cool and unusual punishment

OC Tag

So now that I have a true random book I'll probably take tags more often but I'm still only going to do tags I give a shit about... so not many. I also got some more comments on the Q n A which is ongoing so I'll go check those out later. :V I know some of these questions are repeated from over there but I'll do my best to flesh out these answers so I'm not just treading old ground. 

Thanks to AwsomeDragons for tagging me since she knows this is riiight up my alley.

What Inspires You To Make OCs

That's a good question? A lot of my earlier OCs were influenced by people I know, and then some of them were sort of... generic background characters. I ended up recycling those characters for so long that they took on a life of their own. More often than not, when I need new characters, it comes from ideas I think are cool that eventually sort of get wrapped around. I like certain dynamics, think certain personalities would go well with certain powers or ideas, etc. To be honest my characters kind of show up uninvited most of the time, admit themselves in, and then dictate exactly who they are, what they want, and when they want to be written (now), throw their shoes off, ruin my life a little bit, and then they either get written or fade into blissful obscurity.

Seriously though I'm sure most of them are influenced from somewhere but there are quite a few (Vivian, Sweep, Quill, Ylva and Emily, Evan) who came right the heck out of nowhere. Most of the familiarity comes from things I tacked on (determination/hope motifs) once they already existed to make them FIT.

Favorite OCs

Already answered but seriously, it changes. Weekly. 

I could talk for hours about any one character, favorite or otherwise, and by the end of the talk I'd probably be in love with them again. Amalgams usually rank pretty high for this reason because I could talk about their weird fractured pseudo-psychology forever if no one stopped me. I also adore my more morally ambiguous characters and whether I think they were in the right or not tends to flip around as I get older. There's also a lot of fun to be had in looking back at my characters from when I was juuuust a bit younger. I find a lot of myself, including some unfortunate revelations, in Gale and Ashley, but there's also characters I keep coming back to just for fun, like Indy and Orca, the latter of which is so stupid on concept (she's an Idate expy) but due to fan input from a fan who nO LONGER KEEPS UP WITH MY BOOKS she's somehow wormed her way into relevance. 

That's such an Orca thing to do. 

Current contenders for 'favorite' include Serena, Evan, (bonus points for Serena AND Evan) Joel, Dylan, Axiom, and Marie. Omenpaw, my DC character, also ranks pretty high. What a clueless mess.

Least Favorite OCs

I used to joke about how useless Deepkit and Blossom were but then I rebuffed Blossom and I just don't care about Deepkit. Thistle and Necaris are also hard to write but it's worth it for whn they do work. Same goes for Twitch.

 Characters I objectively hate: 

-background characters. I don't usually have background characters I don't give a single fuck about (even Cecily from Broken Souls is important to me) but when I do, you can tell, and I don't give a siiiiiingle fuck. They're barely even characters in my mind. They're just there.

-Ylva and Crypt are both frustrating piles of garbage. They add almost nothing to their respective stories which is made worse by Ylva being the protagonist. 

-Any time I tried to make a reference character in Hearts of Gold or for that matter any of my books. Pacifica is the worst thing that happened to the whole trilogy besides the ambiguous Morty/Ashley age gap (because that was retconned. I can't retcon Pacifica). Gash was originally conceived as a reference character and is so bland without it that even his concept, which looks GREAT on paper (not the writing paper but the planning paper) falls flat on its face.