Why are Composite and Decomposite Character written as adaptation-specific?

~Vilui removed this Decomposite Character example (and some corresponding sub-examples) from Reign of the Seven Spellblades — The Sword Roses.

• Decomposite Character: The six human members of the team each roughly split one member of the main Power Trio of the Harry Potter novels: Oliver and Nanao split Harry,^note Oliver got his looks, all-round competence, and Missing Mom; Nanao got Harry's Fish out of Water tendencies, Flying Broomstick proficiency, and readiness to fight Guy and Chela split Ron,^note Guy got Ron's looks and Impoverished Patrician rural upbringing, Chela got his Blue Bloodedness and status as Mr. Exposition on mage social relations and Katie and Pete split Hermione.^note Katie got Hermione's looks and social activism, Pete got her Badass Bookwormness and Mage Born of Muggles background

Given Edit reason:

I checked the trope description and it is written as adaptation-specific, but I think this example illustrates a flaw in that reasoning. The characterization of the example as "a game of finding similarities with an unrelated series" is factually incorrect: Reign of the Seven Spellblades indeed isn't an adaptation of Harry Potter but it is heavily inspired by it (at least for the setting and the first volume), per statements by the author (the afterword to his previous novel series says as much when he discusses the series he'll be working on next). We'd normally call such a character who's directly based on a character from a different work an Expy, but in this case the author has "decomposed" the original three characters into six. There's a similar case where a teacher and the headmistress mix and match bits and pieces of Snape and Dumbledore.

I think it's worth exploring whether Expy-like examples in a Spiritual Successor work should count for Composite Character and Decomposite Character, and if so, their descriptions should probably be rewritten.

Edited by StarSword on Feb 13th 2024 at 5:17:02 AM

Short answer is Composite Character is defined by adaptations and to ignore that is misuse.

Longer answer is that there have been issues trying to curb Expy commentary tropes because the line between "Inspired by one specific work" and "This is a popular character archetype now" is impossible to define. It sometimes works when the inspiration is intentionally obvious, such as Lonestar from the parody film Spaceballs being a mix of Han Solo and Luke Skywalker, but becomes increasingly pedantic when a work is trying to be a traditional take on the same genre.

I think there might be legitimate cases of Composite Characters cropping up in parodies and homages. However, this is only clear cut if the homage or parody is to a specific work. Spaceballs is a parody of a specific movie series. If it were a general parody of science fiction, it would become impossible to tell if Lonestar was a Composite Character or just an archetypal one.

I'll go with what everyone else said: taking a broader approach has the exact same pitfalls as Expy.

I don't see why it shouldn't potentially be used for parodies/etc., but only where that's explicitly made clear (like, as mentioned, Spaceballs in relation to Star Wars).

Edited by DoktorvonEurotrash on Feb 13th 2024 at 3:25:26 AM

Yeah, in this case the author was explicitly using Harry Potter as an initial inspiration and framework, right down to the main cast initially becoming friends by fighting a troll together early in the semester (on opening day in fact), but put his own twists on the formula and then very much went off in his own direction starting in roughly the epilogue of volume 1.

~Vilui since the tilde markup doesn't work in OPs (to my knowledge).

Is it just Word of God that the characters are inspired by Harry Potter or is the work explicitly trying to invoke it? One is just copying character traits and other elements from one work to another, the other is trying to create a sense in the audience that yes, these characters are, in fact, supposed to, between them, be Harry Potter. That's why the emphasis in this thread has been on parodies and homages, cases where the characters are, explicitly, not supposed to be their own characters, whatever their origins.

Word of God confirmed it, but the through-line between the two works is very easy to see.

• Series is mostly set in a prestigious boarding Wizarding School that looks like a medieval castle which is set within a Magocracy, much like the Potterverse (bar the labyrinth under the school and the Cosmic Horror elements that are incorporated later).
• Lead characters are the Power Trio of the novels broken up into six characters:
  • Oliver Horn, the main viewpoint character, looks like Harry, is a Jack of All Trades with no significant weaknesses, and has a Missing Mom (like Harry, got her eye color) and Disappeared Dad (like Harry, got his general looks) as character motivation, one having been murdered by the primary villains and the other being indirectly dead because of them. And we more recently learned he had to grow up with abusive relatives with whom his mother had gone no-contact a la the Dursleys, though frankly the Dursleys look like saints compared to the Sherwood elders.
  • Nanao Hibiya is a Fish out of Water raised by Muggles and has a natural talent for Flying Broomstick sports like Harry.
  • Guy Greenwood is a Fiery Redhead and is an Impoverished Patrician from a rural area, like Ron and the Weasleys.
  • Chela McFarlane is a mage aristocrat who acts as Ms. Exposition on mage social structures, like Ron frequently does with wizard culture and history since he's the only one of the Power Trio who was raised a wizard.
  • Katie Aalto looks like Hermione and has a similar character arc involving Inhumanable Alien Rights advocacy for intelligent nonhumans.
  • Pete Reston is an annoying know-it-all Mage Born of Muggles who becomes a Defrosting Ice King and Badass Bookworm after some character development, much like Hermione.
• Protagonists are brought together early in the semester by trying to save one of their number from a rampaging troll a la the Halloween incident in Philospher's Stone (though it happens during the entrance ceremony instead).
• Setting features significant Fantastic Racism, with Muggles and many intelligent creatures considered at best second-class citizens and only grudgingly given Inhumanable Alien Rights.
• Main viewpoint character gets into a rivalry early on with a snooty aristocratic student a la Harry and Malfoy.
• The alchemy instructor is a racist Sadist Teacher with shoulder-length black hair who was involved in the murder of the main character's mother a la Snape and Lily Potter.
• There's a nearby mage-ruled college town that the cast sometimes visits a la Hogsmeade.

The main difference, besides taking place in a Constructed World rather than behind The Masquerade in a Like Reality, Unless Noted world, is that a lot of the flaws of the Potterverse that are usually chalked up to bad writing and/or the politics of the author (don't get me started, I call myself a "recovering Potterhead" for a reason), are here clearly incorporated intentionally as deliberate features of a Crapsack World: the core conflicts are more "man versus society" than "man versus man" as with Voldemort, because this world sucks to live in almost as much for mages as it does for Muggles and demihumans, and a lot of the characters know it and want that to change. As a consequence of which, the Myth Arc is completely different: Oliver doesn't merely blunder into the villains' plot like Harry repeatedly does. He attends Kimberly with the intention of avenging his mother's murder, and the killers aren't some mage neo-Nazi group a la Voldemort. Rather, his mother was betrayed and tortured to death by seven members of the faculty, including the headmistress and the aforementioned Snape expy.

Bumping this because it's been almost a month and I never actually got a reply to my response to Morgan Wick.

I suspect the problem might be that we'll see fan speculation/shoehorning added if we relax the restriction to adaptations - while sometimes authors confirm that they took inspiration from another character, often it's fan speculation. I also think that taking inspiration from characters in other works is what expy and the related tropes are supposed to be used for.

For what it’s worth, I’ve seen the trope be used, quite regularly based on the related pages tab, for examples of characters in later installments of a franchise who have several shared traits from characters in earlier installments.

I've seen it used for Vtubers, saying they are similar to previous talents from the same company, which I'm pretty sure is misuse.

I guess for the inciting example, for the time being I could go with Played With Cast of Expies for the group's bullet and Played With Expy for the individual characters, but that gets me to wondering: was the adaptation restriction a TRS decision? Because the TLP draft for Decomposite Character doesn't have the adaptation restriction. (Can't speak to Composite Character: its draft isn't linked to the page.)