[ SECRET POST #2074 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2074 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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[Sam Winchester, Young Hercules]


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[La Pucelle: Tactics]


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Notes:

Important: I'm really sorry about this, but I accidentally misclicked and deleted the submission post from last week instead of saving it. Managed to save the first page (25) of secrets, but the rest (about 100 or so) are gone.

If you submitted something last week (Aug 26-Sept 1), please resubmit it here.

The submissions post for next week is below as usual.

Secrets Left to Post: ?? pages, ??? secrets from Secret Submission Post #296.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[fscom]

14. http://i.imgur.com/yrxz8.png

[(Anonymous)]

I'm sorry you feel left out, OP, but to be completely honest, if my friends only wanted to talk about their OCs whenever we joined a new fandom...I wouldn't be very interested. I mean, if we were sound-boarding original fic ideas, sure, and maybe if it was just a few times, but when I get into I new fandom (or in a fandom, in general), I wanna talk about the canon characters and, yes, perhaps even shipping, not OCs. /Kanye shrug

[dethtoll]

that is seriously a lot of water all at once.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, well. This is fandom--unless you're doing some epic universe exploration, most people don't give a damn about OCs.

[streetcake]

I always feel bad when I see people excited over their OCs and I don't really care. :(

Maybe you could suggest to your friend about making an OC, maybe at least one of them would be interested and you could talk about it.

[velvet_mace]

Yeah, that's a tough thing to want to gush about and get other people interested. This isn't to discourage you from working on creating characters -- that's a useful skill. But you have to understand that no one else will have that immediate visceral connection to the character that you do. To you, the emotional connection is incredible: You feel what the character feels, you revel in their accomplishments, you are fascinated by their quirks. They are like your children. But to everyone else -- they are also like your children. There is no investment in them. They are strangers.

So fandom is really not the place for that. The place to enjoy them is in your head and when you get good enough at making them, you can create worlds they live in, write that up and voila: original fic is made. And then you can get strangers on the internet to have some personal interest and investment in your OCs.

So... enjoy your OCs, but also, try to get involved with what other people are interested in too, like shipping or speculating, or squeeing over episodes or whatnot. You may find you actually enjoy it if you put your daydreaming aside long enough to give it a chance.

[deadtree]

what is this magical comment made of logic and wonderful?

[(Anonymous)]

+1

[(Anonymous)]

So fandom is really not the place for that

Well. The bit of fandom anon shares with zir friends isn't the place for that, says the nonnie who's really never had any problems in the "friends! let's talk about our OCs and be excited about them!" spectrum. And I think fandom is a great place for us to do that, thanks ever so. :)

Because, you know, to torture your metaphor a little: I've got plenty of investment in some other people's kids, for one reason or another (from "I look after them" to "their parents are my bffs" to "they're really adorable and I worry about them because I recognize myself in them").

OP, if your friends aren't into it, you have two choices (other than the "be the annoying person who keeps insisting on talking about what nobody else wants to talk about"): do as the poster above me suggests and try to get into what they're into - or go looking other places for people who are enjoying their fandom in the same way you want to. They do exist.

[velvet_mace]

You know, if you really wanted to be helpful, you'd give the OP a few of those places so she knows where to go.

[(Anonymous)]

Thing is, if the OP is gracious enough to suppress her own interests and listen to her friends blabber on about stuff she doesn't care about, it would only be fair for her friends to indulge her now and then.

but also, try to get involved with what other people are interested in too

This part, I disagree with completely. I hate shipping. Hate it. Nothing will make me drop a series faster than a developing Romantic Plot Tumor, and nothing will make me stop reading a fic faster than smut. I'm not about to "try to like it" just because none of my friends can shut up about it for 5 seconds. There's no reason the OP should have to force herself to be into things that bore her for the sake of her friends.

[(Anonymous)]

I have the opposite problem. I love shipping, but I'm the only one in my main group that loves it, so I keep a lid on it because I know it annoys them. But holy crap sometimes I wish they would shut up about their fan OCs for like 5 seconds.

[diet_poison]

0__0 what fandom is this?

[(Anonymous)]

I wish I could find these people. I'm way more interested in OC-building than I will ever be in shipping.

