My very very very first OCs and canons

[Kit the Human 759]

I was discussing elsewhere about how us roleplayers have probably been RPing since we learnt how to play. Pretend was my favourite of games and I clung onto my toys into my early teens because I loved creating stories with them.

 

Writing RP was such a revelation.

 

So who were your very very first OCs? The ones that inhabitated your figurines or dolls, or the ones you pretended to be? What about canons? Did you carry them into your writing RP career?

[Bro 89]

oof

 

So my first 'OCs' would have to have been my beanie babies. I had an angel bear and a plain brown one, and I had a whole story line in my head of the plain bear falling for the angel bear and none of the other beanie babies approving because the angel bear was too special. So the plain bear had to go out and fight my robot Norbert The Dragon (from Harry Potter), to prove he was good enough for the angel bear. It was adorable. 

 

Then I got a little older and learned what roleplaying was, or, at least, the idea of 'playing' your characters instead of just playing with toys. It was a magical cat (my friends also had magical cats). My cat was purple and had glowy green eyes and had the power of telekinesis. The group of magical cats protected the playground magic kingdom from invading dogs. It was still adorable, but beginning to border on cringey. 

 

The first OC I WROTE, as an actual RPer (on DeviantArt, so they had accompanying drawings), was an absolute cringefest. I'd just discovered anime and was an awful, awful weeb. An awful, cringey, edgey weeb. And so was this character. His name was Aizen, he had long black hair and yellow eyes, and he was possessed by a demon that made him 'evil' and gave him red eyes because red eyes= evil. He was overpowered, had a targic (not tragic, targic) backstory where the demon had made him kill his parents, was somehow a knight(??), and then had been accused of treason and was on the run.  I rp'd with this other equally cringey guy who played the prince of the kingdom my character had worked for, and the prince was usurped. So the prince and my character teamed up to take down the big bad (a silver-haired but still young ultimate badass with heterochromia and the power of mind control). 

 

My last character above actually followed me from DeviantArt to other 1-1 rps, and evolved over the years to be slightly less cringe, but it is hard to escape an origin like that. 

[Huskerdust 625]

My first OCs were paper dolls. I drew them and my sister and my friends would play them out in ridiculous stories about hackers and there would be school and romances (back in Jr High, so that was the interest at the time). I would draw the same characters in different outfits. I remember my dude Parker was a cool 90s dude hacker with the stupid 90s hair cut and everything. And my other main was a girl named Lacy. I have never translated either of them to forum RP. They're too embarrassing. Haha!

[ChrisOwl 59]

Oh this is a fun question! My first canon that I created all sorts of stories about and who played with me (imaginary friend), was Wendy from the animated Disney Peter Pan. Legit me and Wendy did everything together and when I was not playing with Wendy I was imagining stories about her. Sometimes Michael was along, I did not like John so much. The OC's I suppose would be the animal friends which were physically the end bits of wood that my dad was cutting off while building our house, but each little triangle of wood definitely had their own character and personality behind them that nobody but me understood, and again when I was not physically playing with the pieces of wood I would imagine the stories that went along with them. I've definitely been crafting stories in my mind as early as I can remember.

I have never carried on and done Peter Pan RP as a writer though... lol...

[Arceus 1,082]

Shimskabobs, lessee if I can remember. (Gosh, that was a long time ago.)

 

So I distinctly remember my first RP technically being a LARP in the street of Sailor Moon, and usually I "played" Sailor Neptune, but I think I recall taking Jupiter's place a time or two. Um... I also remember that my engineering genius pirate king is actually my first OC, but he didn't see RP-landia for many more years after his creation (he was made for a book, that is actually still being written; you don't wanna see what I wrote when was nine, trust me). I never really played with toys, because I didn't have a lot of them, but what Barbies I had often had names, at least. Mostly they went shopping (and occasionally ran into Godzilla). I also had a mermaid Barbie that I had loads of fun with in the pool and bath. Think her name was Jewel. All throughout my early written RP career, I still did verbal "banter" with my friends and RP partners, most of them were people I knew in real life and could sit down and talk to face to face. We never really did full-on LARP like my childhood friends used to, but we did end up bantering IC plots from start to finish sometimes verbally, so I don't consider myself to have completely converted to written play, even now (@Yumeand @dragonbornand I will still often devolve into IC banter when face to face).

