#this was the nicest and least incriminating (of them) ver of this post I could type up

[cereovo]

Several years ago when an ex of mine said they wanted to make OCs shortly after I'd made my own set of characters, I encouraged them, because I thought it would be fun to develop story concepts alongside one another. And in the moment it Was fun. I contributed because I wanted to, gave them suggestions because I enjoyed their vision.

Now that the dust has settled I can't help but feel frustrated by just how much of their characters and story came from me. I gave my ideas freely and I can't be mad at my ex for taking them, but a lot of what I didn't give freely still felt heavily referenced off of my own work. Even when we were together we had friends assume that our two sets of characters were initially born from the same concept, which wasn't the case.

Despite the racism and suicide baiting, I cut things off with them discretely cause I think callout posts for interpersonal drama are stupid. But that discretion allowed them to rebuild popularity on some corner of the internet and certain OC circles are small enough that I've had their art cross my path more times than I'm happy about. And they're still using those characters, with the names I gave them, with the worldbuilding concepts they borrowed from me -- right down to bits of aesthetic visual language that I'd used in art for them.

It seems they've done very little to divorce their characters from the last iteration I saw of them. Should they have to? Probably not, and I don't expect my feelings to mean anything to them after the implosion. But the frustration (selfishly, I know) comes from the fact that new people are taking interest in these characters that would not exist without me, and my ex is completely comfortable with taking that credit.

My fear is that at some point someone will accuse me of copying them, that I'll have to 'race' them to post a finished story if I want my own concepts to feel original. Which is actually a pretty discouraging mindset to have in relation to your own projects. So I guess you can take this as a sort of paranoid failsafe in case I don't win the race lol. I have no real way to conclude this post this is just a bit of an r/offmychest, so thank you if you've read this far.