#to be fair i have an oc named Melanie that's just me but like if i was batshit and cool and had a girlfriend

[fraternum-momentum]

Dude it's fine I promise you 90% of those oc are self inserts with ✨flavour✨(speaking from experience)

this makes me feel less of a freak now,, im glad

[awkwardtaco056]

so now that i’m no longer in the Hell that was school and after finding the lovely blog @endcringe i’ve decided to talk about my own experiences with cringe culture, bullying, and why it’s Really Bad to not let people enjoy inherently harmless things, especially neurodivergent people (read more because this is gonna get long and triggering at times, TW for mentions of bullying, suicide, child abuse, a brief mention of incest shipping. I won’t be naming any of the peers that I discuss my experiences with, because my point with this post is Not to “cancel” anyone, I just want to speak out on my experiences)

I’m neurodivergent; I was diagnosed with ADHD when I was 8 years old. I didn’t know a lot about it, and a family member even painted it as “oh it’s nothing blah blah blah just apply yourself more. Because of this, I had no idea about the concept of hyperfixations until I was in my late teens. Due to that, I would obsess over random things and my family would shame me relentlessly for it. My mother said I had an “addictive personality” and that she feared I’d end up a drug addict or alcoholic because of it.

I look younger than what I am, I’m short, and small. AKA, the perfect candidate for being picked on by people bigger and stronger than me. People made fun of my art when I was around 13, but fortunately that was an instance where spite fueled me to improve drastically. However, just because I happened to take the shitty comments and have it fuel me then does NOT mean bullying people will have that effect all the time. At some point someone put my old South Park fan art on a cringe blog. I was temporarily hurt, and a little angry, but I realized that if someone was making fun of a 15 year old’s art, they probably didn’t have much going for them in life, so I moved on.

Fast forward to high school. Everything was horrible and I’m not exaggerating when I say I barely made it out alive. I was living in an abusive household up until January 2018 and I found comfort in many different interests. I’ve always found great comfort in music and the arts in general. In 2016, I drew a picture of a mermaid. I was inspired by the chocolate opal gemstone, and I thought it’d be fun to draw a gay chubby mermaid with dark skin and a rainbow tail and freckles. Junior year was lousy and I wanted something that sparked Joy. I was immediately told that “scientifically, mermaids wouldn’t look like that. Mind you, my take looked like this:

Obviously I wasn’t going for realism, I just wanted to draw a cute mermaid. However, they continued to tell me that they wouldn’t look like that, going as far as writing so on the back of said drawing. When I got angry at her for taking it too far (as I’d established before that I didn’t like it when people wrote on my art without permission), they got angry back, accusing me of being unable to take criticism. Heated by the accusation, I went as far as asking my art teacher if it was fair for them to say that, and she said no, stating that constructive criticism would be talking about how I could improve my lineart and coloring in the digital version. I took her actual helpful criticism and since then have improved Drastically in digital art. Even with that being said, I found myself hesitant to participate in things such as MerMay because I was leery of hearing that peer berate me for having cartoony mermaids. 

 During high school I grew to love many musicians, a lot of emo/alternative stuff, a couple being Twenty One Pilots and Melanie Martinez. I love how unique TOP’s style is, their open discussion of mental illness, and as someone who had a rough childhood, I connected with every single song on Cry Baby. It was like nothing I’d ever heard. I started listening to mashups featuring all these different artists I love, adoring how they could change the tone and sound so drastically. A peer Bully of mine in junior year condemned these two artists, declaring that they made “Bad Music” simply because it didn’t fit their tastes. They’d throw my drawings on the ground, write over them in pen, steal my headphones so I couldn’t listen to music, push me around, complain that mashups sucked and gave them a headache, and in general shit all over conetnt that was actively preventing me from committing suicide. 

Some family members were no better. Once high school hit, I began listening to Fall Out Boy, Panic! at the Disco, and My Chemical Romance. Their deep complex lyrics stuck with me. I would write down quotes from my favorite songs and thanks to hyperfixating, I remember each studio album in order My mother resented when I fell in love with the “Emo Trinity” because “the Columbine  shooters were emo and that event traumatized me” Despite that, not only did the Columbine tragedy occur in 1999 and none of the bands got together until the early 2000s, but I have a pretty good feeling those groups aren’t For gun violence. The other side constantly criticized the fact that I love FOB, P!ATD, and MCR because I’m black and “why must you listen to that white people music.”

