Characters The Essential Guide to OC's: The Mini Challenge Revival - Prompt the Fourth!

What a fun idea! I've created few OC's in my time but my absolute favorite is Arik Skywalker. For those who remember him, here are his responses:

1. Who's your daddy? Anakin Skywalker - The biggest, baddest, toughest, best Jedi in the History of the Order. You might know him as ?The Chosen One,? ?The Hero With No Fear,? or ?Every Sith?s worse nightmare,? ect. I?d go on but Master Yoda says Jedi should not exaggerate.

2. What's love got to do with it? Oh gross! What is everyone?s obsession with love? I mean, really, you should see the way Luke moons over Mara Jade. Disgusting! Quite frankly, I think the whole love thing is overrated and I?m never gonna let myself fall into it.

3. Who do you think you are? Oh, didn?t I introduce myself?

My bad.

I?m Arik Skywalker, son of Anakin and Padmé Skywalker, younger brother to Luke and Leia, padawan to Master Siri Kenobi, and if you listen to Master Windu, pain in his butt.

4. What's your problem? Problem? I don?t have problems. I?m a Jedi?well I?m a padawan, anyway and Jedi don?t have problems, we solve ?em.

A funny story from my childhood? Well, I supposed I should explain Master Windu?s opinion of me. Not that what happened was my fault. You see, I love working on things. It?s something I inherited from my dad who can fix anything and in record time. I can fix a lot of stuff too, it just takes me a little longer. I?m only 13 after all but give me time, I?ll match my dad one day.

Where was I? Oh yeah, Master Windu. The Temple was having trouble with it?s heating unit in the residential area and Master Yoda kept insisting he would assign someone to take care of it but a couple hours passed and it didn?t happen, so I decided to fix it myself. And I did?.mostly. I just accidentally crossed the wrong two wires - two wires out of hundreds - and well?it was for Master Windu?s quarters and to hear him tell it, I deliberately tried to blow his rooms up.

Just because the temperature rose to about 110 degrees before he realized something was wrong and re-crossed the wires himself. No big deal, right? I didn?t think so but I still ended up with two weeks of crèche duty.

 

Ah, heck, maybe this will help me finish one of my stories, finally.

Xhinhi

1. Who's your daddy? [looks nervous] No one important.
2. What's love got to do with it? Love is something that happens to other people.
3. Who do you think you are? Oh, I am just Xhinhi.
4. What's your problem? [points to little brother] He eats too much. Look at him! He's so small! Where does all the food go? [gives him a noogie]
Then, tell us one strange childhood memory. When this one was born, he cried and cried and cried, and then said, "Feed me." I'm not lying! It's true!

Ispeth

1. Who's your daddy? On my planet we don't have daddy, we have Padao and Padwa. Padao is your mother's brother and he is [tries to think of the word] ... how do you say? He is boss of your house. Padwa is mother's boyfriend, and he just visits sometimes. My Padao is dead now, but he was boss of this town. Mayor, that is the word.
2. What's love got to do with it? Love is why people are stupid.
3. Who do you think you are? My name is Ispeth Navana Goathva L'sethva Hureeth-xha-ghova. [laughs] If I were a man my name would be twice as long.
4. What's your problem? [sighs] We all have problems. Best not to complain.
Then, tell us one strange childhood memory. When our teacher Oolana came to Mandawa, I was just a little girl. We are all humans here and no one had ever seen a Twi'lek. I was so scared of her! I thought her head was made of snakes. But I miss her now.

Adris

1. Who's your daddy? [winks] You are.
2. What's love got to do with it? Coming on a little strong, aren't you?
3. Who do you think you are? In my mind, I am Emperor.
4. What's your problem? I just flew three really gassy Wookiees from Kashyyyk to Coruscant yesterday... and people ask me why I don't want to make an honest living...
Then, tell us one strange childhood memory. My childhood was boring.

 

So, any takers of the Diary Chellenge for next year?

 

Yeah, I'm thinking about doing a story featuring an OC or more in an established movie.