[(Anonymous)]

Have you tried looking for OC-based fandom RP communities? They can be hard to find sometimes and your best bet is large fandoms that have a lot of room for making OCs (like Harry Potter, for example), but if you like making and gushing over fandom OCs, it seems like something you'd have fun with.

[diet_poison]

Maybe you should seek out people who are interested in the same things as you, OP. Lots of people in fandom love shipping, and you may have to look a little harder if OPs are your thing.

[ecoerrante]

I...am kind glad that most of my fandom friends have little to no interest in OCs. OTL

Sorry, OP, but OCs are just that: OCs. As a result they don't have the connection to canon that canon characters do, and that combined with the fact that a lot of people automatically assume that OC = Mary Sue just means that people are going to either have their guard up when you bring them up, or they're going to not want to bother with them.

There are some fandoms that are relatively open to OCs though! For example, I know Hetalia has some comms that are open to them/loosely based around them, and someone else has mentioned Harry Potter. So...maybe you could check to see if one of your fandoms has comms like that?

[(Anonymous)]

I've never understood the ambivalence/hatred for OCs, since every character in the canon is an OC at the beginning of a given work. Other than "it's officially published so it must be good" bias.

[(Anonymous)]

I think it's because so many of them turn out to be love interests for a main canon character, or at the very least centrally important to a canon character's emotional life. After a while, it starts to feel like a kind of H.M.S. Pinafore routine:

"I am the Big Canon Hottie! Whose praise all fandom loudly chants!"

"And we are his sisters and his cousins and his aunts!"

"And they are his sisters and his cousins and his aunts, his wives and his sweethearts and his daughters and his aunts, his sisters and his aunts!!"

Especially since they are all somehow the only person canon character could ever love, his destined soul mate, you know the drill. You can't be surprised that people flinch when they see yet another iteration coming down the road.

[kittybeard]

There's...a lot of problems in this comment, and I'm really struggling with wording it. It's not that they're "only good because they're officially published" (there are plenty of flat-out terrible published characters, lol), is because a large amount of people have been given access to these characters and their stories and are able to talk about them, ship them, etc everyone has some sort of understanding. When you walk into a fandom with your own OC, it's personal to you. It doesn't matter that the original story started from an OC, you're still sort of walking in on something people already love and trying to make them care about a character that they have no investment in.

[(Anonymous)]

A large part of it is because people have already come to love the canon, the characters in it, and come to trust the creator of the canon on some level not to put a completely horrible character in the canon [usually, there are exceptions to every rule]. With an OC, you're coming into an established canon, usually forcing your character into it some how [IE: They're X character's brother/sister/sweetheart/etc], and as often as not usually forcing a character on people who don't want anything to do with a character whose being put into the series by someone who isn't the creator.

What you're basically doing here is sort of like demanding why none of the 'reworking' of Shakespeare's plays ever gets as popular as the original [because it's not the story people know and love]. It's not just that most are bad - it's also because even the good ones are being put into a world that people already know and love, and for the most part don't want to put changes implemented by someone most people don't even know who *is*

Also, there are plenty of times when the creator of whatever series/medium can't throw a new character into without pissing fans off, or the character being hated.

[(Anonymous)]

Or you could do what a girl in the One Piece fandom is doing and make a deviantart group dedicated to your OC and make people draw fanart of it so you can put it in your group gallery. A lot of people would probably feel embarrassed for you, but that's kinda part of the package when you make OCs anyway, so...

[(Anonymous)]

Write original fiction. That way you can gush all you want over your characters without people groaning when yet another "Popular male canon character meets a mysterious girl. Who is she, and what ties does she have to his past... and his future? Canon character/OC!" fanfic summary shows up.

[kittybeard]

I think it would ultimately isolate THEM more, in conversation. You're gushing about these characters in YOUR head, even if they are in the same verse. They want to talk about characters you all know and discuss and such. It's no fun sitting there listen to someone yammer on about their own character in fandom.

[(Anonymous)]

On the other hand, it's no fun to patiently listen to your friends gush on about their ships, yet when you say "I had this idea for an OC for a fic set 50 years before the canon timeline," they instantly change the subject. If the OP can listen politely to her friends talking about something that doesn't interest her, it won't kill her friends to listen politely to her when she talks about something that doesn't interest them--if they actually are her friends.