Discussion Characters / YaBoyKongming

There's a lot of "evil" tropes for Nanami and Karasawa, but they haven't done anything either questionable or antagonistic? Karasawa is simply a cynical producer with experience who's doing the job the girls asked him to, the season finale showed he's not even close-minded.

I want to talk about the usage of Expy for characters in Ya Boy Kongming:

To put it simply, I don't believe that Eiko is particularly an Expy of Liu Bei and Mia is definitely not for Lu Xun.

Eiko's similarities to Liu Bei as described in the article revolve almost entirely around her interactions with Kongming— the three songs acting as the three cottages visits (三顾茅庐) and the stone sentinel maze, and nothing about her inherent traits besides just "being nice". Their situation and relationship are highly reminiscent of Kongming's service to Liu Bei, but that doesn't make Eiko an Expy of Liu Bei, that just makes her the latest recipient of Kongming's peculiar strategic services. If you remove Kongming from the equation, Eiko goes back to being a struggling singer and not the modern version of Liu Bei.

Contrast that to her character's references to Huang Yueying which are clear and inherent to who she is (her name sharing the same Kanji as Yueying, her having yellow hair just like Yueying was described as having and her father having the same name as Kongming's father-in-law). Even if Kongming wasn't in the story at all, Eiko would still be clearly based on Huang Yueying.

Mia has even less traits related to Lu Xun. Their only similarities are that were negative recipients of the consequences of a Stone Sentinel Maze formation. She clearly just happened to be the antagonist at the time that fell victim to the exact same trick that Kongming pulled off on Lu Xun 1,800 years ago. That doesn't make her an export of a 200CE ancient Chinese general, there needs to be more tying her to him than just that. She didn't even go into the actual maze itself like Lu Xun did.

To push the point, just because Jet Jacket fell for the "Create Something From Nothing" stratagem doesn't make the Jet Jacket lead singer an Expy of Guan Hai, Yellow Turban captain who was besieging Taishi Ci.

I feel like as more three kingdoms references will be made in this show, there needs to be more judicious use of calling parallels to different characters between Sanguoyanyi and Ya Boy. If there are more material connections to be made (say one of the antagonists has an eyepatch as part of their outfit, that would be a great argument to be made for them being an expy of Xiahou Dun) then more examples could be added but for now there needs to be more basis for the trope than just "Kongming did something to both of them".