 I grew fond of Dan and Phil in high school (and I’m still a fan to this day!), I loved Phil’s kindness and positive aura and I deeply connect with Dan’s sense of humor and personality. Their content made me happy during some very dark times in my life. It’s November 2017, I’m over a close peer’s house at the time, and notice PINOF is upon us. I drew the PINOF whiskers on my face, my plan being to quietly watch them in the corner of peer’s bedroom on my phone through headphones, the others were doing their own thing and I knew they didn’t like them, so I thought they’d respect it if I silently indulged in it. Unfortunately, the complete opposite happened. I was immediately shunned and locked out of the bedroom, told that I’d only be let back in if I washed the whiskers off because “absolutely not”. Me, being stubborn, washed them off temporarily but drew them back on in the room. Life during then was especially bad for me, as the abusive household I was in was getting worse. They noticed, of course, and even though all I wanted was to enjoy this small tradition in a time during a deep depression, I was immediately shoved out the room and locked out, only to have said peer’s family members notice. I’m a relatively shy person, so this was honesty a really harrowing experience that had a lasting effect on me. 

I grew to adore Sanders Sides as well, but the moment I found out most of my peers didn’t like Thomas, I was terrified.  I stopped watching Dan and Phil’s content for months and shied away from other fandoms too, only occasionally indulging in times of complete solitude. One time when said peers were due to visit my house for the first time, I saw the Phandom and Fander stuff I’d hung up on my wall in my little sanctuary that was my bedroom (it was the first time in years I’d had my own room), and I was filled with panic and fear. I took them down and hid them away, genuinely terrified of what they’d do to me if they saw. It’s still incites so much anger in me to this day because they turned around and ended up shipping incest, but somehow liking D&P and Sanders Sides was So. Much. Worse.

They were baffled by my actions, despite having humiliated me Twice by going on a private blog of mine separate from everything so that I could fully indulge and laughing at everything on there, once at a peer’s house, once right in school. I don’t think they realized how traumatizing it was to have a large group of people in public laughing at something I was deeply self conscious about for all of my life. I put on a brave face at the time, but ended up crying in the bathroom after first period began. I continued to be treated as lesser until things came to an ugly head August 2018 when I ended up in the hospital because I nearly attempted suicide. Years of child abuse, bullying, and being deemed “cringy” made me feel like I didn’t deserve to be alive, that everyone would be happier if I were gone.

After arguably one of the lowest points in my life, I cut them off and slowly began to embrace the Real Me. I started letting myself enjoy the things again, made true friends and even found love, my first boyfriend ever at 18. I still get choked up retelling it, but when PINOF 10 dropped, after he found out how much I’d been hurt over the incident in 2017, I was greeted with a photo of him with the whiskers on his face. I cried for a while, blown away at such a pure act of kindness. He listens to me ramble about my interests, he compliments my taste in music, he watched K-12 with me. 

This got incredibly long, but my point is this: Cringe Culture hurts people. You might think it’s whatever if the Thing doesn’t apply to your interests, but content you’re denouncing as cringy could be something that’s keeping them alive, that one flicker of light in a void of darkness. When I was contemplating suicide, I listened to The Black Parade, repeating Gee’s words to myself over and over, that nothing in the world was worth hurting yourself over. Some friendly joshing here and there is okay, but actively ripping someone to shreds constantly to the point where they have a mental breakdown in front of you and later on plan their own demise is disgusting. Nobody should abuse anyone for having harmless interests, no one. Unless you’re participating in p*dophilic/inc*st/s*xual assault/inherently abusive ships/content and pretending it’s not bad because “Fiction doesn’t impact reality!”, you have every right to like what you like and be happy. Read homestuck. Play Undertale. Draw up the Wildest OCs you can imagine. And stay away from people who try to rob you of innocent fun, life is too short and in this cruel, unforgiving world, you deserve to be happy, whether you’re a 13 year old who draws cute furries, a 16 year old cosplayer on TikTok, a VSCO girl, a 30 year old who writes/draws self insert art or a 20 year old who adores Invader Zim. 

Cringe Culture is just bullying under a different name, and it can lead to many instances of people, especially fellow neurodivergent folk to feel isolated and ostracized. Attempting to bully someone out of an interest they have isn’t going to fix them; it’s more often than not going to cause more damage. I suffer from diagnosed C-PTSD, anxiety, and depression, and sometimes I still find myself trying to over-justify my interests. To all who are roped up in bad homes and lousy “friends” who berate you for your innocent passions, I’m sorry you’re suffering, things will one day get better even if it doesn’t feel like it, and fuck those people. I’d also like to note that sometimes even if it seems more terrifying, it’s better to have one or two close friends you can truly trust than a whole group that walks all over you. You have every right to call them out for treating you poorly, and if things don’t improve, you also have every right to leave.

You have a right to live your True Self.

[shadowsong26fic]

On OC Creation

[Disclaimer: I’m not super interested in Discourse about Mary Sues and/or the concept of OCs in general. Just...starting this whole thing with a foundational premise that OCs are Fun and Not A Bad Thing.]

