As I’m looking across my YouTube feed, I am reminded of the popular superhero teams that have been prominent over the last few decades. Most people can think of at least two or three, depending on if they watch any movies or cartoons. But for each of these prominent teams, there are usually, at least, a few teams that are meant to mirror or parody them. These parody characters are often made as a joke or as a dig against competitive companies. It’s a common practice. To use one example from the public domain, Sherlock Holmes was shamelessly parodied by a French author for his work. But does that mean that if you make characters inspired by other characters, they will inherently be lesser than the source material? No, but it is more likely to be perceived that way. So how would one go about making sure that their original characters, inspired by established, well-known characters, have depth and quality?

The first answer that comes to mind is do something different with them. Put them in different situations, give them something different from the established characters. Good basic writing advice. But is there something more specific that is proven to work?

Often, I see writers create the evil or morally inverted version of the popular character. This is technically viable, though I find it a bit limiting. I would say that an evil version of an established character is a different character because it is inherently different from the heroic character. Think of an obvious example of a heroic character in pop culture and then think of how many evil characters in other stories are made to resemble that character. This moral inversion may give a fair starting off point, but unless those characters are interesting in some other ways, they can still be boring and obvious.

Other times a writer may put their version of the character into a setting that is wildly different in tone or a story with a different theme and show how a familiar story could happen differently. This usually tends towards cynical displays, using a character from a story or franchise with a more hopeful and bright tone and putting them in a dark and brooding setting. The author can use this method to either prove or disprove some view about worldviews or morality previously prompted in another work. This may pose an interesting question, but again, it doesn’t seem to ensure that the character will be more memorable or distinct from its inspiration.

There may be a better method, but it seems to me that the best way is to start with a different character entirely and then bequeath the necessary similar characteristics to your new character to evoke the desired parallels instead of taking the original character from some other established work and then trying to tweak enough details hoping that it is sufficient to make your copied character distinct and memorable.