- How do you handle revamps?
Well these days, artwise I don't really do them, but before, I had no art from others so I could easily redesign them. Writing wise I am a lot more open to revamping for a good number, but not all. A few of mine have ties to other characters, and I'd like to preserve those, plus those ones with the ties I am really darn happy with, so hey. - Do you struggle to rewrite old characters?
I had rewritten quite a lot when I took a leap from MLP everything to a more general anthro universe, and some of those characters were pretty old at the time, and I feel I got them done right. They still kept aspects of their old self, though. Not sure how good I'd do if I had to do rewrites like that now a days though. - What do you do with the old writing?
There wasn't really anything written down when I did that rewriting thing, so can't do anything with what never existed! I don't really do good writing stuff down past my toyhouse bios, and if you seen most of mine, they aren't exactly deep. Probably bad but eh just how I do it. - Is there a way to cut this attachment?
Heck if I know, I love my characters, and a few don't pan out, but that's rare. - How the heck can you convince yourself to trade off a well-loved character?
I can't. I don't do character trading. I did sell one I was actually kinda on board with cause I was in a horrid mood, and the only reason I did let the deal hit, well sides the money, was cause my friend was really excited about the idea of having that character, and has done nice stuff with her, and yeah it paid off. But that's a one off case... and offtopic since this is about trading not selling :p - How guilty do you feel breaking up couples via trades? (Is it story related?)
If I did trading, and had to call off a ship to do it, yeah I'd feel bad, I wouldn't be good at telling the friend "Oh yeah I traded off that character you really liked and all haha whatever" nah, couldn't do that. I like the few ships I got going too much...and well the whole not one to trade thing :p - What do you do with art that doesn't suit your character anymore?
Only one case of that ever happened when they ignored my ref and left the character half done and with the totally wrong bodyshape. It was the first piece I commissioned so I didn't want to be an asshole and never said anything. It's currently not posted anywhere I don't think. In my MLP days, I didn't have much original art, and when people gifted me art, turns out a lot of it was recolored vectors that they had no permission to use, so removing most of that stolen stuff was easy. I think I have the original pieces somewhere, still. And yeah I don't post em anywhere but I still like to remember them. - Am I asking too many questions?
Nah~
One of the huge things I see happening here is how people will draw and commission art of a character, they're the biggest fave, never for trade.... then trade them off for whatever newest thing comes along. I don't get how you do that. At all. I get super attached to anything I do anything of once. Heck, I've drawn OTP art for people via commission, then half gets traded and the art's never seen again and it breaks my heart every time I love drawing couples but I hate what happens sometimes. I've got characters I've doodled once and owned for years and then never done anything with afterward and I still refuse to get rid of them.
As such, I'm struggling revamping some of my older characters that don't really fit in one of my worlds as-is anymore. I had a spirit hunter, one of my first MYOs who I've loved and adored and his design is (was, clothing-wise) a hot mess, and I've been wanting to redesign him and rewrite his story for well over a year to be a king, since I have a pretty good pile of his species around and he fits as the oldest of a few that mix well into a royal family. I've got so much art of his old form, and I really do love it, but he'd do so much better if I just rewrite his story. But I'm seriously struggling to let go of all his old everything. I've had all his old writing and art sorted into a tab for ages, and I have a new outfit for him, an outline for his new place, but I cannot convince myself to finish putting all the pieces together. He's the only one of the royal family lagging in development and references and I know it's because he's an older design of mine and I'm so attached to his old self.
I have an old dreamy who followed old dreamy lore in their story, and it also doesn't fit my world. And honestly that lore, if you think too hard, is really kind of gross and bad, and using it the way it is in my story for them implies some pretty unpleasant things that neither fit my character nor does it reflect anything I want to do with any of my characters. And I love this OC, they're basically the perfect design as far as my aesthetics go, but honestly, I really need to rewrite them too. And as much as I hate their story as it is right now, I don't know what I want to do to change it, and I feel like my attachment is what's blocking me.
I have a huge family of OP OCs that are so obnoxiously chuuni that I don't ever want to unprivatize their stories again, but I've had them for so long that updating them is an absolute no-no. But they're so embarrassing, lmao.
And this is just scratching the surface of where my struggles lie. I'm stuck with so many!
Questions, feel free to answer anything or nothing:
- How do you handle revamps? (by this I mean majorly dumping a story and re-purposing the design/personality into a new one)
- Do you struggle to rewrite old characters?
- What do you do with the old writing?
- Is there a way to cut this attachment? (to old writing/art/ocs, w/e)
- How the heck can you convince yourself to trade off a well-loved character? (by well-loved I mean someone with a lot of work and/or art put into them, but maybe their adventure ended a long time ago and now they're just sitting)
- How guilty do you feel breaking up couples (where you own only one of the two) via trades? (Is it story related?)
