#writing ocs

[themightyhumanbroom]

Oh wait it'd be really fun if I had this OC I made interact with this character-

*remembers I had that OC violently murdered in the chapter I introduced them in*

.....okay but there's still a window, it's a small window, but a window nonetheless where I can still have them interact. It'll just be in the past tense.

[suspensefulpen]

That moment when you’re in public and you think of your ocs and you start giggling

Then the moment directly after when you remember you’re in public and other people can actually see you and they now think you’re crazy

[enlightenedfeline]

ASPD tip posts poll!

hihis, im starting school again and id love to make another tips post before its too late, ive been interested in my characters will aspd lately, so tell me:

[altarfates]

we should talk about our ocs.

[jazzylicious8]

Sometimes I forget my characters aren’t real

[a-wordsmith-of-sorts]

hi will u share character introductions? or just ur favourite character im struggling with how to word them and make my characters more realistic thanx xx-🦄

hello! thank you for your ask! i will introduce my characters soon, since i'm still working out how to make a compelling tumblr post about them. for your ask, i'll take my favourite character (and one of my oldest) as an example to answer your questions (: our characters are humans (in most cases lol, in my case they are). humans have fears, desires and misbeliefs. they have a background that makes them who they are, their fear comes from somewhere. they are complex and layered and there's more to them than meets the eye. how i like to approach it is to give them a fear, desire and misbelief first and then think of fun ways to make them come to life even further. a fear, a misbelief and a desire are the basics of a character. it forms a fundamental for their story.

let's start there!

The Basics

for example: my character is deeply afraid to lose control of himself. that's his biggest fear. his fear stems from his teenage years, when he spiralled so much that he nearly lost his life because of it. from then on, he held a tight grip on his life so that it will never happen again. the misbelief that stems from his fear is that things will go wrong if he acts out of line. he keeps himself strictly in check to a point that he's unbearingly controlling over his own life. which makes his desire that he wants to live a life without restraints.

so:

fear: losing control of himself

misbelief: things will go wrong if he acts out of line

desire: living a life without restraints

Make Them Come To Life

when the basics are down, i like to come up with traits that align with how the basics shaped them as a person. usually i already have some sort of vision of how i want them to be.

for example: my character follows strict routines which makes him consistent in all aspects of life; he's always on time and he follows up on promises he makes.

your characters are not just their fear, desire and misbelief, though. they have a personality outside of it, and are much more than their fear and misbelief. usually i already have some sort of idea of what i want them to be like; other traits, hobbies, interests, name it!

sometimes, i base it off a personality test like the MBTI, and i answer the questions as the character. it can help to shape them when you're stuck.

one of things i do (and absolutely love to read in stories) is to think of fun ways to contradict the fear, the misbelief or even personality traits. it adds another layer to their character.

for example: my character follows strict routines, but can make impulsive decisions. he's firm when it comes to putting his foot down, but sometimes crosses his own boundaries for the people he loves. he's fiercely loyal, but drops you like it's nothing when you cross him.

i think you get it. giving a character contradictions makes them human and realistic.

Where To Go With All Of This Information

i have so many characters with so many arcs that it can be easy to confuse them. i like to make character sheets and there are plenty to be found on the internet! i personally use notion for this - if i can find the name of the template, i'll let you know in the first character introduction! - but some people write it down in a notebook or just write everything in a word document.

it's a personal preference whether you like it to be structured and tailored to get the basics down - and go deeper, too! - or you just like to dump the info to get it all out of your head and onto the paper. personally, i like to have it structured so the information is easy to find!

this has been a long explanation, but i hope i was able to answer your question! again, thank you so much for the ask! <3 i like answering questions like these and share my process with people. we can all learn from each other! :D

if you want to know more, don't be afraid to pm me or submit another question! my inbox is always open <3

[living-mites]

remembering i have free will and can make my characters do whatever I want

[fazbearedits]

POV: me cooking up my oc lore, family history, and story

[pokette]

curious if this happens to anybody

[hms-no-fun]

