User blog:RRabbit42/Similarities and inspirations

In stories and in real life, there are patterns. Many of them are in the way the stories themselves are written. A common one is the "three-act structure". It goes like this:


 * 1) Introduce your characters and the world they live in. Something happens that gives them a goal and their life won't be the same ever again.
 * 2) They attempt to fix the problem but don't have the skills or information to do it yet. They learn more about themselves and what they can do.
 * 3) The pieces start coming together. The story and its subplots are resolved. The climax is where it gets exciting and intense.

A "four-act structure" splits point 2 in half so there's an attempt to fix the problem. It should have worked but didn't. Fall back, regroup, try again. Continue with point 3 for the next attempt.

In all those stories, you have your characters. They could be based on yourself or people you know, or they're based on a genre: the action hero, the scientist, the reluctant hero, the child that is forced to grow up by events beyond their control, a jilted lover, etc. If you're looking for an idea on what kind of character to write about, TV Tropes is a great place to lose a lot of time do research.

There are hundreds of thousands of stories and characters that have been written over the centuries, if not millions. We've got the Internet, libraries and TV that gives us exposure to as many of them as we want. The more you watch and read, the more you'll see the stories and characters have things in common with other stories and characters.

It's inevitable that we'll find those similarities. We pick up on those patterns. There's just so much that's come before that we can't avoid it. Sometimes it's a deliberate connection by the author to another author's works (an homage or directly mentioning that person or what they made) and sometimes it's subtle because that other person inspired them.

Sometimes we see connections because we want them to be there or our own personal experiences lend themselves to finding those similarities. If you're a sports fan, you might look at how the character relates to Mickey Mantle.

All of that leads to people saying on wikis like this "character A is similar to character B" and then they'll start listing the points that makes them similar.

That's not as helpful as people might think. We have a lot characters to choose from. We've got over seven billion people on this planet. That many people looking at that many characters are going to find countless similarities and not everyone's going to find the same similarities.

It becomes less helpful because the points they choose for comparison often have qualfiers: "character A is similar to character B because they did C, D and E, except the second guy did E differently".

I can do the same thing. "RRabbit42 is similar to Celine Dion because they're both human beings and they sing, except that RRabbit42 hasn't had any formal musical training and knows he sings out of key a lot of the time."

That doesn't make me a professional singer like Celine Dion. It's a coincidence that we both happen to be humans and we both happen to be able to sing. The point about how well each of us sings is what makes the "similar to" fall apart.

Let's do it again. "RRabbit42 is similar to Abraham Lincoln because they're both men and they're both leaders. Lincoln was President of the United States and RRabbit42 is an administrator on a few wikis."

Not quite the same level of leadership ability, and I haven't done anything yet in terms of humanitarian efforts like Lincoln did. But it goes to show that if you relax how close the comparison point is, you can say that anything is "similar to" anything else: "A spider is similar to an elephant because they're both alive."

Related to this is "inspirations". There's a spot in the Infobox to say that character A was inspired by other characters. But because it's an Infobox, there isn't room to put in any reasons why the inspiration exists. It gets used as a dumping ground for any character that is "similar to" another character.

What that is really for is when people connected to making the story say that the character was inspired by one or more specific characters. For example, Discord from My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic was specifically inspired by Q from Star Trek: The Next Generation and getting the same actor to do Discord's voice made it work even better. That changes it from Discord is "similar to" Q into Discord was definitely inspired by Q. It's documented in articles that this is how we got Discord.

But there's almost never any references for why someone thinks a character was "inspired" by another character. It really does become a dumping ground for what are coincidental "similar to" lists.

Some of these have a side-effect that most people aren't aware of. A lot of the inspirations are supposedly from Disney characters. Disney is very possessive about what they make. If someone from DreamWorks says "we were inspired by this Disney character", Disney's reaction is very likely going to be, "You didn't get our permission to do that" and they'd file a law suit.

Any inspirations need to have references where it's documented that character A was definitely inspired by character B. If you're going to say a character is similar to another one, you need to be very specific how they're alike so it's more than coincidence that they're alike and leave out the exceptions that make the comparison fall apart.