Fimfic OC Creation 101 · 5:44am Nov 8th, 2015
Never go Full Reta Alicorn
Okay, so that's not necessarily true in absolutely all cases. But it's a good rule of thumb to stay away from creating an alicorn OC until you have at least two of the following items under your belt:
a) enough experience (and by that I mean more than a couple of 1k one-shots)
b) a solid following of people that will help you not feel like you wasted your time writing it (or auto-hate it on sight)
c) a proven record of being able to tell compelling stories. (No, your friend telling you your story is awesome is not proof of this.)
Suffice it to say, if it's your first story ever... No. Don't. You're just setting yourself up for disaster, unfounded bashing, and an immediate alienation with most readers who won't care that it's your first story.
It's not fair, especially if you come over with high hopes of recognition or to share something that perhaps is actually and truly important to you. But it's the truth. OC Alicorns, at first blush, basically take away most of the credibility in much less than 10 seconds flat.
The fact is: OC Alicorns are very rarely needed. If at all.
Beyond the color scheme, it's an interesting thing, how seeing an OC tag can make you doubtful about a story regardless of the experience of the author, but seeing an Alicorn OC is pretty much a guarantee of a shuddering "nope!" with possible auto-downvotes without even glancing at the contents of the story.
In a way it is unfair, of course, but at the same time... it's an invitation for that. And if you write an Alicorn OC, well, you should expect that gut reaction for people to hate it.
The reason is that—unless you have a proven record of being able to tell a tale—what you're doing by creating an Alicorn OC is basically telling the universe your character is a Mary Sue. You might be shaking your head and saying: "But mine isn't!"
Well then, why is it an Alicorn?
This boils down to basic character creation for any given story, not just fan fiction. Any story. Character building takes effort if you want a good character. Personality traits, physical appearance and power levels are not enough to build a character.
I will get to effective character creation in another blog, but let's just brush the basics here. Those three things I listed? Those are the seeds of your character. If you're making a real OC, something that feels relatable and is more than a medium for your projections of what a super-being is, and something that is worthy of you writing thousands of words about... saying: "He's a broody, deep, scarred character who has phoenix-like wings of flame, a horn made of obsidian with gold and silver inlays and controls the galaxy's rotation around the Great Donut!" is, besides intentionally obtuse, not telling you anything about the character, as cool as he might sound in your head.
But back to Alicorns.
Alicorns are basically the most powerful creatures in the world of MLP:FIM. They have the overclocked abilities of all three races of pony: unicorn magic, earth stamina/strength and pegasi flight in addition to alicorn-exclusive magic (in accordance to the show) and an undefined lifespan ranging from decades—if you want Twilight to have an early death—to centuries, millennia and, in some cases, immortality.
They are immediately assumed to be leaders. We don't have alicorn carpenters or chefs or accountants. They're royalty.
In summation, they are better at everything than anyone else, and if they are not right now, rest assured they will be soon enough.
So, it's with a healthy amount of trepidation that someone in their right mind would even glance at an Alicorn OC and expect anything less than an overbearing character that is there to do something better than everyone else.
When creating a character, you have to ask yourself what the character is for, as much as who he is, where he came from, where he's going and what his favorite food is.
Do you need a leader? Why does it need to be an Alicorn? Why isn't your character a unicorn if he or she is part of the nobility? Or a pegasi if they're a military genius or an Earth Pony if they have a financial empire? (To cast them in the cliched roles.)
Not being perfect or immediately liked or immediately assumed to be the rightful leader makes a character more compelling than Rictus Magnus, the Alicorn of Stallionhood and testosterone-proximity-induced-pregnancy taking the role of the boss in the local town's Winter Wrap-up. (Unless it's a comedy, but we're assuming a serious story here.)
Sure, having an Alicorn that can fix everything in a second makes the story easier. But it also makes it less interesting. It's just as bad as rewriting the episode with a Twilight Sparkle from 1000 years in the future, with all her power, appearing and just doing everything. You don't need 1000 words for that. You just need a sentence.
Far more interesting is when you have a less powerful character that struggles to make things work. Say like... Twilight Sparkle struggled to fit in, do something outside her expertize and deal with her mess-ups.
Any OC, well written, can be an excellent character and friend/leader/lover/mother/son/daughter/alloftheabove. But very few ever need to be godlike figures even if you want to argue it's just in appearance.
If your OC alicorn is the villain, do yourself a favor and don't start the story with him/her. Create suspense and don't try to give too many hints. Make people like (or hate) the villain through their charisma and their actions rather than beginning with a mysterious creature that by the end of the first 500 words we know is an alicorn.
