I never really get to talk about Elding because I haven't really thought of her story that much, and she needs development, but I really love her.
How many of these kinds of characters do you have?
30 Votes
A lot... whoops...
20 Votes
A decent amount of them.
10 Votes
Eh, I have some.
11 Votes
Just a few.
8 Votes
Only one or two.
1 Votes
None!
Everyone has their favorite characters! The ones you write stories about all the time, the ones you can't stop commissioning art of, the ones you always find yourself doodling, the ones you like to RP with and think about the most... even if you don't have A favorite, there are probably a handful of characters your followers can tell you love just a little more than the rest.
But then there are these characters.
Sometimes you have a character (or a few) who you really adore, who's really special to you! But for some reason or another, you just... never talk about them. Your friends might not even know they exist. They're like the cryptids of your character roster, and you're the person with 10,000 reality TV shows about finding them. Even though you love them as much as your "visible" favs, these elusive kinds of favs just aren't spoken about as often.
There are a lot of reasons these characters exist! Here are a few:
- Practically everything about them is a spoiler, so you can't really publicly do much with them without spoiling your stories.
- You're really self-conscious about that character for some reason, be it because they're very personal to you or you're worried people would make fun of them (a common concern with fan characters.)
- Their design/story changes so often that you're not comfortable showing them off since they aren't really "complete."
- Their design is extremely complicated or otherwise something difficult for most commissioners and/or yourself to draw (elderly people, robots/mecha, armored characters, eldritch monsters, etc.,) so you don't produce a lot of content of them.
- The people around you don't seem as interested in them as you are, so you've shied away from talking about them.
- There's so much to say about them that you've just been too lazy to finish a profile of them anywhere, making you less willing to show them off.
- They're a terrible, horrible person, so while you enjoy thinking about them you might not be comfortable exposing others to them.
- You don't know. Why don't you talk about them more often...? Huh.
And there are plenty more reasons!
So, who are your "neglected favorites," and why aren't they as spoiled as your "visible favorites?" Share them here, give 'em a little love!
Most of mine are characters who don't have a profile anywhere yet, which is often the reason they're neglected in the first place: I feel like if they don't have a profile, no one will really have any way to connect with them and learn about them since I don't draw very often and writing is hard to draw attention to. Reasons for not having a profile vary but usually just revolve around the fact that I have a bazillion OCs and can only crank out so many profiles at once, especially since I try to focus on getting adopts up first to prove I'm "using them." Most of my "neglected favorites" are originally-designed characters, so they've got quite a bit of time before most of them will have profiles.
The big exception to that is Nolan, who's probably, like... my third favorite character? He's easily in the top 5, at least. I love the dude to death but I just!! Can't talk about him!! So much about him on every level is major spoilers for his native story, so I'm stuck just not talking about him much until I write the story in question. That seems kinda unlikely, though, and if I use him in RP at all he'll innately be spoiling things for reasons, so I'm considering giving up and just including all of the spoilers in his profile one of these days... the struggle...
Another example is Ouray. I'm super fond of them and actually think about them a lot, but... well, they're dead. Just straight-up permadead, so dead that they reincarnated into my favorite OC somewhere along the way and thus I can't even do a "got brought back from the dead" kind of plot. Super duper dead. There's only one kind of RP they could really ever be in (something taking place in Dicro's subconscious, but even then that's just an illusion of them,) though I guess sometimes people do RPs of their characters taking place in their past... either way, since they're super dead I tend not to talk about them nearly as often as I think about them.
i've been focusing a lot on a specific group of ocs i intend to flesh out and make into a "main cast" of future projects, but then i've also got this little kid named nora whose concept i LOVE and want to develop more but i just haven't found the motivation or confidence? but i'm really attached to her because i've put more thought into how her clock eye works and affects how she lives than i have... most things
i really want to get to fleshing out her character someday, but it's probably not going to be any day soon. at least i have some details up on her old charahub page
Honestly the first one to come to mind is Dolly Lolly! He's kinda important to the story all my MLP OCs are in??? but I??? never ever talk about him ever??? He's a very sweet boy, a genius, and a model because Goals. He ran away from home when he was like eleven and rode trains and walked and eventually found the Peaches, Hayle and Rose! (They're two OTHER underappreciated faves- they're a lovely straight couple who runs what is basically a foster home. Rose is bisexual and Hayle is trans- I love them a lot they're so sweet and nice.) They took him in and Dolly became like. The big brother of the home!
