Expies

I would say when the reader stops thinking, "That sounds like So-and-so," and instead thinks, "Hey, this character is So-and-so." The problem you'll have is that readers will not all reach that point at the same time and/or in the same way. (And I think the reason no one's answered you until now is that there is no hard-and-fast answer.)

What's an 'expie'?

mirandashell said:

What's an 'expie'?

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A pie that used to be a pie but is no long a pie. An "ex-pie". Haha. xD

*ahem* Sorry. That was the first thing I thought of when I saw that word. I'm weird.

Being serious now, I think the OP may be referring to this: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Expy

I'm just as weird cos that was my first thought!

About <----------> this much.

How would that possibly be quantifiable?

NoirSuede said:

Generally when making a new character, how much can i base him off of an existing character before it stops being a shout-out and goes into plagiarism territory ?

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Do you want the character to be recognizable? I think you need to give us more info, here.

A shout-out is when you briefly reference a well-known character. The audience is supposed to recognize the character.

NoirSuede said:

Generally when making a new character, how much can i base him off of an existing character before it stops being a shout-out and goes into plagiarism territory ?

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If what you're basing your character on is a defining characteristic of the first character...then steer away. For example, my writing a character with brown, messy hair, green eyes, glasses, lanky limbs, and magical powers would call out....

(hopefully you guys thought Harry Potter)

Whereas using the motives or gist of a character in the development of another is completely different. There can be more strong female leads than just Katniss Everdeen. There can be more plucky little heroes with golden hearts than Sam Gamgee. Etc.

Do you mean like, how far before I can be sued for copyright infringement? Or, how far before the readers accuse me of ripping off [insert book here]?

For the first, I am not a lawyer so I can't really help there.

For the second, readers will do whatever they feel like, so there's no good in worrying too much about that. On the other hand, if it's making it hard to write because you keep thinking "This character is just like So-and-so," you might as well change it. Whatever works.

Slightly off-topic, but I don't think "plagiarism" is the right word for this. Plagiarism is when you try to represent someone else's words as your own. That's different than including their character.

I'm not sure what would be the right term. Might this be trademark infringement?

jjdebenedictis said:

Slightly off-topic, but I don't think "plagiarism" is the right word for this. Plagiarism is when you try to represent someone else's words as your own. That's different than including their character.

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I thought the same thing. I don't think it's plagiarism, exactly.

I think it's just ripping a character off? (Not trying to be rude about it. There's instances where using an expy is okay, and there's ways to do it well.)

I read the TV tropes pages, but I'm still scratching my head.

You mean like an archetypical or trope-y character? Or a derivative or satire type of character? Or a character that has some tropes in a story that lampshades or subverts some of the well-know tropes of the character (or the character's story)?

An obvious example is how Gregory House is Sherlock Holmes and Wilson is Watson.

This is one of those things where if it's done well, it's fine. If it's not, then it's not.

kuwisdelu said:

An obvious example is how Gregory House is Sherlock Holmes and Wilson is Watson.

This is one of those things where if it's done well, it's fine. If it's not, then it's not.

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Ha well I never realized that until now....

bunny-gypsy said:

I read the TV tropes pages, but I'm still scratching my head.

You mean like an archetypical or trope-y character? Or a derivative or satire type of character? Or a character that has some tropes in a story that lampshades or subverts some of the well-know tropes of the character (or the character's story)?

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According to the Tropes page, I believe it's a character from another series (by the same writer) who is parachuted into the new series. An example would be Lobsang in The Long Earth, by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter, who is obviously an alternate-universe version of the Lobsang character who appears in Terry Pratchett's Diskworld series.

However, the way the OP is using the term, I wonder if they mean a character from someone else's books who has had their serial numbers filed off. For example, I remember reading about an author who gave Peter Davidson's iteration of Dr Who a cameo in one of her books. He wasn't named, but he was described accurately, and he behaved in a very Doctor-esque fashion while he was on the page. Someone familiar with the character would probably get a chuckle out of it, but the author didn't carry over so much that she couldn't have claimed coincidental similarity if anyone's lawyers came knocking.

And I'm wondering if the OP is asking where that line is. Where does it stop being an homage and start being a rip-off of another person's intellectual property?

An expy is when you take a character, change the name, and then use them in a new story. It doesn't matter who the character belongs to.

For example: Fifty Shades of Grey was originally Twilight fanfiction. Christian Grey is an expy for Edward Cullen. Anastasia Steele is an expy for Bella Swan. They are essentially the same characters -- same backstory, same family, same appearance, same personality, same mannerisms -- but the names have been changed.

Generally, an expy is supposed to be recognizable. It's done deliberately.

Some narrowly focused examples: from Tanith's Lee's character Azhrarn in her 'Flat Earth' series, Will Shetterly got a similarly named character in (I think) Cats Have No Lord. N. K. Jemisin took the same inspiration for one of her enslaved deities in her 'Inheritance' trilogy. I borrowed the same guy, with just as obvious a shout-out, for a historical character in my books. (But only total dweeby Lee fans would know to look past the red herring.) It's an homage.