- What do you do with art that doesn't suit your character anymore?
- Am I asking too many questions? (if not you can suggest more lol)
Oooh Also!!! If you have any before/after characters you're willing to show (I mean after a heavy revamp, not just "I drew/wrote this better", but more like "here's this character that looked completely different with a design that now reflects their story better" OR "here's this consistent character design, and now they have a completely knew job/plot/life with only shadows of their old self left". That kind of thing. Pulling fancharacters out of their fandom and overhauling them to be original would be a good example.
- How do you handle revamps?
I really rarely go through design revamps for characters who already have art, because redesigning them make their old art obsolete and.... this would be a waste? Though, if something really doesn't feel right with a character, I'd still change it. It will be long and difficult, but the changes usually are quite minor then the character is still the same and the old art can still stay, even though it is a bit outdated.
- Do you struggle to rewrite old characters?
Not much. I like to update them, though I never change too much things about a character. I can change their age, develop their background, alter their personality a bit, but I'll never redo the character entirely nor change who they are. I'd rather create a new character....
- What do you do with the old writing?
I don't have much polished writings anyway so, yeah, I don't care much. I'll keep some file in some folder on my computer and that's it.
- Is there a way to cut this attachment?
Yes, there is, but why would you even want to cut it ?
- How the heck can you convince yourself to trade off a well-loved character?
Why would you do that? Unless you have some very important financial issue, like you're about to get homeless, and your characters can be sold for thousands, then I really do not see a reason why you should trade them off? Even if you don't use them anymore, nor see you using/developing them again, you can still keep them "just in case" or.... just like you'd keep your old childhood's plushie, you know. It might be hidden deep in your cupboard, but it's still somewhere. There's no reason to throw them away.
I have a whole universe that I do not care much about anymore, and I'm probably never be working on it again, but... I just can't trade these characters. Then I just keep them, and they're sitting there, with their empty profiles. But I'm still attached to them, then I'm keeping them. Because I will not get such an important benefit from selling them. Sure, they can bring some money, but eh, am I THAT desperate for money?
I have a whole universe that I do not care much about anymore, and I'm probably never be working on it again, but... I just can't trade these characters. Then I just keep them, and they're sitting there, with their empty profiles. But I'm still attached to them, then I'm keeping them. Because I will not get such an important benefit from selling them. Sure, they can bring some money, but eh, am I THAT desperate for money?
- How guilty do you feel breaking up couples via trades? (Is it story related?)
Never happened to me and will probably never happen. I don't ship characters for the sole reason of shipping. If they're shipped, something happened (through roleplay or head-cannoning) to have them shipped. And if I cared for them enough to spend months roleplaying them, then I'm not going to trade them anyway.
....well, my characters aren't shipped with other people's characters anymore anyway, as they all went through some break-up before the roleplays ended.
....well, my characters aren't shipped with other people's characters anymore anyway, as they all went through some break-up before the roleplays ended.
- What do you do with art that doesn't suit your character anymore?
I keep it. I keep everything about my characters anyway.
- Am I asking too many questions?
Yes. But I like it.
Y'all aren't helping me figure out a way to push aside my feelings for a re-write but I'm feeling a lot better about keeping a hold of characters I've loved that I don't do much with anymore that I don't have the heart to send away. Hoarders Unanimous :,D
Also it's starting to feel like the trade-away-OCs habit is less common than I thought.
my attacthment to ocs is hit or miss honestly. sometimes a character sticks and sometimes it doesnt : P
- How do you handle revamps? - most of the revamps ive done are story revamps, which are cool because like.. characters gradually evolve over time so its not an 'all at once' thing? i dont do design revamps much because i keep most characters pretty simple in design so any changes usually only fall under outfits which i can get away with. the only one i can really think of in recent history is my character lune, who used to have hair like the black and white 2 protag's, but i couldnt draw it so i cut it short and kept it :p
- Do you struggle to rewrite old characters? - not really, because as i said before the characters really just evolve over time ! a bunch of small changes over a year can result in a different attitude, the biggest struggle i have in this aspect is rewriting outdated bios which im.. trying to do now. after that long the changes really start to show, which i guess is a downside of that always changing thing
- What do you do with the old writing? - archive it, mostly. my tumblr has a LOT of archived stuff before i moved my oc stuff onto th, some of it is ... not good lmao . but its interesting to look back at it to see how characters have changed, and how i;ve changed as well
- Is there a way to cut this attachment? - i.... im in the same boat as you honestly. once im attached theres no going back
- How the heck can you convince yourself to trade off a well-loved character? - the only way i can see myselrf trading off my main ocs if if John Gamefreak:tm: comes to me personally and asks for them cfvghbjnk . i dont do a whole lot of trading/selling of non-adopts , and characters who have a lot of sentiment are stuck with me forever
- How guilty do you feel breaking up couples via trades? (Is it story related?) - if i were to ever sell/trade a copled oc, id trade both of them tbh
- What do you do with art that doesn't suit your character anymore? - archive it, usually. i gotta archive e v e r y t h i n g
- Am I asking too many questions? - shrugging emoji .. this made me realize i dont know much about this because i get very extremely attached to my ocs LMAO
- How do you handle revamps?
