Making a reference or basing your character into some element of the culture.

Do you do that?
I personally love to do that

I love for my characters to be based on famous authors of notable novels or books. Or I ocasionally give to my characters skills named after a book.

Conglomerate several refferances and use it as a template for the basis of a fictionalized culture... or at least what passes for a foriegn-culture in stories.

After blending that to the consistancy of some broad generalization for that race, I then pepper the individual-characters' backgrounds with various parodies, refferances, and outright mash-ups.

When I get bored, I deconstruct the character-bio just to see how many ways I can piece it back together w/o anyone noticing.

And that, is how I troll on the hyper-meta level.

Hoh? now that's interesting. Care to give an example?

I make my share of allusions.

Marlene Abdelkadar in Shock & AWE (an Infinite Stratos RP).
-Zata got troll'd.

For a 1x1:
Ato Yot, riding in the back of a Toyota in a Fallout RP with Sarafene.

And Nat Greene of the NCR

Oh, and the Aussie-sniper they hired.

I often do it in my roleplays and short stories. Last year I knew I wanted to do something with a touch of noir surrounding a group of political activists/assassins. It a modern, French story that drew from past French assassins and anarchists to bring more roots to the story. I didn't want it to come off like Assassin's Creed. By studying up and finding these historical connections I really discovered a little more what the plot was calling out for. I feel as if by basing characters off a compilation of historical figures, even obscure ones, it helped me to fully realize who my character actually was.

90% of what I do is based on references to either obscure moments/people/places in history, or obscure pop culture references. For example, much of what Hyuude does is based almost entirely on Fist of the North Star-style making people explode by punching them a lot.

I haven't RPed here yet (I'm planning to do though)

One character I like to use is Gerad D. Poe. His name is an anagram of Edgar, being a reference to Edgar Allan Poe.
His two eyes are called The Raven and The Tell Tale Heart. His special move also consist on inflicting the experience of all horror into one person's mind.

I tend to base my characters off people like Jace Wayland from the City series or Joshua from the World Ends With You.

@ Shon:
Yeah, something like that.

It's how I did a Firefly and a Fallout RP with having never watched an episode or played a game.

You'd be surprised how well that works.