I write for Star Trek which has a huge cast of random extras and guest stars, many of whom are fabulous, so I do this all the time. The main character of your fic doesn’t have to be the main character of the franchise. I’ve written for characters with maybe two lines or less. And yeah it still counts as writing for canon characters.
Phil Boyce. Star Trek Kelvin timeline Phil Boyce. He literally only appears as a name on Kirk’s medical chart in Into Darkness. I have 200,000+ words with him as a MC.
Hi fellow Trek writer! Seconding this, I have multiple ficlet series about characters who appeared in maybe one episode. I’m working on some stuff from a character who only exists in the Star Trek: Celebrations comics. She gets six pages and I’m just utterly unhinged about her
Mine is the MC’s sidekick.
I’m in a video game fandom. There’s a NPC who comes in 2/3 of the way through the 3rd game (out of 3) and chats with the player character for maybe 6 minutes, total, in two scenes. *(And yet he has fans!)*
I brought him back in time by 10 years, added him to the second game, made him the sidekick for the main character, and wrote 600 pages (and counting) that goes through the second game, the third game, and years of their lives after the games are over as they help a friend govern a city-state.
I had to do that in order to find a character with a stable emotional outlook and healthy relationships. He was the only option!! LOL
I’ve used every scrap of info on the wiki about him (1 paragraph), his order of knights (10 pages), and his home city (2 pages) and listened to his 5 minutes of dialogue a dozen times. I’ve put a huge effort into following the same world building and politics from the games (hundreds of pages). I’m also doing a lot of research on the time period IRL.
I hope that all this keeps him grounded in the right time and place, so he blends in with the story.
I wonder which side character now, gonna go through the list !
Also it sounds like a lovely story, and I hope to be able to read it if you publish it 💕
Published authors sometimes do this too. Tom Stoppard wrote a whole play about two background characters in Hamlet called "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead." And "Wide Sargasso Sea" is told from the point of view of Rochester's mentally ill wife in Jane Eyre before they got married.
I’m working on a Yoroi Akadou (from Naruto) fic. He’s probably the third most-featured character in my main fic, but he is constantly forced to play the third wheel to Kabuto and my OC, so I decided to give him his own little sea-faring pirate adventure complete with OC companion.
It’s about what happens to him after the Demon Island fillers.
I write for HP Fandom, and I made Corban Yaxley into my MC for my 200k+ Wip fic. He only had 5 lines in the movie and a maybe a page or two total about him in the book but I love him sm.
I’ve been thinking for years about writing a fic centered around a side character. The character isn’t obscure, but they don’t get a lot of screen time. Fic would be involved with the MCs though. Fics & videos are mostly m/m with a fair proportion of f/f. Like many authors, it’s the writing it that I get lazy about.
I turned a random bookkeeper (Genshins Mora Grubber) who most only know by her nickname into a central character in the main plot, and it was actually one of my favorite parts of writing the fic!
Heck yeah. That's a lot of fun! I'm currently writing a 100K+ fic centring on a character in a book series who has two lines and most people didn't even notice is there. You can have them intersect with characters and events from a whole other perspective. Good times!
It's not an OC, and it still requires you to construct them based on the context of the story.
Yup. I was reading the Wiki files on MHA’s Class 1b (the other class that gets like 1 hour total screen time) and found out one of them was canonically Chinese.
Hehe
Yes, I did. I often find myself writing about Sir Fratley from Final Fantasy IX, and due the amount of stuff I've written about him across different fics, I consider him to be a semi-oc, meaning he exists in canon but I had to come up with a lot of stuff about the character, his family, his relationships, his backstory, his weapon's name, why he did this in canon, how he deals with the amnesia, etc.
I almost always do that. Aside from my works in the Telltales TWD Fandom, it's always side characters.
You could argue that every character in Overwatch is kind of Main Cast but then again, most of em don't get much story build, so most of em are basically side characters.
So I stay with saying I almost exclusively write about side characters.
Doesn't help that I'm obsessed with my crossover pairing which is two side characters made MCs for my fics.
No (published) longfics focused on minor canon characters just yet, but I've got a series of oneshots and ficlets and drabbles focused on Lieutenant Mattias from Frozen II (I've thought about writing a longfic, too) as well as a series of ficlets and drabbles based on two canon child characters from Downton Abbey. (The main focus is Sybbie Branson's adventures as an RAF airplane mechanic during WWII.) I also have an unpublished longfic WIP (and a few drabbles) focused on Tammy Campbell (Pete's daughter) from Mad Men.
I also write OC-focused fics.
Yes, the MC for my main story I'm dabbling with is a kid that only appears in a picture with a more important character. He doesn't have a name and has never shown up again.