 

Beyond that, I actually don't really recall. Hmm. I've had a lot of OCs over the years, and playing a canon never really occurred to me as a thing that was acceptable? At least, it took a long time before it did. Even when I was playing in Harry Potter-verse on Xanga, I did not have a canon. ... uh. Actually I think I took Hermione for a ring once, okay, alright now I'm remembering. My first written OC was Rowena Malfoy. She was Draco's wife, not his family member (this was loooong long before he married Astoria Greengrass in canon but funny enough, Astoria looks and is portrayed a good deal like Rowena did and was), and that was um interesting. I remember her being very cringe-y borderline-Mary-Sue and I cannot remember why... she died and became a phoenix once. That was odd. Childself, why.

 

I also remember playing the spirit of the planet in smol-girl form. Smol-girl-planet was very bouncy and sweet, but had her moments where she became weirdly serious for just a split second and then went right back to being bouncy and sweet. In current incarnations of smol-girl, she is usually the goddess of the universe; creepy, cryptic, and vague af. I love what she became. Most likely, she was borne of my early habit of personifying rocks and leaves and trees and such. The big tree outside my house was named Alorn, and he was a sorcerer in service of an evil queen that had been cursed into the form of a tree. (Nope, I never did figure out how to free him. Poor Alorn. He's still there.) I also made a Rikku-like thief-girl very early on, she was basically my junkyard queen. Lol She's the OG engineering genius. Give her some really blase materials and she could make something cool. She died in a story-line on my Bleach site, and quite frankly... never really did come back. -shrugmoji- I guess she actually died in my head, though little vestiges of her still remain.

 

Ahm. As for... engineering genius pirate king, he actually started out an undead monstrosity, and I don't mean that in the best way. He was a creature I called a shade at the time, partly dead, partly living, virtually impossible to kill (and then, you know, the Inheritance Cycle happened, funny that). Most people really like him, nowadays, but his past is excruciatingly bloody. He and his brother Rezouken were the only two members of the security team of Giannun Corps (guy-nun, is how we said it), the precursor to my infamous Aeon Geneticore. Run by a guy named Giannun Wallace, it was basically a pharmaceutical company turned very bad; full-blown grafting bird-wings onto people for "medical research" purposes and loading them full of god knows what drugs sort of very bad. They had an accidental mutation start costing a lot of money because they required high temperature ranges, so GC just gassed the entire deck. Yeah, GC was not kosher. So to say the least, engineering-genius pirate had precisely zero conscience. He was usually the one that got to drag escaped lab-rats back, and was always very annoyed when he got dusted (shades didn't die, they just burst into ash, and reformed, unless you got their heart, but they could live without their heart in them, so good luck finding it most of the time). It's kind of ironic to me that so many people seem to absolutely love him, and I'm just like mate if you saw him fifteen years ago, I promise you. Lol He did keep his chaotic Ditto-like personality, I suppose that's what they find attractive. His turning point was at the end of that storyline, where he helped design and piloted the very first space-travel capable airship in that setting. I guess the vastness of space reminded him that his viewpoint was very narrow and the struggles on that planet didn't ultimately make a damn bit of difference. He's been somewhat space-y, addicted to air travel, and weirdly philosophical (in that cryptic way that takes days, weeks, years to understand, even I don't know what he's on about now half the time...) ever since. Still has his moral ambiguity, but chances are, it's not as ambiguous as it seems if you zoom out; he's just thinking way bigger than most are, and understands that sometimes bad shit's gotta happen so good shit can.

