Asset Actor

If your name is "Edgar", why does your HP meter say "Mitsurugi"?

"You'll face off against a fighter whose abilities and personality are kinda-sorta similar to the opposing spirit."

—Masahiro Sakurai, 1 November 2018 Super Smash Bros. Ultimate Direct

Sometimes an event in a game needs to happen for the story to move forward. However, the game does not have the proper characters or environment to do so, and you want to avoid having Dummied Out content. So what is there to do?

Use something that is there, of course!

In short, this is when something is represented by a "close enough" replacement, and the audience is expected to use their imagination and common sense that it's supposed to represent something else.

While this can be effective at avoiding unnecessary wasted resources, especially if the scenario is only going to happen once, there's a risk of it breaking Willing Suspension of Disbelief if done carelessly.

To be this trope, the re-used element has to be already explicitly established as something else. Use of generic assets that aren't supposed to be anything in particular don't count.

Can sometimes overlap with Prop Recycling. Compare Permanent Placeholder when something was intended to be given its own assets, but never was, as well as Palette Swap, Recycled Animation, and Underground Monkey, all of which are different forms of reusing existing graphics.

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Examples

Fighting Games

• Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 2:
  • This game's story mode has a segment that covers Future Trunks' past, adapted from Dragon Ball Z: The History of Trunks, with the first battle being Gohan training him. Since this game doesn't have a separate Future Gohan model and character slot, he is represented by the teenaged version of Gohan from the Buu Saga, which stands out since he has a different gi and hairstyle than the one Future Gohan has. When you play as Future Gohan against the Androids later in the story, he doesn't have access to his Buu-era forms like Great Saiyaman and Super Saiyan 2 on a first playthrough (they're unlocked while playing the story), but Super Saiyan 1 Gohan has access to the Brothers Kamehameha Ultimate Blast attack, which has Goten as his partner, who doesn't exist in the future and wouldn't appear until the Buu Saga. Not only that, if one is replaying the story, Gohan will be able to access the Great Saiyaman and Super Saiyan 2 transformations, which he logically shouldn't have either.
  • Since this game doesn't have GT-era specific models for Goku and Vegeta (outside of Super Saiyan 4), the cutscene that plays after defeating Omega Shenron in the story mode reuses their normal Z-era models after they revert back to base form.
• The initial release of Mortal Kombat 3 lacked the "Palette Swap Ninjas", meaning Noob Saibot had to use Kano's sprite colored solid-black. Later issues added the Ninjas and Noob Saibot's sprite was changed accordingly.
• Soul Series: While most of the series uses the Character Customization feature for minor characters, Soul Calibur II had not introduced this feature yet. Because of this, the "Weapon Master" story mode uses standard fighters instead, with the characters they represent listed as their names in the lower-right corner of the screen opposite to your own. For instance, your trainer Edgar is represented by Mitsurugi, The Rival Leon or Minerva (depending on your own chosen character) are represented by whatever character is encountered in your character's Destined match in Arcade Mode (though there are exceptions), and Big Bad Veral is represented by Nightmare at first and Final Boss Inferno as a One-Winged Angel form.
• Street Fighter:
  • In a few of the Street Fighter Alpha series' arcade mode scenarios, Rolento is used to represent Shadaloo's mooks. His name and face are not changed, however, which confused some players back in the day, as Rolento acts against Shadaloo in his own scenario.
  • In Street Fighter V, there are six different arcade mode routes each based around a different game in the series. However, not all of the characters are present, so some substitutions have to be made, such as Balrog (Boxer) standing in for Mike in the Street Fighter route, and Laura standing in for Sean in the Street Fighter III route.
• Super Smash Bros. has used this since its inception.
