💡 Why does your OC exist (in meta)?

I wanted to create a character that was a Broadway actor since I myself am a thespian. I also wanted to create a character that shares a look that I wear. He's become a main and now acts as a character from my favorite musicals 

All I remember was that I wanted an anthro dragon oc and thought that a water gimmick would be a cool. She had a different personality and little to no backstory when I first made her, she was just some random princess that lived in a cave slightly submerged in water. She wasn't even an alien back then and was just a regular anthro dragon since I thought those were cool.

Jonathan Weyland 

danlion  I remember when Hoffman was a character in a Saw movie for the first time and we talked abt how we really liked him, he was hot and (spoilers) it has not been revealed yet that he was the villain (though I believe we already knew that) and the other detective on the case, Strahm, was in the race for Weyland too back then. I do not remember exactly why we started to face hunt for a Weyland then.. maybe we had been watching Aliens again and I told you about my love for Carter Burke all over and my hc about his Boss? Bc I remember it was you pointing out Costas for exactly that reason.

I was torn for 30 minutes but then we looked at more pictures and I loved his acting and charisma so much that there was no doubt left. Costas was perfect for Weyland. 

ex-friend was making a show in like. middle school. of course this animated show went no where, but the world building i did with this guy (i made her, and she was originally self insert that went by my dead name :skull:) in that time allowed me to turn them into something else. with technically never rewriting anything, and just making her a god who was just some young adult who fucked and found out.

I listened to the song Astrea no Shitsubou and thought "I should make an OC based around this song" so I did and I love her KJSNSKND

He was originally based off that one photo of travis scott holding the mic in the air while screaming with flames in the background. I wanted him to be extremely chaotic for no reason but he ended up being pretty wholesome. And chaotic.

Because I thought of a silly pun and built a character around it

He was just a bunch of random bullet points I wrote down on the back of some of my dnd notes at first lmao

this is an interesting question i want to answer more broadly instead of just assigning it to one character! my characters exist for a variety of reasons: as an answer to me wanting to see a specific type of character, or to subvert a trope, or to help support another character idea (while still making them their own thing, too! you don't want to make characters that JUST exist to fill a role for another character, real people all have their own things going on beyond what their friends are doing.) a couple of them are "i blorbo'ed too hard and now this fictional character is so far removed from the source it's just my oc now." i made patty because all the "melee/tank" roles in fighting teams always seem to be men, i wanted a huge woman who beats the shit out of people for a change. i made lucky because... well, i can't tell for spoiler reasons, but let's say i wanted an ex-main character as a side character. he's sort of had his whole own story play out already, now he's just tagging along for somebody else's. i made clara and james because i really love 1930s musical escapism and i wanted to tell my own story there (also they are some of the aforementioned "i headcanoned too hard and made an OC instead" characters). GL0RiA exists because i've had that sort of sheathed hologram wing idea in my head for Years and i needed to get it on paper, also i thought the idea of a robot with multiple personality cores installed was interesting.

and some of them are just silly. i made dakota because i saw a jacket that looked just like hers and wondered what a character who would wear that jacket might look like. nyx was originally a shitty invader zim fan character. 

this is actually a really interesting thread and i kind of want to make a document now just for myself highlighting All my OCs and why they exist from a meta standpoint. thank you op 🤔

"I want an OC with the most ridiculously colored suit."

And green/purple has always been one of my favorite color combos so why not lmao

I always loved gijinka art, especially technology related gijinkas like OS-tan. Though I saw that most OS-tans are very much Windows-centric, so I wanted to create my own twist on in by personifying vintage computers, sometimes the really obscure ones.

How I come up with the traits for the character is usually based on the source computer's history and their impression on people. It's not always 100% factually accurate though, since they are characters first and historical facts are second. Nix for example has somewhat of a laid-back and unassuming personality, due to the operating system she's based on was less known by public.

Daliel (posted IC) was created for a "boarding school for magically gifted kids" roleplay on the Neopets forums.
He looked a lot different back then, and his name was Daniel. Daniel and Daliel are pretty much two different characters now, but Daliel wouldn't exist if not for Daniel.

Erubisca exists because I drew a redstone block with sharpie while I was watching some one play Minecraft with friends, and then I gave it a body and thought "hey that would make a neat cryptid."

Diaproxy and Benita are also neopets-related.
For Diaproxy, neopets with names that don't have numbers or underscores were valued, so people got pretty inventive with names. But, there was also limited space for pets (4 pet slots per account) so I got Diaproxy from a friend who wanted to make room for a name she liked better. 

Benita Blue was somewhat the opposite. I had a pink zafara named Blue_[random numbers here] with a short poem in her profile saying "Why am I pink with a name like Blue? Well, why should that really matter to you?" and it stuck with me even long after I lost that account. Bennie has nothing to do with that zafara, but when choosing a surname for her I thought back to that neopet, and now Bennie Blue's favorite color is pink.

Goose exists partly out of spite. I was getting exhausted by the amount of times a "little creature" character was male, and if they WERE female they had some pretty obviously feminized features. I'm looking DIRECTLY at Angel from the Lilo & Stitch tv series. Goose is a cis lady that I don't draw any differently from how I'd draw her if she wasn't. (I'm not sure how to fully articulate why this bothers me, but the gist is just that female characters are hardly ever allowed to just be chaotic without being "reeled back" with hyperfeminized features)
The other part of why she exists is because I really wanted to create a character that was easy for me to draw, and could be recognizable without very much effort in uncolored doodles.