#LAST ONE prommy.. i will actually start working on the stuff i'm supposed to be doing

[hoofpeet]

They're so sillies....

[shooks-stupid-stuff]

one thing that's been bothering me for a few years now is how i basically have 2 types of ocs: ones that are pretty much entirely original, and ones that are very obviously inspired by media i like. it's that second category that's been bothering me, and i just... feel the need to finally put it into words.

it's no secret that i'm incredibly passionate about the media and characters i like, especially if you're someone that knows me closely and/or talks to me a lot. so sometimes when making ocs i just go 'ooh i should make one that's like this character i like', and i think that's normal. characters people like often have traits they find to be interesting, and those traits can easily be spun in many different ways.

however, there are quite a good chunk of my ocs that i think are a bit too... derivative. and i have no clue how to make them not feel that way, both because me and my friends who i do oc stuff with all already know what the inspirations were and because i feel way too attached to make any major changes.

it kinda started as a joke. a few years back when i was in an active rp community (a story for another time (never)), and thought 'hey it'd be funny if i made some ocs that were just bootleg touhou characters since all my friends know im obsessed with the series lol' (this was technically not the first time i had done something like this, but the previous characters had very rapidly separated themselves from their inspirations in all but general appearance and/or color scheme). and so i did. and it was great, i had a lot of fun taking them and spinning them in a different direction, trying to subvert the mold i had made them from.

however. i quickly began to feel just... really conflicted about these characters. i REALLY liked them, and i still do, i think some of them are some of my most fun characters, but... can i really call them my characters when they're so heavily inspired by something else? even if they're different enough, it didn't matter. you could still tell (or i could, at least). and i couldn't bring myself to massively change anything about them because... they were already cemented into my mind. it felt wrong.

even now, having redesigned basically all the characters i have that fit into this category at least once i just... can't help but feel conflicted about most of them. and i kind of can't escape doing this, even with new ocs (example: i recently made a character based off of a japanese mythological figure, and all i could think about when designing them was the touhou character also based off of that mythological figure... and it definitely shaped the design a lot).

i... don't know what point im trying to make here. or if this is even coherent, or something i should be all too concerned about at all, or something other people have even noticed.

i guess what im trying to say is i was gonna post some redesigns ive been working on for like two weeks but im kinda too scared to because i feel like all the characters are very obviously derivative and it's making me feel really... well, conflicted.

oh, and quick clarification because this just occurred to me as i was about to hit post: this has nothing to do with the thing i was doing around mid last year where i was making actual bootleg touhou/len'en characters. that's for something else, and those are supposed to be very obvious spoofs and are not actual ocs. i am still working on those i prommy, ill get around to the few in my ask box/commented on that post eventually.