Hi, I think this is more on the line of advice, but there it goes, I have this flash oc I want to pair with Iris, but later seasons have been so heavily in the iris/barry, I'm having a hard time developing the storylines for later without straight up swapping Iris and the oc, which I don't really wanna do. Anyway, since you guys have been writing for flash for so long, how do you deal with this? Keep the canon as much as possible or just throws it at the window?
Riley: Hmm, firstly, our advice may end up repeating so I apologize if that happens, Lol. But because we’re in similar boats of having our OCs be major players to Barry’s story, or at least have it affect his and his affect our OCs, then, it may help.
Ahem, one of the things I worried about the most was having Cadence completely switch places with Iris in terms of the WestAllen story to be for BarryCade (or NashAllen as I sometimes refer to it). In some cases, there’s no way for you to avoid this, it’s going to happen because of some dynamics and some plots. So there’s going to be a lot of points within your idea where IrisOC is going to be there in place of WestAllen. However, this doesn’t have to be a bad thing!
One thing you can try is plotting out ahead of time what key points that you want to hit withing IrisOC that are going to be organic and what will be influenced by the show’s plot. I know you really don’t want to swap them out but having a clear idea of what it is that you want to achieve with IrisOC will help. Then you’d want to figure out how important WestAllen’s relationship/friendship will be for your story. Even if they’re not together, it’s been seen that they’re best friends so they’d still have a close connection in that aspect. Moving forward with that will make it easier to figure things out as you go along.
For me, the first thing I made sure of was that Cadence (and by extension, Brady and Ryder) had a story of their own that didn’t completely revolve around Barry. So that way there couldn’t be a claim that Cade was a complete Iris stand-in. I also take events from the show as a baseline and either completely re-work it in my own way to better tell that story plot, I change it completely but keep the key players the same, or I leave it the same but change the timeline of events. Not everything can be streamlined in the same 44 minute way the show has and there are times where I have it where something happened with one villain, something happens with another, and then long into the story later the first villain will come back because it make sense for my story and plot.
So I do both, keep canon and throw it out the window.
Do whatever works best for you! Thanks for sending in the ask, we’re always here for any more advice/help you need!
Rhuben: This can seem like a daunting thing, but it doesn't have to be. Of course you'll have people that will say that Barry and Iris should only be together, but it's fanfic for a reason and of course we know that Iris was with Eddie to start. And both Barry and Iris were with different people in the comics at times so it's not unheard of.
You could always choose to keep Patty around longer to ship Barry with someone - if you feel like Barry would just be "out in the cold" so to speak. I think the two had great chemistry together and could have lasted for a while. That way you could also have it that while Barry and Iris aren't romantically linked, you could really play up/enhance their friendship and their importance to each other as best friends. It still captures the WestAllen essence and keeps them close.
I kind of equally keep canon and take canon but flip it on it's head in ways. One way I'll do this is by watching the episode/season keeping track of how my OC would react to things or influence situations in some way, or see if a meta makes better sense of a villain to the OC than to Barry. I also look at differrnt storylines from the Flash comics to see how to re-work those into the fic. It'll also help you figure out if you want to adapt every episode or skip past events. Or if an event is not done as well as you think it could have been, you can change it or expand on it way more than a 44 minute episode would allow. Let some arcs continue on, or make others shorter for example. Instead of an event being based around Barry (for example) re-work it to be based around your OC.
Hope that helps a little.
