Well that's another issue with Expy and its subtropes: Fan Myopia. How many examples of "a Rei" or "a Char" are legitimate and how many are just fans making connections that don't exist? Hell, is "blonde masked rival" unique enough of a description that we must assume the character was derived from Char?

That's the thing though. Calling a character "a Char" doesn't mean you're saying they're based on Char, only that they fit his archetype. The reason the page was named "Char Clone" wasn't because that's the term most commonly used by fans,^note And I mean it, the specific phrasing of "a Char" is a meme in its own right, so Char fans go out of their way to use it it's because names like "The Char" are against TV Tropes policy (enacted because no one could figure out that "The Mario" meant "the guy with even stats"). The same goes for Vader.

Calling a character "an Adonis" doesn't mean you think they're a reference to Greek myth, it just means they're handsome. But calling them an "Adonis Clone" would imply a lot more than that.

(and I'm not saying "blond masked rival" is the entirety of the archetype, I just didn't want to derail by posting the entire trope description)

Edited by Prime32 on Dec 15th 2021 at 12:50:20 PM

The thing about archetypes is that they have to have a consistent set of traits between them. To be an Expy, one character just has to copy another and there are a lot of ways to do this. Sure there might be some commonalities between most of the examples, but there can also be a lot of variety. The wick check for Darth Vader Clone showed this. The examples were split between ones that copied the appearance and those that copied the character/story role.

Edited by RustBeard on Dec 15th 2021 at 7:15:42 AM

I'm very much in favour of the disambiguation idea that's been put forward. May the Farce Be with You, Expy itself, Black Knight, and It's Personal with the Dragon are what I would disambiguate it between.

Honestly I think that distinction in the Wick Check has been exaggerated and isn't really there. The Legends of Tomorrow, Mega Man X, Hegemony, Demon of the Lute, Chernobylite, and I Went To Another World But Got Sent Back With My Party examples are all listed under the "Appearance" section despite mentioning their example is a Fallen Hero or relative of a major character. Similarly, the Archetype entries from A Plague Tale: Innocence, Jade Empire, Shining Force, Sky High, Tangled: The Series, Wild Arms 1, The End of Ends, Captain Power, and Chris Colorado all mention the ways the character in question resemble Vader whether it be with all-black clothing, voice-obscuring masks, dark armor, a flowing cape, or red weaponry.

It mostly just reads like certain Tropers wrote in more detail on the aspects of the trope that interested them, not that there are two distinct tropes here. I think the issue is over-stated and the page should largely stay as it is.

Agreed. A much better method of sorting would be "Checklist examples" that just list off traits, and other examples that, well... put those traits into context? I'm not sure how to phrase it, really. "Giving the strong, intentional impression of Darth Vader," I guess.

To be fair, that point about the wick check... is totally valid.

When I was separating the examples, I came across a lot of ones that went either way. So I tried to sort them based on what the example emphasized most. If it talked more about personality and action or if it talked more about appearance. In the end I feel the sorting still makes sense, but the experiment was more just to see what the people using DVC cared about... and since the examples themselves were a mixed bag in how they were written, that still told me a lot. But that check was never made with a TRS thread like this in mind, and had I know this would be going to TRS one day I probably would've done the sorting differently.

Edited by WarJay77 on Dec 22nd 2021 at 2:32:51 PM

On the subject of Fountain of Expies subtropes, I've been going through the Morgue lately out of boredom and I found this thread from ten years ago questioning whether Char Clone is even a real trope, so debates over Fountain of Expies subtropes' tropeworthiness are apparently nothing new.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Dec 22nd 2021 at 3:44:32 AM

Both Expy and Fountain of Expies have had problems for a long time. They're both tropes that attract a lot of Fan Myopia and shoehorning.

That may be true, but I’m not sure this trope has those issues. Vader is well-known enough that imitations of him are very popular and self-evident, with clear parodies like Zerg and Darth Helmet alongside more serious imitators like Royal Pain, Final Fantasy’s Golbez, and Kylo Ren. The fact that there are even lampshades and subversions of this trend (especially notable with Kylo) make it seem even more like a real trope.

Except that's not true at all. Vader is famous, yes, but his design is based on several other pre-existing trope concepts.

Royal Pain's only similarity with Darth Vader is that she wears a suit of armor that distorts her voice. I would consider that an example of a shoehorn.

Okay, I had to cut my post short to go eat dinner, so I'll explain my actual thoughts in more detail now.