 

A little late on this bit of fun, but here's my favorite OC Kionee Rinnh.

1. Who's your daddy? Gad Rinnh! You know, the founder and CEO of Rinnh Imports. He's really smart, a starship engineer, but he quit that when my mom died. Turns out he's really good at running a business too. He designed the freighter that I fly for his company--he's the one who gave it to me too. I wish I could be more like my dad.

2. What's love got to do with it?
Love makes the universe go 'round. If you love what you do, you'll be successful. I think life would be pretty meaningless without people to love and people who love you. What's the point, without it?

3. Who do you think you are?
Uh, a pretty decent freighter pilot for Rinnh Imports. Nobody special, except to my family.

4. What's your problem?
Haha! Well, that's a good question. I don't even know where to start. Heh heh... I guess, maybe I'm unhappy in my job--I mean, I love working for Dad and flying around the galaxy all the time, but I feel like there's got to be more I'm supposed to do with my life. I don't mean, like, settling down and having kids like Everel, but, but something different, I guess. But I don't know what it is.

If anyone spots an interesting job opening anyplace, can you let me know? But don't tell my dad. At least, not yet.

A funny story from my childhood?

Back when I was a kid on Rodia while Dad was setting up connections there, about the time Cash and Roshind were starting to do import rounds, both my brothers and my dad were out-system for a couple of days. I pestered my older sister--older by eight years--into cooking a big welcome home dinner. They were all supposed to come back on the same day. Roshind's last run had been to Ryloth and one of the things she picked up to sell to the Rodians were those thin little yellow peppers Twi'leks love for spicing up their dishes. They're some of the hottest peppers on the outer rim. Roshind and I sliced off the top and the tips and fried them up with noodles and other stuff. With the ends cut off, they looked just like krembleesh, a common type of vine bean on Rodia.

Dad, Everel, and Cash were all super happy to have a big dinner laid out for them when they got back that day. But you should have seen the looks on their faces when they bit into that stir fry. Cash almost cried. I actually did laugh so hard I cried. Roshind too.

About six years later, Cash tried to pull the same thing on me and Roshind, but one whiff of it gave his trick away. He was pretty disappointed.

 

It's been a while, but the OC thread is being revived, thanks to the dedication and efforts of our new co-host:

SoA!!!

SoA has been a mainstay on the OC threads for years, and I'm sure will be more than helpful in rejuvenating the thread.

Let's give her a warm welcome!


So let's kick things off right: OC Quotes!

Post your favorite OC qoute(s) from other authors! (include a link to the story)

 

Welcome SoA

 

Congrats, SoA!

OC quotes, huh? I'll have to look through some stories and dig some up.

 

SoA is an excellent choice. I'll have to go and dig up some quotes. I have a few in mind already...

 

Tell it to someone with a hand!

No, that is not my welcome to SoA.
This is:

Above an unforgotten quote by one of Luton_Plunder's characters. I absolutely love it.
By Iqbal 'Despot' Despotov from The User series.

 

Thanks for the warm welcome!

Let's get some more quotes going! So here's one from DWH's The Blue Side of the Force, the fanfic that convinced me I should hop ship from Sailor Moon and bring my OCs over to this fandom too.

?Well, I, ah? wouldn?t want to keep you from showering.?

She raised an eyebrow. ?Are you saying I smell, flyboy??

?No, no, I wasn?t implying that? I?m sure you smell great.? Even sleepy as he was, he inwardly grimaced as soon as the words left his mouth. ?Not that I?ve been sniffing you or anything??

 

I was looking for Ewok Murder Rampage, but couldn't hunt down a link anywhere (is what I get for trying to find a story from 2005...). Instead, I come to you with a quote from Burn! Burn! Burn!, by the beloved oqster:

?Silly, I?m Badour.? She pulled her sweets back.

Gooli shook her head, ?No, you?re not.?

?Why do you say that?? Badour affected a grotesque pout.

?I know Badour Osel.?

?What a coincidence, so did I.?

?Where is she??

?I left her in the cupboard.? She answered matter-of-factly.

?Where??

