Fountain of Expies, Mountain of Problems

Saw this new draft for Minecraft Parody and not going to lie, I feel like we're replacing one issue with another with the recent rise of "parody" drafts. They're admittedly more conceptually grounded than expies since there's a distinct intention in the reproduction which means such examples are often (but not always) much more blatant, avoiding some of the shoehorning that expy tropes suffer.

That said, I feel like we're on the cusp of having a slew of "[blank] parody" tropes that are nearly identical except for the subject matter.

I've been meaning to start a separate thread for "Stock Parodies or Stock Shout-Outs that should really be just Referenced by... subpages" for a while but haven't had the patience to weed through the indexes for potential candidates.

IMO, parodying a specific scene (like "Basic Instinct" Legs-Crossing Parody) is probably fine, especially with enough examples. But "every kind of parody ranging from logo riff to Whole-Plot Reference" is just plain old Shout-Out and should go on Referenced by....

Edited by Synchronicity on May 24th 2022 at 5:58:48 AM

The problem might stem from how Referenced by..., despite being on the site for many years, is still not known by every troper (hell I didn't know about it until fairly recently) in the way, say, Shout-Out is. I remember being excited by "[X] Parody" tropes because I so rarely saw that kind of analysis of pop-culture references in media... until I found Referenced By..., and all those proposed tropes now seem redundant.

I don't mind the parodies personally, they feel like actual tropes to me where expy tropes are just pareidolia half of the time and fan myopia the other half of the time. At least parodies are intended to be there, and if you do the parody in a similar way enough times, I do think it becomes a Shout-Out subtrope.

I don't mind parodies in theory. In practice, a lot of them miss the whole "intended to make light of / exaggerate for comedic effect" either in the definition themselves, or in the curation of examples.

For example, there's this example on the Minecraft draft:

• Roys Bedoys: The Bedoys brothers are commonly seen playing a video game like Minecraft called Blockcraft which involves building things with a crafting table and making buildings.

^that doesn't really discuss how anything is being exaggerated for comedy. it's just saying that an "everything but the name" version of the game exists in universe. Which to me feels like Writing Around Trademarks or Bland-Name Product. And when it's about a specific character, then Lawyer-Friendly Cameo and Captain Ersatz seem like they'd suffice for everything that Referenced by... doesn't.

Yeah, that's definitely more of a Writing Around Trademarks thing. When I think parody tropes I think of things like Phonýmon.

Phonýmon has creative appeal because the parodies get to make up their own mon designs which usually parody specific types of Pokémon like Pikachu, Meowth, Jigglypuff, and Charmander. Minecraft parodies don't seem to be as transformative or noteworthy.

Update: Fauxba Fett Wick Check is done (by everyone other than me). I've drafted an OP in the TRS Queue—how does it look?

This long thread suffers from overuse of jargon, and a lot of repetitive arguments. The main issue with the entire concept of expies is the following: Two or more characters happen to share thematic or stylistic similarities. They are not identical, but there is an assumption that one inspired the other. That assumption is not backed by sources, and nothing confirms whether these similarities were intentional or coincidental.

To be honest, it reminds me of accusations of plagiarism. Sometimes creators are directly accused of copying fictional elements from older works which they may have not even have heard of. Some of the similarities derive from common influences underlying more than one work. Others seem to be the development of near-identical ideas by people who had no direct interaction with each other. Fact-finding is not always easy, and accusations should be avoided if they can not be supported by evidence.

Don't forget about the uncanny releases of Dennis the Menace (UK) and Dennis the Menace (US), neither of which are related aside from the name.

We can use that as an example of coincidence.

Edited by Nen_desharu on Jun 21st 2022 at 10:33:40 AM

taken the words right out of my mouth, i really dislike the expy trope for those reasons. it implies that inspiration is plagiarism, and for a website about encouraging others to write creatively, this trope sends the wrong idea. ive even seen examples where people say an older character is a ripoff of a new character, its ridiculous

I've never seen anyone use Expy to accuse another work of plagiarism. If anything, the trope has a gushing problem with people using it to imply that their favorite work was influential.