[...]and from the collapsing tower in the middle of the abandoned forest, which was right-smack in the center of the Lifeless Wasteland, which lay north of the Empty Continent... a creature emerged, wrapped in a cape and hood which he ripped apart in a dramatic show of strength no living being in more than 300 miles could even glimpse.
He stepped forward, his magnificent, Adamantium Clad hooves making small craters with each step to the slavering awe of no-one whatsoever; his mighty wings of FIRE with pinions of silver extended to their full capacity, toppling down the doorframe behind him and with it finally bringing the rest of the tower down—thankfully not killing or hurting anyone since there was no one in side as previously stated.
His horn of obsidian with inlay gold shone with eldritch energies reminiscent of the constellations floating behind him in some sort of simile of a wavy mane, which no one was around to compare them to.
For some reason he laughed evilly, and then spoke up in a voice that sounded like Tom Hanks after smoking a chimeny, "IT IS I! RICTUS MAGNUS! I come for this world, Celestia!"
But no one answered. Because no one was around to see it anyway.
I have yet to see a single "prologue" (or prolog as some people insist on writing it) introducing any OC alicorn that doesn't set the story for failure. If the main characters of your story don't know he/she is an alicorn, the readers don't need to know either until it's actually relevant. This is called "The Big Reveal" in most cases and it's "big" because no-one knew for sure the character was an alicorn.
"Well done, Twilight Sparkle," said the figure sitting languidly on the throne.
Twilight was grateful that the guards hadn't checked the magic inhibitor they had placed on her horn, or they would have noticed the crack Applejack had managed to create on it. Now that this mysterious villain was within sight, she would be able to use the power of friendship to bring him down.
"I am amazed you were able to discover Blueblood's duplicity. I thought I had chosen a better pawn."
"Ponies are not pawns!" Twilight shouted, her horn flaring.
The figure's eyes widened when she cast the blast of pure, magical friendship at it, throwing the two guards away with its sheer power. Finally, after several seconds, she relented her assault, gasping and falling to her knees, tired.
But at least her enemy was down and they could go back home and help rebuild Ponyvi—
"Very amusing, Miss Sparkle."
Twilight's head snapped up and she stared in horror at the pony walking down from the throne towards her. "But-but that's impossible! You're—"
His wing extended and pushed her mouth shut just as his horn glowed with magic, levitating the magic suppressor off of her. "Now dear, no need to state the obvious."
A big reveal, on the other hand? Works better.
The bottom line is: Alicorn OCs are not a good idea in general unless you have a very specific role for them and that needs to go beyond, "I needed a main character."
So guys, any additional Alicorn OC suggestions for new authors?
Neon Boom, tho
The weird thing is that I don't even think it's a question to people a lot of the time that their OC needs to be an alicorn. They'll point to like some wacky circumstances in their plot that "require" the character to be an alicorn and go "See? Here's why."
I think a big part of the problem isn't just that some people don't understand what makes a character interesting. It's that they also don't really grasp how to build reasonable plots yet, so the characters they build to fit those plots look nutty and overdone by default.
Now I want to write a story about Biscuit, the Alicorn Baker. He has Mayor Mare's color scheme, is afraid of heights, and magic gives him a headache. The story would be mainly about his fantasy hoofball league and mixing bread dough.
I'm inclined to think that OC alicorns are a product largely by new authors, and the drive that made them authors in the first place was the desire for wish fulfillment. Something that, because of its power, is worshipped, exerts tremendous influence, gets all the female pones and stuff.
I haven't read much in the way of these at all; I've heard of alicorn fics that supposedly work (Appletheosis? And Bad Horse's set, even if it doesn't quite fit the bill of seriousness), and of course everyone knows the sort that don't work, but it seems that the heart of having most, if not all alicorn OCs, lies not in making a compelling story, but providing a shallow gratification, either in the concept or the irony of subversion (as of compared to the likes of Harry Potter, Jeeves, Bartimaeus in the Bartimaeus Trilogy, and other such characters that wield a substantial amount of power in their worlds). I'm wondering if the concept is just too soiled to ever be worth trying - that this crowd will read it for simply the unironic or ironic indulgence, and any attempts at the subtler things that round a concept out are wasted. Probably, if there had been better alicorn fics around during the time before we became jaded, we might have been less cautious, but now we demand a level of justification that might be unreasonable. A stigma tax, if you would.
