#she's one of the coolest characters I've concocted

[seyaryminamoto]

I like how you do OCs. So many fanfictions make them overpowered and without flaws. But your ones come off more natural, half of them aren't even martial badasses but just regular people getting by. Like Kino, or Shouji. If I recall, Rui Shi was once some nameless caption before you developed him. Hina is, haha, yeah, a bitch, lol. Is it just me or would Ozai's assassin and Toph make a great comedy duo? The blind girl and the invisible man. Even Xin Long has personality. My fav is still Rui Shi.

Well, like I always say, Shoji isn’t an OC :’D he’s another repurposed one-time canon character who got a much bigger role in Gladiator than in ATLA, just like Song. This is him! It’s possible that it will become more obvious that he’s a canon-based character in chapter 201, but even if it’s not that obvious, now you know the truth!

Either way, I’m glad you like my OCs! Rui Shi is one of the best of them, without a doubt, so I take pride in knowing he’s your favorite. I guess there are many secrets to making OCs for fanfiction, because chances are you will need OCs in a long-term story like my own… but when I started out with the story, I always kept them at a minimum both because I wanted to use as many canon characters as I could (hence, Shoji), and because I knew of the stigma that surounds fanfiction OCs. There’s people who do like reading about OCs… but the majority of the readers will open a fic out of interest in the canon characters they already know and love. If your story isn’t outright about OCs, you risk alienating readers by introducing characters who could feel out of place in the setting (and that, I think, is what bothers you with OCs who are overpowered and flawless).

Admittedly, it may sound like I’m talking out of my ass because of characters like Rhone and Seethus, who probably do fall into the overpowered OC cliches… but uh, small secret: they’re not exactly my creations. They were a suggestion by a friend, one of Gladiator’s staunchest supporters from its very inception (being upfront, Gladiator wouldn’t even exist without him), and I did my best to accommodate them into the story despite there were some things in his original ideas for the characters that would have been quite difficult to work with. Seethus seems to have been received much better than Rhone, which is a relief for me, but the truth is that neither of them are 100% mine and they follow entirely different character-building principles because of that.

Outside of those two, though, the other OCs we have generally obey the need for these characters to exist in this world and setting: when it comes to the soldiers in the Fire Nation army, the show portrayed them as real people by the last season but I wanted to flesh out some of them further than that, beyond showing they can be nice to prisoners (Iroh’s friendly prison guard) or playful with each other (the ones from the Boiling Rock). That’s where Rui Shi came from, the most exasperated and tortured Royal Guard in the history of the position. Part of Rui Shi’s success, I think, comes from him being 100% loyal to Azula despite being 100% exasperated by her antics just as well :’D he’s a cool guy, but all he ever wanted was to protect a Princess who refuses to be protected and who seems to make a sport out of making his job more and more difficult xD which results in his constant clashes with her and his little patience for the ridiculous crap she gets up to more often than not. He serves as a counterweight, I think, to all the characters who are starstruck by Azula and Sokka: he’s a grounding character, helps us see these two are a pair of reckless dorks in love who need to get reeled back into their best behavior once in a while.

And then there’s Kino, who basically breathed life into the South Pole and created much more fun dynamics with those characters than everything that had preceded him. Kino was a REALLY lucky hit, a completely random night-time idea that came to me when I was about to go to bed… and when I woke up the next morning I couldn’t remember him anymore :’D it took a while for me to remember what that damn great idea had been… I was so glad when he returned to me, honestly xD Kino is a lot of fun, and as comedic a character as he may appear, that comedy is what makes him an individual rather than just another soldier. The idea of him being largely ignored by his fellow soldiers and commanding officers started off as a funny way to ensure he could hang out with Katara and Aang without trouble… but in Part 3 that will result in a pretty useful skill that everyone shall cherish him more for. He’s a counterweight to main characters too, in a sense, but in the opposite way Rui Shi is: he lightens up the generally serious and heavy South Pole chapters and embodies the common, ordinary Fire Nation citizen who has been indoctrinated since youth but who can find a new path for himself, learn better, cherish new ways of living once he’s removed from that very toxic environment.