I guess the question is, is are Fountain of Expies subtropes really tropeworthy? To me, the only way a Fountain of Expies subtrope would be tropeworthy would be if the characters all have a consistent set of traits. But at that point it becomes an archetype. What makes it tropeworthy is the traits and not the fact that they were all inspired by the same character.

This is why I wish the Expy cleanup thread had more traction. It has over 25K wicks, so I understand it's a massive undertaking, but just letting it fester isn't making the problem any better. Kinda jealous of the CM thread for being so dedicated. :P

It's especially difficult cleaning because I'm not familiar with a lot of works here, so I can't ever really determine whether something is an expy unless it's got WOG backing it up, or I'm familiar with the works.

TBH, Expy is just one of those tropes I'm more likely to clean silently than take to the cleanup thread. Most things are just ZCE or blatant shoehorns and don't really need to be discussed.

Alright so Fauxba Fett has now been disambiguated. Are there any other Fountain of Expies subtropes that might be problematic/may need TRS visits?

Added link to May the Farce Be with You for Fauxba Fett

There might actually be a viable trope in Doc Savage expies: This might just be Fan Myopia, but expies for him seem clearer and more obvious other Expy tropes:

• Doc Savage. Key points of a Doc expy are being a Proto-Superhero who is the pinnacle of human achievement (possibly due to some kind of parental experimentation), either appearing in Two-Fisted Tales or "the pulp era" of a superhero pastiche universe, and often actually being named Doc or having a nickname reflecting Savage's "Man of Bronze" tag, or both. They include Tom Strong, Doc Sidhe, Doc Brass from Planetary, Doc Prophet (the Man of Marble) from Freedom City, Doc Aeon from Halt Evil Doer!, Mr Misnomer (the Man of Chrome) from Bernice Summerfield, Doc Thunder from Pax Britannia, Doc Bronze from the works of Kim Newman, and Doc Wilde.

This doesn't even include Philip José Farmer's Doc Caliban, who essentially is Doc in all but name.

My position is, tropes that are just "expies/knockoffs of X" aren't really tropeworthy, and "parodies of character X" aren't really any more tropeworthy, especially since in practice there's little to no distinction between the two and each kind of "trope" tends to cover both (which is why I think any problems with Expy are orthogonal to problems with these tropes). (Whole Plot References are another matter, if only because of long-standing wiki precedent, though there's a difference between something like Yet Another Christmas Carol or It's a Wonderful Plot, which are typically used to say something about an existing character or advance their Character Development, and Off to See the Wizard or Charlie and the Chocolate Parody that's just plugging characters into an existing work.) Characters that are modeled after a particular character, but are still characters in their own right, can work, but characters that are explicitly just stand-ins for this other character is just The Same But More Specific of Expy, Stock Parodies, and their related tropes. This applies no matter how many such stand-ins there are or how popular or widespread the source work is. Yeah, you can argue that you need to understand the work you're parodying, homaging, or ripping off, but in practice all these tropes just come off the same.

We have a lot of "tropes" that might as well just be pages in a ParodiesOf/ or ExpiesOf/ namespace associated with the work being parodied/copied (and maybe in retrospect that would have been the better course of action, if we don't just merge them with the Referenced by... pages). Many of them are very uncreatively named, picking a synonym for "not the original" that happens to be alliterative or rhyme with or pun off of the character's or work's name (or in the case of HULK MASH!-Up, their catchphrase), and if one can't be found defaulting to a more prosaic word like "parody", even if it doesn't make sense for what the "trope" actually covers. (In the case of HULK MASH!-Up, it's supposed to be about references to a particular character, not a "mash-up" of multiple ones, so it arguably makes even less sense than most.) Notably, this includes a lot of pages that are, in fact, based on popular, influential, omnipresent, Trope Overdosed works. Doctor Who is one of the two most Trope Overdosed work pages on the wiki, yet I still don't like Doctor Whomage.

