An expy is an unambiguous and deliberate copy of another, older character."
Note the word "another" and the words "unambiguous", "deliberate", and "copy". Those are the important words.
Here's your checklist:
- "Unambiguous": There is no doubt, there is no room for arguing that they aren't.
- "Deliberate": Done with intent.
- The resemblance is not accidental or coincidental. (For instance, being played by the same voice actor/actress is not sufficient to make an expy. Neither is a similar art style when they're both drawn by the same artist.)
- Word of God helps a lot with this point, but if the other points are present strongly enough, Word of God is not absolutely required.
- "Copy": A duplicate, an item made in imitation of another one.
- The expy came after the character they're an expy of. If they both were created at about the same time, it probably isn't an expy.
- The older character is never the expy, even if the other, later character is better known.
- Superficial traits (like a hairstyle, choice in clothing, preferred fighting method) are not sufficient to make an expy; the copy needs to also fill the same role in the work and serve the same purpose within the story.
- Major traits or characteristics being very different between the two characters is enough to make a character not an expy (for instance, the original is a demure Girl Next Door, the proposed Expy is a FemmeFatale — not an expy)
- "Another": One other. Note the singular. It doesn't say "several". If the proposed expy combines traits, characteristics, or features of two or more other characters, they are not an expy of any of them.
If an entry fails to meet even one of those criteria, it is not an expy and should be removed.. Actual expies are nowhere near as common as many editors think.
If you want to link to this post in your edit reason, please do.
Here's the link to copy and paste: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=13983140170A37263400&page=1#5
edited 27th Mar '15 6:53:01 AM by Madrugada
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It's as you said, "dude getting powers after being zapped" is pretty standard fare for comics superheroes/supervillains, and both characters are really nothing alike in terms of motivations. Now, if the Spot was characterized in the same way as Dr. Manhattan's disinterest in humanity we would be talking, but as it stands, this entry should be cut for shoehorning.
Also, one shouldn't put in spoiler tags the character that the expy is based on.
"They played us like a DAMN FIDDLE!" — Kazuhira Miller, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain
Sounds like the things that count are too different. Feel free to cut.
Reposting this since we're on a new page and still hasn't gotten a response.
Grabbed this example from Characters.Baldurs Gate III under Astarion's folder.
- Expy:
- Of Sebille, another callous elf who interrogates you at knife-point when you meet, wants out from under an abusive master's thumb, and eventually lightens up.
- Many players have also drawn parallels between him and Dragon Age's Zevran, another hedonistic, bisexual elven rogue who pulls a sort of quasi-Wounded Gazelle Gambit when you first meet.
- He has more than a few things in common with Fenris as well: Both are white-haired, bisexual Defrosting Ice King elves who spent some time as a psychopath's personal slave (Astarion for 200 years, Fenris from birth to... Twenty-something). It took a Deus ex Machina (arguably a Diabolus ex Machina) for both to escape, and even after joining the PC's party their masters send people to hunt them down. Neither likes to be coddled, especially over either their magical physical scarring (given to them by their masters) or their forgotten pre-enslavement life. They have similar senses of humor, and both their primary goals are to ensure that they never have to go back to being slaves.
Thoughts? The first two entries aren't nearly as fleshed out but, going by Rally's earlier comment, it sounds like you could swap Astarion with Fenris. And speaking of Dragon Age, here's a couple of problematic entries I found while poking around.
- The Baroness: Pretty clearly [an expy] of Countess Elizabeth Bathory, a Hungarian aristocrat who gruesomely murdered dozens of young women and was rumoured (though never proven) to have bathed in their blood to remain youthful. Since Elizabeth Bathory was a real person, doesn't this go under No Historical Figures Were Harmed?