  • Super Smash Bros. 64: Captain Falcon and Ness don't have their own stages, so instead the matches to unlock them are fought on Planet Zebes — the only stage with a futuristic settings that isn't in space, and Dream Land — the only stage with a grassy setting, respectively.^note The latter also shares a creator with this stage.
  • Super Smash Bros. Melee:
    • In the second round of Classic Mode, you fight against one of a number of predetermined teams, usually sharing either a series, like Mario and Luigi, or an attribute, like the similar-looking Kirby and Jigglypuff. One of the potential teams, however, is Ness and Princess Peach, who don't have any connection to each other. This is because, visually, Peach is the closest character to Ness's ally Paula. Otherwise, Ness wouldn't have anyone to partner with, as he was the only playable character from his franchise at the time.
    • In All-Star Mode, every character is matched to a Home Stage 1:1. However, some series have more characters than available stages, such as The Legend of Zelda, and others have more stages than playable characters, like Donkey Kong Country. As a result, many characters are given stages not from their own series, but resembling something that is: Ganondorf is fought on Brinstar Depths to represent his lava-surrounded castle, Young Link is fought on Jungle Japes to represent Kokiri Forest, Marth is fought on Fountain of Dreams to represent the Dragon's Table, Pichu is given Fourside to represent the Saffron City stage from the previous game, and Mewtwo is given Battlefield to represent the laboratory he was created in. Averted, however, for Roy, who gets Final Destination as he didn't yet have anything to be represented.
  • Super Smash Bros. Brawl:
    • In Solo Event Match 26: "The Slow and Easy Life", Ness is used as the player's character to stand in for Villager — who wouldn't appear properly until the next game — that's trying to listen to K.K. Slider's concert.
    • In Co-Op Event Match 18, "The New Weapon of Shadow Moses", R.O.B. stands in for Metal Gears that Snake has to defeat.
  • Super Smash Bros. for Wii U:
    • In the solo event match "Mechanical Menace", Metal R.O.B. and Metal Mega Man stand in for Mechons aiding stage boss Metal Face.
    • R.O.B.'s Home Stage is Wrecking Crew, used as a surrogate for R.O.B.'s signature game Gyromite.
    • In the solo event match "The Falchion's Seal", Giant Charizard stands in for Grima as Robin and Chrom try to defeat him.
    • In the co-op event match "A Fairy Nice Trip", four differently-colored Kirbies stand in for Inky, Blinky, Pinky, and Clyde to interfere with the players' journey through Pac-Land.
    • In the co-op event Wrecking Bros., Wario stands in for Foreman Spike, a similar greedy business over.
    • In A Royal Errand, Robin stands in for Kris, another avatar who helped Marth.
  • Super Smash Bros. Ultimate:
    • The occurrences in Spirit Battles are too numerous to list, but the long and short of it is, matches with special conditions are set up to recreate a situation from the spirit character's source material, such as choosing specific characters and colors on specific stages and with specific special effects applied. The game's story justifies all of them with Big Bad Galeem (later joined by Dharkon) attacking across the multiverse to reduce characters to spirits and stick them into an army of puppet copies of whichever is a given character's most compatible fighter^note the Hilarity in Hindsight with Min-Min, Mythra, and Pyra still having their respective spirit battles being represented by Fire Emblem characters when both would later become playable through Downloadable Content notwithstanding.
    • Separately from the spirit battles, each character has a Classic Mode series of battles where they face off against themed opponents. Sometimes these directly involve actual fighters where appropriate, but in many cases fighters, modified with palette swaps or size increases or decreases, are used as close-enough stand-ins for other characters. For instance, Samus's path uses a giant King K. Rool to represent Kraid, Pit's uses Bayonetta to represent Medusa, and Steve's uses various fighters to represents Minecraft mobs and ends in a battle against Ridley as the Ender Dragon.
• In Xena: Warrior Princess: Talisman of Fate, Xena is unable to fight Gabrielle without the use of a cheat code. Without this code, Gabrielle as an opponent is replaced by Hope, but the name is the only difference: "Hope" is still Gabrielle in model, voice, and gameplay.

