Oooooh, tell me something about your OCs, anything you want ro share? Please, gush away! :-D
This is so sweet! Thank you! 💙
Sorry for taking a bit to answer, I’ve been in finals crunch and grad school is kind of kicking my ass (starting school again after five years away and I’ve completely forgotten all my coping skills).
I watched the Vampire Diaries for the first time this summer with @bellona1521 (and have been much more slowly making my way through the Originals and probably won’t get to Legacies before next year because of said finals + holiday obligations) so I’ve definitely been creating ocs for TVD like crazy haha.
My big huge intended rewrite fic, The More Things Change (The More They Stay the Same), only has one oc in the strictest definition. Annette Saltzman is the daughter of Alaric Saltzman and Isobel Flemming, making her Elena’s half-sister. She’s six in the first season and she’s a witch.
Isobel had not really wanted children to begin with, whereas Alaric had. She sort of allowed herself to be persuaded into the idea, thinking it would be different to be a mother in her thirties, rather than age seventeen, and with a partner, rather than alone, but ultimately motherhood was not for her. Alaric has technically only really been a single parent for as long as Isobel has been missing/presumed dead but practically speaking he’s been a single dad to Annie from the get go. Alaric being a dad and a single dad at that results in some subtle differences to his character compared to his canon counterpart.
Sheila spots Annie out as a potential witch almost immediately after she and Alaric move to Mystic Falls and begins training her. Annie is in love with Bonnie immediately and constantly talks about how Bonnie said this and Bonnie said that. Sheila becomes a surrogate grandparent figure to her.
Annie loves her dad a lot and as a kid she largely seems unaffected by her mom’s abandonment of them but this gets explored when she becomes a teenager and starts to realize ‘oh shit, that was actually super messed up’. Teenage Annie is going to be a lot. She clashes with Caroline and starts fighting with her dad.
Annie’s character was the starting point for the idea of the fic and my intention currently is to end it with her as an adult, but her presence in Mystic Falls and in the fic has only minor effects initially with a gradual increase in focus over time.
One thing I’m looking forward to writing with the Alaric-Annie dynamic is when Alaric is possessed by Klaus and when the Gilbert ring turns Alaric dark and twisted because you can bet that Annie can tell when her dad isn’t acting like himself.
The other two ocs in the fic technically I swiped from the TVD books but I haven’t read the books, only the wiki summaries on them, and they are Meredith Sulez and Margaret Gilbert.
Their characters in TMTC(TMSTS) are going to be a bit different from their canon characters in part because Margaret of the books is Annie’s age whereas here she’s thirteen, two years younger than Jeremy and four years younger than Elena, and because the other characters they’ll be interacting with are different from the book counterparts.
Margaret and Meredith’s presences obviously change things right off the bat.
With Margaret, she’s the youngest Gilbert sibling and as the baby, she’ll give me opportunities to explore and expand both Elena and Jeremy’s family relationships. Like Annie, she seems initially to be the least affected by her parents’ death but unlike Annie, this facade is going to crack early on and man is it going to crack hard.
I have less of a sense of what I’m going to do with Margaret in comparison to Annie and Meredith but I do know that she’s going to get Jeremy’s medium powers instead of him and that because Elena wants to protect her, Jenna gets brought in on the supernatural earlier.
With Meredith, I’m interested in exploring the idea of a character knowing about vampires and coming from a family of vampire hunters before the Salvatore brothers ever set foot in Mystic Falls. In some ways it’s actually a relief to her when her friends find out about vampires because it’s been a big secret she hasn’t been able to share with them.
I’m also interested in exploring how her presence effects the friend group of Bonnie, Elena, and Caroline. Three can be a really hard number in a friend group, I know from experience, and I want to look at Meredith’s relationships both with the three other girls and with each of them individually.
The wiki entry for her describes her as as follows:
Meredith is the only person, especially the only female within the series, that is not in any way affected or influenced by Damon Salvatore's charm and she is the one person whom Damon actually fears and finds scary.
So I’m super excited to figure out how to make that work for Meredith in the showverse and how that dynamic is going to go.
Abby Cardenas is a really recent TVD oc creation but I’ve been having fun with her because she’s not so involved in the main plot and so I don’t have to rewrite canon constantly. She’s Caroline’s maternal cousin (I started creating her before I realized that Caroline mentions having two aunts, specifically her mom’s sisters, who won Miss Mystic Falls, which means Abby could even plausibly exist in canon haha) because when I decided I wanted her to be with Tyler, it was important to me that Caroline was someone close to her.
After deciding that she was going to be with Tyler, it was important to me that Abby and Tyler have some things in common, so they both have complicated family relationships. Abby’s family is inspired by a less idealized version of Lorelei and Rory Gilmore in Gilmore Girls, Georgia, Ginny, and Austin Miller in Ginny and Georgia, and Sara, April, and Brenna Carver and April and Brenna Carver and Natalie Ortiz in Chasing Life. Abby’s always had love but not always stability while Tyler’s always had stability but not always love and neither of them has had security.