?I hate your question game.? The corners of her mouth turned downwards. ?She was lost in the spaceport on Shoda. Banner was running quite late, he made my job easier. She was very understanding.?

 

Ewok Murder Rampage

And a quote:

?My Coruscanti brothers and sisters!? Elan?s voice boomed unnaturally. The mob regarded him suspiciously. ?The Empire is dead!?

A deafening cheer erupted drowning out the first part of Elan?s next wildly popular sentiment, ??the Emperor!?

Empowered by sheer opportunism and the crowd of over seven hundred thousand, he climbed higher and stood on the statue?s shoulder. ?We?ve suffered! We?ve lost money! We?ve lost friends! We?ve been oppressed!?

The crowd roared angrily after each statement. ?Throw off your oppression my Coruscanti brethren! The Emperor is dead! Killed by tiny Ewoks with big teeth!? He paused to make a gesture with his index and middle finger to signify ?big teeth?. As his excitement grew he became more animated and risked falling off the statue, which had begun to lean at a precarious angle. ?Loot! Pillage! Plunder! Take back what you deserve!?

 

Pandora, you are made of awesome. Thanks for digging it up! That has to be one of my all-time favourites.

 

Some of my all time favorite OC quotes:

Recognition by Exeter
Kaeso:Oh, I?m sorry. I didn?t realize I needed a translator droid to do business transactions in Basic. These folks are so bad that when they say ?Hello,? you?re looking for the hidden meaning behind it.

?What do you mean, Hello?!? I scream, usually followed directly thereafter by pulling out a Class C illegal firearm and getting my merc mojo on.

As you can see, my contracts don?t usually last that long. Just once, I?d like to get a client who doesn?t drip every third sentence with impregnable euphemisms. I?d kill for a weapons smuggler who can say ?I?d like you to give so-and-so a token of my appreciation? without some facial tic or muscle spasm that makes me wonder if I?m supposed to send someone a gift-wrapped holo-game or lace their evening meal with a few thermal detonators.

No, I mean I?d really kill for it. Literally.

---

[link=http://boards.theforce.net/the_saga/b10476/24799569/p1/?0]SIn[/link] by [b]Luton_Plunder[/b]
[b]Taban:[/b][i]"Suggestions, anyone?" he asked out loud. The only thing he got in the way of an answer was a blank stare from those droids that were close enough to hear him. Just like every other time. "No? Fantastic. Great job gang - back to work with you."

He liked to think that the reason that they turned back to their consoles was because of his order rather than sheer coincidence.[/i]
[hr]
[link=http://boards.theforce.net/beyond_the_saga/b10477/28038288]The Reason I Didn't Update (TRIDU)[/link] by [b]MsLanna[/b]
[b]Mellana:[/b]
[i]"There is no 'The Empire'," I interrupted him. "There are people who are responisble for it and the decisions they make are either good or bad, right or wrong; their motives are righteous or ?evil?. 'The Empire' is just an excuse.

"We are the Empire. If our decisions are good, so is the Empire. Blaming it on the institution is just denying all the things it has done right in the past, all the things good about it. It's refusing to learn from the mistakes of the past and improve the system for the future." I took a deep breath. "Or something," I added half embarrassed about my lecture.[/i]
[hr]
[link=http://boards.theforce.net/the_saga/b10476/29752145/p6]Braken Starblaster Destroys the Galaxy[/link] by [b]The_Face[/b]
[i]All eyes in the Most High Supreme Cosmic Court were on Sith Pope, who uttered one fragment.

?Not guilty.?

?YES,? Braken yelled. ?Take that, judicial branch!?[/i]

 

Those were some great quotes there! Thanks for sharing everyone!


So, with a new face helping to host this thread, we're going to stir some things up a bit!

First off, we are bringing back the OC Story of the Month. Our story of the month for April 2011 is Republic and Rebellion by LaForzaViva. This pre-Mandalorian Wars fic follows the lives and adventures of six OCs who find their lives increasingly entwined.

