Characters The OC Revolution | NEW! 2Q 2024 Challenge Is Up: Friendship

No. The definition of an original character is one that is created by the author, not adapted. The first post of this thread opens with this definition from Wikipedia: “An original character, or OC, is a character created by a fanfic author or roleplayer for an established canon storyline.” Similarly, the definition on TVTropes is: “An Original Character is, in the simplest terms, a new character created in a Fan Fic or other work that does not come from an existing copyright work.” This is the universally accepted definition of an OC and should be adhered to.

I’m a big fan of AUs; it’s where I spend most of my reading and writing time, and I’m no stranger to characters who have been changed greatly from their original canon form. But that doesn’t make them an OC. If you didn’t create the character in question, they are not an OC.

No. I see no reason for there to be two sets of rules for the same thread; it’s more likely to breed confusion than anything else. Regardless, the definition of an OC stands, and I don’t think that an OC thread should allow non-OCs in its entries. (Edit for clarity: I mean allow non-OCs to be counted as OCs, not that ECs shouldn't be allowed at all, obviously. Sorry for the misleading original wording!)

No. Again, this was not a character created by the author in question, and personally, I think it’s best to keep the thread policy clear and consistent throughout. There’s also the possibility of confusion later on should that character wind up being fleshed out in canon.

That said, I acknowledge that this is potentially a genuine gray area, because any fanfic writer who chooses to flesh out such a character is indeed making up almost everything. If the character in question is nameless, dialogue-less, and a random face in the crowd, then I think there’s more wiggle room because there is nothing specific pinning that character to a developed canon individual. Even in this best case scenario, though, there’s the very real possibility that these characters will be fleshed out later in canon—or even are already and we’ve just missed it. Star Wars is pretty notorious for being populated by background characters who’ve done little or nothing onscreen but still have a canon name and maybe even a backstory. There’s a meme specifically about this phenomenon: I’m going to star the offending part of the name out (though the profanity filter would probably do that for me ), but google Glup ****to.

And of course, if the character in question does have identifying canon markers such as a distinct, recognizable appearance, name, or a spoken line, then however scanty the characterization may be, they are still an existing character and the fanfic writer did not create them; therefore they should not be counted as an OC.

Overall, while it’s a perfectly valid and rewarding creative process to flesh out that extremely minor background character almost from the ground up, it is still working from someone else’s creation. Therefore, my vote as to whether they can be considered an original character remains no.

No, for the same reasons stated in my answer to the second question.

 

Sheesh, thanks for bringing this back up @ViariSkywalker, I'd completely forgotten about it and I meant to reply.

For questions 2 and 4 (non-competitive challenge entries in any shape or form) I'd answer yes, and I'd even take it one step further and say that any entries inspired by the prompt are OK, even those that wouldn't be remotely eligible for a competitive OC challenge. I may be wrong about this, but my sense was that ad-hoc entries were always okay for most challenges on the boards, and I don't really see any problem with that.

For questions 1 and 3, I can't say that I have particularly strong feelings either way and I don't participate in competitive challenges often enough for my opinion to really matter, so I'm happy to abstain and go with the flow.

However, I'd like to point out that "characters borrowed and transplanted into SW from other fandoms, properties, or preexisting source material" is an extremely broad definition that opens a far larger can of worms than the one it seeks to close. On the one hand, it covers characters such as @Raissa Baiard's Doran, whose OC-ness no one ever thought to challenge for more than a decade. On the other hand, if I go and retcon Doctor Cottle's name to something else in my stories (because the name is really the only in-universe indication that I drew inspiration from BSG's gruff military doctor, and not from Star Trek or MASH or anywhere else), ta-da, I've made him a pure-blooded OC with a wave of a magic wand for the purposes of this thread? That doesn't feel quite right. Bottom line, if we're going to have a general rule about this and not handle it through a discussion and/or on a case-by case basis, it should phrased in such a way that it doesn't open the door to all sorts of unpleasant practices.

My two drachmas

 

Lol no problem, I kept forgetting about it as well, between the KR and the FoF Festival and DRL being a bit relentless.