I could talk for ages about the OCs in the story: Xin Long being so feisty, for instance, comes from my need to give him a visible personality, reminiscent of Azula’s own, just like Appa and Momo had in canon. Otherwise he’d feel like a mere object to be ridden back and forth between places and nothing more… which would be really demeaning for a proud creature like that, huh? :’D But I think you’ll get bored of reading too much of my OC theory, because I’ve thought about this stuff a lot xD Still, I’d like to add that there may be some characters who feel a little more complex, who may have more substance to them than initially obvious…

… And it’s because they do have more of it: I had an original story before Gladiator, pretty dense and huge story, and I’ve littered Gladiator with cameos of those OCs EVERYWHERE, it’s just not something anyone can tell because that story was never published (and never will be x’D). So… remember the Priestess of the Flames, from the Dragon’s Pit? She’s one of my favorite characters from that story xD some of her defining traits in Gladiator are outright taken from her original iteration (if you don’t remember her, no worries, you’ll see her again in the upcoming Slave Riot arc and I suspect she’ll make more of an impression there). Your Doom, his sponsor, the Ruthless Hero, the Dark Rook, Scoundrel and his sponsor too… they’re all crossovering OCs who got small roles in Gladiator xD in general, these repurposed characters have always been background or secondary characters (the ranking is FULL of these OCs, even if they might never get speaking roles, because that way I could fill up the ranks a little faster :’D), but that they already have established personalities allowed me to work easily with the ones who do have a starring role in the story, without needing to spend more time than I could afford fleshing them out so they felt believable.

I guess that really should be my final point: the OCs have to feel believable. If it looks like they have a life beyond interacting with the main cast, I don’t need to devote too much time to developing them unless strictly necessary (as was the case with Yang and Haiyan, as a quick example). OCs are, ultimately, characters: they have flaws, they have personality, they have a history just as everyone you walk past in the street does, even if you can’t fathom what it might be. As much as the world absolutely revolves around Azula and Sokka in Gladiator, each ordinary individual’s world doesn’t revolve around them. These two are as good as celebrities to admire, leaders to look up to, obstacles to overcome or nuisances to deal with… but they’re not the center of everything for the average citizen, as things stand. They’re not the only thing on their minds. Each OC has their own struggles, their own pursuits, some more mundane than others, just like every canon character does. It’s easy to think of characters, especially OCs, through a very simplistic “helpers” and “foils” filter… but real people are a lot more complicated than that, and so are they :’)

[pyjamaart]

decided to illustrate one of the dreams i had recently! keep reading for more about this crazy sonic/kirby crossover lol.

Three years ago I started dream journaling, which is still one of the coolest hobbies one can have. I said it before and I'll say it again: If you have even a little bit of interest in starting a dream journal you gotta do it. It's so freaking fun.

I've had some crazy dreams in these three years. At the moment, my dream journal has 124 entries.

This one started pretty tame, as me and some other person were playing a video game. We were riding a bike through some tunnels and had to hide from the police by hiding out in a big trash can.

After that, we rode through a tunnel flooded with loads of pink flowers. As we were heading out of there, we came face to face with a big city and our bike transformed into a space ship, just in time before the whole city fucking exploded.

Susie, who suddenly appeared and turned out to be our characters traveling companion, was not amused by the sight of the burning buildings. And we found out why soon after: her father, President Haltmann, was erecting a gigantic tower out of the ground in the middle of New York, pushing over a few sky scrapers in the process. That was probably the reason why everything exploded.

You knew it was her father doing this, because the big silver tower had a big ass purple H on the very top of it. The H standing for Haltmann, of course.

Back in the real world, my gaming pal was already coming up with all kinds of wild theories as to what was going to happen in this crazy story. They theorized that Susie was gonna turn out to be evil and that she was actually helping her father take over the world.

I was not convinced, however, as I was positive that Susie was on our side. "No, I don't believe that. You could hear in her voice that she never wanted all of this destruction. Susie is a true comrade."

I think this might be a good point to tell you that I have never actually played Kirby Planet Robobot, so I have no fucking clue how these characters would behave. But don't worry, it's on the very top of my "games I finally need to play, because they've been standing around in my shelf for years" list.

To continue the story of the dream, Susie was flying us to a space station far away from earth, where we planned our next moves. There we finally found out who we were playing as the entire time: None other than Sonic the Hedgehog!!

After that was a section I can only explain as "Super Sonic Galaxy", as Susie and Sonic concocted a plan to stop President Haltmann and fly back to earth to invade his tower. You had to move Sonic around with a Wii-Mote and Nunchuck, just like in the real Super Mario Galaxy. (I've had a few nightmares about Wii-Motion technology. At least 4 now. The worst was one day before the release of Fire Emblem Three Houses, when I dreamt that the monastery was a labyrinth of brown walls that you had to navigate Byleth through using the dreaded Wii-Mote motion controls. I woke up in a cold sweat from that one.)

As Sonic and Susie finally made it back to earth, they came face to face with the gigantic silver building and its big metallic entrance. It turned out to lead straight into an elevator, where Sonic proceeded to get his face stuck in the elevator door as it shut on him. Susie could only look on in horror. All part of President Haltmanns master plan. (?)

That's where I woke up sadly. My dreams always seem to end just as it gets interesting.

This was really fun, so you can probably expect me to illustrate a few more of my dreams in the future!