TELL ME MORE PLS I AM INTRIGUED
OKAY SO. don't laugh but these ocs started out as a tv show we could have the party watch in my friend's st fic. originally they were supposed to parallel them so that we could use their opinions on the show to have certain implications in-universe, even if we only included it in one or two scenes.
thus started the bit that this show would be called "odd stuff" and all the characters would just be stranger things characters shifted slightly to the left. it almost worked that way until we were discussing names. mike's counterpart was to be named maurice and will's counterpart was to call him reese because his favorite candy is reese's, we decided. and that got me a little bit too attached to them to let them just be joke characters. now they don't really have anything to do with st anymore, other than the young friend group facing the supernatural (but it's aliens that they may or may not have created themselves).
maurice, or reese or mo depending on who you ask, becomes sort of the catalyst for the friend group forming. they're all at summer camp, attending camp andromeda for all different reasons that i won't get into right now. his parents signed him up with the intention that he'd participate in the sportier activities, but he's easily distracted and gets a moderately bad injury that he uses as an excuse to skip out on the sports.
benji tries nearly every hobby under the sun and likes most of them, and so reese runs into them a lot. his favorite is photography and later filmography; he takes his camera everywhere. eventually they strike up a friendship with a group of other kids working on a zombie story, which turns into an alien story because they decide aliens are more interesting to them.
jean aka jeanie is reserved at first, not contributing too much to the project until the others go out of their way to include her. but once she gets into it she is that girl (positive connotation). she's very creative once she has a good outlet. i like to think she makes her own clothes, sometimes making them for the others too, but that's not necessarily canon. she does make the costumes for their alien short film, though. she also has the best first aid skills, although they all have some level of training by the time they reunite since they're camp counselors.
morgan uses her knowledge/interest in science and sci fi to help with worldbuilding. she also likes fencing and skating. i have. so much to say about her i might have to go on another tangent i literally adore her, but since we're sticking mostly to hobbies and the role they play in the friend group, that's what she does. and she's often the first to step forward to fight for her friends, because she is a) intimidating all on her own and b) good at it. not because she's physically strong but because she knows how to hit where it hurts and what's actually necessary in a situation. she's not a show off, she fights when she needs to and because she needs to.
the others are much less fleshed out than these 4, but i think the main friend group is going to be 7 characters maybe? i can get into their families as well if you wanna hear about it, but the most relevant is that reese and his family move when the friends are in middle school. i think he doesn't tell anyone until the last minute because he doesn't want to think about it, and they don't end up keeping in touch. they reunite their junior or senior year of high school and that's when their story starts seeping into the real world, or at least when they start noticing.
there's more to it, and a lot more that isn't set in stone, but that's the gist of it. if you want to see art of them, that would be here, and i didn't really talk about them here or have a tag for them before so if you want to know more you'll just have to ask questions.
& shoutout to @existingonanotherplane and @vivelegalite, my beloved co-creators for these characters and their story.
