Does anyone else have a place in their mind, warm and comforting, where their primary OCs reside?
Not all of them, there aren’t castles big enough for that. But I reckon we all have a few OCs that are just that little bit more precious than the others. Perhaps they’re a proper self-insert into a world you love, or the person you’d like to live the rest of your life with. Perhaps they’re your Problem Child, your Grumpy Hero, your Hot Mess. Perhaps you’ve broken them over and over just to know that they’ll always get back up. Perhaps you’ve given them everything only to take it away to see how they carry on. Perhaps they’ve survived torment after torment, only for you to let them have everything they’ve ever wanted.
Perhaps they came to you when you really needed them, to give you hope or strength when you were struggling to find it for yourself.
Perhaps they come in pairs - forever together, or attached to a character that isn’t yours, but is just as much part of them as you are. Perhaps they are alone.
You don’t always know which of your OCs will end up there - not all do. But at some point, perhaps in the first few days of getting to know a new OC, perhaps longer, perhaps even months or years later, you realise that they’re a proper part of you now and you bring them into the room.
They may stay there, forgotten for a time, but you know they’re there because, one day, you’ll think about them again and it feels like home, brings a smile to your face and the sudden urge to go and reread/look at all the content you’ve ever created for them.
They are our muses, our projections, our hopes and our fears. They are how we fight, how we explore and experiment, how we work through our feelings, how we find inspiration.
And perhaps I’m just feeling sentimental today, but I kind of want to thank them for being there when we needed them. Which, I suppose, is the same as thanking ourselves for creating them. Well done us.
