Is your main character(s) an expy or just original?
What an expy is from what TV Tropes tells me is when a character was deliberately crafted to be very similar to another character in a different work, but is not intended to be exactly like the inspiration.
Do you have a character like that? Are all of your characters purely based on your own imagination?
What do you think?
I think sometimes unintentionally, some might turn out similar, but I’d probably really have to think about it.
I don’t deliberately write a character to be like another character. They are all based on my own imagination.
Some books that started out as fanfic but then turned into fully fleshed books (like 50 shades of grey was once a Twilight fanfic) might be kind of like what you’re talking about, but I don’t know.
The main character? No, never. But very often the side characters are based on characters from other people’s works, simply because it’s easier to create a character based on one that already exists. But yeah, the one that already exists never fits perfectly, so they have to be changed a bit. ¯\_(ﭢ)_/¯
Not all but some…
Mine are always original unless they are based off me. Any half-dragon is me. Most the stuff that is me actually goes into my husband’s work, not mine usually. It’s too much work to keep a character true to the OC.
I probably do this a lot actually. I’ll see a character that I like in other media and I’ll pick a few key traits of theirs as inspiration to use as a base for my characters. But then I also pull inspiration from other characters in media and build on the character more until they’ve got a little bit of a lot of different characters in them, and also a lot of original stuff that came directly from me. I use other characters portrayed in media as inspiration a lot, but it’s less like I’m trying to actively make them like someone else and more like I use those other characters as examples to explain who my characters are to other people so they kind of have a general idea of what my characters are like.
For example, my MC, Alma was originally inspired by David 8 from Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. But I also drew inspiration from Data from Star Trek, both Temperance Brenan and Zack Addy from Bones, and even Magneto and Loki from the Marvel movies. Some of these characters seem similar at first glance while others are wildly different. But I took parts of their personality and fit them into my own character when they seemed applicable. Of course, there’s a whole lot of Alma that doesn’t relate to any of those characters too.
It’s not just my MC either. Another synthetic that he thinks of as a sister, named Arda, could easily be compared to Luna Lovegood from the Harry Potter series, or Rapunzel from Tangled, or Kaylee Frye from Firefly and Serenity, or Abby Scuito from NCIS.
Hell, I’ve got a character I’ve had for a long time, who is very developed, but I still don’t have a concrete story for, named Garick, that I based off of a combination of my own uncle, Magneto from X-Men, Hopper from Stranger Things, and Dr. Cox from Scrubs.
Even though all of these characters of mine are reminiscent of those I drew inspiration from, I can still confidently say they are their own person and are original characters of mine. They aren’t interchangeable with the characters I used for inspiration and would change the stories drastically if I replaced those characters in their original media with my own.
Ah no, most of my characters are original.
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