

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

No Celebrities Were Harmed has 2200+ wicks. That probably won't get renamed.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

Might I remind you that Eddie has created a way to swap a Wiki Word with another en masse? That's how we dealt with renaming Token Loli to Token Mini-Moe a couple of years ago.

edited 14th Jul '13 1:25:43 PM by MarqFJA

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

Frankly, a lot of the time having a lot of references is a sign that something should be renamed, especially in the case of a Pothole Magnet. Blatant Lies, It Got Worse, and I Got Better, anyone?

Key part of that is "a couple of years ago". Is that thing still around?

edited 14th Jul '13 3:58:56 PM by MorganWick

It's been around since the site was created. But it takes up a lot of bandwidth, and is useless for anything more complicated than an absolutely basic copy and paste rename.

But that's all irrelevant, since the reason we don't want to redefine expy away from "intentionally similar character by a different author" isn't because it's too much work, but because that's how it's used off the site. That's what it means now, and that's that. We have neither the authority nor the ability to change it.

I think they were talking about renaming No Celebrities Were Harmed to include Historical Domain Characters and such.

I intentionally did not reference Word of God for exactly that reason. :P A substantial number of similarities in physical appearance, character traits, and role in the plot should suffice as evidence of intentionality.

(On a related note for another thread, I don't think Looks Like Cesare or Looks Like Orlok belong on the Fountain of Expies list Looks Like Orlok seems to be applied exclusively to vampires or vampire-like characters, actually, so it might possibly fit, but Looks Like Cesare definitely isn't - it's an appearance trope only.)

edited 14th Jul '13 5:21:30 PM by Noaqiyeum

The Revolution Will Not Be Tropeable

@Marq: Fan perception is just Counterpart Comparison, is it not? Because if it isn't, I'm not getting something here.

Please help out our The History Of Video Games page.

The auto-rename script in the past has been used only when the admin had personal interest in the rename (such as Token Loli). It's not very applicable here.

Counterpart Comparison is apparently when a character is seen in comparison to another character they are an Expy of.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

The trope description says otherwise:

Bolded "complete coincidence" since that part of the description singlehandedly makes the trope really broad. Maybe it's too broad...

Please help out our The History Of Video Games page.

Complete coincidence puts it squarely in the YMMV zone, doesn't it?

All I'm seeing from a Google search is that pretty much all of those uses are explicitly based on our definition — i.e. they saw our article, and subsequently adopted our definition as part of their personal terminology.

As long as that is made clear, I have no problem. Previous TRS threads that delved into the matter of intentionality have had problems with how to differentiate it from fan reaction, which is why I asked the question here.

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

That doesn't change the fact that it's how it's used offsite. The fact that we seem to have come up with the term originally is an interesting piece of trivia, but irrelevant.

The fact that they've picked up our definition is not irrelevant - we can't have pages for terms that mean something else on-wiki than off-wiki.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

Just curious, where did the term come from in the first place? I never heard of it before joining the wiki.

From a site named TV Tropes. It means "exported character".

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

@ Septimus: Yes, you're right. What I should have said was "Just because we invented it doesn't mean we can change it." At this point, we need to fix the definition on the page to match the use.

@209: I interpret "complete coincidence" to simply modify Septimus' description to "perceived Expy". It gets rid of needing an arbitrary "intent" burden of proof for something that's an Audience Reaction either way.

edited 15th Jul '13 3:12:03 PM by MorganWick

Does that mean we'll have to merge Counterpart Comparison and Expy?

Please help out our The History Of Video Games page.

Ugh. Why? That seems completely unnecessary and probably detrimental.

The Revolution Will Not Be Tropeable

Yeah, that doesn't seem like it will work.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

Counterpart Comparison is one of the most annoying. No one can agree what it is, and the description seems to be describing two separate tropes. Maybe we should just...ignore that as an expy subtrope, figure out all the others (which are duplicate tropes, which ones are unnecessarily specific and need to be merged with expy, which need new names, etc), and then come back to Counterpart Comparison in its own TRS thread later.

I'll try to initiate a Counterpart Comparison thread eventually. This thread isn't going anywhere now.

Please help out our The History Of Video Games page.

I made a thread for Counterpart Comparison. It will tie into this discussion, so this will be bumped as well.

Please help out our The History Of Video Games page.

Re-clocking this one.

This is waiting on the CC thread, which appears to be languishing.

Someone will need to get that thread going if it isn't already. As for this one, since the clock's up, its time is up as well.