- Oghren: Of Korgan Bloodaxe and Black Whirlwind. The missing relative, the drinking, the axes, The Casanova Wannabe traits and the general Blood Knight attitude... it all checks out. Even one of his battle quotes ("Let's see what your innards look like!") is taken almost word for word from a battle quote the former uses. Similar issue of multiple character expy claims. I don't know anything about either character so I couldn't say but maybe Korgan with the shared battle quote?
- Varric Tethras:
- Of Iolo FitzOwen from Ultima, the granddaddy of all Western RPGs: both men are professional storytellers (although Iolo is more musical, while Varric is more literary), both are the respective Featureless Protagonist's (the Avatar and Hawke) lifelong associates and confidantes, and both wield custom-built crossbows in combat.
- Fans of this series and A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones have made comparisons between him and Tyrion Lannister. Each is The Unfavorite: a scarred, intelligent, snarky but easygoing Breakout Character, the younger son of a noble house. Each is also a dwarf (the fantasy race for Varric, a person with dwarfism for Tyrion), each befriends a displaced hero/heroine, and each was exiled at some point. They both even go through an Arranged Marriage and a broken heart because of class differences.
- Of the garrulous crossbow-wielding gnome storyteller Jan Jansen from Bioware's own Baldur's Gate II. Jan tends to tell inane, annoying, blatantly untrue (but funny) stories while he plays up his Cloudcuckoolander tendencies, and he's at most a turnip merchant as opposed to the Tethras' mercantile empire, but unlike Varric he invented his own Automatic Crossbow and assorted other gadgets. It balances out. Sounds like too many differences.
The Astarion/Fenris angle is the only one that should be kept since it's a fleshed-out comparison.
For the Dragon Age entries, the Baroness's Expy mention should indeed be shifted to No Historical Figures Were Harmed, though it looks like the only key similarity is their vanity in preserving their youth through means involving blood (the Baroness with Blood Magic, Bathory through rumours of bathing in her victims' blood).
"They played us like a DAMN FIDDLE!" — Kazuhira Miller, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain
low-poly Shinri
Found these Characters.Deltarune Lightners
- Expy:
- While the parallel with Falco has been mentioned many times, Berdly is also reminiscent of Revali from Breath of the Wild: a blue bird with an affinity for wind attacks and who acts smugly towards the player character because he knows he's destined to be a helper instead of being The Hero.
- His personality is highly reminiscent of Eridan from Homestuck, which Toby Fox previously worked on — an egotistical nerd who is disliked by everyone, feels entitled to the company of his female Only Friend, Is Friends With Somebody Who Capitalizes Every Word She Speaks, uses a speargun-like weapon in battle, and teams up with the Big Bad in order to save himself. But unlike the pompous seadweller, Berdly never goes as far as to kill anyone and eventually makes a Heel–Face Turn.
The fact that there's two of examples already makes this trope mutt, but I feel like Berdley takes more from Falco than he does Revali (Whole Costume Reference aside). Would like more opinions though.
She/Her | Currently cleaning N/A
I wouldn't call Berdly an expy of either character, tbh. He definitely has the Whole Costume Reference to Falco and a superficially similar character arc to Revali, but he's still got quite a bit different from each individually.
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Probably.
Edited by badtothebaritone on Jun 5th 2023 at 12:29:20 PM
low-poly Shinri
If that's so, safe to delete?
She / Her
I think you can cut it.
~Dante Vin: Regarding the point you brought up on ATT
, while I personally can't participate in the discussion tab as it belongs to a part of the site I can't contribute to due to being suspended from editing, there is one certainty about the expy debate on Characters.Honkai Star Rail: regardless of what trope the editors will settle on, you all must elaborate on how the expies are related to the templates. I didn't think I had to put a reminder on How to Write an Example to avoid Zero-Context Examples, but here we are.
This, for example in Bronya Rand's trope list:
... is plain unacceptable and should be commented out. The average reader should not be forced to read a separate article detailing the character that the expy is based off from. If the entry cannot be fleshed out to stand on its own, then it has no value.