The supernatural does play a part in Abby’s fic (obviously with Tyler and Caroline as two of her most important relationships) but honestly her biggest obstacles to overcome are largely human stuff, hang ups over getting attached to people and places because of having constantly been on the move, an awkward relationship with her dad, and communication issues. She fights with her brother and sister as siblings do.
Another thing that’s fun is Abby’s mom Delilah’s romance. It’s mostly happening in the background but she and Gabriel eventually get hitched and the whole relationship is a sign of Delilah’s growing up and a sign that Abby doesn’t have to be guarded and closed off because things are changing and she’s going to have stability and not get uprooted again. Also the Cohen-Standishes are an adorable blended family.
The Cohen-Standishes are also an opportunity for me to explore diversity in Mystic Falls from a different angle. The Cohens are Jewish and Gabriel and Isaac are Deaf. (Emmie was born hearing but is fluent in sign language (well as fluent as an eight year old can be in any language!) as she was brought up bilingual). Alicia is biracial (her dad is black) and Abby is white and Latina. Neither of them looks like their mom like their little brother Andrew does. Alicia feels it more but they both feel the way that they get othered and are not assumed to be their mom’s kids.
Abby is cynical, sarcastic, and judgy. She is confrontational when she wants answers and believes they’re being withheld from her but when she’s being pushed into a confrontation she didn’t instigate and doesn’t want to be in, she’ll straight up run away.
However, she is also loyal and generous to a fault, funny, and practical. She keeps her head in an emergency (assuming said emergency doesn’t involve discussing feelings). Abby can be charming when she wants to be.
I’m never sure how much to say about my original fiction ocs — definitely I like to talk about all my babies but I also don’t want to give things away.
I’ve always had an interest in ballet and I fell in love with the Australian show Dance Academy. I have watched a handful of other dance focused shows but DA remains unmatched in terms of raw emotion and fairly authentic ballet representation.
BHS which is short for Ballet High School is my tag for my ballet kids. It’s a prestigious ballet training school, most of the kids come from different places and board at the school, and the environment is just chock full of delicious tension, drama, and, of course, ballet!
The story centers around Shani, a second year ballet student who unlike the rest of the kids, actually lived in the city the school is located in before she got in. Her parents have money so she dorms at the school but can go home whenever she wants. Shani struggles with a) not having a stereotypical ballet dancer’s body and b) whether or not to commit herself fully to ballet to the exclusion of her other interests. Her character is inspired partially by Abigail Armstrong in Dance Academy and partially by Jenna Cristinziano in Backstage.
Keely is Shani’s best friend since babyhood and her link to the outside world. She is very practical, no nonsense in contrast to Shani and won’t hesitate to point out when her best friend is being ridiculous but loves her dearly. Her character is partially inspired by Kit Dunn in Backstage.
Raquel is the first friend that Shani made at ballet school and the person there she is closest to.
Malina is Shani’s roommate. She has that similarly no-nonsense vibe as Keely, although she has a softer manner, and she stays out of the relationship drama that Shani gets into. She’s dating Dorian, a fellow ballet student.
Vera is Raquel’s roommate and Raquel’s closest friend at ballet school. She comes from a military family. She is partially inspired by Vanessa Morita in Backstage.
Aidan is Shani’s dance partner. Shani has an embarrassing crush on him but he finds her kind of annoying. He’s a loner and thinks he is too cool for everyone at ballet school. He is partially inspired by Christian Reed in Dance Academy.
Danny is another ballet student with a crush on Shani which is very much unreciprocated. He is partially inspired by Ben Tickle in Dance Academy.
Camilla and Wyatt are ballet exchange students from the U.K. They shake everything up! Shani and Aidan are separated. Wyatt and Shani are partnered and Camilla and Aidan. Aidan doesn’t get a chance to appreciate not dealing with Shani because Wyatt’s making her laugh and making her blush and it turns out Aidan really doesn’t like that. Hmm, maybe he likes Shani more than he thinks. Meanwhile Camilla starts dating Keely, which Shani hates because she doesn’t like sharing her best friend and she doesn’t like Camilla. Hmm, maybe she’s jealous.
Victoria Carrow in Dark Glory is me exploring shades of grey and also arranged marriages set in a hellworld where Voldemort won. I get to explore Slytherin society, pure blood society, Death Eater society, and how a Slytherin presence in the Resistance might look like. And enemies to lovers babey.
Victoria is super fun for me to write because even when she has the same goals as other characters like Neville, she goes about them very differently. Her head snark is very much constantly like ‘learn to pick your battles, be strategic’ especially around the Gryffindors.
She and Neville are very fun POV characters to swap between because their impressions of each other are going to change so much over time. They’ve both got the other pegged in very stereotypical boxes (conniving socialite for him, noble idiot for her) initially and their perceptions of each other are going to be so different by the end.
Also Victoria has a very cool girl-heavy social circle and that lets me flesh out the Slytherin girls beyond the really flat mean girls we got in canon.
Sorry that ended up being less about Victoria and more about writing about her!
I tried to do a little bit of all over. If anyone is of particular interest to you whether I mentioned them here or not, feel free to ask more! I can be slow to answer but I love questions. 💙
