Help:Similarities and inspirations

This page provides information on characters being similar to or inspired by other characters.

Story structures
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 the 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 that should have worked but didn't. Fall back, regroup, try again. Continue with point 3 for the next attempt.

Finding similarities
All those stories have characters. They could be based on people the author knows, the author themselves, 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.

There are hundreds of thousands of stories and characters that have been written over the centuries, if not millions. The Internet, libraries and TV gives us exposure to as many of them as we want. The more you watch and read, the more you 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.

A is similar to B
All of that leads to people saying "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. There are a lot characters to choose from and there's 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".

For example, "Pierce Brosnan is similar to Celine Dion because they're both human beings and they sing, except that Pierce hasn't had a lot of formal musical training and his singing in a movie was widely criticized."

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

Let's do it again. "Bill Pullman is similar to Abraham Lincoln because they're both men and they're both leaders. Lincoln was President of the United States and Bill Pullman played a President in a movie."

Not quite the same level of leadership ability, and we don't know if Bill will have the same impact in humanitarian efforts as 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."

Inspirations
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.