 

My first canon that I fully attached to... and played in written RP, was Larxene of Kingdom Hearts. Boy she was a friggin psycho, but that was part of her fun. Back then, people didn't get as miffed if your character didn't get along with theirs, so yeah she had more enemies than anything, and I distinctly remember her constantly dodging death. I then later attached to Toph of A:TLA fame. I played a dang good Toph, thanks you very mush. Oh, my first non-cishet character. Her name was Haku, and she was born male, but felt female. Actually looked very female, too. Someone discovered she was physically male, threw a giant catastrophic apocalyptic FIT, and it took another ten or so years before I made another transgender (that is Axel, my hot-pink haired Russian FTM), because I was afraid of that happening again (this was a cishet man that was absolutely offended that his character was talking to a transwoman and had a pissy meltdown, not a trans person saying I did it wrong). But to be totally honest, a good number of my characters are at least non-binary.

 

99% of my OCs and canons I no longer play anymore, at least not as they were when I first did. Honestly, even Suyis is different now, but he's never once changed his name. Most of them "evolved" into differently named, new versions of themselves, or spawned entirely new characters that are kind of inspired by them but only kind of. (Rikku-like thief-girl actually mutated into Kassander - he is a several thousand year old former Roman centurion turned vampire mafia overlord. Often also the god of light or the universe, or both, so he's sort of Rikku-like thief-girl and smol-girl-planet's lovechild. I know, that's wild. But you can see his roots if you squint!) I think, in a lot of ways, the characters we make up and the things we find interesting grow and change with us, and most likely we don't play the exact same characters we did once upon a yonder time ago, but if you really look at them, you might be able to kind of see their roots. A lot like people, huh? xD

 

Wow I went on a long time for someone with a shoddy memory. xDD

[Kazetatsu 263]

one of my earliest characters was a split-tailed spotted stray cat named resa who had a tragic backstory, and was just a poor character over all.

 

my earliest oc that stuck long term however is this girl here, my dragon Brush, who I made in 2011/12 or so, and have used in rps, writing and art to this day.

Edited January 17, 2019 by Kazetatsu

[Elena 546]

I don't translate playing with dolls into roleplaying. Yes, when I was little, I had plenty of dolls and animals, and a doctor kit, and construction kits... and I was playing, like any kid did. Of course, in that moment I guess there had to happen something, to be a kind of story behind the kids play... but it was just play. Maybe like the improvised theatre we played later, in our pre-teens and early teens. (And that's fan fiction too, because we improvised based on Jane Eyre, Agatha Christie, Dallas Ewing Oil Company, The three Mousquetaires, Michel Zevaco's Pardaillan series, etc.)

 

However, in my mind, this has nothing to do with roleplaying.

 

For me, roleplaying is writing stories with others. And writing my own stories alone had started when I was in first grade. Since I learnt writing. Then, in middle school, I was writing the stories and my deskmate was drawing my characters. I have a few stories, I think, from fifth grade, with her drawings. (Nina is a dentist now and her main hobby is photography, she photographed the city and won prizes and her photos were published in collective albums). In Uni, I started writing stories together with my deskmate Mirela (she got married in the USA, and she isn't writing anymore). But we didn't write them character by character, like in roleplay, but scene by scene. I loved that too, especially the plotting sessions.

 

I discovered that roleplaying exists when I was 41, so... that's an important difference of 34 years. And my first OCs in roleplay, my seafarer siblings, Marina and Andrea, had been present in my stories since I was 10 or less. 

[Deacon Frost 196]

I played with G.I. Joes a lot as a young kid. But my intro to RP came when I was 8. My Dad sat me and my brother down with D&D 1st Edition and taught us to make characters. My first ever character was a thief named Taz with a ring of invisibility and a bizarrely high strength score. Over the next ten years my father ran me through a number of D&D campaigns and I made a bunch of characters. I started DMing. I ran games for friends. To be honest none of my early stuff was really all that memorable. I remember snippets of things we did; but the characters were all pretty generic. It wasn't until I hit college that I started RPing online on a PERL script chat room and was developing my own world setting for D&D. I created a city called Saltwater's Weep and gave it a pretty in depth history and setting. 

