how are ocs created?

ME TOO. My characters are full of my favourite tropes. There's nothing wrong with it. And it's fab when you meet someone else who'll indulge you in them. xP
Which is the reason Mr. Avatar Character gets a redemption arc and a love interest.

 

I don't even know, it just happens.

 

You know that one post I made in the worldbuilding thread a while ago? Yeah, I didn't intend it to be an in-universe narration. But then some character just started existing and hijacked it. I don't even have a good plot for this setting yet.

 

thanks guys! :D

i'd @ you all and try to respond to all of your points if, well, there weren't so many of you and of them - which is awesome, btw. i love getting this big a response. :D:D:D

 

Hah, I'm actually in the middle of OC creation right now ... I've got four slots to fill on a High Council of sorts. Usually I start with a concept. Way back in the day I'd pick a Pokemon and think how to incorporate that Pokemon's design into a character -- for example, a Deoxys-based character with DID, one personality per Forme. Then I found this song meme on Deviantart where you put your playlist on shuffle and use the songs you get to answer questions, so I created several characters with that. For this latest thing, I'm going off a two-element description model. So, the existing characters on the Council are 'light and insects', 'fate and strings', 'glass and lightning' and 'shields and heart'. So far for the others I've come up with possible elements of gravity, rhythm, dreams, breeze, sand ... so I need three more, and then to combine them in pairs. Which is proving, uh, difficult. It's a work in progress.

 

@An Actual Bird thanks!
that makes a lot of sense.

is there a particular logic you're using for the pairs?
'cause if there is, that might help you with combining the last three.

 

A bunch of my OCs started out at vidja gaem avatars. Like, here's your character and generic in-game back story, go play the game. And then I'd get way inside that character's head. My StarWars: The Old Republic clade is so intertwined it's sickening. Everyone is allies or siblings or rivals or adopted kid with everyone else and everyone's mashed in together.

And then I have to make a character for D&D or a fic or whatever and I just transplant that character and their personality into the new world.

Hell, my namesake here is one of them. Captain Aviari Otsoa, Wolf of Rishi started out as a plain ol' Republic smuggler. Then I fell in love with her personality, attitude and sass--90% of which was in my head at this point because oh my fuck do I get bored at work and making extended versions of scenes from the game entertained me.

Now she's a staple character in my Pathfinder games.

 

Well, sort of. Light/insects and shields/heart were reverse-engineered from existing characters ... I suppose it's major power+minor power, so, pick one major power then something that compliments it. Other than that I've just been picking cool-sounding words :P

I'm glad it makes sense! It's not an exact science, but it can be a lot of fun.

 

@Aviari thanks!

@An Actual Bird so, hmm, if you write down which of the remaining powers are major and which are minor (which you might've done already), that might make it easier to pair them up.

 

Yeah, that sounds like a good idea! ...I hadn't, actually. I should do that.

 

@An Actual Bird :D thanks!

 

This is really fun way to go about it. My current Favorite is one of my Dragon Age: Inquisition Inquisitors. Everything about him is pretty heavily tied to the game universe... but there's no telling when he'll make it into something of mine in another iteration.

An OC that did make the jump from game to original fic was a character I'd made for a Harry Potter RP, of all things. When that imploded I took him with me, and wrote a story around how I'd intended to RP him, with a Draco expy as the other major character ... who quickly turned into a character of his own. If he weren't blonde and wealthy he'd have no resemblance left whatsoever.

 

@Mercury and now i'm thinking about one of the ocs a rp partner of mine had in a rp i did on tumblr (which might technically be co-owned since though the partner did most of the actual roleplaying of the oc, one of my characters literally created the oc [in a non-sexual way] and the oc is basically a clone of a canon character with a different personality; it's a long story, haha), and well, feeling sad 'cause i'm pretty sure i won't see more of that oc than, well, what had already been rped. (which to be fair, was quite a lot.) but yeah... i had feels tangent all of a sudden about that.

 

Oh another beautiful story is how Novalee Noreen Norwood became 'NONO, FFS DON'T'
see there is one thing LARPers especially know.
No Character Concept Survives Plot Contact
I initially wrote Nono as a shy-to-the-point-of-nonverbal runaway noblegirl with half an apprenticeship as a Bard finished.
then she became a white cap and that day was exceptionally sunny.
I'm photosensitive and had the worst migraine ever the entire day.
Nono's human shyness quickly got replaced by snappy comments and a serious 'BITCH WHAT YOU WANNA GO' attitude.
I'm also loud as hell and have occassional volume regulation problems, especially when i'm in a pisspoor mood.
Which means it was quickly established that fully Red Cap Nono's normal mode of communication is 'HOLLERS PROFANITY LADEN SENTENCE ACROSS THE SQUARE'

and i can't go back to shy!nono but i'm so glad tbh because this is much more fun and it developed really organically and I got a lot of compliments for Nono's three-days-long descend from shy to eternally pissed off and rude

 

@IvyLB awesome! :D:D:D

 

Your character is Cenezoic onlap onto a Mesozoic synclinal basin?

 

what would that character even be like?

 

My first OC was some weeaboo 12-year-old's imagination creation and I've buried that hot mess deep underground thank you very much.

My current trashbaby uh.

...
.........Used to be the Grand Highblood? I roleplayed a lot and was very into having a neutral evil villain character whose canon backstory was basically nonexistant (the only canon we have of him is from Mindfang's POV and exactly how credible is her story, exactly?).

Now I just have some weird deer mom thing. His name is Avikka and I used to RP seriously but now he's just the wife of a werewolf and aggressive PTA mom who sometimes eats things he shouldnt like rocks or his kid once.

