i cant type a whole lot on mobile but!
im psychotic. im very upfront about this. im also v upfront with me being autistic.
i have a few characters i put through my own personal mental hell. and to others itd seem like unnecessary torture, but its therapeutic for me.
i find it important for my growth to be able to project some of my mental health struggles onto my characters. bc then i can write them a happy ending. and remind myself and others that you dont need to be perfect or cured to be worthy of love and happiness.
so i guess! stories about hitting rock bottom, finding hope, and found family for me!
I wasn't sure how exactly to phrase this, but basically I mean if you have ever given your character details of your own life or made them go through or think about things important to you? Maybe they have a similar home situation, maybe they have a similar experience with something or maybe there is a part in their identity they share with you. Or maybe their stories are wrapped around a concept or a theme you find important and/or dear to you for whatever personal reason.
I'm fully aware not everyone does this with their creations, however: I know a lot of people who go as far as to avoid having anything in common with their creations or characters as well as they just humanly can. If you don't have anything of your own, I'd prefer if you didn't come here to just announce you have nothing; it hardly contributes to the thread! Also remember to be nice and respectful of other people, as we're all different creators with different priorities and life experiences! Also try to keep it age appropriate and use blacked out text if you must!
A lot of my OCs deal with developing their own sense of self and learning to accept themselves as they are or otherwise attempting to acknowledge their shortcomings and trying to overcome them. Self-discovery is a theme I like to explore because of how personal it is and how it applies to me.
Another common theme within my OCs is them getting away from an abusive situation and kind of unlearning all the unhealthy mindsets that they picked up in their previously toxic environments and recovering from that. Again, that particular theme is personal to me and acts as an inspiration of sorts.
A lot of found family cause friends families are the best, healthy characters, and just ones who have friends, really. With a layer of fantastical stuff cause hey, I can!
There are a lot of things I can't really fix, one major one really preventing the rest, so I just kinda live through my characters. They have some problems of their own, of course, but overall, if I could be most any of my characters, I would do so in an instant. I got it real fuckin bad, though mostly my fault from what I hear, so well why not just see how things could have been, with a little extra layer of magic and tech and shit to spice it up eh? While not all were made as characters that have some of me in them, I probably could work some aspects of who I'd wanna be into those.
Sona's should be a given, but I project a lot onto my OCs, and without getting into really personal territory, I have a lot of things that make living life really difficult at times. I use my characters as a way to improve and better myself, as when they develop and bypass their obstacles, so do I- because I share the same obstacles!
I use self-insertation into my own world/story as a form of coping as well as it lets me "talk" to my characters who have, in fact, gone through what I am going through, and seeing their development makes me feel more confident and help me through harder timers! ;v;
I tend to make characters specifically to help me cope as well, by making them a representative of my own issues and basically personifying them, but in a way that allows me to become more comfortable with the problem, if that makes sense?
o how did i miss this thread :0
tbh I'm of the belief that everything someone creates is gonna reflect something them in some way, so I embrace it pretty willingly ;v I don't set out to create characters who are like me, but the ones that are important to me inevitably explore something that resonates w/ me personally
verrrrrrry common themes you see among my OCs (even my joke characters) include: existentialism, alienation/isolation, addiction, self VS body, trauma, co-dependancy, (re)discovering a sense of self/identity, and, if not recovery, then survival at least. ~That's no coincidence~ My life has been nowhere near as hard or dramatic as any of my ocs', but these r still topics that have coloured my real life in some way or another. Also, my main story is set in a locale similar to my irl one, which is a good excuse 2 like explore and think abt my observations of the culture of my little chunk of the world!
lmao this is only tangentally related but another thing I do is give my OCs hobbies in the hopes that they will encourage me 2 pursue them more myself ;p
A lot of my OCs character arcs center around finding peace in who they are. While I tend to have characters who are relatively static, here are a few that struggle with things that I do IRL.
- Leela captures my own feeling of dread about the future, as well as my tendency to ignore my problems and act like nothing's wrong. Like myself, she has a very low self-worth, and high dependency on the people around her. However, I don't experience all the same mental health problems she does. Unlike myself, she has symptoms reminiscent of bipolar disorder/manic depression (as per what I've read online. I'm not a professional, so I can't say what problem she definitively has.) I definitely don't.
