something ive realized about social media is that people like Character Design but they do not actually like ocs. you can make a zillion designs of like, a humanized fish or can of soda or flower or whatever and get thousands of likes. but once the novelty wears off and you actually want to Make something with the characters and give them a story (mini comics, a longform webcomic, animations etc) its like pulling teeth.
outside of your mutual circle, you will get one or two reblogs thats like "#i dont know what this is from but—" like they are just incapable of realizing there is art outside of fanart. i no longer blame people that go "oh this isnt my oc its actually just my au/take on [popular character this looks nothing like] from [big media everyone loves]" bc you literally cannot get people to engage w/ your art unless its a one off design or already connected to something .
man. idk where im going with this besides it feels like there's nowhere for ocs that arent gimmicky and marketable and it SUCKS !
This... is not a new phenomenon 8'D
People never care about OCs. I mean I get it, I guess-- all characters are OCs, in a way, and getting engaged with an OC requires you to put in more energy than either a familiar franchise where you've already invested that energy, or a one-off design where your only investment is to go 'oh that's cool'.
And I mean, to be fair, there's lots of things you reblog that you're not actually interested in. I've reblogged a few Genshin characters and I have absolutely zero knowledge or interest in the story. But it does hit harder when it's like, a personal project and not a Big Thing.
Steering it to writing for a sec, i feel like the rise of Y/N fanfics has been a way for folks to get people to actually read a story that stars an OC, by stripping away their name and sometimes pronouns. People hate OCs that are the author's self-insert, but they're more tolerable of an OC that is a self-insert if they're being invited to do the inserting self bit. Which is dumb, but what can you do?
Anyway reblog people's OCs and hype them up when you see them, cos that's the only way to break this cycle. And if you're writing that OC's story, you gotta stick it out. You're building your own media here from the ground up, you ARE going to be pulling teeth to be seen.
