fails at being neutral: Overused Copycat Character

"The focus of the example is the character being parodied, rather than the (uncited) work doing the parody."

That's the form of the example, not the substance. The magazines called on the character for being copied by Image.

My only concern is how this meshes with No Such Thing As Notability. Wolverine, yea, everyone knows how popular he is, but if we don't have to cite specifics, you could take any character and come up with the example:

• Several websites have pointed out how often Kensi gets copied in other shows.

I have this nagging feeling that we should at least have to cite where this parody is coming from, I mean really, how hard would it be to find the name of just one of these magazines that joked about Woverine?

I'm beginning to think that there's a lot of "arguing about things that we all fundamentally agree about" going on here. As I understand what I'm reading:

DQZ wants this pruned back to simply "A character has so many close expies that it becomes a subject for joking by other works." No more, no less. Not "in video games" not "the joking is optional", not "on Tuesdays." He thinks what happens to the other tropes (like Fountain of Expies) is a completely different question.

Triple Elation appears to want basically the same thing, going by this sentence in his most recent post: "Frankly, the more I look at it, the more it seems like the only trope we need is something about "When a character type becomes an Undead Horse Trope"."

Superior appears to be more concerned with the "negative" quality of OCC than what it's about, and with making the other two versions (Fountain of Expies and "Copycat character but game exclusive and mocked"); he has no objection to stripping OCC down to the same thing as DQZ and Triple Elation, as long as it has enough examples.

Twilightdusk and I both appear to be in about the same place: fix OCC to the definition "Some characters get copied so widely and so closely that they become the subject of jokes about it.", and treat the other two possible tropes as irrelevant to this discussion.

We're all in agreement about OCC. It's the trimmings that are different.

My personal preference is to make the list by character, with subpoints for specific works that mock them. That will keep all the examples about the same character together, rather than all the examples from the same work.

So it would be

• Superman
  • mockery in Magazine
  • scene mocking it On Tv Show
  • scene mocking it on Other TV show
  • mocking reference in Movie
• Wolverine:
  • Pastiche in Other comic series
  • Send-up in Movie
  • Stand-up comic's routine

and so on... Sorting it by work doing the mocking will wind up with an example list more like

• Mad Magazine
  • Superman
  • Wolverine
  • Sherlock Holmes
• 8BitTheatre
  • Sauron
  • Drizzt
• Family Guy
  • Superman
  • Sherlock Holmes
  • Wolverine

Mad seems to have a good idea for the sorting, it will still require some cleanup no matter what we do, but I think it's a good way to do it. It also makes it a bit easier to judge just how often a given character gets parodied as opposed to others.

"My only concern is how this meshes with No Such Thing As Notability. Wolverine, yea, everyone knows how popular he is, but if we don't have to cite specifics, you could take any character and come up with the example:"

You are supposed to mesh with that. That page is an actual policy of this site after all.

And I should also note that the magazines did this in the early 90s. I can't exactly go finding loads of back issues to get specifics. Websites can be looked up currently. So that's not a fair comparison.

edited 2nd Sep '10 3:22:44 PM by DragonQuestZ

My point being, if we don't have to cite specifics, that's an invitation for people (Trolls or otherwise) to just list characters they like, characters they think are popular, etc, without backing up the claim that they've been parodied.

How would that example make room? The context is clearly noting that Image comics gets mocked for unoriginality. That's a lot of stretching to use that as an excuse to put any character on the page.

I agree with Madrugada's break down of the argument.

^ If the joking itself is the subject of the trope, the specific example itself should get a citation. The idea is that we always use citations, for example, an example that claims: "House is a Jerkass" cites House MD as the source for the claim that he is an example of the trope.

If the parody/joke/mocking/reference itself is the subject of the trope, saying that "Superman's ripped off a lot, and it was parodied in some magazine" is about as helpful as saying that "Some show on Fox has a Jerkass in it"

edited 2nd Sep '10 3:57:35 PM by Superior

No Such Thing As Notability means ''no work is too obscure to use as an example" not "Anything anyone wants to add as an example is good." Since one of the criteria for OCC is :"it's been mocked in other works" I would have no qualms at all about chopping out examples that simply say "This character gets mocked a lot" with no further information, any more than I have qualms about cutting examples from Badass Longcoat that are all about how badass the character is but only say "He wears one." about the coat.

edited 2nd Sep '10 3:57:58 PM by Madrugada

Well I don't remember much of the specifics, but Wizard Magazine occasionally called on Image for character copying. Will that be enough?

edited 2nd Sep '10 4:05:25 PM by DragonQuestZ

That would be enough in my book, just some citation of where he was parodied. You don't have to the depth of "1984 volume 4 issue 12," Any more than you have to say "Season 3 episode 6 of The Simpsons," when "An episode of The Simpsons" will do.

It was 15 !&%#ing years ago. We allow leeway for examples where we don't remember all the details, as long as they otherwise fit.

I said, "An issue of Wizard Magazine" will do just fine, and you don't have to go into any great depth.

The "just some citation of where he was parodied" threw me off. That term still implies something more specific than just the book.

DQZ, now you're being overly picky. We accept thing like "an episode", "X magazine", "[name] comic" without demanding chapter and verse. Why are you assumong this one would be any different? If you want to assume that there are going to be lots of people making bad-faith edits, go ahead, but there's no reason unsupported examples can't be cut.

Again, I just got confused by one part of that comment.

Sorry if my wording was confusing, it's just, "Some magazine said this," is horridly non-specific and unhelpful. Saying "Magazine X said this," Gives the barest minimum of citation, which is all we need for this wiki.

Well now that I'm clear, I tweaked the example.

Um, do we still need this?

No.

We decided to launch the two tropes in the winning option, and also keeping the original trope specifically for in-universe jokes.

I forgot to bump the "Drizzt Syndrome" variation in the YKTTW, so it's still there, but now I added a memo to myself, so it will be launched too.

This thread expired after 60 days of inactivity.