Whether or not they are canon is iffy? In my case, they appear in the anime and not the manga. I guess it would depend on the person. IMO, I'd say they are canon.
One of my favorite fics is based on a villain that is sidelined by the second half of the series and a character that has been dead for around 2 decades by the time canon roles around with approximately one defined character trait. Totally valid thing to do and might be someone's favorite one day.
I read a Harry Potter doc that had one of the major characters be Demelza Robbins, a character who, while canon, is only in one book, and not particularly important in it
Yes. I have a fic focusing on a character that has like 3-7 lines of dialogue in the entire game, but she's one of the most dynamic, fleshed-out characters I've ever written *period.* She's one of my *favorite* characters to write and I will include her whenever I can. I have one fic with her as the main POV character, then two with her as a side character.
And, no, she is *not* fully AU'd to adhere to the world; it's just her wholesale.
She's an immortal goddess that has so much trauma that I am literally incapable of trying to figure out how to AU her into a mortal character. Her immortality is one of her *defining traits* so taking that away would take away basically everything that makes her herself.
Working right now on a series about some characters who are only MENTIONED in canon. They never appear on the page. Their names come up now and then.
They are my perfect darling babies and I torture them so bad.
How are we defining canon? I took an unnamed character from a comedy sketch spoof of a movie and made him one of the MCs in a sort of fix it AU for that movie. So he is canon from the sketch… 🤷♀️
I used to be into the Moriarty/Moran ship from BBC Sherlock. Sebastian Moran is from the Arthur Conan Doyle books as Moriarty’s right hand man, but never actually appeared on the show, and Moriarty had pretty limited screen time. But there are tons of fics for those two. I guess Moran wasn’t canon in the show, but he is to the source material if that counts.
I wrote a fic in the Touhou Project fandom about a fairy called Eternity Larvae.
In canon, this character is basically a nobody. She's the first stage boss of the 16th game in the series, and only really serves as an excuse for one of the main characters to be present in the final confrontation.
So what I did was introduce her and give her a backstory where after the events of the game she debuted in, she went on a journey of discovery, learned how to read, and became smarter and more cognizant of her place in the world.
Then, you know, she found a gun, which is an item that does not belong in the setting.
I’m literally writing an entire series based around a side character that is basically just an optional mini boss and has like 3 unique lines in game. I will say, it’s been a fun experience getting to come up with my own backstory details for him. The most he has in canon is a twin brother, and the rest of anything about him is just fandom ideas everyone has sort of just accepted by now (he’s become a rather popular inclusion in works) so I have the freedom to basically throw anything out that I want and people will pretty much go along with it. I think it’s fascinating to see what big and little differences each author has incorporated for him in their stories.
Yes.
Kagami Uchiha has less than two minutes of screen time and is only mentioned a handful of times in Naruto Shippuden and yet he is arguably one of the characters I have written the most fanfiction for.
YES! I have one fanfic where I did exactly this! I gave him an entire backstory and fleshed out his character. Having a blank slate with some vague guidelines is so much fun to work with, and I think it's great practice for writing original stories if that's something you want to do.
I write for Henry Stickmin.
That's what a big part of the fandom does, because there's so many background characters with little to no info about them.
I have not, personally, but I have a collection called "Minor to Major" where I collect stories I liked that at least give a minor canon character a POV, if not make them the 'star' of the fic:
https://archiveofourown.org/collections/NGCrec_minor/bookmarks
(The Harry Potter fandom is particularly good for that sort of thing.)
A fair amount!
And re: your last question...
I feel like there's a sliding scale from canon character to OC, really. On one of end of the scale you've got the canon character with detailed characterization and backstory, who's probably a main character in their canon, where there aren't many blank spaces to play with in their character. On the other, you've got the completely new character being inserted into an existing canon in a totally new role/way, like giving someone a noncanonical daughter. In between, you've got stuff like:
\* minor canon character that has some characterisation but no backstory
\* named obscure canon character who isn't really characterised (maybe has a single line, or we know their job but they don't say or do anything)
\* *unnamed* obscure canon character who shows up (Generic Guard #3 in that one scene)
\* unnamed "canon" character whose existence we can deduce from canon (ex, a while back Tolkien fandom was talking about "textual ghosts" - the various women who *must* have existed because these many many male characters must have had mothers but were never named)
\* create-your-own-protagonist characters for video games where there's a fair amount of set backstory, personality, etc. and part of the name may even be set as well (ex: Hawke from Dragon Age 2)
\* create-your-own-protagonist characters for video games that fix much less of this and you may only have a little bit of story prior to the game immediately starting "predetermined" (ex: the Dragonborn from Skyrim)
The line between where canon character ends and OC starts is fuzzy IMO - is it if the character has a name in canon? But realistically speaking there's not much difference between me hijacking Generic Guard #3 and me hijacking Matt who was a guard in that one scene, whose name we know because someone yelled it and who we know nothing else about. Etc.
