Oh hi social anxiety, I did not miss you.

I realised this morning (morning?) that if something was important enough to keep me up for three hours working it out in my head, it was important enough to write down. Buckle in for unpopular roleplay opinions.

Remember that conversation I had last night? The one about OCs, and writing with them? Yeah, That started because I asked, “What do you perceive as the difference between an OC and a character like Skye with currently very little canon story?”

And the answer, basically, is “Skye’s limited information is accessible to me in a way that I prefer, and she is presented from the beginning as interacting with a character I accept as canon.”

And that is bullshit.

I’m going to use my Summer as the opposing example here, because I’m a horrible person who thinks everything revolves around her. By doing a very little reading, you know a great deal more information about Summer than we know right now about Skye.

You know her history. What’s Skye’s history?

You know her name. Is Skye her real name? What’s her last name?

You know her family. Does Skye have a family? Where are they? What kind of relationship does she have with them?

You know what kind of job she does, both as a superheroine and as a normal person. How does Skye make her money?

You know her powers. Does Skye have any powers? She’s presented as a genius hacker, but so far there’s actually not a lot of detail beyond her own claims to support that.

In terms of personality, there is exactly as much information available for Summer as there is for Skye — the difference being that Summer’s information is presented via writing in interactions with other roleplay characters, and Skye’s information is presented via television in interactions with other new characters.

To say to me, “With Skye, i’ve seen her interact with other people that Tony already has a background with – Coulson, May – and I’ve seen how she reacts to them. I’ve seen how /they/ react to her, and therefor, Tony already has a baseline for how he would react to her, to what she does for a living” is to utterly, utterly denigrate all the work I’ve put into shaping Summer as a character, in writing with other people and thereby fleshing her out.

It’s also showing yourself up as a lazy roleplayer who is apparently incapable of getting enough into character as to figure out how your muse would deal with someone brand new.

So somebody explain to me this, because it seems to be the key problem with OCs: why is it considered so hard to write your muse meeting someone new? Why do you have to have a preexisting concept of that other muse before you can imagine how your character would react to them?

And given all the information that is available about my muse that isn’t available about these new ‘canon’ muses, why am I being slighted in favour of someone who is making up just as much information about their muse as I have about mine, simply because you happened to watch a tv show where they interact with a minor canon character?

What’s the difference between all the roleplay history that you demand people be aware of when coming to interact with your muse and all the roleplay history I’ve created for mine?

If you can’t figure out how your muse meets someone new, maybe you shouldn’t be roleplaying.