"They played us like a DAMN FIDDLE!" — Kazuhira Miller, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain
I see, I wasn't aware that suspended editors can't participate in Discussion tabs. For now, the Star Rail character discussion page itself isn't getting enough progress anyway (I think it's halted), like not enough tropers are participating in it to help and see if the tropes were being used correctly.
At least there were like 2 to 4 Honkai: Star Rail Expy examples that were in fact deleted correctly because it was deemed by several tropers (through valid edit reasons, this Expy Cleanup thread itself, and the game's TVT forum) that the editor(s) who originally added them were making associations with characters not even made by the same company, or that the similarities were extremely superficial or grasping at straws.
Yes, there is still currently a mess or confusion in the character pages of Star Rail when it comes to dealing with "template characters".
I'm not sure if the Expy Cleanup thread, the "Is this an example?" thread, the Wiki Talk, or TRS is the best place to ask or say this but, it looked like the Company Cross References trope itself is being used to substitute or "stealthily" add Expy examples in order for them to avoid getting caught in Expy clean-up threads like this. The pages of Honkai: Star Rail has this trend.
CMIIW but, a few weeks ago, different troper also brought up some Company Cross References examples in Tokyo Xanadu to have them checked in this Expy Cleanup Thread, and they were also deleted after citing this thread.
Does this mean that we can bring up suspicious Company Cross References examples here as well if they read like they were hiding Expy examples?
With Great Power, Comes Great Motivation
To my knowledge, Expy needs to be inspired by a character that's completely outside of the series/franchise, and and imo it should also be a series that the expy's creator had no input on; not sure how specific Expy's definition goes on that point, but if we go by my logic, then there are not supposed to be expies mentioning past miHoYo works because they are the ones that know their characters best.
For years, a similar point of contention happened (and is still happening) on FromSoftware's Dark Souls games and similar "Soulsborne" entries like Demon's Souls (Dark Souls predecessor and logically the template of Soulsborne games), Bloodborne, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice and Elden Ring. Back then, I thought I had solved the issue by getting rid of most Expy entries by swapping with Recurring Element, but looking back, it was more of a band-aid solution than anything.
I'm not familiar with Company Cross References' origin, and I'm not sure if it was made in response to Expy's restriction of "inspired by character from an older series". That said, on Characters.Honkai Star Rail, the Mythology Gag entries are mostly right where they belong since the game's story is a different continuity from Honkai Impact 3rd, and the Shout-Out page already covers some of the obvious superficial references.
Edited by AnoBakaDesu on Jun 7th 2023 at 9:09:05 AM
"They played us like a DAMN FIDDLE!" — Kazuhira Miller, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain
low-poly Shinri
Found another double expy entry, this time on Characters.Granblue Fantasy Humans A To E
- Expy:
- Her backstory and motivations very much mirror Utena on a superficial level.
- From a visual standpoint, her design evokes Sapphire from Princess Knight.
Excuse me but, isn't Star Rail, HI3 and Genshin all part of the same Imaginary Tree/Sea of Quanta multiverse canon? According to Warlike Cetaceous on this discussion thread, every Hoyoverse game aside from GGZ and ToT are part of the same continuity, so therefore Mythology Gag can't apply there.
HSR, HI3 and GI all take place in their own respective universes, so they are definitely not in the same continuity.
Wait, what? I thought those Hoyo games all had a canon continuity within the same multiverse.
In that case, ~Dante Vin, go with Mythology Gag for the Hoyo character references. You were actually right about your choice all along and things only got more confusing because people kept on misusing Expy and Company Cross References without realizing what those tropes are about. Not helped by the Imaginary Tree canon fan theory adding more confusing factors.
The thing with the Imaginary Tree is that it's a very real and recurring element linking the universes together, but that's usually on a scope level that's above what the games present us.
