For many writers, the goal is to be as original as possible. They want to create new stories, introduce new problems, and, most of all, write original characters. If you're one of those writers, you should probably check out our guide to Being Original. But, as that article points out, it's virtually impossible to be completely original in this day and age. Everything comes from something, and there's no harm in pulling from some of your favorite media to create something that's your own.
This is where the Expy comes in. There are many reasons to use an expy; maybe you're exploring a story choice that the original writer shied away from, or you're making a commentary on the genre and the tropes associated with it, or you're transposing them into a new genre, or you want a character who will feel familiar to the audience without much setup, or maybe you just really like that character. All of these are valid reasons to write an Expy; the key is to blend the tropes of the character with new tropes of your own to make a story that still feels fresh and unique.
It's important, before we start, to establish that what you are not doing is creating a Captain Ersatz. A Captain Ersatz is meant as a parody or homage to another character, basically the character version of a Bland-Name Product. In that case, you want your character to be as blatantly similar to the original as possible, removing only as many signifying details as would violate intellectual property laws. Those characters tend to work better in brief cameos, or in outright genre parodies—for major characters in something more serious, you'll want to do more than file the serial numbers off.
Reasons
Once you've determined what character you're going to make an expy out of, you need to ask yourself why. Not that you need to justify the decisions made in your story — it's your story — but how you build your expy is going to be different based on what you want to get out of the character. Below are some of the more common reasons for crafting an expy.
- Automatic Familiarity: If you want a character to feel familiar to the audience but don't want to dedicate a lot of time to familiarizing them, an expy might feel like a good shortcut. When people see a guy run into a dungeon with a fedora and a bullwhip, they'll recognize Indiana Jones pretty much instantly, and with that recognition come a bunch of associations that you can either lean into or subvert at will. However, you'll also want to find ways to set this character apart from the original, especially if you intend to feature them as a protagonist. Maybe replace the bullwhip with a different sort of iconic weapon, or lose the fedora altogether. Maybe instead of excavating ruins, your Indiana Jones is a cowboy in the Wild West. There are millions of ways to reflavor your favorite character so they remain unique, but keep the core that you want to maintain intact.
- Genre Staple: This is a common one, because certain genres have certain expectations of the characters that will inhabit them. Every Fantasy needs a Gandalf, every Space Opera needs a Buck Rogers, every Superhero story needs a Superman and Batman. As you can see, expies of those characters are tropes on their own, so peruse the trope pages for those to get an idea of what is considered part of that archetype, and then find your own spin on what's left. Your version of Batman doesn't need to have a Bat-Signal or a Batcave, so long as he's a brooding vigilante who operates at night and strikes fear into the hearts of criminals. Maybe he's not extremely wealthy like Bruce Wayne, or maybe his parents weren't killed by a criminal when he was a child. In this case it's more important that he reaches a familiar status quo than how he gets there.
- You just really like that character: If you really just want to tell stories about that character, there's good news and bad news. The bad news is that you're going to have to work much harder to cover up your expy, as people tend to be more critical of tropes used for Author Appeal. The good news is that this is still a common, tried and true practice, and there are pretty straightforward ways to maintain them. Decide what it is you like about the character, and specifically what you want to use in your story. Is it their personality? Their backstory? Their look? Once you've decided which part you most want to emulate, everything else is fair game to be changed. You can keep some of it, but the more you update the better. This also works best if the character occupies a different role in the story — if they were an Ensemble Dark Horse in the original work, then they're perfectly poised to be the main character in yours. However, if they were originally the protagonist, it might feel too derivative to make them your protagonist as well.
Pitfalls to Avoid
The main threat is obvious; you never want your character to feel too similar to whoever they're an expy of, lest they feel unoriginal or like a rip-off. This means breaking down exactly what it is you want to emulate from this character and using that as a jumping off point, then coming up with your own character traits to fill in the rest. You may find yourself thinking "Is this really that character without [x]?" The answer is: no, it isn't. That's the point. Unless you are writing fanfiction (again, a respectable medium in its own right) then you should not be trying to make the same character — just someone who's inspired by that character.
Potential Subversions
Sometimes it's fun to create your own "What If?" story. The setup will often be something familiar, but the character in question will make different decisions, and sometimes end up being a complete antithesis to the character they're aping. Maybe you want to do a story about an evil version of Harry Potter; does it matter if he's a student at a magic school, or is it more important that he be The Chosen One who followed a dark path? You might want to shy away from iconic things like his scar and his glasses — or maybe you don't want to shy away from them, if you really want to hammer home the idea that this is building off the expectations of that character. Use your own judgement.
Extra Credit
As mentioned before, you won't be the first person to make an Expy. It can be infinitely helpful to read up on successful examples of Expies — and just as helpful to read up on unsuccessful examples. The idea here is to first check out the original version, then read or watch the series with the expy, so you can get a sense of how the characters are different and yet the same.
The Greats
- The superhero genre is chock-full of expies. Marvel's Moon Knight is an expy of DC's Batman, who is in turn an expy of the Shadow. However, one of the best series to find good expies in is Astro City. The entire premise of the comic is to tell subversive stories about typical superhero archetypes, and so you get versions of Superman, Batman and Robin, the Fantastic Four, Wonder Woman, Spider-Man, and countless others.
- Angel Beats! is a great example of some expies from the Haruhi Suzumiya franchise. The protagonist, Otonashi, is based on Haruhi's narrator, Kyon, and as such is a Ridiculously Average Guy in much the same vein. Yuri Nakamura is clearly modeled off the titular Haruhi Suzumiya, as evidenced by her visual style. Lastly, there's Kanade Tachibana, who has a similar personality (or lack thereof) to Yuki Nagato, but looks very different. The key is that the premise of the series is entirely different, focusing on the afterlife instead of the high school life of Haruhi.
- Drawn Together was a series all about expies, playing off of different tropes from Western Animation, including superheroes, Disney Princesses, anime, video games, etc. While the characters are identifiable as being based on one character or another, they mostly stand in for the broader concept of said character.
- As alluded above, Simon Belmont was originally inspired by Indiana Jones, as a hero who goes through ruins, avoiding traps and fighting enemies with a bullwhip.
- Ultraman is already a Fountain of Expies, so much that the character's expies have a whole page dedicated to them. One of the best examples is Gridman of Denkō Chōjin Gridman, who even got an anime sequel series in the 2010s. Like Ultraman, Gridman is a size-changing being from another world (Hyper World as opposed to Ultraman's Land of Light) who bonds with a human host (a young boy as opposed to an adult man) to fight Kaiju. No Creature-Hunter Organization is present, instead Gridman and his host rely on the latter's closest friends to assist them, and the battles all occur in Cyberspace, as opposed to the real world. The basic formula is very Ultraman-like, but there are enough differences to make Gridman stand out on his own.
