Regarding the Trivia namespace (crowner switched 20th Jan 2020)

Calling a ton of items (about time someone called these):

• Contest Winner Cameo
• Recycled: The Series
• Unintentional Period Piece
• Recursive Import
• Development Gag
• Scully Box
• Exiled from Continuity
• In Memoriam
• Bonus Episode
• Milestone Celebration
• Billing Displacement

The following are (as of this post) one vote away from the magical number 10:

• Wag the Director
• Academy Award
• Ability over Appearance
• Recycled Set

IMO, as soon as those four are approved, we should change the crowner. The current one is way too large. Having such a bloated crowner discourages voters.

edited 13th Nov '14 12:53:27 AM by MyTimingIsOff

Not sure whether Academy Award should be here. It's an award (which goes into Useful Notes), not a trope-like concept.

Calling Wag the Director and Recycled Set.

Calling Ability over Appearance.

I've changed the crowner to a new one. The old one was waaaay too long.

S Ince some people said that it needed authorial intent (rant: while long ago it totally doesn't), I think Ex Py should be trivia.

Huh? That makes it a trope, not trivia.

You, uh, do realize the authorial intent is necessary to prevent people from listing absolutely every character who can be possibly construed as resembling another character, right?

Who is that addressed to?

The self-described rant about Expy requiring authorial intent.

What does count as "authorial intent"? I don't think we can get any clear indication of intent if not from Word of God (which is already trivia).

And besides, the fact that "the author intended a character to be referencing another" sounds like an out-of-universe factoid, to me at least. (No Celebrities Were Harmed should be trivia too.)

edited 27th Nov '14 9:53:02 PM by DAN004

Well, how do you accidentally copy another character?

The problem with these tropes in general is that thanks to apophenia from the editors, they tend to get examples that are only "similar" to other works with no evidence that they are actually derived from these other works.

that's the thing: sometimes you can't find any evidence and yet they're just so similar. And most of the time nobody bothered to ask the author about it.

But regardless, I wanna mark Ex Py as trivia not just because of the "authorial intent" needed but also the fact that "being a copy to another character in some way", by its own, has no impact in the story.

Considering how often this trope is misused, I'd support the change. It is indeed unrelated to the work itself. Urging editors to move the examples to trivia would help removing the shoehorned cases.

I am not seeing how it would help, really. The misuse certainly fits the category, though.

Misuse does not justify moving something to trivia. For one thing, it wouldn't solve the problem, just move it somewhere else. That's like if you have a messy bedroom, instead of cleaning it, you just shove everything under the bed. Furthermore, legitimate Expy examples (you know, the ones that matter) are not trivia-worthy. If a character is truly an expy, it should be obvious enough without Word of God that it was intentional.

There's no such thing as "obvious enough", especially on the Internet. There's everything from missing that one characters that's almost exactly the same as another is an expy, to claiming that one characters is an expy of another because she's got the same hair colour and vaguely simiar shoes.

which means Ex Py is YMMV?

No, it simply means that Expy is heavily misused. In fact, it's so misused that we have a dedicated cleanup thread for it.

If a character is truly an expy, it should be obvious enough without Word of God that it was intentional.

.... .... ....

It's obvious that this gunslinger with a Japanese name is an Expy of Clint Eastwood, because they both use revolvers!

I... don't think that works well. Even worse trying to claim a lesser - known Western actor without Word of God support. The big problem is still copyright infringment.

I must say again that I have nothing to say about the misuses. I'm talking about the fact that "a character is made in reference to another", by itself, is not a trope because it serves no purpose in narrative. And the fact that it's talking about an Out-of-Universe thing (i.e authorial intent).

I don't entirely understand what you are saying. An expy is, as the description states, an "unambiguous and deliberate" copy of another character. I'm certainly not one of those people who thinks someone is an expy because they wear the same brand of perfume or some other stupid shit like that. Furthermore, characters based on actors are an entirely different trope anyway, but that's beside the point.

If you're insistent on it, you're more than welcome to add it to the crowner. However, you should know that it was already on the first trivia crowner and got mostly negative votes.

edited 30th Nov '14 12:30:52 AM by MyTimingIsOff

And how do we know the copy is deliberate without Word of God?

I mention an animated character because the author tells people he is based on a character played by an American actor. That makes it unambiguous (it is this character) and deliberate (the author chose to do it). But without Word of God support, there's no connection.

Plenty of people have added expy examples in the WMG-style similar to what I posted above. Unambiguous to them, but not definitively proven. To prove the relationship, information outside of the work is needed.

EDIT: expy is not on the Crowner that you linked.

edited 30th Nov '14 8:44:52 AM by crazysamaritan

Yes, it is. It's just so far down that you can't see it without clicking the "To include items with lower scores, click [here]" button. It's the second lowest item on the crowner.