#i typed this out at 22:37 under rum and coke influence so

[yugotrash]

I would love to hear your thoughts about people having OCs screwing up tumblr's comprehension of society.

do not expect the same level of intellectual rigour that ive cultivated on my page but i am so ready to present my bullshit

essentially I associate havings OCs with having middling-to-solid drawing skills and being heavily into fandom. as well all know fandoms are piles of noxious muck that comparatively few people can dive into and still retain their dignity and capability for normal human interaction. however, OCs take things further, because if fandoms gave us things like annoying gifs and drooling afte rancid british moids, OCs gave us fursonas and miku hatsune binder thomas jefferson. i think for a sizeable portion of tumblr users, OCs were an extension of the impulse you should have outgrown by the time you got to secondary school. now, however, instead of your crudely drawn original pokemon or whatever that you compared with your classmates, you got people customizing their blorbos by attachingng progressively weirder and edgier traits to them. "MY blorbo is an asexual demiromantic serial killer with a penchant for vulture culture!!" And to me there's not a huge step from viewing characters like this to thinking that you yourself can be made interesting if you made up increasingly niche labels for yourself which contributed to the rapid proliferation of micro-identities on here.

Additionally, even mediocre art, the primary medium through which the existence of OCs is expressed, has a way of garnering attention and pulling you into these online circles that reinforce Extremely Online behaviours. To me, the relatively recent explosion of tiktok and tumblr kids identifying as "systems" and making up DID personas is directly linked to the weird phenomenon of tumblr/deviantart OC culture. Now im gonna really go off the rails and say that I am a firm believer that reification of concepts through visual representation has proven so powerful to the weak of mind that it could generate a feeling that these blorbos from your head are in some way real, in some way parts of you. I've known a person who trooned out largely through progressive identifying with visual representations of his blorbo. His brain turned to mush, he lost all sense of what is actually really possible for him to be in society, because he could commission smut art of a being he invented in his head. Sadly I do not consider him a particularly uncommon specimen in that regard.

And just how little OC culture is related to the ostensible goal of an "original character" is that even when the characters are actually put into some kind of narrative - you know, the thing you make up characters for - they are overhwhelmingly bad to mediocre pieces of writing.