Now, if I were to copy large sections of the 'Flat Earth' books plot for plot and line by line, that would be plagiarism.

jjdebenedictis said:

However, the way the OP is using the term, I wonder if they mean a character from someone else's books who has had their serial numbers filed off. For example, I remember reading about an author who gave Peter Davidson's iteration of Dr Who a cameo in one of her books. He wasn't named, but he was described accurately, and he behaved in a very Doctor-esque fashion while he was on the page. Someone familiar with the character would probably get a chuckle out of it, but the author didn't carry over so much that she couldn't have claimed coincidental similarity if anyone's lawyers came knocking.

And I'm wondering if the OP is asking where that line is. Where does it stop being an homage and start being a rip-off of another person's intellectual property?

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Slartibartfast in Life, The Universe, and Everything is The Doctor. The story was written as a Doctor Who script and got repurposed, I think because the BBC didn't go for it. The krikkiters are likely Cybermen. In this case it's practical--the storyline works so you shave off the serial numbers and put the Doctor-y archetypes into the Hitchhiker's world. They're (un)surprisingly nicely compatible.

Tali in Mass Effect is an expy of Kahlee from Firefly to the point that if they were played/voiced by the same actress they would be essentially the same character. The whole Mass Effect series is a sequence of shout-outs to various slightly-dated sci-fi, so it's used there as a kind of tribute and extension. It's pretty common in SF to take an idea and "extend" it by twisting characters or events in different hypothetical ways.

You can go pretty far with it. It's not plagiarism at any point because plagiarism is stealing words. Characters are ideas, although their specific names might be trademarked. What you may stray into is rip-off territory, but that's going to depend a lot on how well you execute the character. Tali and Kahlee share extremely similar roles and personalities down to some fairly specific traits and tropes, but they're used pretty differently in the overall narratives.

ETA: cross-posted with Filigree, but homage is a perfect word for it.

Heh. Between 1977 and 1983 my school buddies and I (who were all hopeless dweebs) amused ourselves by tracking down as many of George Lucas' Star Wars SFF and fantasy 'inspirations' as possible. Great Googly, there were a lot more than we'd realized, during those first dazzled viewings in August of 1977. Theft? Homage? Inspiration? We really couldn't tell, except that as time went by, we realized Lucas probably didn't know, himself.

Great artists steal.

Well, let's take Star Wars. The main character is a farm boy who wants to have adventures and see the universe, loses his family, and discovers he has great skills which he puts to fighting evil.

The thing is, this can describe a lot of characters. To make people say "That's Luke Skywalker!" you need two things - a very close similarity of personality, and very similar plot development, because those both contribute to making Luke what he is.

If you take away the scifi and put Luke in a modern high school, he'd likely be unrecognizable. He's not doing Luke things, even if he's complaining about his boring life and being sent on errands by his aunt and uncle. In fact, now I write that, he sounds much more like other non-scifi teen heroes. Much of Luke's personality is generic teenager. It's what he does that makes him exceptional.

So, if your character has a strong personal resemblance to a specific character, *and* they go through the same plot arc, you'll have an issue. If I take "whiny farmboy who looks for adventure" and put him through a very different plot, I think few people would see it as more than a general trope that teens often feel their lives are boring, and some of them have unexpected capabilities when faced with danger. On the other hand, if you want to do the "hero's journey" bit, use a character who isn't exactly like Luke. Maybe he's cheerfully oblivious of danger around him, or starts out afraid of his own shadow and keeps wanting to return home.

In my book, the charitable organization referred to as Poverty Bells is an expy for The Salvation Army.

I did this because the organization is central to the plot, plus there's a certain level of social commentary I worked into the story that draws attention to certain aspect of the organization in real life. I suppose in that same way, if your goal is to make readers instantly recognize your character as an expy for another, you could simply give your character similar initials, or a closely resembling description.

kuwisdelu said:

An obvious example is how Gregory House is Sherlock Holmes and Wilson is Watson.

This is one of those things where if it's done well, it's fine. If it's not, then it's not.

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Silva said:

Ha well I never realized that until now....

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To me, House will always be Bertie Wooster* with a major, and I mean major, personality and intellect transplant

*or any of various characters from Blackadder

neandermagnon said:

To me, House will always be Bertie Wooster* with a major, and I mean major, personality and intellect transplant

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Exactly.

A shout out is great, a homage is fine, plain copying the character and changing their name really isn't:

If your starship captain says "I've got a bad feeling about this" - that's a Han Solo shoutout and it's fine.

If your starship captain is a smuggler with an alien first mate flying a souped up old freighter that's faster than it looks - that's a Han Solo homage, and it's fine if you don't overdo it.

If your starship captain is a smuggler in a ship called the Decade Vulture with a huge shaggy howling alien first mate who picks up a farmboy and rescues a princess from the Imperial War Star - that's taking the piss.