What was it like going from writing Homestuck characters throughout Godfeels to your original characters? Was it intimidating after so much time spent with just the Homestuck cast? I believe Lenore was the first to appear in a minor role at first, but then you have the Moon war crew, the Halo's AI and Epigone all take center stage as villains (especially those last two), but I guess you could also argue June's headmates were kind of OCs? How was it writing them in the beginning compared to now?

honestly, i never found it particularly intimidating. when i started Godfeels, i never planned to write beyond John and Jade and Terezi because they were the only characters whose voices i had a handle on. as the series continued and became more of a full-cast affair, that was the most intimidating part. learning how to write a convincing Dirk or Jane or Roxy or even Rose. the key i think is that Homestuck characters are a collection of traits which express personality in a few key ways. this is true of all fiction but it's an explicit narrative mechanism in Homestuck proper. i used to talk a fair bit about narrative building blocks, the ways Homestuck is perfectly designed to train you in the act of remixing characters. like, if i said "Jade Lalonde" to you, you'd probably have a pretty clear idea of what that character looks like despite the fact that this character does not exist in Homestuck. this is the nature of HS's hyperflexible mythology. the hardest part was just learning how these characters speak and why, which required a lot of revisiting the original comic and a multitude of drafts, and i still don't think i really got them down until well into GF3.1. the intimidation mostly vanished once i felt like i could set these characters up in a room and let them play off each other without me having to pause every few minutes to question their authenticity.

honestly, bringing OCs into Godfeels felt pretty natural. i understood the existing cast and the world they existed well enough that it was easy to invent interesting oppositions. of course it helps that, going into 3.1, i knew we were always heading towards The Land of Many Unique New Guys. i wanted to do new things with the existing cast and break from the established patterns of the series, and that meant blowing shit up and changing the status quo. most of the fiction i've written in my life has been original, so really, once i gave myself permission to do so, inventing new guys was practically second nature. frankly, this setting (particularly with the EWL) is a guy factory, because it takes HS's hyperflexible mythology as a foundation and then metaphysically incorporates the existence of MSPFAs and fan sessions to expand the possibilities. Homestuck characters are equations whose variables are remarkably elastic, so it's quite natural to shuffle the old variables around and swap some out with new ones. i think it's fun trying to find a type of guy that we've never seen in Homestuck but that still feels like a Homestuck character. the OCs i've brought into the fold in GF3 aren't independent creations that i shoehorned into this universe-- they were designed for and with this universe.

and then yeah, i mean, going back to GF2 even before Risk and Dare entered the scene, June herself is functionally an OC because she's a fusion of June and Vriska. that's the entire conflict of the story, is that suddenly John's become June and she's a Vriska now. i used to joke that she was my self-insert until a handful of haters decided to canonize it and use that as an excuse to write Godfeels off entirely (which is probably for the best tbh). really, i just wanted to relitigate the Vriscourse through the lens of a human character, explore the appeal of having a Vriska-like grip on your own agency and the ways that might turn out to be destructive. the hard part was finding a realistic middle ground between John and Vriska. by the time we got to 3.1 and the plural arc really kicked off, doing the headmates almost came as a relief. i'm having a lot of fun writing Dare because they're kind of the first time in this story i've actually been able to write a straightforwardly John character. it all feels fairly natural since, like i said, the entire process is supported by Homestuck itself.