- Lock has themes that are also very important to me. She has a dependency/addiction to any and all kinds of food, which is something I currently struggle with, and a feeling of being worth less than other people because of her weight, like "why would anyone ever like me? I'm fat." Also, she feels lonely, something I haven't struggled with for a few years, but back in 5th-7th grade, I felt like I had nobody to confide in. Similar to Leela above, she feels dread about her future, which is one of the biggest problems I deal with. She also deals with sporadic periods of depression. It's a minority of her time, but during her low periods (typically two weeks long, but sometimes last longer), she can't get anything done and constantly feels down. This is identical to how I've experienced feelings of depression.
- Maddie is currently hidden (though I may unhide her at some point.) She buries herself in books and games and fantasy worlds, without paying attention to anything around her. She's not very functional, and she represents my creative side at its worst. I'm not sure what more to say, really.
The characters listed above, I typically pay most attention to when I'm "in a dark place". There are other OCs of mine that aren't actively "in a dark place", but I still relate to them.
- Umeko, Florence, and Chip are all on the ASD spectrum, which I am, too. They're important to me because I feel that ASD myths and stereotypes should be lifted. We're not all the same (Umeko, Florence, and Chip certainly aren't) and everything is of varying intensity. Florence, for example, does not typically have a problem with sensory overload (but she has several Bad Textures™) while Chip carries her noise-cancelling headphones everywhere. Umeko and Chip are people that one would suspect to be autistic, but Florence is largely non-typical, as she's extroverted and athletic, unlike most ASD people. None of them have it listed on their profiles because I typically don't draw attention to my autism and neither do they.
I'm not feeling too too upfront right now so I'm keeping things vague, but I tend to do this by accident really often. I'd originally gone out of my way to not do that because I didn't want to go about spilling personal stuff through my characters, but I think it happened anyway, boooo.
Arielle is a very dear character to me, because they are the character I relate to the most.
I've been told by a dear friend I am the "in real life Arielle" before pfft.
Mostly due to the similarities in both our façade and personalities.
Their story involves exploration of the society and individuals in the society.
That is also something I'm currently doing, mostly also since I just moved abroad.
Also, Arielle's character involves possession, a theme I play a lot with.
My friend jokingly told me, "If there's no possession involved, it's not Rainbow's story."
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In general though, my characters usually have "pieces" of me, that makes them all dear and connected to me.
Whether it be appearance-wise, personality wise, backstory wise.
Sometimes little things make a major connection, and it's unique how though they share a part of me, they can differ so much!
a lot of my ocs also have aspects of myself - plus some of them are inspired my friends, too! chris's backstory is related to mine, for example (it's just,, worse). these traits help me a lot when it comes to making realistic characters, which is very important to me. i've been told a few times that my most developed ocs are like real people, and i'm very glad for that. since i suck at writing and drawing fantasy/sci-fi/etc., i just write what i know, which is modern everyday life. to me, making my characters as realistic as i can helps make my slice-of-life stories more interesting and also makes my mains more sympathetic.
to add more realism, i find it very important to do proper research for sensitive topics, especially when i'm not familiar with them myself. but, the things that i explore the most often are what i'm most familiar with: depression, lgbt stuff, recovery, etc. recovery is also v important to me since i want to add to the stories of mental health that end with recovery that have been popping up recently. i just want anyone who's gone through similar issues that i've had that they deserve to recover, if that makes sense :^)
The vast majority of my ocs deal with themes of identity and recovery to some degree or another. My characters are usually made for playing in ttrpg campaigns, so when I first make them I don't know with any certainty how their story arc will resolve, but I tend to really find personal importance in characters who start out with some kind of identity crisis and heavy situation and climb their way out of that. My ocs backstories are generally tragic, but written with a vested interest in seeing them grow as people and get better. Their narratives tent to heavily feature 'man-vs-self' elements, and I really enjoy moments where I can play their flaws to interesting effect, not just their strengths. As a mentally-ill person who was in a very dark place for a while and who still struggles with day to day recovery and self esteem, it has been very important for me to be able to create and explore flawed, growing people and to explore my own journey through them.