First-Person Shooter

• Many named NPCs in the first BioShock game are slightly edited versions of the common Mooks. Atlas in particular is always kept at a distance to keep players from noticing that his model is barely changed from the original, down to retaining the deformed face.
• Doom II: The two secret levels are recreations of, respectively, Floors 1 and 9 from the first episode of Wolfenstein 3-D. While the SS guardians make an appearance as mooks, the dogs are replaced by demons. Also, the original boss of that Episode (Hans Grosse), who should appear in the second secret level (based on Floor 9), is absent, but a Cyberdemon appears in his place to roleplay as him.
• TimeSplitters:
  • Many Arcade League and Challenge missions cram together characters from different time periods into different settings, often because the characters are thematically similar, such as Leo Krupps (a man in a lion costume) and the many anthropomorphic animal characters (Bear, Duckman Drake, Calamari, Shoal, the many Monkeys, Deerhaunter, and Dinosaur) standing in for actual wild animals, soldiers from 2401 showing up in a contemporary Vietnam map just because they're military-themed, and the Chinese Chef (a gangster from the 60s-70s) being pit against Gaston Boucher (a zombie from 1994) just because they're both chefs.
  • The Challenge mission "Sammy Nammy Hamby Pamby" in TS3 is particularly ridiculous about this. It takes place in the Vietnam map, you play as Renzo, and the enemy mooks consist of Goddard, Schmidt, The General, and Beserker Splitter. Goddard and Schmidt are supposed to be Renzo's allies, while The General is one of the aforementioned 2401 soldiers. Only the Berserker Splitter makes sense given the franchise's premise.
  • Nikolai and Sgt. Shivers' models are used for several mooks in TS2's first mission, but the "real" Nikolai and Shivers are the two Red Shirts who get killed by a zombie in the level's intro cutscene. This means that by the time you reach them in gameplay, they're "portrayed" by their undead counterparts Pvt. Poorly and Sgt. Slate. (with the "real" Poorly being the zombie that killed them).

Gacha Games

• AFK Arena's periodic "Voyage of Wonders" adventures sometimes have NPCs to speak to to continue, but for their dialogue portrait, a playable character is used. For instance, Vurk, a mere hunter, stands in for the chief of the Durri species in "The Road Home", and Nakoruru, who isn't even from the same universe, is used as a Lightbearer villager in "The Depths of Time III". Whenever this occurs, though the stand-in character's portrait is shown, the name in the dialog box is replaced.
• One of the Christmas episodes in Dead or Alive Xtreme Venus Vacation involves the character Sayuri, who at the time was just introduced only in the Japanese port of the game. In the Steam version of the game, when this Christmas episode came out, Sayuri was not in the game yet, so her role would be taken over by Momiji, who has a similar personality to her.
• Fate/Grand Order:
  • The Massive Ghost enemy is typically used as a stand-in for established boss characters who have their own expression sheets but do not have in-game sprites created, albeit generally having some color changes and a few of the character's clothes added. Some of these characters like Ereshkigal and Ashiya Doman got Promoted to Playable later on with their own unique sprites, but their earlier content still has a Massive Ghost instead of being updated to use their new original assets.
  • Played for laughs in the "All the Statesmen" event. The event is themed around American Servants, and since the roster of American Servants is rather small with Paul Bunyan as the only newcomer introduced, boss fights against Wyatt Earp, Buffalo Bill, Davy Crockett, and Columbia are represented by Altera assuming their identities and being fought in their place, with the protagonist complaining about how lazy the devs are not to implement any of them ("Oh, COME ON! Wyatt Earp Servant when?!").
• Girls' Frontline's crossover event with VA-11 HALL-A uses Paradeus units to stand in for the latter's White Knights. Also doubled as an Early-Bird Cameo for the English version of the game, which got the crossover at the same time as the other versions of the game despite otherwise being about a year's worth of content behind.

Hack-and-Slash

• Dynasty Warriors:
  • Depending on the game, there are several character models used to represent various important generals or warlords that aren't notable enough to have unique ones. In Dynasty Warriors 5, for example, one particular cutscene drew attention to the warlord Yuan Shu, but it turns out he merely used the generic "officer" model. The only truly unique NPC model was that of the Emperor, but that came to an end from Dynasty Warriors 7 when Cao Mao also uses the Emperor model (due to also being an emperor).
  • This can lead to hilarity when a character has a unique voice for story reasons but then uses a generic voice in gameplay. As an example, in Dynasty Warriors 5 the sorcerer Yu Ji uses the generic "strategist" model and taunts Sun Ce with a unique, light-hearted, and mocking voice. Upon his defeat, he then uses the generic model's much deeper and rougher voice.
  • Fire Emblem Warriors features a History Mode, where chapters from the featured Fire Emblem games are reenacted. As not all characters from the five games appear, they will sometimes use characters with similar personalities or motivations to take up roles of other characters. For example, in a recreation of scenes from Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light, Leo replaces Gotoh due to their shared knowledge of magic and Robin replaces Bantu as someone who knows and cares for Tiki.

