In the writing career of most fanfiction writers, there comes a time when you wish to write a story in which a character of your own creation appears. Some writers only work with their own characters. Some use mostly canon characters, but then add in some with their own touches. Some only use their original characters as very minor characters. Either way, most writers do end up creating a character of their own sooner or later.
As it turns out, that’s not very easy. No, seriously. You need practice in that type of thing, and not many people are willing to go through the trouble of mastering this process. Simply because you like your OC doesn’t mean it’s a good OC – it could mean that, but in many cases it also doesn’t. This is especially evident because many writers want to take shortcuts and make things easy for themselves instead of going through the effort of fleshing out their characters and making them believable.
Here are five ways to create an original character that you should use if you really don’t want people to take you or your characters seriously.
5: Me as the Hero of All TimeTM
Using yourself or parts of yourself as a basis for one of the main characters is probably one of the oldest tricks in the book. And that’s largely because it’s a pretty good trick; after all, who would you know better than yourself? It can add layers of reality and depth to your character, passion to your writing, and sense to the motives and reactions the readers see. And, after all, most of the readers won’t know you, so it doesn’t matter if you go ahead and use your own name and own looks for the character – and it saves you the trouble of writing down eye colors and such, because of course you’ll remember it when it’s you in the story.
The problem arises when you, the creator of the story, realize that you want to be an especially benevolent god to the little fictional you within the story. It would be cool to be a hero and an important sort of person, and, hey, here’s a good chance for that. After all, in the story, you can do anything! You can make everyone love your character no matter what mistakes they do! You can win the heart of that one character you’ve always really liked! You can make yourself be the most skilled trainer/coordinator/gym leader/Chosen One there ever was! Celebi and Mew could shower you with gifts on your birthday just because of how awesome you are! You can have all the money and Hall of Fames and riches! You can be the Most Important Person on the planet! Ahh, the satisfaction of imagining yourself with all these amazing things…
That crashing sound you hear is the readers’ suspension of disbelief breaking into rubble in the cannon-fire of unbelievable events in your story. You have now passed from the realm of using yourself as a basis for a realistic character into the realm of wish-fulfillment. While that’s all fine and dandy to write, there’s hardly anyone who’s going to want to read it, because it simply isn’t believable by any stretch of the imagination. It won’t be enjoyable to read to anyone but yourself, and chances are it actually makes others a little uncomfortable because of the awkward feeling of looking into someone’s personal fantasies.
So, wish-fulfillment is perfectly okay, if you just want to do a bit of therapeutic writing sometimes, just for yourself. For someone who wants to write a character that will be taken seriously, it is a Bad Idea.
4: The Forcefully Added Love Interest
What’s something people have always liked and will always like to read and write about? Romance. As a subject of stories, it’s probably about as old as the ability to speak, and after a certain age, many of us are utterly fascinated by it. It makes sense, therefore, that a lot of people would wish to write about romance. Excellent! There can never be too much love in the world, right? So, since there is no canon paring you particularly feel like writing at the moment, you create your own character to romance up an already existing canon character, such as the ever popular Misty/May/Dawn/Iris/Tracey Sketchit. Your OC is specifically designed to be loved by the canon character. It’s going to be awesome! What could possibly go wrong?
Well, for starters: everything. In many cases, for reasons I never quite fully understood, the OC either replaces a canon character or tries to awkwardly co-habit the same character slot. The former causes all kinds of continuity problems that often end up hand-waved and makes readers very confused. The latter causes, predictably, awkwardness, when a possibly very important canon character is suddenly faded to the background in favor of the newcomer OC. This is going to upset a lot of readers that really like that particular character, but, of course, there’s going to be a large portion of readers who share your opinion of his or her insignificance and will not mind. So, okay, I guess we can stretch our minds a little bit for the sake of romance!
But then we walk into the problem that this character was designed to be loved by the canon character. The OC isn’t there because he/she happens to be a cool character to write about, or because he/she is a new type of character introduced to the cast of the canon to mix things up and see what would happen if there had been a person like this in the team instead of the one that has now faded out or outright disappeared. No, this character is here because it was built as a romance machine, and its only purpose of existence is to be loved by this canon character. The OC, in most cases, is going to end up extremely one-dimensional and come off as obsessed, possibly borderline insane and stalkerish towards the canon character – or, worse yet, they will make the canon character behave like that. And given that you’d be possibly changing a lot about certain canon characters that one can often see shipped with an OC (heck, Ash doesn’t even know what a girl is yet, let’s face it – he’s not going to just suddenly hook up with someone for no reason), it’s not as simple as slapping the two together in Dark Cave and hope the readers will swallow it.
It’s going to read like a forced romance. Forced romance is bad. And reading bad romance is like seeing animals in goofy clothing – kind of funny, but really it just makes you want to cry. Don’t do it.
This is what happens every time a forced love interest is created.