I think the understanding of continuity was blurred along the way here. I'll take Welt, for example: he's been part of the HI3 continuity up until the Alien Space comic's ending that has him step into another universe that would end up being HSR's; now, he's part of HSR's continuity, and HSR features characters that reference miHoYo staples like Bronya or Seele, but as with Guns GirlZ, don't act the exact same manner as their original counterparts.
Now, if miHoYo came forward with media that builds a story spanning multiple universes actually interacting with each other, that story would be the one with a common continuity, but at it stands, miHoYo games are largely disconnected from each other save for references to one another.
"They played us like a DAMN FIDDLE!" — Kazuhira Miller, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain
So the Imaginary Tree is just a dev meta linking point and not something that ties all Hoyo continuities together, and here I thought for the longest time that SR, HI3 and Genshin all had the same continuity (I saw Dvalin appearing in Otto's visions as definitive proof that Teyvat is connected to the HI3 continuity).
So with that in mind, I vote to move all Expy/CCR misuses on the SR character pages to Mythology Gag, now that the main confusion is cleared up.
Edited by VintageEmma on Jun 9th 2023 at 3:07:54 PM
K, since it's been a few days and Dante Vin never responded to my ping here, can I have permission to change all Expy entries on the Star Rail character pages to Mythology Gag? I've already outlined here based on Ano's post over why MG fits better than Expy.
I was about to suggest taking a look at Alternate Self, but ultimately decided against it since none of the HSR characters that resemble characters from previous miHoYo are 100% identical. Without further contesting, I think it's safe to move the Expy mentions into Mythology Gag.
And done. Thanks. I've also moved the Company Cross References entries too while I was at it.
Now a lurker. Thanks for everything. | he/him
I've been thinking this over for some time, and after a lot of debate in the Fountain of Expies Trope Talk discussion about whether or not Expy needs TRS to implement stricter standards (and I will cross-post to the Wick Check thread too), I think I'm finally going to start a wick check for it to eventually bring it in and hopefully implement those standards.
Problem is, I am probably not the right person to do that because I haven't really participated much in this cleanup, and I'd also have to check 164 wicks (of which I plan to do collaboratively).
Would any of the participants in this thread be willing to help with the check? And what categories should go into a hypothetical wick check? Or is the check even a good idea at all? (I was thinking it’d be like the Nightmare Fuel TRS thread, where the goal is just to establish standards for a cleanup.)
Edited by themayorofsimpleton on Jun 15th 2023 at 11:26:59 AM
TRS Queue | Works That Require Cleanup of Complaining | Troper WallI'm very sorry for the late reply!
I have been off-site or inactive recently on this wiki (let alone the Star Rail pages) for the past few days, so I wasn't able to participate in nor initiate the effort to move the examples back to Mythology Gag.
With Great Power, Comes Great Motivation
Can I remove the following from the Corrupted Character Copy page for being Expy misuse:
Full disclosure: I have removed Adam from the page previously and removed him this time before realising; so I added him back to the page and came here. The previous example claimed he was a CCC of the Beast, while this entry claims he's both the Beast and Gaston. Given that this entry is trying to claim Adam is based on two characters, and the pinned post in this thread states that multiple characters is automatic misuse of Expy, I went ahead and removed it before checking the page history. Word of God and supplementary material have confirmed that he's inspired by the Beast, but that they wanted fans to take a step back and wonder if he's Gaston, and then take a further step back and wonder if he's actually the cursed rose because he's a blight on everyone's lives. The fandom places a lot of emphasis on comparing him to Gaston, or both Gaston and the Beast, but forget what the creators said about the Beast/Gaston/Cursed Rose layers to the character.
The creators have also made it clear multiple times that no-one should expect characters that have been inspired by other characters to be exactly that character or to have the same story as that character. So, he's a full-blown terrorist who may have started off as a sweet kid until he was branded like cattle by abusive employers. Ever since then he's spiralled into a terrorist who wants to enslave humanity to the "superior" Faunus race. So, he went full-blown Nazi, made the White Fang more extremist than even its leader was willing to tolerate (so he killed her for Klingon Promotion), and he's a domestic abuser towards his ex-girlfriend Blake, whom he stalks and eventually tries to kill because he can't control her. That's not a CCC of either the Beast or Gaston, and it is the reason why they threw in the wilting rose comparison (and the wilting rose is his personal symbol). It's too many elements to be an Expy.