when it comes to the Upsilon kids, i was inspired by the Omega kids of HS2/HSBC fame. i originally planned GF3 to be a mirror of the post-canon project, and that meant responding to their OCs with my own. but i didn't want that response to be linear! i didn't want them to feel like Another Group Of Homestuck Kids, nor an obvious direct response to the Omegas. GF3 is about escaping your normal and learning to live among new people, so i was very deliberate in keeping the direct-relations to a minimum. i'm sick of everything being about the characters we already know. it makes sense for HS2/HSBC to have the Omegas be the descendants of the main cast, so i figured i'd let them have that. the closest direct response is Edie, who felt necessary not just for the existence of Yiffy, but also because of Kitty from Kittyquest and the various other alternate interpretations of Jade's daughter that followed. i like the idea of "Jade's daughter" being a uniquely responsive variable, someone who is paracanonically defined by the absence of singularity. then came Dana, modeled after Dirk precisely because of his antagonistic role in GF2. they're both parts of an ongoing conversation with Homestuck-- OCs yes, but not entirely original either. Lenore happened as a result of my involvement with Vast Error, which is actually a huge inspiration for GF3 in general for how it takes Homestuck's template and changes many of the rules without feeling fundamentally unstuck from that context. that their version of Sburb is called The Game and operates on an entire different yet somewhat familiar logic is what gave me the idea to explore the Universe Engine as a system of infinite variables that the EWL must directly respond to. it can be anything. it can have anyone. and because Repiton is existentially cut off from Homestuck, i liked the idea of Lenore being this lone escapee from VE's continuity who's totally unable to go back or learn anything about her home that she didn't already knew before she left. last to the party was Alphi, who needed to be a combo breaker. six-armed muppet dressed like a prep! just an entire alien. she's by far been the most difficult character to figure out, but doing so was part of what gave me confidence in the Upsilons conceptually. these four characters should not get along. they are diametrically opposed in many respects, in stark opposition to the other kid groups who typically enter the story already friendly.

so you can see, then, how the act of writing the Upsilons is also an act of commenting upon the Betas/Alphas/Omegas. i want to see what it takes to make four people who hate each other fall in love with each other. i want to see what rhymes and what opposes. the fundamental challenge hasn't changed-- it's the characterization. once i've found their voices, the rest follows on naturally. everything new in this story is built from the bones of what came before. that's the entire project, top to bottom. yes we're in a completely new setting with a bunch of new characters after obliterating the previous status quo, but it IS still Homestuck. the hardest part of selling all these new guys was simply developing the circumstances which allowed them to emerge. in my own head i've always seen the gargantuan wordcount of Chapter 8 as the necessary cost of fulfilling that ambition. hopefully now, with 3.2 A1 and B1 finally in the can, you can see for yourself how despite all that's changed, Godfeels is still having the same fundamental conversation today that it was in 2019. albeit with a few new arguments :)

[luna-azzurra]

8 secrets that your character has (School Edition)

1. Secret Cafeteria Connoisseur: The character has secretly become an expert on the school cafeteria's offerings, knowing all the best combinations and hidden menu items, but they keep their culinary expertise a secret.

2. Locker Organizing Obsession: The character is secretly obsessed with keeping their locker meticulously organized, using color-coded folders, labels, and even a mini whiteboard to maintain order.

3. Underground Study Group: The character leads a secret study group in a hidden location within the school, providing fellow students with creative and unconventional study techniques.

4. Secret Note-Writing Club: The character is a member of a secret club that writes humorous or motivational notes and hides them in random lockers, brightening up their classmates' days.

5. Secret Library Nook: The character has discovered a hidden nook or cozy spot in the school library where they retreat during breaks to read comics or engage in other secret hobbies.

6. Teacher's Pet Comic Strip: The character secretly creates a hilarious comic strip featuring exaggerated versions of their teachers, capturing their quirks and funny anecdotes without anyone knowing they're the artist.

7. Secret Study Break Games: The character has created a series of hidden challenges or games within the school, inviting friends to take study breaks and compete for secret prizes or bragging rights.

8. Impersonating the Principal: The character pulls off an elaborate prank where they disguise themselves as the school principal, causing mischief and confusion throughout the day without anyone suspecting their true identity.

[bodyhorror-bimbo]

Fuck it. All my main ocs (for all my stories and concepts) are trans now. It’s been a slow creep anyways. Might as well embrace it.

[suspensefulpen]

Um so after having a gender crisis, I have realized that my favorite gender is actually a well dressed, traumatized oc/whumpee

Just thought I would let you guys know…

[kibabanana]

when pookie gives me an idea for my ocs, but its actually kinda traumatic and i gotta turn to the little guy like this:

*sends video to friend*

me: oh, this reminds me of 'little guy'

friend: oh, so what if this happens?

*and then i gotta add little guy getting punted by an adult furry*

I gotta say tho, its one of my favorite ways of giving characters lore.