It’s another edition of Trope Tuesday and this week we bring one that’s especially relevant to the Star Wars Expanded Universe: Hold Your Hippogriffs.
The author uses a popular and/or modern phrase in a work of Speculative Fiction, and adjusts it to the setting by replacing certain concepts with their more-or-less appropriate counterparts. Works as a sort of Shout Out to make the reader/viewer more at home in the world, while at the same time highlighting the difference; it can also be used to disguise swears. Can backfire if the adjustment comes off as too arbitrary (e.g., if the proverb refers to concepts that should exist in the speculative setting as well).
At times these are specific to an exact scene, too. The replacement concepts can be tailored to characters and current action, rather than being a common phrase of its own. A cop with an antagonistic relationship to his Imperial liaison can sardonically say the liaison’s investigation team got past security like X-Wings go through a Death Star. In this way it can overlap with Remember When You Blew Up a Sun?, though it can refer to past moments anywhere on the spectrum of awesome and suck.
Well frak me, I get the holo. The trope namer is Harry Potter, a series that introduced the world to such lovely phrases as “son of a bludger” and “get off your high hippogriff.”
Occasionally this trope can be amusing in the EU, but sometimes authors have a tendency to go just a tad overboard. The brilliant, foul-mouthed duo behind Penny Arcade pointed this out once. Some fine examples courtesy of TV Tropes:
- “He was as green as the foam on Lomin-ale.”
- “Less chance than a flame on Hoth.”
- “Blue milk-run.”
- “Sabacc face.”
- “Out of the reactor core and into the supernova.”
If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to get out of here faster than a Hutt in free-fall.