Unfortunately I probably won't have time to respond more thoroughly for a few days, but I did want to address this real quick:

I honestly don't think that description covers a character like Doran at all, and I don't think anyone here is challenging his OC-ness. The description in that question is referring to official canon characters from another franchise, created by other people. Apologies to Raissa if I'm getting this wrong, but my understanding is that Doran Blayne has always been Doran Blayne. There is no character named Doran Blayne in any other media. She didn't take a character named Doran Blayne from another franchise and put him in SW. She created a character that filled a similar niche as an existing one, but that is not - and never has been - the same as taking a character with their likeness and personality and most importantly, their name, intact and putting them into another storyline. When you take an existing character and put them into another timeline or a different fandom completely, that's an AU and/or a crossover. Luke Skywalker in The Hunger Games is still George Lucas' character from SW, no matter what changes the fanfic writer makes to his personal history, and that is something that the fanfic community has always been cognizant of.

 

I'd just like to address this real quick: it's not a matter of whether the entry is competitive or not, but whether it's in line with the OC thread policy or not. If a prompt response does not focus on an OC, then it's not.

Example: we used to have character and pairing-specific threads with indexes. If the Skywalker Jade Revival Society thread posted a prompt, then yes, anyone could write any story they wanted for that prompt, but if you wrote it for A/P, then it would not be put in the L/M index.

No one is at all saying that people cannot use prompts for fics that won't count in the prompt thread index. Write whatever you want, from whatever prompt you want! We all should, all the time. If an OC prompt gives you a great EC bunny, write it, and add "thanks to the OC thread for the inspiration" in your author's notes. But that doesn't make it an OC fic, and it shouldn't be in the OC index.

Similarly, no one is saying that ECs from another franchise can't be transplanted into SW fics with an AU background. Of course they can! Go wild with your imaginations, everyone, write whatever sparks the muse! The only issue here is whether or not such characters count as OCs. In every single source I looked up, an OC is defined as one "created by the author," and that's the definition this entire thread is based on from the very first post, so that's the standard I would like to see upheld.

I agree with every word of this. All of us are inspired by existing characters and tropes every time we write. It's impossible not to be; we cannot erase all those existing references from our minds and start from a truly blank slate. But there's a huge difference between inspired by and transplanted from.

None of us can read each other's hearts and minds to determine the exact degree to which we were inspired, and accept or reject our OCs based on that - nor, I have to think, would any of us want to. We're not here to police each other's creativity to such a degree. But an obvious transplant, which the use of the ECs exact name is, should not qualify as an OC.

 

Yes. Doran has a role analogous to Rick Blaine in Casablanca and he is heavily inspired by Humphrey Bogart’s portrayal, but he’s not exactly the same (he’s a fugitive Jedi, for one thing) and he is not meant to be the “actual” Rick Blaine in the GFFA. I think it’s legitimate to consider characters that are based on or inspired by characters from other media as OCs. A lot of literature wouldn’t exist otherwise

On the other hand, I wrote a My Little Pony/Star Wars mashup back in the day in which Twilight Sparkle was magically transported to the GFFA to become Twi’lek Sparkle. Even though she changed form, I wouldn’t consider Twi’lek Sparkle an OC, because she was meant to be the “actual” Twilight Sparkle, just in SW cosplay.

As far as the background character issue, I could see claiming a character as an OC if they were a nameless “extra” who doesn’t speak. For example, someone posted an image of a female Twi’lek and a male Togruta holding hands in one of my cosplay groups. They are part of a much larger crowd, don’t speak, and are nameless. If someone wrote a story about how they met, I would be comfortable with calling those OCs, because it seems similar to using a stock photo prompt to inspire a story.

 

Agreed. This is what I was trying to say in my original post, and I wasn't sure how clear I'd managed to be, but you just summed it up, Raissa.

Even in this situation, there's always the possibility of those background characters becoming ECs, like Chi Eekway Papanoida and Baron Notluwiski Papanoida did, so I'm still kind of leaning toward disallowing such characters just because SW has a history of doing that sort of thing, but as Raissa says, "a nameless 'extra' who doesn't speak" would indeed be like using a stock photo prompt. At that point, you really are making up everything save for a basic appearance, and if others want to accept these as OCs, I wouldn't object.

