Have you ever written or read a fanfic that focuses on OCs and obscure characters? Though OCs can get flak sometimes, they can be great for pre-canon stories where you need to pad out the cast. And obscure characters can be kind of a blank canvas.
Though I’ve never written something like that, I’ve been reading a Transformers fic with a cast full of OCs and obscure characters (characters that died on their first appearance, only said a few lines in canon, etc). It focuses on the wife of one villain before canon, back when she was a child.
I loved the main character, but when I tried looking her up, virtually none of her backstory was even on the wiki page, and when I tried looking up some of the other characters, they didn’t even have pages. I’m a little disappointed that nearly all of the events won’t be referenced in canon, but I’m really impressed with the author’s world building.
I always love it when authors put their own spin on an existing world, and I’d love to hear if anyone has read or made any other fics like it. (though it is kind of the point of fanfiction, these authors take it to the next level)
(Sorry if this was a little clunky, or if it’s similar to something else. First post and all. 😅)
Whoops I missed this post =')
I don’t think I’ve written for fandoms with a big enough cast to have characters qualify as “obscure” but I’ve definitely written for characters with less time in the spotlight.
As for OCs, my personal taste when I write is to use OCs when I have a story idea and no one in the canon cast can fill a much needed role. Given that I focus on character psychology, “a story idea” means something centered around at least one canon character, so I never wrote a story with an OC as main character (except if you count reader-insert, which I don’t personally like reading but have fun writing for prompts). I did have an OC as second main character just behind a canon character once, though.
So yeah, in short I agree with your “padding the cast” idea, even if I tend to keep my OCs count very low.
That being said, as a reader I’m way more open to stories with lots of OCs.
As the others said, the overall presence of OCs can vary wildly depending of fandom. For example I’ve dabbled into the Vampire: the Masquerade – Bloodlines fandom, and given that this is a video game with a fully customizable player character, every fic using that player character writes them as an OC. Other fandom, other habits: in Lobotomy Corporation and its sequel Library of Ruina you have lots of characters that have a purely gameplay role and don’t appear in the story at all, and they’re all customizable, so players tend to get attached to their versions and it translates to lots of OCs in fanart and fanfic. Like, a lot. I think there are more fics for OCs than for any canon character in the Lobotomy Corporation tag of AO3 xD But when I read about games with no custom character, OCs are extremely rare.
Anyway, OCs can be absolutely great and don’t deserve their bad reputation =)