Party Games

• Mario Party: The Top 100: Since Koopa Kid has been gone from the series since Mario Party 7, Bowser Jr. takes his role as Bowser's sidekick during "The Final Battle" (originally from Mario Party 4).
• Mario Party Superstars: In any minigame that featured Koopa Kid in their original appearance (such as Quicksand Cache or any of the item games), he is replaced with Bowser Jr.

Platform Games

• Donkey Kong '94, during one cutscene, uses a sprite of Mario shrunken by a Poison Mushroom to simulate Mario being far away.
• Shipwrecked 64: In some sequences, the humans in the backstory are represented by clones of Bucky and his friends. Justified, as several major events involved Creepy Mascot Suits.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • Super Mario Bros. 3: Starting from this game, most reappearances or recreations of the first Mario Bros. stage replace the Shellcreepers with Spinies, because the similar-looking Koopa Troopas can be stomped unlike Shellcreepers (and having the former enemies appear would derail the intended gameplay of stunning them from below, hence why the unstompable Spinies are used instead).
  • Super Mario Maker: Some of the levels from classic Mario games that are replicated here originally featured enemies that are absent here, so they're substituted with other enemies. For example, a Hammer Bros. is used in the place of the Chargin' Chuck that originally appeared in the replicated level of Super Mario World, red Koopa Troopas stand in for Shy Guys in the event course based on World 1-1 from Super Mario Bros. 2, Bowser Jr. replacing both Larry Koopa in the World 1 Airship and Boom Boom in World 8 Airship (both from Super Mario Bros. 3), and so on.

Real-Time Strategy Games

• Age of Empires: Both the first and the second installments feature enemies in campaigns that do not have civilizations in-game. In these cases, the game uses a "close enough" civilization as a stand-in. This becomes less common after Definitive Edition for II as, as more civilizations are added, the need for stand-in decreases. As an example, one mission from the launch version of II featured the Hungarians as enemies, represented by the Teutons as there was no Hungarian Civilization. Following Definitive Edition, however, they are now represented by the more historically accurate Magyars.
• Empire Earth: Alexander the Great's generals are played by Hero Units regardless of source (thus Philotas is played by Gilgamesh and so always talks about Ishtar). One of them, however, uses the Barbarian model (which isn't a hero but can move through trees).
• Rise of Nations: In the "Conquer the World" scenarios, there are a number of non-player nations on the map (and one playable one) that aren't playable in the game's regular Skirmish and Conquer the World campaign modes. As a result, these new nations usually just borrow the bonuses of existing nations and have their own unique cosmetic set. This is most evident in the Napoleon campaign with the Knights of Malta-Americans, Austrian-Greeks, Portuguese-Incans, Papal State-Romans, and Prussian-Turks.
• Total War: Warhammer:
  • Rogue Armies are roaming horde factions with armies made by selected units from one or more of the full factions' army rosters, usually with a specific theme in mind. These sometimes use specific units to represent more generalized groups that, due to only featuring in one or two Rogue Armies, don't merit dedicated models themselves. For instance, Morrslieb's Howlers use Empire Flagellants, extreme devotees of the cult of Sigmar, to depict generic frenzied lunatics, while a number of others use a mixture of Empire Militia and Bretonnian Peasant Mobs to represent hordes of poorly armed pirates and brigands.
  • The Red Moon Inn landmark in Ubersreik adds five characters to the garrison representing the player characters in Vermintide. The Witch Hunter, Empire Captain and Waystalker represent Saltzpyre, Krueber and Kerillian directly enough, although the other two have more overt visual differences — Sienna is represented by a boldly bearded Bright Wizard due to the Empire lacking female wizard models, while a Dwarf Thane stands in for Bardin the ranger.

