#i love and admire all of you wirters

[nevergonnnalietoyou]

I fell behind on a lot of fanfic and now I don't even know what exactly I've missed but I'll read everything I promise 🤞🏻

[historicfailure]

Maybe an unpopular opinion, but: I actually prefer OCs over y/n, because 1) I fucking hate the you perpective with a passion (i.e. you looked into his eyes... ) 2) They're supposed to be blank slates so readers can project themselves onto them, but like... 100/100 times they act in a way I personally never would and find rather unrelatable 3) I feel like most y/n characters are OCs in the wirters heads anyways (at least reader insert fics), so like, don't give them a physical description if you don't wanna, but like at leats give them a proper name because I find y/n really disrupts the reading flow and maybe don't use the fucking you perpective. Also sorry for the rant, but also your reader insert fics are some of the ones I actually do enjoya, but generally? Always searching the OC tags on ao3 and ff.net first before I look for reader inserts. Also, when and why did OCs start to get so unpopular?? I feel like all the older fics till like maybe 2014 were a lot more oc centric rather than y/n??

Hey there! :D

That is so valid tbh. Generally, I also "only" started writing you or y/n perspective because I felt like my oc wasn't good enough and a bit cringy tbh. Also, I was annoyed with most y/n reader fics as well and wanted to make them more realistic for myself, so I could enjoy them outside of oc content.

I don't know how exactly I got that perception that ocs are bad, but somehow along the way of interacting with fandom (even way before I started writing) I managed to have the mindset that ocs are automatically cringe as they are mostly seen as wish fulfillment on the writers part... A rather unhealthy way to think, so I'm trying to unlearn that.

And true, yes! I definitely see my reader inserts as their own characters, as each and every one of them would react differently to a given situation. I just didn't give them a physical appearance because... well, see above.

I have no idea when OCs became unpopular, I can only reach back to the mary sue argument as a whole, as well as the fact that most fandom was built by women and then slowly overtaken by men as well (best example is Star Trek, the very first fandom, its foundations with mail-chains and fanfics and meetings built by women, only for these women to be pushed aside). Most women would have liked to see a women also succeed in fanfiction, be admired and loved by everyone, do everything on their own, with the world on her shoulders...

Which sounds very Mary Sue like, but if you think about it? Every "successful" male superhero nowadays (and even before that, lets be honest) is a Mary Sue archetype. Batman. Superman. Ironman, just to name a few. There was a wonderful essay about that exact problem I read once and I couldn't have agreed more. Let's see if I can find it when I'm home, I know I have it somewhere in my bookshelf xD

But the Mary Sue "problem" started way before 2014, so idk what the then decline caused.

Thank you so much for your ask! That was a wonderful insight and definitely a great opinion ^^ ocs for the win! :D