 

I guess I'm not really a member of the fanfic community, then. Neither, apparently, is Ubersue given her initial response in the discussion, nor are the thread runners, given, again, their first response.

Or maybe, you know, let's just agree that no single user here can claim to speak on behalf of the fanfic community and leave it at that.

At any rate, the question we're trying to answer here isn't "Does the name make the character?" but "Should characters borrowed and transplanted into SW from other fandoms, properties, or preexisting source material be counted as valid for challenges in the OC thread?" I understand why the question would be phrased in such general terms, because the thread runners couldn't reasonably hold a poll about "Should Chyn's character Dr. Cottle be allowed as an OC in our challenges?" but in ten pages nobody will even remember Dr. Cottle. Without the context of the conversation we're having right now, the terms of the question are so general that it's just an internet dramarama waiting to happen.

As for indexing @Gabri_Jade I do see your point but indexes exist primarily to help readers find stories and that's something that's sorely needed around here because the boards format isn't very helpful when you're looking for something in particular. So I think it can be useful if thread indexes pull double duty, both as thread-specific indexes (OC stories in the case of this thread, L/M stories in the case of the SJRS, etc) and thematic indexes (for each challenge prompt, e.g. music, nightmares, childhood). However, this is certainly not a hill I'm prepared to die on. I've cast my vote and I'll just go with the flow

 

Oh, come now. With respect, Chyntuck, we all know she meant "the fanfic community as a whole," not "every single individual since the dawn of fanfic." She wasn't excluding anyone from the community. Vi has in fact done quite a lot of work for the benefit of the community. But part of being a community is assuming the best of each other rather than the worst. You can point out what you believe to be a flaw in her wording without implying that she was attacking anyone, the same as I can disagree with you and believe that you're arguing your point in good faith the same as I am.

I'm sorry, but the exact wording of this follow-up post is not the question we're trying to answer here. That wording is itself addressing the original question currently under discussion, and to what degree a name anchors a character to their EC roots is an integral part of that original question. As I've said, the name is critical. I know that you disagree, and that's what this discussion is here for.

Let’s continue Vi’s Hunger Games analogy for just a minute. Peeta Mellark has blond hair and blue eyes. He’s principled and cares deeply about other people. He’s not a farmer, but he is a baker, a relatively analogous profession, and he’s from a rural area. You could even continue the similarities into the EU—he’s unalterably devoted to a woman with a tragic past and a lot of emotional trauma. Was Suzanne Collins inspired by Luke Skywalker? I don’t know! I certainly can never prove any such thing without an admission on her part.

Now let’s imagine that Collins had submitted her original manuscript just as we know it, but with one small change: Peeta Mellark was named Luke Skywalker. Does even one person here think that any agent who opened her manuscript would do anything at all but instantly close it once they came upon that name, and send it back with a rejection notice?

The name is important - more than that, the name is crucial. That's the point I'm making for the sake of this discussion.

The exact wording of the policy is a separate issue, but I'll just go on record here and say that I have no problem with the wording as it is. However, if others want it tweaked, there's plenty of time to discuss that (if the thread hosts so choose) once the policy itself is sorted.

Your point is valid; however, this is part and parcel of being on a message board. The format has never been particularly helpful in finding stories. That's part of the reason many if not most of us also post on FF.N and AO3 where the search system is more effective for this sort of thing. We've also found workarounds since the beginning, of which indexes are only part. We can put links in our sigs, we can put links to all our fics under a spoiler cut at the beginning of each of our stories, there's the Prolific Writers' Index, there's the Readers' Choice Index, there's the past year's Festival index, plus all the subject-specific indexes in the challenge threads.

And those subject-specific indexes are not of use for readers to find fics if they stop being exactly what they are, subject-specific. They are filling a specific niche. As I wouldn't look in the L/M index for A/P stories, I wouldn't look in the OC index for EC stories - and if I am looking for that specific subject but the index that claims to be dedicated to it is full of other things, honestly, I'm going to stop looking at the index altogether, because it's not serving its purpose.