Role-Playing Games

• Franken: Played for Laughs. Cerberus appears as a scorpion during battle because his actual sprite isn't ready yet. His actual sprite, which you can see later on, is very poorly-drawn.
• Granblue Fantasy: There are several generic models that sometimes get repurposed as story characters during events. Of note is the "middle-aged gentleman" model, with light brown hair, a moustache, and a goatee. That model is often modified with new clothes to represent various people. Among other things, he's been used to represent a referee in combat tournaments, a commentator during a race, a judge during a cooking contest, and even the opposing heads of two factions (which included a running gag about how they were twins because they looked alike).
• In the original SNES version of Live A Live the Wild West incarnation of Watanabe used the same sprite as Cesar, despite Watanabe being a child and Cesar being a grown man. The remake differentiates the sprites to make Watanabe smaller (though they still share a color palette).
• Monster Hunter Generations: Being a Megamix Game, it features a wide array of monsters and playable stages from all previous games in the series, and for extra nostalgia it also brings back many hunting quests that appeared in the series before. However, there are still many monsters that didn't make the cut for the game (including, notably, all subspecies), so there are quests that are lifted from previous games but with the original monsters replaced with equivalents or stand-ins due to their absence. For example, the HR 6 multiplayer quest Topple the Monarch is based on the Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate and Monster Hunter 4 quest Infernal Overlord (where you originally hunted a Stygian Zinogre), and it takes place in the same hunting area as the latter game's version of the original quest (Frozen Seaway); however, since subspecies aren't present in the game, a regular Zinogre takes its place. Another example is Proof of a Hero in Generations Ultimate, which is lifted from 3 Ultimate and keeps Brachydios, but replaces Ivory Lagiacrus and Azure Rathalos with Hyper versions of the standard Lagiacrus and Rathalos (again, this is due to the absence of subspecies).
• Etrian Odyssey Nexus is a Megamix Game with elements of various past games in the Etrian Odyssey series. In the Waterfall Woods, a Labyrinth from Etrian Odyssey III: The Drowned City, you encounter an NPC adventurer named Charis, and she can optionally and temporarily join your party. Charis's armor is modeled after the Hoplite class from Etrian Odyssey III, featuring distinctly bulky shoulder and chest plates. However, this game does not have the Hoplite class, so she's instead classified as a Protector, an Etrian Odyssey class that is also a defense-oriented class but whose official portraits lack the thick armor of Hoplites (instead opting for large shields).

Survival Games

• Non-playable races in Starbound that don't fit the standard humanoid shape (namely Deadbeats, Creepling, Agarans, Frogs, Alpacas and "Maggot Man") are represented by playable races (Florans for Agarans, Hylotl for Froggs, Humans for the rest) wearing outfits not usable by the player without modding or admin mode. You can tell because they use the original race's sound effects when spoken to.

Tabletop Games

• Etherfields: There are two types of monsters (known as Entities). "Generic" Entities are represented by all-purpose "shapeshifter" miniatures, while "showcase" Entities — usually those associated with major missions — are represented by specific tokens/miniatures. These "showcase" tokens/minis all use the art and designs of specific Entities, but some are reused for other enemies later down the line. For example, the token/miniature of the reaper-like Butcher enemy from the mission "The Endless Basement" is used to represent a "mysterious pursuer" in a late-game mission.

Tactical Role-Playing Games

• Fire Emblem is known for its numerous characters, so what did it do in its very early days when they only had the limited power of the NES to work with? Gratuitous use of copy and paste, of course! Many of the character portraits are only slight variations on others, and in rare cases some portraits are entirely identical copies of one already seen before. Later adaptations have since made the effort to distinguish these characters, both visually and in identity. And while the SNES offered a lot more in terms of data storage, it also takes the unusual effort to give portraits to even very minor bosses, resulting in a lot of asset sharing between those.
• Vandal Hearts II: Heaven's Gate: The model and portrait of the murdered childhood friend (who appears and dies in a single chapter) is reused throughout the game to represent generic female civilians.

