I wish some OC roleplayers would realise that canon characters don’t have it as ridiculously easy as they seem to think. I am not belittling the issues OCs face, but someone once said that canon writers ‘have everything handed to them on a plate’ and it really isn’t true. We do face our own problems; being ignored in favor of another version of our character, being accused of writing them wrong etc. So while yes, OCs face many hurdles, please don’t think that canon writers have none.
And to put an emphasis on things that can go wrong: The resources and history a canon character has is usually years worth of accumulation. It’s not information that is handed to a roleplayer on a plate. It’s a vast and specific set of rules rpers have to sort through in order to play their version of a character accordingly. While there are many answers provided canonically, the ability to get something right also leaves room to get something wrong. The other post this OP is referring to has a great deal of issues I have a problem with concerning Canon vs. Original. While it’s all a matter of opinion, original characters have the blessing of full and absolute control. Resources and reference can be used to make them, but the end result is up to the roleplayer. To say one is harder than the other depends on the writer, but saying canon writers have it all served to them on a silver platter is overlooking the very obstacles that make it difficult.
They’re both difficult in equal ways. A canon roleplayer has a great deal of information available to them at the outset, which they must absorb and can then shape slightly with headcanon and their play. A original character must create much of that information from ‘scratch’, but has correspondingly greater freedom to shape.
On the other hand, while it’s risky to make assumptions for canon characters when you begin to interact with them, there are certain assumptions that tend to be fairly safe to make — and this is /never/ true of original characters, but it happens to them equally as much. (See ‘Mary Sue’.) It’s possible, but rude as hell, to interact with canon characters without reading their information; you’re likely to draw their ire and make stupid mistakes. It’s not possible to properly interact with original characters without reading their info — yet people do it, AND make assumptions about the character to boot.
Either way, someone is going to dislike the way you handle the character — either because they think you aren’t sticking to canon, or because they think you’re a Mary Sue.