If thread hosts want to have separate indexes (edit for clarity: subject-specific and thematic indexes, I mean) for each thread, I certainly won't stop them, but neither will I ask them to do that. It's already a lot of work hosting a thread, and everyone doing so is a volunteer with many other obligations in their lives. We have plenty of workarounds to help people find our fics, both here and on the two other major fanfic hosting sites. I personally think that within the confines of the message board format, we've worked out a pretty good system over the years. Of course, if others disagree, that can also be discussed.

 

I look forward to participating more in this thread - at least, writing the challenges.

Speaking of which...

Prophesy - OC Revolution Challenge 2nd Quarter 2023



Entirely new set of OCs, btw.

EDIT: Question: Can I post follow up stories in the same thread I posted the challenge? Using the same OCs, of course.

 

@Gabri_Jade I appreciate you taking the time for a detailed reply, I truly do, but we're not having a discussion here. We're having a yes-or-no vote about a specific set of questions, one of which is (IMHO) worded in a problematic way; and we're having this vote because people felt strongly enough about the outcome of a previous discussion to think that it should be challenged. And that's fine! If users of these boards feel strongly and passionately about fanfic, OC challenges, the importance of character names or any other point of literary theory, that's great, more power to them. But I don't feel strongly about any of it. I asked my question, I said what I had to say, I cast what votes I had to cast and I expressed my reservations about the wording of the question. Beyond that, I'm happy to bow out and let this community decide. I'll be good with the outcome of this poll whatever it is, because I'm on the boards for a bit of Happy Nerdy Time and I'll be getting my Happy Nerdy Time either way.

Please don't interpret this as a wholesale dismissal of any conversation with you. I quite enjoy your interventions on the boards and I'm usually happy to engage. In this case however, I think it's rather obvious that we're coming at the question from such radically different perspectives that we're talking past each other, and all we can do is repeat variations of "the name is crucial" vs "the name is secondary". That could certainly make for a happy nerdy conversation if we were having it over a few flasks of tsipouro, but (to me at least) not on an internet message board. If you ever come to Athens, I'll take you to my favourite Cretan restaurant to ply you with moonshine, and then we can disagree to our hearts' content.

 

(sticks head semi-timidly into thread) Hi everyone! Wow, what a discussion! In case anyone else wanted to weigh in, I thought I would just come remind everyone that our current poll is still running and I am eager to see what votes and thoughts come in. I originally had the poll ending today, but I think I'm going to extend it one more week, through April 7, to see what else might come in. Once again, either a public post or a PM is fine for those who would like to weigh in.

Also, @Vek Talis, I've indexed your challenge entry; thanks so much!

 

1. Should characters borrowed and transplanted into SW from other fandoms, properties, or preexisting source material be counted as valid for the purposes of current, competitive challenges in the OC Revolution thread? No
2. Should characters of the type described in question 1 be considered acceptable for ad-hoc, belated, and/or noncompetitive entries to challenges in this thread? Yes
3. Should unnamed background characters from within the SW universe who are fleshed out within a fanfic story be counted as valid for the purposes of current, competitive challenges in the OC Revolution thread? No
4. Should characters of the type described in question 3 be considered acceptable for ad-hoc, belated, and/or noncompetitive entries to challenges in this thread? Yes

As you can see, I'm pretty split about this topic. I don't see why someone wouldn't just make up another character in the cantina in A New Hope, for instance, rather than using one of the actors in makeup who was on set and calling it an OC for challenge purposes.

That being said, if someone wants to do a noncompetitive story with that unnamed character, and post it here as if that character had wholly been made up in the fanfic author's head, then I have no problem with that.

Not that I think the unnamed Aqualish in the background of a scene gives a fanfic author any kind of 'edge' in a competition, I simply think, well, George put that guy there in the cantina, so it's really George's character.

I guess that makes me a 'by the book' kinda guy. And yet I also believe the spirit of the law is just as important, so again, if it's non-challenge, then good on ya.