Turn-Based Strategy

• Nintendo Wars:
  • The Black Hole army in first Advance Wars used the same units as Orange Star, and their "evil and emotionless" clone of Andy had the same jolly expressions and theme song. Re-Boot Camp makes Clone Andy a unique character with a more sinister appearance and theme song, and also gives Sturm the AW2 Black Hole units.
  • If you're using Max and/or Sami for the final mission, them having separate armies from Andy is handwaved by Grit and/or Eagle allowing them to command Blue Moon/Green Earth troops, though the units end up wearing Orange Star uniforms like when choosing a particular nation's color with another nation's commander in multiplayer. The same applies to Rachael commanding the "on loan from Blue Moon" soldiers in the tutorial for Dual Strike.
  • Hawke and Lash are represented by a Rocket Launcher and APC in the mission that has them escape from the Bolt Guard, the former of which is ten separate vehicles when in battle. Similarly, a lone Will in the first mission of Days of Ruin is represented by a Bike unit, despite never being seen obtaining a motorcycle and the sprite clearly showing two people.
  • During the single mission you fight alongside him, Davis uses the same theme song as the only other non-playable commander, The Beast, despite it being wildly unfitting to his character.
  • While the original Advance Wars trilogy had separate unit designs for every faction, Days of Ruin only has "Rubinelle" and "everybody else". While IDS sharing Lazuria's units can be handwaved by them Playing Both Sides, ragtag groups of raiders and rioters wearing proper military uniforms is less excusable. That "separate unit designs for every faction" also only applied to the in-battle sprites if they weren't infantry; The map sprite for AA Tanks always had two cannons even though Yellow Comet's version had just one, and the map sprite for Recons didn't look like any of the in-battle designs.

Wide-Open Sandbox

• Minecraft: Most of the color variants introduced in 24w10a are simply based on various colors and subspecies of wolf, but three — the rust wolf found in sparse jungles, the spotted wolf found in savanna plateaus, and the striped wolf found in wooded badlands — are based on, and meant to represent, dholes, African painted dogs and striped hyenas by using a palette swap on top of the standard wolf model and AI.

Non-Video Game Examples

Films — Animated

• Norm of the North: The model used for a younger version of Norm during a flashback sequence in the first movie was re-used as Norm's son Quinn in the sequel, Keys to the Kingdom.

Live Action TV

• Lois & Clark: One episode reuses the existing cast for completely different characters in extended flashbacks to the gangster era.
• Roswell: One episode has an old soldier explaining his story in the form of flashbacks, where characters are played by the regular cast.

Web Original

• Objection.lol: Most transcribed discussions use the Ace Attorney characters provided on the website as stand-ins for people. The site encourages this by allowing users to set aliases that will automatically change the character's name in text boxes.
• While Youtube Poop as a whole reuses existing assets by definition, one of the longest-standing and most universal instances of something standing in for something else is Ludwig Von Koopa's castle hotel in Hotel Mario being used as the exterior of Hyrule Castle, due to the latter never being viewed from the outside in The Legend Of Zelda C Di Games, as well as the identical art style between Animation Magic's works making the transplanting seamless.

Western Animation

• In the Thomas & Friends episode "Percy Takes the Plunge", Bill and Ben take the place of the unnamed tank engines from the Other Railway in the original story, likely due to the impracticality and high cost of constructing several single-use engines. They aren't referred to by names, and Henry tells them that "this shed is for the Fat Controller's engines".