- i do them often-ish. if its a design i didnt make then ill sort of or drastically revamp it depending on the designers rules and what my purpose is, but it depends on if im already attached to my idea of the character. if i made the design then i might totally redo it and not care lol
- Do you struggle to rewrite old characters?
- i dont have any super intricate stories rn (one will be like that but its not yet) so im not bothered by rewriting bios and stuff. change is good
- What do you do with the old writing?
- ill probably keep a couple things the same but if it was only a bio then ill just scrap it. if it was like a fic then i would keep it
- Is there a way to cut this attachment?
- usually i do it by saying to myself that in the current state of the character, there is someone who will love them and use them even more. even if it getd traded like 50 times eventually it will land into the hands of someone who will love it forever
- How the heck can you convince yourself to trade off a well-loved character?
- above answer. its hard but you have to remind yourself that maybe the character isnt meant to be in your hands
- How guilty do you feel breaking up couples via trades? (Is it story related?)
- i have ocs who used to be in relationships with ocs belonging to my exes. i totally wiped the parts of the character bios relating to their ocs from mine so i didnt care. i traded them away if i didnt want to see them or use them since it would feel worse to me to just delete something i spent time on. i dont have a problem removing other characters from my stories but if its my own ocs then i will ask the person im trading the character to if i can reuse the bio for a different design. i did that recently because the design was so complicated that i hated drawing it so the character name and bio is in a note for me to use again when i feel like making her a new design ^^
- What do you do with art that doesn't suit your character anymore?
- i keep it! even if its not ic anymore its still art of my babies and its character development c: i even keep the art of my ocs with my exes ocs because of that, and i still use it sometimes. i got a commission of my oc dane with my last exs oc and its literally his profile icon lol
- Am I asking too many questions?
- needs more questions
i just wanted to chime in with some thoughts! i dont ever trade my characters away so i'm not as helpful on that front but i have thought about some of the other questions.
in terms of revamps/rewrites, i think of my ocs as more a part of myself rather than anything else. the way i see it, the revamps aren't throwing the old version of the character away. rather, as i grow as a person in my life, because my ocs are truly an extension of me, they are growing with me. so when i revamp them i keep who they used to be in mind, but change them to fit more with who i am now, what i'm interested in now, and in that way it's not really a revamp as much as a maturation. :>
in terms of the old writing, i usually archive it! sometimes i like to look back and think about who they used to be and how they+i have grown together, and feel proud of how far we've come! same with all the old art -- i keep it, and remember the great times i've had with that oc in the past. even if they may be a little different now, it's the same kind of love as before - like looking at pictures of old childhood friends. :D i especially keep the art from other people i've received! even if the OC doesn't look the same, the time and love put into the art by friends/other people is something i will always value.
I don't have much thoughts on trading/hoarding/etc, because that's a very personal thing for everyone, and also because I vaguely feel like it doesn't really affect me that much. I haven't traded that many ocs away, because I don't really have that many. Best of luck figuring something out though, and don't feel bad about hoarding them and not doing much with them, they're yours and they're ultimately just there to make you feel good (or feel something).
But for revamps:
I have characters that have gone through some pretty massive overhauls. Pyrit over here has gone from "shiny deerlike faun dude" to "god of forgotten things", and this revamp includes scrapping like 90% of his design. But, in the same vein, I love to give artists a lot of free reign when drawing my characters, which you can probably guess from looking at his art %)
I guess what it boils down to, ultimately, is figuring out what the core concept behind your character is. What's the most important thing about them, and how do you want this to carry over into their design. Pyrit is a god of forgotten customs and history, and so he looks like he fell out of a specific historical era. He is forgotten, so he has no face. The hoofed feet are the only throwback to his old design which I kept in, bc I like them and it kinda works. But also, it doesn't have to be that deep: Vasiliy is what happened when I went "fuck gender stereotypes and also, why are all cross-dressing
male characters so girly?" so his design is just basically me going "I'm putting a dad-bod into a dress and I'm gonna make it look good". The important parts of his design are "big" and "dress" and everything else is really just cosmetics.
But for all I sound like I can totally rework everything: exceptions to every rule and all that: Cain here is my "embarrassing, self-indulgent, kinda shitty OC that I made when I was like 14, with a Tragic Backstory (tm) and an edgy design and way too much art" and I just- I am probably never revamping him? He's objectively terrible but also kind of hilarious to me, and I've gotten over the embarrassment and tipped right over to "yes this is my terrible trash boy, please beat him up"