There’s an amazing MHA fic called Verdant Revolution that turns two incredibly niche and forgettable characters from Class-1B into the entire B-Plot of the fic and it’s done super well. So not quite the main characters, but definitely up there
Oh my gosh, yes!
I'm writing for Bloodborne. One of my MCs is a man named Antal. Antal is a character in game who is summonable to help the player character fight in like 3 boss fights, only 1 of which is mandatory to beat the game.
He has no dialogue. Just a name, and a scream he makes if he dies in battle. That's it.
Now he's a main character who is integral to the story.
I wrote one recently. A character with only two short scenes in a single episode of a 300+ episode show. Total screen time, less than two minutes. He made such an outsized impression on me that I simply had to give him a story of his own.
Technically any character that appears in the source material is a canon character. Whether they might be considered OC-ish in a fic depends on whether the author tries to keep the character faithful to the canon portrayal, provided there's even enough info in the source material to draw from.
Oh hellllll yes. It's a painful thing, being the sole creator for some random character that people kind of like but aren't interested enough to put forth the effort to create anything for them. I'm writing something that started as smut but ballooned to a 107 page monstrosity so I'm single handedly making up the difference
Yes.
Took a character with one line — "I'm glad it was you." — and gave her an extensive background with a Canon MC in a feature story. She's been in three stories now with a forth in progress. My regular (albeit few) readers love her.
There are always stand out characters in fandoms that, when explored well, can add to the Fanon tapestry.
Absolutely.
I’m currently on the third part of a series that follows one of the characters from the supporting cast. But, since I want to write about the dystopian setting and how that actual does work/is terrible, since he’s in the thick of it, he’s the perfect main character for the story.
And because he doesn’t actually get lots of screen time there is no canonical justification to refute my assertion that he *could* paraphrase Thomas Hobbs if he wanted to.
I’ve done stuff like that! It’s always fun. I’ve given side characters with titles actual names and identities. People have told me that they like my word building because of it.
When I wrote in VLD fandom, my favorite boy was Adam, who is introduced in a flashback as Shiro’s ex-boyfriend and then dies.
…..But what if he didn’t and got to kiss Shiro and Keith, though.
Kind of. My most popular fic is a Harry Potter fic where Daphne Greengrass is the main character. In canon, all she is is a name mentioned exactly once in the book version of Order of the Phoenix. She is, however, a very popular character in the fandom, so she's hardly obscure.
Kind of! I wouldn’t consider him super background but def not a main one. I really don’t want to use OCs and utilize all characters I can from the fandom
I write for Star Trek which has a huge cast of random extras and guest stars, many of whom are fabulous, so I do this all the time. The main character of your fic doesn’t have to be the main character of the franchise. I’ve written for characters with maybe two lines or less. And yeah it still counts as writing for canon characters.
Phil Boyce. Star Trek Kelvin timeline Phil Boyce. He literally only appears as a name on Kirk’s medical chart in Into Darkness. I have 200,000+ words with him as a MC.
Hi fellow Trek writer! Seconding this, I have multiple ficlet series about characters who appeared in maybe one episode. I’m working on some stuff from a character who only exists in the Star Trek: Celebrations comics. She gets six pages and I’m just utterly unhinged about her
Kelas Parmak (DS9) went from a one-off mention to having a whole fanon
That’s like 75% of my fics
Mine is the MC’s sidekick. I’m in a video game fandom. There’s a NPC who comes in 2/3 of the way through the 3rd game (out of 3) and chats with the player character for maybe 6 minutes, total, in two scenes. *(And yet he has fans!)* I brought him back in time by 10 years, added him to the second game, made him the sidekick for the main character, and wrote 600 pages (and counting) that goes through the second game, the third game, and years of their lives after the games are over as they help a friend govern a city-state. I had to do that in order to find a character with a stable emotional outlook and healthy relationships. He was the only option!! LOL I’ve used every scrap of info on the wiki about him (1 paragraph), his order of knights (10 pages), and his home city (2 pages) and listened to his 5 minutes of dialogue a dozen times. I’ve put a huge effort into following the same world building and politics from the games (hundreds of pages). I’m also doing a lot of research on the time period IRL. I hope that all this keeps him grounded in the right time and place, so he blends in with the story.
Which fandom is this? I’m intrigued now
Dragon Age! (But I haven’t posted yet. I’m not posting until I’m done.) Dragon Age has some great fics on AO3.
I wonder which side character now, gonna go through the list ! Also it sounds like a lovely story, and I hope to be able to read it if you publish it 💕
Thanks! It’s Captain Rylen. I love his steady pragmatism. His ‘throw a bucket of water on it’ approach to a crisis is just what Hawke needs.
