Fountain of Expies, Mountain of Problems

Sure, but one voice in a sea of hats and examples won't do much. Multiple people need to say something if it's going to make a dent.

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

The amount of Practically Joker examples that boil to "charismatic man with a wicked sense of humor" I keep seeing really start to bother me. A lot of examples are not

• clowns
• crazy
• chaotic
• green/purple
• corrupters
• any of above

and retroactively try to find parallels with Batman's setting.

TroperWall / WikiMagic Cleanup

I completely agree. I think a major problem with it is that (in comparison to other Batman villains at least) The Joker has been interpreted a lot of different ways, so tropers feel that hitting one or two requirements is 'good enough'.

I feel like a good at-a-glance test to see whether an expy trope is being misused is to glance at sections that are likely to be extremely culturally disjoint from the inspiration to the point where expies are unlikely - eg. the anime / manga section for something from western comics, or the theater / literature section for something from anime. Of course there are a exceptions (there's western-inspired anime and western novels that are inspired by anime), but when examples get heavily bloated with culturally-disjoint works that aren't likely to be influenced by something released in another language on the other side of the planet, especially with older examples that are obviously a stretch, then that's a red flag.

The massive anime / manga section in Practically Joker in particular is eyebrow-raising and seems to be filled with random Monster Clown or Straw Nihilist characters who have no other similarities with the Joker aside from one of those two tropes and its natural implications. Just at a glance:

Light Yagami, really? Johan Liebert from Monster? Ridley from Metroid - the giant evil lizard? Even the My Hero Academia examples (one of the few Japanese shows where you might expect western comics to be an inspiration) seem like an extreme stretch.

I think the problem is that Practically Joker overlaps too closely with too many other tropes. Almost any Monster Clown is going to have a macabre sense of humor, dress in loud colors, be some degree of axe-crazy, and be bad For the Evulz. Likewise, most Straw Nihilist characters are going to hit at least a few points.

Edited by Aquillion on Jan 19th 2024 at 8:13:18 AM

The overlap is the issue with most expy tropes, in my experience. A lot of them are more like a collection of pre-existing concepts which occasionally overlap.

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

I feel like part of the issue is that Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker was very influential, with many characters that came out afterwards borrowing elements from that iteration of the character. To a lot of tropers, that's enough to declare a character an Expy.

I think we can keep obvious Joker examples as Expy but I'm not sure he warrants a Fountain of Expies page if it attracts this much misuse.

I do some cleanup and then I enjoy shows you probably think are cringe.

Weirdly, I haven't seen any White Mask of Doom characters get crosswicked to Practically Joker or vice versa, even though that was the first thing that came to my mind. So I'm kind of curious if fans are just associating characters' off-screen actions with the Joker as much as possible; with most other expy tropes there are just flimsy connections from the get-go but I've definitely seen color coordination overlap be one of the most common ones.

Well, yeah, but White Mask of Doom seems like it'd be a common shoehorn. Going from there to examples that amount to "character wears white makeup" is a big gap, mostly because that color of makeup in PJ examples is (usually) an immediate tip-off that the PJ in question is more than a little Ax-Crazy.

Edited by Coachpill on Jan 19th 2024 at 11:43:24 AM

Silver and gold, silver and gold

I mean, Joker wears makeup, so...

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

I think the problem is that people are good at recognizing patterns and similarities, and will even see them when they aren't there, but there isn't really a clear standard of how similar they have to be. Also, one bad example can inspire another.

Something that occurs to me when glancing over the Practically Joker description (which may be true for other similar pages for other characters) is that it doesn't say what an expy is - that is to say, it lacks the "unambiguously and deliberately" part from Expy. Nothing in its description actually says that the trope requires the character be unambiguously and deliberately based on the Joker, just that he "shares these similarities." That might explain the list of anime / manga characters where the chance that they were inspired by the Joker is negligible.

Possibly copying that bit from Expy into the subtropes could reduce misuse a bit. It's already implied by the fact that they reference expy, yes? It's just that most editors won't click through to Expy to see it.

That's a big oversight which needs to be added to the page.

I had a dog-themed avatar before it was cool.

The thing is, that warning hasn't prevented Expy from being misused. I think the bigger issue is that these tropes (Characters that are expies of other characters) aren't really tropeworthy to begin with.

Well, that and the fact that people are generally bad at determining what counts as a true expy.

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

Yeah, not including the "unambiguously and deliberately based on" bit opens the door for these tropes to be "kinda sorta looks like this character if you squint at/shoehorn them". Best case is that you might be looking at a larger archetype, but in the case of Practically Joker that would just be Monster Clown.

I think at least putting in the definition of Expy and really emphasizing that it is not just similar or inspired by characters, but essentially the same character in all but name, would give people a fair chance of getting it right.

Why was darth Vader clone deleted again?

1. He's iconic, but not archetypical, and many characters are black knights were linked to Vader despite not being close or deliberate enough. 2. We have May the Farce Be with You.

TroperWall / WikiMagic Cleanup