Eventually, Winter Slip (then known as 'Snow') was found after having escaped where he was held, and was taken by a police officer who was friends with the Peaches to their home. Dolly helped him become used to not having strict rules and things he had to say and do. He was very helpful in helping Winter recover! He is also the bad influence brother in Winter's life, but it was all fun and no danger so it wasn't too big of a deal. Neither of them went to college, Dolly became a model very soon after he became a legal adult, having done some model things as a teenager. And fairly quickly became well known. He's cute and has natural talent for it.
Dolly Lolly's cutie mark is mostly that design for aesthetic, but his special talent is giving people hope (a CHEESY TALENT I am very predictable.) and helping them recover from whatever ills befell them. Winter absolutely adores him and so do I. His name used to be Pharoah Sandstrike. but he is seriously into cutesy pink frilly ruffly aesthetic and renamed himself Dolly Lolly, also he hated his dad (his dad hated him because his mother died giving birth to him. edgy.) and since his dad named him he wanted to get rid of that forever.
This is long and I'm not sure if I'm sorry or not but I love my little pink horse so I had to chatter at length. Also I'm just honestly shy so I don't talk about any of them very much. Winter and Disaster and Discord get the most love, I think.
isaac reuben generally speaking is the one a lot of my stuff centers around nowadays, with grandpa greenfield as a strong support, but honestly???
i wanna start writing isaac greenfield again b/c he was my first OC. but i guess he's not an 'ignored' character??
Tim deserved more attention than i gave him. i still consider him one of my main characters even though ??? where did he go??? i don't know. his slow, steady, calm attitude never really stirred up anything super interesting, but he's a good dude with No Powers. abilities like shipwrightery, being very strong, and very good at handling turtles/tortoises?? yeah. no powers, though.
wait couldnt he talk to turtles?? hell i forgot i gave him that. i should probably reboot him in some way b/c a reason i havent gotten back to him is because he was gonna be a thing in a KoL rp that never kicked off.
even though malwitzer was one of my very first ocs, going aaaall the way back to 7th grade, and i really love his design, i never get to draw him or develop his personality. maybe its because hes kinda tough to draw (not really tough just takes a while cuz hes a Long Boy) or maybe its because hes an animal and therefore harder to add human traits to? it doesnt help that he doesnt belong in any of the worlds i made, hes just on his own, in his own lil world. he actually used to have a brother figure, which was a deer-trex hybrid called deerex, but i scrapped that idea. i should bring it back..
//WEEPS
Ezra immeditaley comes into mind-- they're one of the first characters I made for the universe they are apart of but for some reason ever since I joined TH, they've been very much neglected ;;w;; I really don't know why-- it's not like I don't have a grasp of their story and character. So because of their rather empty profile, I refrain from talking about them. My poor baby, they need the attention they deserve ;;0;;
A lot of my fan OCs tbh bc I cycle through them -- when I first get them I'm super hyped and commission art of them, but after a while they kind of fade into the background :')
Pretty much all my old YGO ocs though, including Lumina, Rosetta, and Camila. I made them when I was so young -- sometime in middle school >v< -- and I haven't had the time or patience to revise them to my liking so they pretty much fall under the second bullet point;; I love them but I'm kind of embarrassed by them haha.
It's pending. Sometimes one story and it's characters are in my focus and another time it's another story.
Like Todd for example. A month ago I doodled him and his friends all the time and now I don't even think about him
Definitely Cassandra and Castello !
I love them a lot and ship them hard.. but I can't talk about them as it would spoiler my story "Bittersweet"... of which I started to create a comic but never got far T_T;;; but since they're connected to quite some plot twists and secrets, I can't say much more than what it written on their profiles because I somehow still want to continue the comic... Ah, the struggle haha ;;
//EDIT:
"The people around you don't seem as interested in them as you are, so you've shied away from talking about them."
Me about all my OCs tbh :')