Tangentially, WD, reading your post made me realize: the editing philosophy of "do not" results in restrictive perspectives, but the editing philosophy of "do" is impracticable. It's more understandable for you to say as such since you have to read and approve a ton of the stuff, but for editors like I used to be, it's so much easier to say "no talking heads" or "no OC-M6 shipping" than elaborate on what they could do to pull it off.
You know... i might have an idea I might pitch you later XD You can perhaps give me some feedback XD
As someone with some experience on the subject of alicorns—particularly ones who are essentially as gods—I am maybe not the best to tell people not to write them. Still, I will say that anyone who chooses to do so should know exactly what they're getting into.
Assuming you're writing good fiction, we'll just call this “having an alicorn that can fix everything in a second makes the story harder.”
The fewer mortal concerns a character has, and the fewer things that challenge them, the fewer reasons you have to have your character do… anything—and characters doing things is what stories are. If you do choose to write an alicorn, then think long and hard about what that actually means for the character physically, mentally and socially. You are, essentially, writing a superhero, and superheroes need appropriate challenges, be they epic in scale or more personal—ideally both. A story that relies solely on the former tends to be unrelatable, while a story that relies solely on the latter has no need of the expanded scope.
You'll keep making blogs like this, D?
If so, thanks!
It's gonna come in handy.
I say go for them if you can keep the story interesting and make your OC's struggles seem like actual struggles.
...what if it's a 1000-word sentence?
(And then every staff member who has ever done story approval considers banning this user on the spot.)
I don't really take the concept of talking ponies with a racially based social hierarchy seriously. So, if I make a character an alicorn they are guaranteed to be ineffective if not incompetent for laughs. Plus, I'm rather fond of the idea that there is a low power distance between the different classes of pony, choosing instead to believe the level of one's performance is based on luck, economics, and social status... which is in no way the same thing as magic, money, or manipulation.
Also, how can we be certain Celestia isn't a pastry chef or the Equstrian Gordon Ramsay? Practically every fic featuring her I've read features her consuming nothing but culinary sweets and exotic foods when she isn't playing judge or doing something seemingly presidential. Maybe the school for gifted unicorns isn't the only institution she presides over. Surely, The Royal Gastronomer has to be replaced as frequently (if not more so) than the Royal Guard. I mean, consider how inept they are compared to an immortal that's had centuries to perfect their craft or their palate. I know I can't enjoy fast food without thinking of how much better I could have prepared the meal, and for someone more than a thousand years old I'm sure anything shy of five hours is fast.
I kind of feel if you want to take any member of the cast and make them an alicorn, secretly or otherwise, you should be able to do so. If I was intending to make something completely original I wouldn't be writing fanfiction. Plus, to the best of my knowledge, everything successful is a re-imagineing of something popular. Why start at the bottom when you fantasize, when you start out you're already there with everyone else. As long as you're at the bottom of the barrel, shoot for the golden ring and maybe your creativity will set phazers to hug... or you know, being that you've put your best foot forward, boost your creativity in sandbox mode in a way that fails so hard it's totally epic.
Creating an alicorn character for a story set in the MLP:FIM universe is one of the rare cases I would indeed tell a person to tread carefully. I'm generally all for original character creation but as much as I love creating characters, I still have some limits. Alicorn is clearly a type in the show that you either need to earn the status of (Twilight, Cadence) or be a very, very rare breed. (Celestia, Luna) It just doesn't seem to happen because random genetics like the Cake twins being a Unicorn and a Pegasus when the parents are Earth Ponies
I would advice, make absolutely certain that an Alicorn is actually necessary. In terms of flight related conflicts, a Pegasus might actually just do or even just a Unicorn who can create a temporary wing spell if magic is really required (we have precedence in the show of a unicorn being able to create temporary wings). Strength? A sturdy Earth Pony is probably going to be more than enough. And I'm probably just repeating what Wandere D pretty much said.
Keep also in mind that if you absolutely need an Alicorn, you already have four canon Alicorns at your disposal, why not just use one of them? Even if I love using my own characters in fan fiction, I still make sure that I can't use a canon character first.
I have been considering using an Alicorn OC for a while now, but obviously, have come up against a whole plethora of problems.
In my case, I only want an Alicorn OC to maintain the lore that goes on in my fic. The family liniage is very important for this OC, and if I make it so they're not an Alicorn...
I'll have a lot of (convoluted) explaining to do.
Perhaps having an OC that is a child of a princess is a really, really bad idea. People have warned me of this. Sometimes, I feel like I'm sacrificing the overall impact of the story when I need to pander to people's stereotypical opinions...