Next, our database is looking pretty stale these days. I know you guys are writing, but there aren't any new stories in our database. To bribe you all to send in your stories, future stories of the month will be taken from recently submitted stories to the sock.

And finally, we've got another challenge for you!

Characters show their true colors when they come at a challenge and fail, and then have to cope with that failure. Confront your OC with failure and see what happens.

This challenge is due a month from now, on May 5, 2011.

Happy failing!

 

I'm assuming the lack of activity means your all busy writing challenge responses, or catching up on the OC STOM!

Let's take a break and talk about our very first Original Character...


Think back to when you wanted to add your own personae to the ever expanding GFFA... let's be honest with each other (and oursleves), wasn't that impressive an outing was it?

Talk about your first foray into OC-dom. How emabarassing was it, and what have you learned along the way to correct how awful he/she was?

 

Yes, busy editing my big fic Reunion, doing the last pieces of artwork for it and because of the plotbunnies and OC's wanting more, writing spin-offs

My first OC was Aaqu Maerhin and I still love to write him. With a long lived character like him - more will be revealed in Reunion pt 3 - you can write in before, saga and beyond

 

I went nuts! My very first team of Sailor Moon OCs had 18 members, in a story that was only 20 chapters long, each chapter being about 5 pages in length at best. Forgive me. I was 13 at the time. They had such creative names as Sailor Sun, Sailor Sunlight, Sailor Red Sun, Sailor Pink Sun, Sailor Gold Sun... you get the picture.

[image=http://www.toweroftime.com/solar/solar_wars_glory.jpg]
Not my art, but you get the beauty *coughs* of that rainbow team.

Of course, the team included my own self-insert, who was way cooler than my 13-year-old self, but a self-insert none the less, and a princess of the Sun: Sailor Specturm.

[image=http://www.deviantart.com/download/169524755/Sailor_Spectrum_by_songofamazon.jpg]
Check out those rainbows! I was that kind of a cool kid. *hides*

Over the course of that year, I came up with an army of OCs that I am still trying to finish all of their stories ten years later, which has involved many re-writes so as to bury the horrendously embarrassing stuff deep down in the archives of my computer.

[image=http://www.toweroftime.com/neof/neoeternalgroup.jpg] [image=http://www.toweroftime.com/elysion/trioshoulders.jpg] [image=http://www.toweroftime.com/elysion/elysionquartet.jpg] [image=http://www.toweroftime.com/beyond/frombeyond_mockposter.png] [image=http://www.toweroftime.com/seasons/Seasonal_Revolutions_mene.jpg] [image=http://www.toweroftime.com/first/mahou&seishou.JPG]
I spy at least two more self-insertions in there.

Sorry for all the picspam, but I think that adequately expresses all my embarrassment. I was drawing them faster than I could write them into stories. I had to reign in my colored pencils and put pent to page and write. It took me a while, but I did move away from self-insertions, worked at less stereotypical strengths and weaknesses and started coming up with *gasps* back stories. That was a major turning point, and it took several years for me to reach it too.

 

Hm, I started with OCs that were not really self-inserts and am now writing little else but shameless self-inserts. Revised development.

I started out writing my first OC for a classic Star Trek 'novel' Her only role was to drool over Vulcans, and get paired with Stephen, Spock's ahh-cousin? half-brother? from 'The FIrst Mission'. Man, did I have a soft spot for Stephen. *lol* There was political plot and it was not really bad, just horribly written and as it is with plot - I couldn't keep it up.


Kayary was my first SW OC, half Chiss and the typically unlucky girl I still write.
She was babbling a lot. Yep, babbling indeed. It was supposed to be funny. Not sure if it worked. *lol*
Then there was my first self-insert and things went downhill from there. Not to mention that I used pics of myself for an OC that was not really me.

[image=http://i303.photobucket.com/albums/nn128/wuehlkuschler/Cover%20Art/Ibob02.jpg]

Today the self-inserts look like this:
[image=http://i303.photobucket.com/albums/nn128/wuehlkuschler/Cover%20Art/TRIDU01.jpg]

 

Beautiful pieces of art SoA and Etain.

