Lost in Space
Tropes Are Not Bad. It's possible to accuse Expies of being uncreative, or of mindlessly following trends, but that doesn't automatically make the character or the work it's in badly written. Some of the most famous and well-regarded characters in all of fiction are blatant ripoffs of characters from other works.
edited 9th Feb '18 5:49:25 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
No, the other one.
The trope isn't bad. There are tons of reasons for why it's a good idea sometimes, since the source character is probably a popular one for reasonable reasons.
People like to complain about anything, especially if something can be construed to not be 100% original. That's why it seems negative. People like to feel better about themselves by "exposing" characters as less than ideal. Which isn't even necessarily the case here.
People also like to compare everything, so there are probably tons of shoehorns for any even remotely similar characters.
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Expy on TV Tropes is defined as "this character was deliberately crafted to be very similar to another character in a different work," but a lot of examples I have seen of it makes it sound like as if the character is either 90% copied from the original character or that Expies are just bad writing. Not to mention the Rei Ayanami Expy trope where it tracks down every Rei Ayanami-like character as if people are saying all of them are ripoffs.