Darth Vader is a character made up of several archetypes. Characters who follow his mold also use those archetypes. Characters who came before him also use those archetypes. They're pre-existing tropes. While yes, Vader has copies of himself in the Star Wars franchise and several parodies, as an actual expy trope, er... it's a lot more unclear. As mentioned above, Royal Pain is only superficially similar in her appearance; otherwise she's entirely different.

And tbh, let's be real, a character who has a lot of in-universe clones and imitators isn't the same as being an expy spawner. Tigerstar from Warrior Cats has so many clones it's become a fandom meme, but Tigerstar is just a racist tyrant with a few parallels to Hitler, and to point at a character in a different work and call him a Tigerstar expy would be completely false no matter how similar the character is to him. Now obviously Tigerstar isn't as famous as Vader, but my point is, a work repeating archetypes and appearances isn't the same as an expy.

I have no doubt that there are examples of people copying Darth Vader outside of Star Wars. The issue is how to determine if these examples are deliberate or not. Too many Expy examples are written to emphasize the similarities between the characters and not authorial intent.

Yeah, unless it's a blatant parody, it's impossible to really know if someone was based on Vader or if they just used similar character tropes.

Vader himself is a case of Older Than They Think, since he's basically a typical fairytale "dark Magic Knight as an Evil Counterpart to a farmer boy" in a samurai armor with a motherboard glued in the chest, IN SPACE!. I'd be interested in hearing from somone old enough if he was even a Trope Codifier or there were similar stories back then.

Vader himself was originally imagined as just a literal Space Samurai with a "Hello! My Name Is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to Die." trope. Which was extremely common in like old Japanese stories which Star Wars was based on. Only later did the 'I am your father' get attached.

As for clones... unlike the Japanese with their Char Clone s and Shana Clone s, I think most western works just hide it better by making things bit more complex. Tropes and trends are almost everything for characters in Japanese works.

Edited by Memers on Dec 29th 2021 at 5:51:50 AM

Vader's famous helmet is based heavily on the samurai kabuto (no, not the Pokémon of the same name), making it clear that Lucas originally envisioned Star Wars to be a Japanese historical drama IN SPACE!.

I'd argue Vader's still the Trope Codifier, at least in western fiction.

The trope codifier of what trope, though? If you're saying that he's the codifier of Darth Vader Clone, it's questionable if DVC is even a trope that exists at all, or if it's just pareidolia combined with obvious Shout-Out examples and parodies.

The reason I call it pareidolia in this case is that it's way too easy for fans to go in with Fan Myopia and say of course these characters are based on Vader, he's famous and came first, even if that wasn't the author's intent at all. It's too easy to pick certain characters and squeeze them into a trope like this whether they're actually meant to be expies or not. It's people creating a pattern, a trope, out of coincidences, or falsely assuming that a specific character archetype started with the most famous example of that archetype (in this case, Vader).

We need evidence that these things are even based on him, let alone that he codified any sort of trope and isn't just parodied and referenced a lot.

The thing is George Lucas drew inspiration from a lot of sources when creating Star Wars. He took from Samurai films, Westerns, War films, and Space Operas. If you think about it, Darth Vader is a combination of a Samurai, Space Wizard, and Nazi fighter pilot. There's no single archetype that he embodies.

Considering how long this discussion regarding the definition and tropworthiness has gone on, does this need to be moved to Trope Talk like Hate Sink?

I think there's a bigger issue here with Expy being a trope that's severely misused and this bleeds down into its subtropes. That's why I suggested on the other thread that we do a TRS for Expy before tackling DVC.

I think the issue of Expy is actually a different problem entirely. That one suffers from people shoehorning any character that might be similar to another character, but the actual definition is clear and does have valid examples.

The issue with DVC is that it might not be a trope at all, or at least, it might not a correctly identified one. It has more to do with Fan Myopia and a blend of obvious Vader parodies/knockoffs with characters who might be inspired by him but also might not be.

I don't know if closing this thread will do much since this issue had already been discussed in depth at the Shana Clone thread. It's really just a matter of figuring out a crowner at this point; I don't know how many new points there are to make.

Edited by WarJay77 on Dec 31st 2021 at 1:31:07 PM

The crowner has been brought up a few times. To recap again:

• Leave as is
• Regulate which specific points from the Darth Vader Clone page must apply
• Cut
• Disambig between other tropes (May the Farce Be with You, Black Knight, It's Personal with the Dragon, maybe more)
• Limiting to only confirmed Vader inspirations
• Let TLP come up with specific tropes ("Evil Wears Black + Rage Helm + Tin Tyrant" and "Fallen Hero + Enigmatic Minion + Connected All Along") to move examples to and see if they fail or not.