Now I shall stop before I talk myself around again.

 

1. Should characters borrowed and transplanted into SW from other fandoms, properties, or preexisting source material be counted as valid for the purposes of current, competitive challenges in the OC Revolution thread? No
2. Should characters of the type described in question 1 be considered acceptable for ad-hoc, belated, and/or noncompetitive entries to challenges in this thread? No
3. Should unnamed background characters from within the SW universe who are fleshed out within a fanfic story be counted as valid for the purposes of current, competitive challenges in the OC Revolution thread? Possibly
4. Should characters of the type described in question 3 be considered acceptable for ad-hoc, belated, and/or noncompetitive entries to challenges in this thread? Yes

In my view, I think 1 and 2 are definite nos, simply because it muddies the waters so much about what is and isn't an OC thread that you could just name this the "Once every quarter, a new challenge about a character you like" and it would still kind of work the same way. OCs, to me at least, as special - they take a lot of work to make a good, well-rounded and interesting character that isn't over powered, or the same empty board for a reader to project themselves on (like in a Reader/Character or 2nd Person POV story). I feel that if we let things in, like a "Sherlock Holmes solves the mystery of the missing Sith Lord", then we start what could very easily be a slippery slope of more and more stuff sneaking in. What if it was a story with Star Wars characters that is set in a different universe - does that then count as OC because the premise is basically the same as transporting another character to the SW universe. I think the best solution is just to encourage people to give a "thanks for the inspo" note in the starting chapter of the fic and leave it at that.

Question 3 and 4 are more difficult to answer. I've taken some character names from wookieepedia for various stories simply because they weren't fleshed out but I wanted someone who had actually existed at some point. There was so little written about them (like a name a pic only) that you are basically working from the ground up to make a character that is an OC because you don't have anything else to base it off. However, it's certainly not my hill to die on, and I can see how people can make the same argument about it being a slippery slope for letting other things in. I mean how much is too much description? Is a name too much? What about a sentence? Paragraph?

I know we don't get a lot of entries into this every quarter, a lot of that is because the boards are generally quieter, and OCs are hard work for the author and frequently not what readers want to read. It often drives me slightly up the wall on A03 when I see things that are simple a canon named slapped on a generic characterisation in a badly written AU being lauded as being better, more interesting, or more 'readable' than the amazing writing that goes on here*. I like this little corner of the internet for its support of OC characters and the unwavering cheersquad that often goes with it, and that's why I kinda just want it to remain as it is - a place for OC writers to be lauded for the incredible work that they do.

*

Spoiler

I am not taking a swipe at AU writers, just a frustration of mine when my worse-written canon stuff receives more attention than my OCs.

 

The old saw 'a picture is worth a thousand words' comes to mind regarding this question. A picture reveals a great deal of information and in doing so locks in place a huge number of parameters regarding the character such as species/race, gender, overt cybernetics, and general height/weight/build. It also may very well reveal things like allegiance (many groups in Star Wars, such as Mandalorians, are stylistically distinctive), weapon choice, and scars. It is in many cases possible to glean more information simply from an image than it is from a novel character with a number of lines but no descriptive text.

The key dividing line, to me, is whether a character has a unique appearance (even if this is assembled out of broadly random components, as many background video game characters are) versus whether they have a standardized appearance. For example, Kae Volend is a trainer character with no lines in SWTOR, but when I used her as a lead I did not consider her an OC, because an aspect of her appearance - the prominent optical cybernetics - served as the primary plot inspiration. By contrast, if I were to choose the model of the generic Sith Inquisitor mob from Taris in SWTOR, slap a name on it and use that then it would be an OC, because I'd be picking 'one of' those inquisitors not a specific character.

This divide can also be seen in animation, especially with regard to clone troopers. Generic clones use the same model, whereas clone characters tend to have some kind of specification to their armor to differentiate them from the mob.

 

Holy cow, it's been a while. I've been lurking for a while and decided to log in and post because I do have some metaphorical skin in the game.