Alyx is a first time addition, so hasn't been removed by anyone in the past. She's really complicated. She's definitely inspired by Alice, in a storyline that's based on the Alice novels, but the entry that's written here doesn't take into account the truth, which is revealed at the end of the volume. The tale that the characters know and are constantly comparing their experience and the real Alyx to was a lie from the beginning, written by her brother to be the story he wished had happened, instead of the story that actually happened. He did that because his sister decided to atone for her behaviour in the Ever After instead of returning home; because she had promised to take a different character home with her, reneging on that promise led to her being murdered before she could atone. So, the character Team RWBY thinks they know never really existed, and Jaune's understanding of what really happened turns out to be inaccurate. As a result, it's actually hard for us to be certain exactly how similar or Expy-like Alyx is intended to be, and we may need creator guidance for this.
- RWBY:
- Adam Taurus is an Expy of Prince Adam, the titular Beast from Beauty and the Beast. Like the Beast, Adam is in a relationship with Blake Belladonna, who serves as his Belle by being a Badass Bookworm, and he's the head of the White Fang, a rebellion group of Faunus who've been wronged by humanity, akin to the Beast's servants being cursed alongside him. Unlike the Beast, however, Adam is a complete terrorist who not only sees his troops as expendable, instead of how the Beast cared for his servants, but he views Blake as little more than an item who he feels he's entitled to have, much like how Gaston acts.
- Volume 9 introduces Alyx, an Expy of Alice, who wrote her own adaptation of her adventure in the Ever After. Though In-Universe, her character is marked with Alternative Character Interpretation, with Yang seeing her as a mean girl that lied and cheated to reach her goals while Weiss sees her as someone that did what it took to get back home. It's then revealed by an older Jaune, AKA the Rusted Knight that Alyx was much worse. The real Alyx was selfish and uncaring towards others, even her own brother Lewis. And after the visit with the Herbalist (who attempts to "fix" people of their conditions), she became far more paranoid and ruthless, poisoning Jaune and doing whatever it takes to get home. Jaune even suspects that Alyx sacrificed Lewis so she can get back to Remnant, while ommitting his existence when she wrote her own accounts of her adventure.
Edited by Wyldchyld on Jun 29th 2023 at 1:41:56 PM
If my post doesn't mention a giant flying sperm whale with oversized teeth and lionfish fins for flippers, it just isn't worth reading.
Wondering if any progress has been made on attempting to create a trope for when creators deliberately homage previous works with a new character, especially if the character mixes influences from more than one?
If not I can try to set one up on TLP, although it would be very rough.
Edited by AlleyOop on Jul 8th 2023 at 2:36:03 AM
I didn't realise that was going to be a thing. What would the difference between that and Shout-Out be?
Any feedback on my query above?
If my post doesn't mention a giant flying sperm whale with oversized teeth and lionfish fins for flippers, it just isn't worth reading.
I saw this on the character page for Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse concerning the Spot:
First off, I don't think an example should spoiler the other character that a character is an expy of, right?
But also, I feel like "scientist (or anyone else) getting powers after being zapped" by energy/radiation is a pretty standard comic book origin for superheroes and super-villains.
Also, while there are some similarities in the specifics of their transformations, the characters are pretty different. Besides big differences in personalities and backgrounds (i.e. the fact that the Spot started out as a Punchclock Villain), they have completely different powersets. Like I don't dispute that the Spot has "godlike" powers in the scale of destruction he could cause, but Manhattan has outright omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence.
Edited by Hodor2 on Jun 2nd 2023 at 12:36:20 PM