Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-6863431-20150103062825/@comment-209421-20150105015404

Hell, I'll say it - all characters, OC and canon, have room for growth. No character is immediately perfect. I prefer evolving OCs over time to make them well-rounded characters, but I play with the canon characters too, so that they're on even ground, always evolving as characters. What I DO NOT do is create relationships from scratch. Invent history, sure, but unless the story I'm writing is heading in that direction without me realizing it, or my readers put enough pressure on me to swing the story in that direction, no relationships form at the start of a story unless they are already arguably canon between two canon characters, such as Arkos and Renora.

73.42.187.52 wrote: Flashfire212 wrote: I would agree, but I imagine their problem with OC's are 2-fold; 1. the Bad OC's 2. even if you make a good OC, the possibility that you mess up continuity by either misinterpreting something or being surprised by a plot twist is highly likely, meaning the reader now has a character they may care about that doesn't actually have a world in which they are canon.

I agree that a lot of the OC fanfics on FF.net are either self-inserts or overpowered Mary Sues written into the story for the sake of writing them into the story. But, not all of them are like that. Like I said, the main reason why I work with FCs? I have to. My character rosters are giant, almost entirely because my stories end up spanning continents, if not entire planets, over their run. Also, my stories tie together. I've got characters from some of my original urban fantasy works being reconstructed as RWBY OCs for minor roles. No one character is a self-insert of me, because I grew out of that years ago. Instead, a few of the higher level OCs have facets of myself. The Rose General has more emphasis on Noir and his side-story than Perchance, which has a far higher focus on Yang, since all scenes involving her are written from her view.

As for your second point... I kinda had that issue with TRG. I created Sun a team of OCs, and now BAM! I've got three canon characters to write in. Luckily enough, that's a simple enough task thanks to my love of starting with a time delay of X years, but it's still frustrating.