I think number 2 has the potential to be iffy and really dependent on certain circumstances. I have included such characters in challenges and considered to be OCs, mainly because of the nature of the original work. The Old Republic video game. The Jedi Guardian and Smuggler exists in Star Wars Legends, as is the basics of their plotline. That said, Jorren Vor-Lonn and Amana Wentlas have their appearances, personalities, and activities not covered in the game created solely by myself. I consider them to be OCs, as others playing the game or writing about the game have vastly different characters to the ones that I have.

And, in canons, let's take the example of Quinlan Vos. Quinlan Vos's technical first appearance is as a background extra in a Tatooine eatery in TPM. Ostrander and Duursema took that character's likeness and created the rogue Jedi that we all love out of it. Would that make Quinlan Vos their creation? Or Lucas's? I personally believe that it's Ostrander/Duursema.

 

I really need to get to writing up something more re: the questions, but I had wondered how that would be considered going forward as well. From what I remember, game characters with unique names and histories (pretty much always TOR characters from what I recall; the Smuggler etc. are exactly the ones) have counted as OC's in this thread before and it never seemed like a problem to me. But I can see how the fact that their stories do come from a common branch of the same set of storylines might be a disqualifier if we go with a really strict interpretation.

 

Hey @whiskers welcome back! I hope we'll see you writing again. (Also, I never realised that the Wentlas family went that far back; I need to track down a few of those stories.)

As for your comment and @Kahara 's, I do remember having very similar conversations in the past; I just wasn't able to track them down in the thread and I don't think we ever came up with a final conclusion – provided that there even is one, because the discussion around "how much is too much when you borrow from an existing character" isn't a straightforward one and there will always be valid objections to any simple answers we can provide.

 

Great to see the discussion continuing! Just a reminder that folks can weigh in on these issues in an “official” manner in the OC poll that I mounted a few weeks ago—and whose deadline I technically extended to two days ago (the 7th) and should have posted results then, sorry! I’ll try to do that by the end of today, but anyone who hasn’t voted yet but would like to is more than welcome to.

 

Poll replies:
1. and 2. No
3. and 4. Yes
I consider these to be similar to characters who are like filling out a scene in a play or movie (part of the crowd or they just have one line) but the author of the fanfiction wants to give them a back story and continue their story arc in greater detail.

 

There's almost certainly a grey area there, because hardly anyone would consider Revan or The Exile to be OCs, no matter when and where the fic takes place (AKA, having a fic be about what Revan's life was post-mind wipe wouldn't be about an OC, no matter how much you made up about the alternate identity, simply because it's Revan in the end.

 

Okay, these are the answers that felt closest to my opinions on the matter. But I've added in some comments where I had doubts.

1. Should characters borrowed and transplanted into SW from other fandoms, properties, or preexisting source material be counted as valid for the purposes of current, competitive challenges in the OC Revolution thread? No - at least if the character is truly that character transplanted and not just inspired by them. I do think it should be fine to have a character that is named after one from another fandom or has some similar backstory so long as they are a unique OC. And I think that's up to the writer/honor system unless there's something really blatant.
2. Should characters of the type described in question 1 be considered acceptable for ad-hoc, belated, and/or noncompetitive entries to challenges in this thread? No
3. Should unnamed background characters from within the SW universe who are fleshed out within a fanfic story be counted as valid for the purposes of current, competitive challenges in the OC Revolution thread? No - but again, I think there needs to be wiggle room there. I do think extrapolating a character, like giving a canon character parents (if they are never specified or given any history in canon), or making up who trained a known Jedi EC, etc., is an OC and should continue to be treated as such. And I think if someone wants to say "my OC is inspired by this background character" that seems fine too OC wise - but only if you're not saying it is that character. (A bit weird, I know, but that's my gut feeling on the matter of where that line is.)
4. Should characters of the type described in question 3 be considered acceptable for ad-hoc, belated, and/or noncompetitive entries to challenges in this thread? Yes

 

I've been giving some thought to the question "how much is too much" when we borrow from an existing character to create a new character and I tried to come up with a set of criteria that would be at the same time simple and nuanced to determine eligibility as an OC for the purposes of this thread. I'm not quite there yet, but I thought I'd post anyway because I'm sure people would think of aspects I didn't think of.