3: Mr./Ms. Angsty Backstory
So, you’re a writer. Most of us writers, even if we do only dabble and write a bit of fanfiction every now and then, yearn to be taken seriously. We want to write things that will affect people and be remembered. One of the best ways to do this, it often seems, is to write stories with heavy subjects, where the characters go through unimaginable hardships and touching moments of doubt and then self-discovery, and then probably add something to make the reader cry in the end. The formula is exposed! This is how you will be taken seriously. You set out to write this amazing story of struggles and the evil in our world, in which the protagonist is chained to their bed because their parents believe ten is too young an age to go off, and once they escape they discover their Pokemon has a terrible disease, and to top it off everyone calls them fat. Oh the humanity!
Oh how often a noble attempt like this – even if it has a good story – falls short because of flat and unbelievable character angst. There’s a simple reason for that: you can’t build a well-rounded, believable character that is more or less completely based on having had a really difficult life. More often than not, a character created from that premise isn’t the unfairly suffering young hero everyone will love and care about, like the author intended, but instead a strange mish-mash of unfortunate events in a backstory topped with either an angsty or angelic generic personality. People will not care about a character like that. Instead, people will go: “so, wait, when she was three, the police brought her into a secret military medical testing center after killing her entire family by forcing her first-catch Zigzagoon to slit all of their throats against its will? That makes no sense!” When you add to that history all the horrible things that happened to her after she was three, the suspension of disbelief is irrepairably broken and it becomes very hard for the reader to care in any sense besides a comical sense. Furthermore, when you pile so many hardships on top of other hardships, you inevitably start handwaving them as something insignificant, in the manner of “but that wasn’t awful enough, so then THIS also happened!”
You might think that it’s actually pretty okay, right? At least it’s not wish-fulfillment. In fact, it’s the opposite of wish-fulfillment. But it’s also extremely offensive. Especially when things like child abuse, kidnapping, near-fatal bodily injury, death of family members, rape, or other such issues are brought in and handwaved in the same way. Real people deal with these issues, and real people are hurt and offended when writers display their complete ignorance and carelessness over the issues and their effects on the victims and other people affected by them. Seriously, don’t do this.
If you want to write a story with serious issues, you need to do your research. Sorry, that’s just how it goes.
2: Name-swapped Canons
You have a specific type of character in mind, and you want to base your creation on something that already exists to make things easier for you. Well, that works! Plenty of people do it and they pull it off, so why not you? So, there’s a canon character who fits the bill, and you go ahead and use them. You add your own twists to the character: a new name, a new hair color, a new eye color, a new hobby… Done! No-one can call it a badly-made character, because it’s based on a character they already love! How’s that for an OC?
Well, the thing is, it’s not. Because that’s not an original character, it’s the canon character with a new name and a wig. And, while you might not get caught for this if your character was stolen from another series, or another writer, if you’re using a character from the very same fandom you write for, people are going to notice. Because, guess what? They’ve seen the series too! People are going to go, “hey, isn’t this basically Ash as a girl called Tash with pink hair ?” Especially much so when you’re copying the events from the canon – most commonly the anime, it seems – to a T, and even using the character’s lines from the canon. No-one is going to buy it, I’m sorry. And no-one is going to take you seriously.
Why people do this to begin with is an age-old question. I have personally seen more fics than I can count that copy the beginning of the anime or put in a character that’s essentially Dawn or Ash or Blue with a different name and altered looks. Sure, it’s probably easy, since you don’t have to come up with anything new, but you’re going to get caught for it, so what’s the point?
Also, this is bordering on unethical here, since you’re basically taking a creation of someone else’s and claiming you made it, when really you just slapped on some paint to make it look like something else on a glance. That’s usually what we call plagiarism, and in many cases, it is very much frowned upon – possibly even illegal! So, yeah, don’t do it.
1: Asking Others for OCs
Urgh, creating characters is such a hassle! So many pitfalls, so many things to watch out for, so much trouble… You simply can’t be bothered to go through all that for something so simple. After all, isn’t an “original character” basically just a name with eye-, hair-, and skin color attached, and then a string of a few personality traits? Anyone can do that, but you don’t happen to have the time right now. So, you turn to your friends. “Hey guys! I’m starting a new story, and I need characters. Please submit your OC’s to me in this thread, thanks! Throw in a team of Pokemon they should have too!” Except, well, maybe a little less punctuation and capital letters.
No. No, no, no no no. First of all, this isn’t really original character creation, because you’re not creating anything. Secondly, they’re not really your original characters, because you didn’t make them. How are you going to write about them? How will you feel like they’re yours? Thing is, you won’t. They’re not your characters, and writing about them won’t feel like writing about your characters. If you don’t care about the characters, the reader certainly isn’t going to care about them. Congratulations, you have just made the whole point of having characters in the story in the first place completely obsolete!
Furthermore, why aren’t you using canon characters if you really don’t want to make up your own? You could be writing about their past, that we don’t necessarily know as much about, or about their future, or you could make a complete AU and just make the setting up while still using the well-rounded, believable characters your readers already know and love. And if you asked for a team of Pokemon as well, good luck having a believable story where everyone has legendaries or very rare Pokemon in it. Rather than trying to fit someone else’s Pokemon to your story, try making your story fit the characters you came up with.
Bottom line is, if you can’t be bothered to come up with your own characters, maybe you shouldn’t be writing at all. Take a break, wait for ideas to come to you, write something else… But if you can’t be bothered to come up with your own story, I can guarantee you that readers can’t be bothered to read it.
Written by An-chan
