A bit of looking back at my history from being in the Oddworld fandom before having accounts on the sites that I would participate in with the fandoms I was part of...
When I was first introduced to Oddworld content through a Top 10 video by SuperHorrorBro on some horror games (even though he specified/clarified on his end that Oddworld isn't really a horror game, but does have some creepy elements to it), I soon became interested in it, and soon, I fell into the "gabbit hole", as I would like to call it, down into the weird and yet intriguing world of Oddworld. (And almost forgot to mention, I was in my first year of middle school during this time, I was young.)
And along my first adventure through Oddworld, I have made OCs for it, because when you're in a fandom, there are destined to be some original characters. I made two characters, technically, with my first one being a human girl, who I forgot the name of who was experimented on to be given various bits and bobs of DNA (majority being Mudokon DNA,) who escapes and then adapts to her environment before meeting Abe and then the rest of the characters, and my second OC being an angel-winged girl named, well, "Angel", who is part of a species of the same name. Really, they're just little human girls with white wings, but Angel did become a bounty hunter named "Lange" at some point, but that whole plot with those characters simmered out, and is, for now, lost media to me.
Then I got OCs that were straight-up ordinary humans transported to the world of Oddworld, one being a girl literally named "Sam" (yes, at the time, I knew that the Mudokon Queen is named Sam, so what's the point of naming an OC after her? Well, zip it and lemme get to it then-), for now, let's call her Samantha for Odd's sake, she was just an ordinary girl who lived with her mother until she, and her mother, were transported to Oddworld and ended up separated in the process, with Samantha's only guidance being her necklace (which looks like the Oddworld Inhabitants logo) and the friends she made along the way, that being Stranger, Abe, and Munch. (You see what I did there? I named her because the first letters of each of their names spell out "SAM", little me thought I was clever, and well, I sorta see it.) Anyway, then we got Marilyn, the main character of an Oddworld x Citizen Siege crossover fanfic, a human woman with no job, no money, and no fame, who lived in an apartment in a fucked-up city before being "biologically transported" to Oddworld to stop both worlds (Earth & Oddworld) from fighting each other, with the help of Klot and Squeek. And today's decade, we also have Mally from my Oddworld Infection AU, a regular human girl who ends up in Oddworld, which was suffering from a horrific plague that looks like the Beastscourge from Bloodborne if you squint hard enough, and join the others so that they can survive the world, rid the perpetrator responsible for the outbreak, and find her way back home.
And now, we cut to today, in this year and decade, and I have made three OCs who were not going to be connected initially, but ended up so because of how cool they are together as a group. Firstly, we have the Vicar, or the Jack of Plagues, as I like to call her, because she looks like the villain, Jack of Blades, from Fable. She is the main villain in my Oddworld Infection AU (the same AU with Mally). Once an innocent religious girl from Earth, she came to Oddworld as a means to spread her faith, even though everyone else around her seemed verbally hostile towards her, despite that, though, she kept going, but when she tried to convince the Magog Cartel to perhaps change their ways, they laughed at her face, which then became her breaking point. While having her breakdown, she was then ordered by the voice of who she assumed was her god to contaminate all products made by the Magog Cartel, such as Paramite Pies, Scrab Cakes, Soulstorm Brew, basically anything both edible and manufactured, with a painful and eldritch plague, which is what she did. This girl poisoned the supply of food that was manufactured by the corpos, and released an entire body-horror outbreak upon those unfortunate on Oddworld. But aside from the Vicar, the next OC is my most recent one, and I'm sure you've seen her before. This girl is the Architect, a "Big Brother from George Orwell's 1982"-esque character who takes control over all of Oddworld in secrecy, watching everything Oddworld has to offer unfold before her eyes. Think of Slade from the 2003 Teen Titans show in terms of personality and maybe even tone of voice, a cold, conniving, and almost eerily calm woman with patience that can rival that of an owl or an alligator. She's also what made me make her, Jack of Plagues, and my next OC connected to each other, because the Vicar didn't hear her god's voice, she heard the Architect's voice, and that's what led to the AU. Meanwhile, in some other timeline or timeframe, the Architect has hired my next OC to be both a mass-executioner of convicts and also an eradicator of certain groups. All in all, if anything happens in Oddworld, 99% of it is the Architect's doing.
And now, what do you all notice here? They're all humans. Sure, someone making one or more Human OCs for Oddworld isn't new news, I'm sure it's been that way for some people, heck two of the folks I follow have Oddworld OCs that were human, but that aside, what I'm trying to get at here is experimenting with the concept of "The World of Oddworld changes People", basically the concept of "anyone who is transported to Oddworld are changed permanently, shaping them in a way either unrecognizable or something else entirely.", about how people are shaped by Oddworld's environment in a physical and psychological level. Like for people like Samantha, Marilyn, and Mally, they're just on a "Hero's Journey"-esque journey that results in them coming back home with a new view on life, either feeling confident on their way or yadda, yadda. For people like my Human-Mudokon experiment girl, they go through both psychological and physical change, having to adapt to their environment without any idea of how to get back home, accepting it as their new home. And, or but, for people like the Vicar, the Architect, and my next OC, they were once ordinary people back on Earth, but, due to the endless possibilities on Oddworld, they decided to change it. The change upon them and their change upon Oddworld are both still negative. The Vicar became mad and tried to teach Oddworld a lesson by releasing a body-horror disease into the food supply, the Architect took control over Oddworld back when it was still new, and my next OC is basically the Pyro from TF2 but with using chemicals instead of fire, (essentially) a terrifying and feared individual who releases toxic gases upon people, and doesn't see the destruction and death she inflicts upon, only seeing the world as nothing more than a paradise, what that paradise is, I'll explain more when I fully talk about her.
All in all, the World of Oddworld changes us, and we change the World of Oddworld. That's the gist, this post's too long, I'm out-
