: Re: At what point is permission needed to reference meta-characters and works in my own? In this question it is mentioned that you can't use a character from another novel in your own novel. But

@Annie587

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Your link to the real world is here:

they were in some legal trouble when they were served a subpoena.

This is no longer referencing fictional characters but real life corporations and their lawyers.

That real-life IP holder is the same company that sued child daycare centers for displaying well-known cartoon characters, they are the only surviving mogul company from the Hollywood Studio system, and have Borg®-sorbed nearly every IP of a generation from Star Wars™ to Marvel® to McDonald's Happy Meals™ (including copyright over words that almost function as blanket terms like "droid" and "X-men"). Furthermore the Star Wars franchise is very now currently in production as a milk cow. I'd say you are picking the wrong IP battle. Don't poke the bear.

I also suggest that the more specific the references become the less clever or funny they are. A laundry list of IP merchandise sounds like you are trying to show-off your trivia research. I realize your bar example is invented for the question, but I suggest it would be funnier to make inferences to a made-up franchise that is a pastiche of recognizable tropes (Galaxy Quest). The best you can get with specific references is childhood nostalgia (which is unevenly distributed among your readers), and "tribe signaling" by pinging a specific time and location (you are alienating readers who are not your tribe). However, with inferences to tropes you get multiple associations that span generations, and creative genre-play as the reader is forced to connect-the-dots of an imaginary (but believable) film franchise.

Referencing another artwork is loaded with unintended baggage

The public opinion of famous people can take a nosedive, jeopardizing your nostalgia tie-in. Praise for a childhood icon can later look naive or just plain wrong, and anchor your work to some unintended circumstance or real world incident as public opinion changes. Beethoven dedicated his 3rd symphony to his hero Napoleon, but that didn't age well when later Napoleon declared himself emperor and went to war with Germany.

It's also important to understand the reference work's cultural cachet, and it's place in the panoply of it's genre. It's not cool or esoteric to reference mass-marketing unless your commentary is about mass-marketing:

Cosplay scenes are a complex interplay of homage and re-invention, subject to "social commentary" on the subject's current cultural status. Star Wars is not Ur, it is kitsch. Leah's metal bikini was already a tongue-in-cheek homage to fantasy illustrations from the previous generation. George Lucas did not invent the metal bikini, in fact all of Star Wars is a pastiche of serials from the 1930s-1950s (pin-up princesses in metal bikinis), re-imagined in the hyperreal fantasy illustration style of the 1970s (fantastic creatures getting in bar fights at a gritty outpost).

References to specific works tie your characters to specific class and attitudes (bourgeoisie), and it does this whether you are aware of it or not – if you are not aware then you are a probably a member of that class (tribe signaling). All of this cultural baggage is avoided by inventing a made-up franchise, which can represent whatever you want and be tailored to match your characters.

If you had 2 women in your story, which one gets to play Leah? There are no secondary female characters in Star Wars, you are stuck with Lucas's lack of imagination. But if you went back to the Ur-space opera, Flash Gordon offers a variety of raygun princesses in metal bikinis (plus good-girl/bad-girl dynamics, frenemies, and a wealth of relationship drama (not to mention BDSM subtext) that could be referenced in your story.

It's a bit of a side topic, but since the idea is that your characters are super-fans, it would be clever-er still to make your satire about fandom itself rather than showing how much of a super-fan you are of just one franchise. Instead of the cliche of faceless distant corporate lawyers (a mis-match of scale between your protagonists and their conflict), they could squabble amongst themselves about authenticity and cannon accuracy, with all the egos, moving goalposts and double-standards, and other interpersonal drama, that would keep the conflict within the characters who are present.

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