So, I’ve been thinking some about OC creation (because, as I’ve mentioned before, I am pathologically incapable of not creating a stable of OCs when I’m in a fandom for more than five minutes lol; also I’ve been falling back into AtLA and I have...A Lot of OCs there XD).

...anyway, I’ve been thinking about it, and...I’m curious, those of you out there who have OCs, how do you create them? Mine tend to kind of fall into four groups.

Group 1: Core OCs, or OCs that are Concepts I want to play with and/or have plots of their own (for fanfic, for RP, for just messing around in my own brain). So, like...Atia from BSG, or Addie from MCU, or Lavinia from SW, or Haku from AtLA (...as far as I remember, he fell into this category? A lot of my AtLA OCs I don’t quite remember where they started, lol...but I’m including him because I plan on using him for an upcoming AU outline project), or arguably Judas from SPN, or Des from Dresden Files...

Group 2: Satellite OCs, or OCs that basically (at least initially) serve to flesh out the backstories/etc. of Core OCs (and/or canon characters in come cases). So, like...Melanie is one of Atia’s satellites; ...Addie doesn’t actually have any until we start getting into Crossovers ETA: lol i forgot Caroline i’m dumb; Vedric Greer is one of Lavinia’s; Wei and Nuying are Haku’s; Hermes and Hathor were Judas’s (though also kind of Gabriel’s); Hamlet and Azriel and Ben were Des’s...

Group 3: Plot-Relevant OCs, or OCs that are built to serve a specific plot-related purpose and aren’t intended to have stories or backgrounds or satellites of their own. So, like...Ileana from BSG; ...I don’t actually have any from MCU; Specter and Infernalis from SW; arguably, the...I forget her name, but the woman I designed to be Iroh’s wife/Lu Ten’s mother from AtLA; Eremiel from SPN; and...I don’t recall any from DF but that doesn’t mean they didn’t exist.

Group 4: One-shot OCs, or OCs that are designed for a specific RP prompt/context. Most of these are also Plot-Relevant or Satellite OCs but I guess I think about them differently, since they’re mostly RP-based? Anyway, as some examples--Khuyen I believe I created because I needed an earthbender willing to train someone Fire-born without too much Drama, etc.; Indree was created to give Roslin some local backup/cultural advice in the Epic Crossover RP of DOOM; Addie has a Love Interest who was created for the same RP; there were quite a few from one of the two DF RPs I was involved in for a while...

Of course, while I say they’re just supposed to be Support and/or For This One Thing, OCs from Groups 2-4 often stick around, and start developing satellites and/or plotlines of their own. Like, as an SW example, I built a sister for Kallus. Then she had three sons, so I needed to name them and give them at least vague personalities (to be fair, some of this was also related to OCs created by me and a friend of mine, respectively, to be Kallus and Zeb’s kids). Then they had partners and children of their own. Eremiel (SPN) was supposed to have one specific infodumpy scene and then disappear. She ended up with a backstory related to characters who wouldn’t appear for two more seasons and the Book of Raziel. Ileana was supposed to be a sounding board for a tertiary canon character who was vital to that fic’s plot and ended up being a million times more Interesting than he was and leaking some crucial information to the press later in the story. And on and on it goes.

Sometimes, they start migrating to other ‘verses (sometimes my original stuff, like Kirana moved from AtLA to Feredar, though she left her AtLA family and some of her personality traits behind). I have one OC who was originally built for a wildly AU Dresden Files RP who then migrated to a more canon verse and then to AtLA. Judas has bounced around in at least three universes I’ve played in, excluding one-shot RPs...at least one character I originally designed for AtLA jumped generations and wound up having a plotline in LoK.

And sometimes, OCs that didn’t initially start out as connected start turning out to be. For example, Iroh’s wife, who I mentioned above (I really need to either remember what name I had for her or just rename her, lol), ended up being connected to a long-standing Plot-Relevant OC I had built as the head of the infirmary in the Fire palace (they served together in the Navy, among other things), as well as a Core OC who was...very concepty and will probably not be revived without some significant revision (IW was this character’s aunt).

Anyway, tl;dr: I create OCs based on either specific concepts/storylines I’m interested in, or as supplements to said characters, or to fill in a specific plot-necessary role. And then they start fractaling out, the same way I work in AUs. This is why I am pathologically incapable of not doing this, lol.

What about you guys? Any of you create OCs? How do you go about doing it?

...as long as we’re here, why not do an Open Question Night? Priority to questions related to OCs, given the topic of this post, but otherwise the usual rules apply. Any fandom/work I’ve discussed here or have posted on my AO3 is fair game.

What’s on your minds?

no i am not procrastinating writing the next chapter of precipice or the other things i have in the pipeline why would you say such a thing