[Muse 121]

I've been playing imaginary roles since I was about 5—I made a very instant friend at summer camp and we developed our own imaginary world with at least 3-5 characters each and enemies and quests and very epic storylines from our first months of friendship until college. Those characters (the first being twin brothers) were my first roleplay experiences, and they opened doors to me playing with other friends in similar fashion. I have a handful of characters that I can honestly say have reappeared in my RPs for over 30 years now, though they have all grown and changed along with myself.

My first play-by-post experience was in middle school when a friend and I would write a story together ini a notebook we passed to each other between classes. We had dozens of characters and a very definite storyline.

 

That matured into play-by-email, play-by-chatroom, pen and paper RPs, and eventually play-by-post. I've been writing or role-playing for pretty much all my life and I have no interest in stopping now. 😉

[Morrigan 1,826]

I really only started like "roleplaying" when I got into Anime and my first OCs that I played... Don't laugh! <_< Evil Mars and Evil Mercury. When I was younger I was actually really obsessed with the bad guy winning, not that that's completely changed. I wrote stories like crazy of them taking out the Sailor Scouts. It was a ton of fun.

 

A lot of that old evil flair has just evolved over the years. When I get to play a super OP badass I channel a lot of things that I first started with those two characters.

[In Red 16]

Well. Now that I think about it, my first RPing was ummm.... care bears (age 3 and 4, in kindergarten, I at one point got 6 or 7 other kids to claim a care bear and we made their little tummy pictures and stuck them on our shirts and ran around doing the care bear stare which.... involved squinting REALLY HARD and using our imaginations I guess? I was always cheer bear), and around 6 or 7 with the next door neighbour, Bucky O'Hare (where I always was Jenny) and the big ol' wood pile he had at his house was the ship (The Righteous Indignation, my neighbour couldn't pronounce it, but I could).

 

Later on there were some original settings and characters too with one of my more creative friends, but as I still harbour the dream of one day writing those into reality I'll keep the details to myself  🤣 (but they involved really.... tall.... dogs, and a sentient crack in the earth).

Edited January 19, 2019 by In Red

[Icewolf 258]

Most of my early stuff revolved around animals, most of it I can't remember because it was such a long while ago! I do remember a leopard family (three cubs, two males and a female and their mum.) Once, I created a town populated by dinosaurs but after that it was fiction based on some of my favourite books. I don't really call any of it rp, though, just making stories and world building.

[StudioEden 9]

Not even gonna lie because I can say this 20 years later, my first OC was such a Mary Sue that it makes me cringe so much. Like, and it wasn't the typical oh she's pretty and perfect. Because I learned that an overly flawed character can be considered a Mary Sue as well. Like you're trying to make up for something. I have since reworked her and molded her in a way that is believable. But omg, I'm ashamed of her original incarnation. I know I was 13 at the time, BUT STILL! 🤣

[Jaxx 317]

God, I can't even remember my first OCs... depending on whether you'd include solo writing or just roleplaying, it was either fourteen or nine years ago. I have no idea what I had for breakfast last week, y'all. Nine years ago is even more of a blank. I started saving all the apps I wrote about a year ago and the oldest one there was a teenage werewolf who was desperately trying to ignore his new race and all the changes it made in his life, and wanted to still go on dates and attend college and everything like it was all still perfectly normal. 

 

I should probably say I don't remember my first canon, because I dabbled in a bunch of random stuff when I started writing, buuuut. When I watched Captain America: Winter Soldier, I immediately fell in love with the character of Bucky Barnes and I've written him whenever I had the chance in the four years or so since. So I kind of count that as my first canon because that's the first one that I've actively enjoyed writing (and pursued chances to write) instead of only apping a character once and never playing them again. 

[Stcrmwcrning 2]

One of my first OC's was a character based in the Supernatural fandom using Kristin Kreuk. I had so much fun with her back then when I first created her but haven't done much with her since then. I miss writing her but haven't found the right rp and time to bring her back though I have often thought about doing so. 

 

My first canon character was Maria Deluca from the original Roswell tv show using Majandra Delfino. Another character I love and haven't found the right opportunity to bring her back.