If you asked me how I got there as an on-the-spot question I'd have probably answered with (NOISES OF CONFUSION) because when you look at it for a split second it becomes a question of "how the HELL did you get from point A to point B?"

Of course I've also had years to develop his character and fuss with his backstory. One day I just realized I had deviated so far from canon that I could logically back off from the fandom and turn him into something different. All I had to do was tweak what was established canon into a fantasy setting of my own, redesign him to not look homestuck, and there we were.

Before Kurloz was introduced and sealing the "ancestors/descendants share the same surname" thing I gave him the last name Asthira(a) [অস্থির], a Bengali word that means volatile/unstable. His first name used to be Viktoras (Victory) to fall in line with the 8 letter thing. Asthira got a second 'a' tacked onto it for the same reason. Avik(k)a is a Hindi name which I mostly picked to keep with inverse lore of his species making up (the majority of) human mythos*.

He had a couple of physical design points off-kilter from the "canon" Grand Highblood too, like getting his arm replaced by a robotic one when he disobeyed his empress and she took it from him, or getting drunk with his moirail Redglare and they both ended up cutting their hair. these were in-character design changes and he wasn't pre-established with these.

He also had bioluminescent scales hidden by his facepaint/clothes until he stopped doing his makeup to hide them and paw feets.

When I pulled the plug his first OC design looked almost similar to his established look as a troll, mainly because I spent so long on the backstory to make the transistion seamless that I didn't feel like changing a lot of his actual design. What he ended up getting during the initial change was black markings (eventually added to his arms as well), dark-purple sclera and light purple/pink irises, a spaded tail, some prongs added to his horns + turned black and a bellymouth (explicit nsfw warning) that I spent a good chunk of time figuring out how I could put on someone without them falling over from lack of abdominal support. TL;DR it's basically a cat face.

The second redesign shown above made him pink and gave him gay deer ears. A lot of the second redesign was pretty self-indulgent. I also did away with his penis because while I still manage to explain how his race can be hermaphroditic (i spent hours looking up reptile sex and reproduction. i am ashamed) I felt like him having a dick was very unnecessary in the end; I only ever brought it up (ic) to make knot jokes and I felt like that was very lazy storytelling on my part.

This was a good 5-6 year character building, with a lot of it being dedicated to backstory. I'd say designing an OC is 1 part physical, 3 parts mental. The easiest part is the physical design because you can make absolutely anything like it were a blank template and stamp a personality into it and no one could tell you otherwise. I almost always start with this first if I'm creating a character by scratch.

Then you have the initial personality traits (mental design 1). Also fairly easy and very self-indulgent. I tend to give my OCs various traits, interests and habits I have/see in myself (but not so much as to make a self-insert). I notice I also tend to end up liking the same things my OC does after a time because I exposed myself so much to the thing (example: initially Avikka was really into ferrets and had one himself, even before I turned him into an OC. I ended up being really into ferrets. For reasons, I retconned him having a ferret. Eventually he became more deer-like (pre second redesign) and I started liking deer more because of it, which prompted the redesign in the first place).

There's backstory (mental design 2) that's frustrating at worst and therapeutic at best. Give your OC some kind of vague story to begin with. It doesn't have to be perfect, and of course if you end up not liking it you can retcon that out of their life, but a jumping-off point is really good when you start out. Like. Maybe they're a wizard/witch. Or royalty. A military experiment? Go hog-wild here. From there you can shove in the smaller details. Past relationships that explain why they do X thing or a reason they have a certain phobia. Start from the bottom and build your OC pyramid.

If you roleplay or want to roleplay your OC like I do, then you end up having your character form opinions and relationships over time that are fresh and from a different perspective than what you would giving them their own experiences from "NPC" characters that you made up solely to explain your OC's backstory (mental design 3). For example, Avikka used to absolutely hate children and swore up and down he wouldn't willingly associate with one, but after hanging around his mate he now he has several kids, of which one is adopted because he was incredibly soft-hearted and basically held them up to his mate and went "im keeping this" (he technically adopted two but the second one is his mate's son and an adult already). He also is very distrusting of a lot of people in power due to being used and abused by higher-ups (ex. the arm thing with his empress came with him on the ride to being an OC).

DJFHDIOJ THAT WAS A LOT IM SORRY.

*He represents a Yaksha or Rashaka/Asura (both are nature spirits; while a Rashaka/Asura is definitely malevolent a Yaksha can swing either way, but are normally nice; usually when they're the evil kind they eat wayward forest travelers) and his "sect" represents the general South Asian myths. He has two children that represent Celtic/English myths (Cait Sith and ceffyl dŵr/unicorn/kelpie depending on who you asked), though, because he mated with an Arthurian royal on business terms. His mom is Egyptian mythos for much the same reasoning.

 

Well I mean.
Therion technically happened because I was wondering what would happen if R were a serial killer.
But mostly they just show up.

 

I think my favorite transformations involve two REDWALL characters. My favorite was always Pearls of Lutra, and I wanted Arch Enemies in my SW:tOR clade, so I turned:

Grath Longfletch, an otter archer => Republic Trooper Medic with a fuckoff huge cannon who also happens to be a cyborg. She lost and replaced her eye with tech after a fight with:

Romsca Redfang, a ferret corsair =>
a Manalorian Bounty Hunter.

...Then I pulled them into Pathfinder. Grath-Now-Saetha went blonde, became a dwarf, grew a glorious beard, swapped her cannon for an equally fuckoff huge warhammer and became a Paladin. Her tech eye is now magic and carved with the holy symbol she channels divine solar wrath through.

Romsca is Rustpunk Mermaid Furiosa.

It's been a wild ride.