Allegory Adventure

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

An Allegory Adventure is a creative work in which the characters, plot, or both parallel those in another creative work. It isn't a Fable Remake, because the reenacted story is acknowledged — sometimes as fiction, other times as a record of real events. In fact, there is usually an explicit connection between the two stories.

The characters in an Allegory Adventure might be clones of those in the story being imitated, or some of them might actually be those characters. In the latter case, expect to see the Literary Agent Hypothesis in effect. In either case, the events in the Allegory Adventure are likely to be suspiciously similar to the the ones in the story being aped—but don't expect anyone to notice.

To illustrate, here is a fictional example of an Allegory Adventure: Ten-year-old Alice Smith, who has to write a book report on Alice in Wonderland for school, falls into a rabbit's warren. There she meets the Cheshire Cat, March Hare, etc. (or Captain Ersatz versions of them) and has adventures which are uncannily similar to Alice Liddel's.

See also Whole-Plot Reference.

Examples of Allegory Adventure include:

Anime And Manga

Film

  • The film Shrek begins with the eponymous ogre reading a traditional fairy tale and saying "Like that's ever going to happen." Despite the fact that the film is a parody of fairy tales, that plot is roughly the one used in the film.
  • In Jackie Chan's The Forbidden Kingdom, a teenager obsessed with kung fu movies is transported to ancient China, where he must return the Ruyi Jingu Bang to the Monkey King.

Literature

Live-Action TV

  • In the 2001 miniseries The Lost Empire, a Chinese-literature expert joins forces with with the Monkey King, Friar Sand, and Monk Pig to save the kidnapped Wu Chen'en (author of Journey to the West).