But maybe that's just my hypocrisy talking.
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What makes a character interesting is the struggles they face, and the fights they fight. It's about what they've learned and haven't learned, and about how they've changed.
I don't think I've done horribly with my oc's but then again, we humans are vain. I do agree about being cautious of using the God-mode ponies for random things. if you want your character to have both magic and flight, use a changeling. Those guys have the best of both worlds, but literally live and die based on public opinion. It can also lead to some interesting conflicts in travels. A changeling is going to need a travel partner for long trips. Pack as much bread and butter as you like, it won't keep you alive. Unless you made yours some of those OP 'I don't need emotions, I just take them for the lulz' changelings.
Good points, D. Speaking of alicorn OC's though, have you ever succumbed to the desire to make one?
Now I feel super bad for making my second FiM story into a 2000 word epic about an OC Alicorn Soldier who hails from a post-apocalyptic world and gets with all the mares despite his tragic and awesome past.
For good alicorn oc examples, I suggest The Immortal Game
I think this is a good general rule of thumb:
Don't make a character weird unless their weirdness matters to the story you're telling.
The reason for this is that weirdness sticks out, and thus draws attention to itself. This is good if you're going to make good use of the weirdness, but is a distraction if their weirdness isn't very important - and distractions are bad because they draw attention away from things which matter to the story.
Thus, if I'm writing a pony story, I'd write it about one of the three main races unless I had a good reason not to. I wouldn't make a griffon the main character unless I was saying something about that. I wouldn't make a donkey or cow the main character unless I was saying something with that for the same reason.
Alicorns are especially weird and thus especially important to exploit properly. Alicorns are sort of world-warping characters, and thus the fact that they're alicorns becomes all the more important. The character being an alicorn needs to be plot-critical for some reason - the story needs to deal with alicorn issues (immortality/long life, extremely powerful magic, rulership, ect.) and the character needs to fit into the world.
But all weird characters should be what they are for a reason.
Note that weirdness is setting-dependent as well - if you write a story about the US, having an American protagonist is normal, and the fact that they're American doesn't need to be a focus of the story. If you write a story about Japan, having an American protagonist is more unusual, and the fact that they're a foreigner should be in some way important.
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To be fair, this is also true, and is probably responsible for more bad OCs in the fandom.
Though in that case, the issue is less "the OC is bad" and more "the plot/story is bad". OCs in bad stories are likely to be bad OCs, but it may be that the flaw lies higher up the chain.
I feel if you're going to have a protaganist alicorn OC, unless you're turning everyone's power levels up to 11 including the antagonist, you would be better served by turning your OC into a pegacorn as opposed to an Alicorn. Horn and wings, but nothing special in either case.
This particular topic always amuses me a bit on account of my personal history with the subject. Two of the very first stories I ever read in the fandom were alicorn OC stories, the Upheaval series with a literal red and black alicorn, and then Ponies Make War with two up front and then a few more over the course of the in-story flashbacks.
Not that I disagree with the message of the blog post or anything like that, I just find it funny.
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Yeah, there is The Immortal Game/Ponies Make War? That thing introduced an pair of OC alicorns in the second half of the prologue. What makes it awesome is just how sudden it was. I still remember the line where Celestia thinks "there was no plan." Of course, the shape of that story was: dump the characters into a very, very deep hole right at the start then spend the rest of the story watching them slowly climb out so it needed to go all-in.
Comedy's are like the except to every rule (if done right) XD
I actually do have a concept for an alicorn character, but
1) Said character is primarily villainous
2) Said character does not start off as an alicorn.
Them going full alicorn basically signifies them not playing around with the power they've aquired any more.
This isn't a fic I've started writing yet, but it's one of the concepts I'd like to try.
I agree. Why make an alicorn OC when you can make a displaced supervillain?
3529693 You truly are evil.
Come up with my own alicorn OC? Okay. It'll be long though. She comes with a backstory.
The ruler of a faraway land is an alicorn mare, the Princess of Nature. She rules over a vast and expansive territory of uncultivated and untamed land, because she believes that the land is already perfect as it is. For millennia, she has ruled over her people with unwavering and draconic views of the perfection of nature. Not only does she refuse to allow any sort of technological advances, due to them being "unnatural", but she will even let massive monsters and natural disasters ravage her kingdom, on the basis that a "natural" defense is ideal, and each subject should be able to fend for himself/his tribe.