Done several myself for my OC's. And for my first OC this is one with Obi-Wan

[image=http://i279.photobucket.com/albums/kk124/earlybird-obi-wan/forcenetart/faltears7.jpg]

Obi-Wan comforted by Aaqu

And this is Kaagi Adin and his baby son Marhin

[image=http://i279.photobucket.com/albums/kk124/earlybird-obi-wan/forcenetart/kaagi10b.jpg]

 

My first OC... well, there were the parody scripts my two best friends and I wrote of the Original Trilogy when we were in 6th grade, in which every character was named for a person in our class who was intended to play them (Princess Sara, Matt Solo, Obi-Ann Kenobi, and Lisa Skywalker, for example). I did not intentionally cast myself as the Luke expy, it was just the only character left over by the time I got my other classmates in on it. And we did actually perform the first script- it was a surprise for one of our gym teachers, which the other gym teacher was in on, as well as half the administration. We were devious and surprisingly well organized 12 year olds.

Of course, these plays were too silly to be embarrassing... my worst OC definitely from my freshman year of high school, in which a blatant self-insert defied her Master in order to take music lessons (and miraculously played the same instrument I did!), and I think there were some wormholes and Earth people showing up and they might have saved the galaxy with the power of dance. It was baaaaaaad. She remains safely buried.

 

My first OC is still on the boards, languishing in a story that I'm taking forever to update and finish. If I wrote the plot I originally had planned... oh man.

I subjected her to the Mary Sue Litmus test and scored off the chart.

What's really weird was that I convinced myself that she wasn't a real Mary Sue because all of my self-insert personality traits I gave her weren't your typical Mary Sue attributes. Instead of being aggressive and snarky, she was agreeable and excessively humble. Instead of being the most awesomest pilot ever, she couldn't fly to save her life. But she still had two canon characters fall in love with her, a tragic past, and a heroic and untimely death.

I guess I was lucky in that the story basically corrected itself, in that as I wrote it, I couldn't bring myself to stick to the awful parts of the plot. But I think this might be a case in which saving the story killed it, because I don't know what to do with the plot now.

 

Before I wrote Star Wars fan fic, I used to write stories about animals, so I don't think that my first OCs were self inserts, just very badly written derivaties of books like The Animals of Farhting Wood by Colin Dann and Watership Down. I remember coming across my first story and being shocked at how bad the grammer and spelling was.

My first Star Wars OC was a Force-senstive Shistavanen and his younger brother and sister. They weren't brilliant, but they weren't dismal either - I think my main problem was coming up with story lines which hadn't already been done in the EU, though no doubt they did have some Mary-sue/Gary Stu tendencies that I was too in experianced to spot. Like Commander DWH, some of the characters names were inspired by names of class mates (mostly their nicknames) and I'm glad that they are hidden away in the back of a cupboard somewhere, never to see the light of day again.

 

I guess I was lucky that my first OC never embarrassed me, character-wise. In fact, I'm still actively writing him ten years later. It helped that I was out of college when I created him; if I had been a lot younger it would have been different for me.

There are things that, looking back, I wish I had done better or put more thought into from the get-go. The biggest of these is his extended family. I originally didn't go beyond his parents and a sibling, and it has caused no end of trouble for me now because I have to come up with something halfway plausible for what happened to his grandparents/aunts/uncles, and twist and shoe-horn in that background when it doesn't really fit what comes after. I think that since I'm not happy with it and it doesn't really make sense to me, that it'll show and a reader will sense it too.

My early writing is very embarrassing for me. Some of the stupid plots and scenes I came up with make me cringe. The worst ones I won't read even for laughs-- it's too painful to my ego. My writing was also very simplistic. I think my first story on these boards was posted around 2002, and to this day I admire and am grateful to the poor readers who sat through that mess.

So now even though I'm using the same character whose personality really hasn't changed except in subtleties, I can explore those subtleties a bit more. It works in my head, anyway. Not sure how well it works on paper.

Sigh, I'd been psyched about doing this challenge since I love making my character screw up, but I couldn't come up with anything interesting.