Real Life

• In the British Army, a "Helibedford", or "Bedicopter", is when a truck is used to stand in for a helicopter during training exercises, or when there aren't enough helicopters to transport troops.
• While generally discouraged for accessibility reasons, sometimes given Unicode characters are used to substitute for symbols that don't exist.
  • ≡^note U+2261 IDENTICAL TO and ☰^note U+2630 TRIGRAM FOR HEAVEN are used for the "hamburger menu" icon in web design.
  • ⊞^note U+229E SQUARED PLUS is used to represent the Windows key even in formal settings such as Wikipedia, because the Unicode Consortium has policies against implementing any trademarked symbols.
  • Cryptocurrency does not have its own symbols in Unicode with the sole exception of Bitcoin (₿), but is still in need of currency signs, so they have to improvise.
    • Before Bitcoin was given a dedicated codepoint in 2017, the symbol for the Thai Baht (฿) was used. This caused considerable confusion and controversy, especially from people in Thailand who still needed the symbol for their own currency.
    • Ethereum uses Ξ, the Greek letter Xi, as a stylized E.
    • Dogecoin uses Ð, the letter Eth, which is mostly antiquated except in languages such as Icelandic.
  • Before Emojis were introduced, facial expressions could generally only be represented by emoticons made out of text characters like :). Even today, more complicated ones like (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻^note U+0028 LEFT PARENTHESIS, U+256F BOX DRAWINGS LIGHT ARC UP AND LEFT, U+00B0 DEGREE SIGN, U+25A1 WHITE SQUARE, U+F3E5 PRESENTATION FORM FOR VERTICAL LEFT PARENTHESIS, U+253B BOX DRAWING HEAVY UP AND HORIZONTAL, U+2501 BOX DRAWINGS HEAVY HORIZONTAL, known as Kaomoji, are used to represent emotions that don't have corresponding emoji.
  • Emojis that superficially look similar to other things are used to imply other things frequently; 🍑 and 🍆 being two of the most frequent examples. This is so common that, when Apple attempted to Bowdlerize the former so that it could no longer be used for this purpose, there was enough of a backlash for it to be changed back.
  • In text communication where rich text formatting or markup aren't possible, glyphs from the Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols block (such as 𝗔𝘉𝘾^note U+1D5D4 MATHEMATICAL SANS-SERIF BOLD CAPITAL A, U+1D609 MATHEMATICAL SANS-SERIF BOLD CAPITAL B, U+1D63E MATHEMATICAL SANS-SERIF BOLD ITALIC CAPITAL C in lieu of A B C) are often used instead. Again, this is usually discouraged; the notes in this example are what text-to-speech readers will say, meaning visually impaired users will have to listen to it drone on and on, and they may not even appear correctly on all viewports.
• Similar to how Unicode is used above, the concept of homoglyphs has an extensive history and was often Exploited as a cost-cutting measure on typewriters and printing presses:
  • As far back as the 16th century, things were done such as "y" replacing the absent "þ", as þ was not used in languages where printing presses were made. This is one of the most major reasons — though not the only reason — that þ fell out of use and was ultimately removed from the English language.
  • On most early typewriters the number 1 — and sometimes 0 as well — was absent, expecting typists to use lowercase "l" and capital "O" in their places. The inverse of this practice, i.e. replacing the letters O and I with the digits 0 and 1, has occasionally occurred on display equipment mainly oriented towards numbers.
  • The ZX81 did not include an apostrophe in its character set; programs would use either the comma or the upper-right quadrant graphic (▝) as a substitute.
  • Electronic engineers have a very long tradition of substituting "u" for the less-available "µ" as an abbreviation for "micro." This dates back to the era of typewriters, when it was common practice to type the letter U and then pen in one or two extra strokes to correct it to µ.
  • Khyber Pass copy firearms have been known to use "И" or "Г" to substitute for "N" and "L", respectively due to the lack of punches bearing the proper letter.
• An ancient form of communication, the Polybius square, relied on this trope, making it Older Than Feudalism. Specifically, a grid of letters was laid out, and different torches were waved to represent the row and column of each letter, spelling out a message (for example, the code for "A" would be "1, 1"). A perfect square—such as 5x5—is ideal for this purpose, but the Latin alphabet contains 26 letters. It is thus common to signal two "U"s in a row for the letter "W", or "double U," to keep the grid intact. Another possibility is using the box for "I" to also represent "J," as the latter is a rarely-used letter that closely resembles the former.
• Most programming languages use "*" to denote the multiply operator rather than the more mathematically appropriate "×" symbol, since the former is part of the long-established ASCII standard and easier to type on most keyboards. This was codified by FORTRAN, whose earliest draft specification did use "×" for multiplication; the "*" character it adopted instead was already supported by IBM keypunches. (FORTRAN did require a few modifications to the limited character set that was then prevalent on card-oriented computing equipment, which is why a few old source code listings have "#" in place of "=".)
• Fallback fonts are generic, widely-installed fonts used to stand in for ones the user may not have. Usually, ones that look decently close to the webpage's selected font will be used, followed by more widely available but less-accurate ones.
  Marcin Wichary: The first font is the perfect scenario. Each further notch is a deeper fallback, and a bigger compromise. You can almost imagine each one coming with a more audible groan of the website's designer, ceding control from a perfectly manicured, often unique font meant to represent the brand or the emotion of the site, to increasingly more generic fonts—reliable, sure, but not that exciting.

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