Her subjects usually do not complain about any of this, for they are either fit to live in such a savage place, have left to live in better places, or have died attempting one or the other. Numerous attempts at her life have been made, and many have actually been successful. Yet somehow, she always appears alive a day pr two later. Nopony alive has ever seen how she does this, and nopony alive is able to figure out how.
She's not entirely bad though. She does allow natural things to be improved, even in ways that aren't "natural" by any stretch of the word. As long as the result is entirely made of the same thing it was made of before, it gets a pass. This allows anything from buildings made from singular re-shaped rocks to horrible mutant creatures that long for an end to their own existence. Anything goes as long as you work alongside what you already have. Many of these new creations are very helpful, but not every citizen in this land quite approves of this creativity, creating internal tension over how far you change nature and still be "natural".
And the line between what remains "natural" and what's "unnatural" seems to be quite blurry in the case of the undead. Although it does not happen very often, there has always been a presence of necromancers in this kingdom. Almost nopony in this kingdom accepts that necromancy is natural in any definition, except of course for the few necromancers who practice it. One astoundingly notable exception is that our alicorn OC princess accepts necromancy as "natural", and will not intervene to stop it, even though such a thing is well within the scope of her abilities and authority.
With all that said, the rest of the world, especially Equestria, considers this Princess to be either cruel and irrational, or has a deep, deep problem with a lack of cognitive dissonance. Outside of this alicorn's kingdom, no one thinks she is a very good pony. This creates high tension between this nation and the rest of the world, distancing her people from outside influence.
But none of these things are quite as mysterious as the alicorn herself. While the way she runs/doesn't run her kingdom is plain to see, her motivations of why she does so don't seem to be quite as simple of what is "natural" versus what is not. Her policies of "improving nature" and allowing necromancy seem to be beyond any stretch of the imagination for what's natural, regardless of her consistency in keeping these policies throughout the ages, and many of her own subjects are puzzled by this, even though they have long ago learned to accept it.
Even more mysterious is where she came from. There is no reliable existing record of her existing for more than a month before she came to power. Even those ones that talk about this small frame of time have almost no detail about her, except that she was an alicorn in that time. A general consensus of legends and folklore among her subjects is that she was born from nature itself - a gift from the world to protect this land from the evils technology and bless it with the gift of preserving nature.
The truth is that this mare is not an alicorn at all. Or a pony for that matter. She is actually a nature spirit that became corrupted by massive amounts of magic when she got stuck in a leyline for a century. Shortly after she was freed, she decided that she would make everything in her domain obey natural law. The best way to do this, she decided, was to trick a nearby unicorn that had both necromantic and biomantic powers into killing one each of a pegasus and an earth pony, kill the necromancer herself and steal her power, stitch the appropriate parts together to form one "alicorn" body, possess said body, and then use a few tricks to to make the body look like it isn't a zombie.
Between appearing to be an alicorn and having a massive amount of power at her disposal, she was able to successfully trick many lands into thinking she was the Princess of Nature, and unite them all under the guise of preserving nature. From there, she just let her own beliefs and inner guidance - as corrupted as it was - do the work for her. Any time she died, she would just repeat the process she used to get her first body, with the exception that she no longer needed a unicorn with any specific type of magic, since she already knew it for herself.
Who cares? It's not like there's much originality on this site anyway.
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The purpose of comedy is to elevate one's spirit, surely raising the spirits of the dead is as natural as raising the spirits of the living. Assuming you want to make the argument stick you could also argue that to die is unnatural for your nature spirit. I'm thinking of the play Salome by Oscar Wilde. In fact, that should be the name of the Alicorn-Ham in charge.
*looks at the sidebar, then whistles innocently*
3530228 I wasn't thinking about making a character for a comedy.
I was just thinking about how an alicorn OC might be useful as a character, and this really interesting idea came into my head. I guess she could be put in a comedy if you really wanted to, but she would have to be in a particular role. She probably wouldn't show up until later in the story, and she would probably die at least once. Being a non-pony, she would probably have limited familiarity with any culture but her own, since she would have zero interest in leaving home. That could be a funny setup for a fish-out-of-water plot or subplot if you somehow moved her from her homeland. But she has been around for a good long while, so don't think she's absolutely ignorant of the world around her.
But I want to make an alicorn OC.....with pretty red and black coloring, a dark and tragic past....or maybe she'll jsut be soooo good at everything she'll even outshine Twilight, as she is just so perfect!!!
You think I'm joking don't you?
I am.....almost. I just like to mess with people...