My list of criteria is: 1) name, 2) appearance, 3) personality, 4) backstory, 5) skills and abilities.

I think it's fair to say that a character that borrows any combination of three or more of these elements (i.e. more than half) shouldn't be defined as an OC. I did experiment with a combination of only two elements, but that ended up excluding a whole lot of characters, especially archetype ones.

(Just so there's no misunderstanding, I'm talking here about the situation where we borrow from a single character to create a new character, not of the situation where we borrow the name of character A from fandom X, the appearance of character B from fandom Y and the personality of character C from fandom Z to create a character.)

The reason I feel my list is problematic is that it works reasonably well to distinguish between characters-inspired-from-X on the one hand, and crossover characters on the other hand, and I think it works for game characters as well (I'm not a gamer at all, so I'll wait for the gamers in this thread to comment) but it leaves the door open for an awful lot of background characters that appear in SW material. I can't put my finger on what makes it so specific to me, but what I had in mind in my original question was really the character that appears in a single frame with no other information, or the character who is mentioned in a single sentence of a novel with no other information. Anyway, this isn't where I'm going to answer my own doubts, and I'm sure that they aren't something a bit of discussion can't solve

 

So my two cents

1. Should characters borrowed and transplanted into SW from other fandoms, properties, or preexisting source material be counted as valid for the purposes of current, competitive challenges in the OC Revolution thread? Depends usually not I think the big question here is how much of said character is transplanted. Usually I would say no, but if only like the name or only the apperance of a character is taken, and the rest being different I think one could make the case for this.
2. Should characters of the type described in question 1 be considered acceptable for ad-hoc, belated, and/or noncompetitive entries to challenges in this thread? Yes I think anything else would kinda limit creativity cause for every OC you could probably find some Established character in some fandom that is somewhat similar.
3. Should unnamed background characters from within the SW universe who are fleshed out within a fanfic story be counted as valid for the purposes of current, competitive challenges in the OC Revolution thread? Yes but only if the character is truly unnamed and has no deeper information on them in wider universe. Cause I feel this is the same thing as having an OC be based in looks on an actor, and that shouldn`t disqualify OCs in general.
4. Should characters of the type described in question 3 be considered acceptable for ad-hoc, belated, and/or noncompetitive entries to challenges in this thread? Yes But as above I don`t see the issue with them being used for the main challenge as well.

And I would like to add a question of my own, for something that has been bugging me in therms of the OC challenge for a while now.
5. Should a story that in its writing does fit within the confines or the wording of the current challenge BUT puts a huge focus of said story on an Established Character opposed to OCs be be counted as valid for the purposes of current, competitive challenges in the OC Revolution thread? Essentially how much can Established character appear and be the focus in stories for these challenges. Don`t want to point any fingers but I´ve seen quite a few stories over the years I`m not sure I would truly consider OC focussed. Though TBF maybe I am overtly specific on this issue.

 

As for me, I would say that, so long as there are more OCs than ECs and an OC is the main character pov or the main character in terms of 'screen' time, then that's fine by me.

Now, if you have, say, 8 characters in a story and 7 of them are: Chewie, Han, Leia, Luke, Vader, Boba Fett, Zombie Mace Windu with only one OC, even if that OC is the main character, I would say heck no, lol. Most anyone who reads said fic would be reading it for all the movie characters, not the OC (imho). But, I'm also not the authority in charge of any of this stuff, so it's just my opinion.

I like where you're going with this, @Chyntuck and at the same time, for me, if you take an ECs personality (and characterize it well enough that it's recognizable) & backstory, then imho that disqualifies him/her as an OC. You're basically taking Luke Skywalker, slapping a different face (or gender) and having him/her/it whine endlessly to his Uncle Bowen and Aunt Peru about going to Tosche Station. If an EC is fleshed out enough that they have a personality and backstory, borrowing those two elements pretty much makes it the EC in the first place. Background characters who have somewhat of a personality that you borrow along with their name, I can see that.

But, like I said, I do like where you're going with this and look forward to seeing further discussion about it.