Even these tropes, though, could potentially hold the seed of a larger archetype codified by the base character or work. For example, HULK MASH!-Up could conceivably be expanded/refined/split into the concept of the Monster Superhero, though we'd need to figure out what separates it from Horrifying Hero and it's likely to end up being broad enough that we'd have to consider the Thing a co-Trope Codifer. A case could be made that is similarly identifying an archetype codified by Doc Savage but which can be defined separately from him.

Something that occurred to me reading the second page and all the discussion about Shana Clone and Char Clone: TV Tropes works best when a trope has a firm yet relatively simple definition where someone from any background can look at any character or situation and determine where they fit the trope. Tropes that are "you know it when you see it", such as character archetypes defined with reference to a particular character, don't work well in this format because they have to be defined in a way that people who aren't familiar with the trope, or in this case the originating character, can think they have a grasp on it, but that can lead them to introduce examples that don't capture all the nuances of the trope.

(Besides the problems with tropes based off of anime characters, which run into the additional problem that non-weebs don't even have the cultural context necessary to truly grasp the trope, this is why TV Tropes' history is littered with tropes that were basically "something like this character" that took a while to even get any real definition at all, like The Snark Knight originally being "The Daria", or in some cases never had a firm definition, like the recently-disambiguated Extraordinarily Empowered Girl.)

While I do agree that "Stock Parody or Expy of X" are The Same, but More Specific to, well, Stock Parody and Expy, I do wonder if there's a precedent to hard-split the page(s) into its own thing if there's enough of examples of one particular source of Parody/Expy, if just to keep the parent trope from getting bloated. Case in point, iPhony, Fauxrrari and Faux Furby are basically brand-specific subtropes to Bland-Name Product but apparently warrant their own independent pages.

Edited by Adept on Jul 11th 2022 at 2:50:03 AM

Something that reads TSBMS for a broad supertrope can be a subtrope with enough examples and some interesting RL backdrop (Stock "Yuck!" has them too.)

The problem is that people are horrible at identifying Expy. So instead of nice subtropes where people go “hah that phone has a pineapple” or “wow people sure hate haggis” you get bad pages full of “maaayyybe this character is a reference to that other character?”

I’d rather keep the mess confined to less pages than more in this case.

Edited by Synchronicity on Jul 10th 2022 at 7:42:34 AM

I think what we need to do then is identify the legitimate tropes from the bad ones here. We've already taken care of Darth Vader Clone and Fauxba Fett—are there any other bad Expy subtropes that can go?

i genuinely think most of the ones that are character/people based. Product-based ones are easy because more often than not, it's a gag. The fact that its a knock off is supposed to be kinda cheeky.

Most of the character/people based ones are filled with speculation from what I've seen unless it's a parody, since, once again, its a joke and for people to get the joke, you need to make the reference fairly obvious

Edited by amathieu13 on Jul 10th 2022 at 1:23:31 PM

People get more attached to characters than to products, and characters can also exhibit a more nuanced range of traits than an inanimate object, so people are more inclined to seek out superficial similarities for Expy subtropes than for Bland-Name Product subtropes.

i think Bland-Name Product is also easier to identify because, generally, examples of that involve directly taking a real product and changing its name to avoid legal issues. you can easily identify a real-life car or phone by its objective features when it's made into a bland-name product.

by contrast, a character has a lot of subjective attributes that make them who they are beyond their objective appearance and personality, so even something that seems like a clear-cut expy to one person might not have any resemblance at all to another. i feel like the fountain of expies subtropes are so surface level because it avoids the issue of having to argue for a true expy, when you can just say "this character superficially resembles this other character" and leave it at that.

i agree with the earlier point about most Whole-Plot Reference sub-tropes still being tropable because it says more about the characters within them than just being a superficial reference, and to add onto that, archetypes defined by a particular example (such as Adventurer Archaeologist and Stock Shōnen Hero) are much more tropeworthy because they're usually used as the basis to create a new character and story rather than directly copying a previous one.

Edited by NoUsername on Jul 10th 2022 at 2:43:11 AM

So I might be in the minority based on the hat count, but I've raised questions about this draft being basically another Fountain of Expies / Stock Parody type of trope (works that resemble Tom and Jerry) that could be expanded into a genre page that was codified by the work as to be less limiting.