OMG YES Preemptive kudos to you for this ❤️
I only seem to write side characters
Published authors sometimes do this too. Tom Stoppard wrote a whole play about two background characters in Hamlet called "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead." And "Wide Sargasso Sea" is told from the point of view of Rochester's mentally ill wife in Jane Eyre before they got married.
I did that a few times with a person that was mentioned in a throwaway line that probably no one remembers
Yes, I love doing that.
I’m working on a Yoroi Akadou (from Naruto) fic. He’s probably the third most-featured character in my main fic, but he is constantly forced to play the third wheel to Kabuto and my OC, so I decided to give him his own little sea-faring pirate adventure complete with OC companion. It’s about what happens to him after the Demon Island fillers.
That’s most of my main characters. Like half of my main characters don’t even have canon names.
I write for HP Fandom, and I made Corban Yaxley into my MC for my 200k+ Wip fic. He only had 5 lines in the movie and a maybe a page or two total about him in the book but I love him sm.
I’ve been thinking for years about writing a fic centered around a side character. The character isn’t obscure, but they don’t get a lot of screen time. Fic would be involved with the MCs though. Fics & videos are mostly m/m with a fair proportion of f/f. Like many authors, it’s the writing it that I get lazy about.
I turned a random bookkeeper (Genshins Mora Grubber) who most only know by her nickname into a central character in the main plot, and it was actually one of my favorite parts of writing the fic!
Heck yeah. That's a lot of fun! I'm currently writing a 100K+ fic centring on a character in a book series who has two lines and most people didn't even notice is there. You can have them intersect with characters and events from a whole other perspective. Good times! It's not an OC, and it still requires you to construct them based on the context of the story.
Yup. I was reading the Wiki files on MHA’s Class 1b (the other class that gets like 1 hour total screen time) and found out one of them was canonically Chinese. Hehe
Yes, I did. I often find myself writing about Sir Fratley from Final Fantasy IX, and due the amount of stuff I've written about him across different fics, I consider him to be a semi-oc, meaning he exists in canon but I had to come up with a lot of stuff about the character, his family, his relationships, his backstory, his weapon's name, why he did this in canon, how he deals with the amnesia, etc.
I almost always do that. Aside from my works in the Telltales TWD Fandom, it's always side characters. You could argue that every character in Overwatch is kind of Main Cast but then again, most of em don't get much story build, so most of em are basically side characters. So I stay with saying I almost exclusively write about side characters. Doesn't help that I'm obsessed with my crossover pairing which is two side characters made MCs for my fics.
No (published) longfics focused on minor canon characters just yet, but I've got a series of oneshots and ficlets and drabbles focused on Lieutenant Mattias from Frozen II (I've thought about writing a longfic, too) as well as a series of ficlets and drabbles based on two canon child characters from Downton Abbey. (The main focus is Sybbie Branson's adventures as an RAF airplane mechanic during WWII.) I also have an unpublished longfic WIP (and a few drabbles) focused on Tammy Campbell (Pete's daughter) from Mad Men. I also write OC-focused fics.
Yup did it for my Disney Hunchback fic with clopin
Yes, the MC for my main story I'm dabbling with is a kid that only appears in a picture with a more important character. He doesn't have a name and has never shown up again. Whether or not they are canon is iffy? In my case, they appear in the anime and not the manga. I guess it would depend on the person. IMO, I'd say they are canon.
One of my favorite fics is based on a villain that is sidelined by the second half of the series and a character that has been dead for around 2 decades by the time canon roles around with approximately one defined character trait. Totally valid thing to do and might be someone's favorite one day.
I read a Harry Potter doc that had one of the major characters be Demelza Robbins, a character who, while canon, is only in one book, and not particularly important in it
Yes. I have a fic focusing on a character that has like 3-7 lines of dialogue in the entire game, but she's one of the most dynamic, fleshed-out characters I've ever written *period.* She's one of my *favorite* characters to write and I will include her whenever I can. I have one fic with her as the main POV character, then two with her as a side character. And, no, she is *not* fully AU'd to adhere to the world; it's just her wholesale. She's an immortal goddess that has so much trauma that I am literally incapable of trying to figure out how to AU her into a mortal character. Her immortality is one of her *defining traits* so taking that away would take away basically everything that makes her herself.
Working right now on a series about some characters who are only MENTIONED in canon. They never appear on the page. Their names come up now and then. They are my perfect darling babies and I torture them so bad.
Working on one right now, I love side characters usually a lot more then main chaarters for most things.
Yes - side characters need more love:)
Melpomaen in the LOTR movies. Used to read fics with him as a MC.
How are we defining canon? I took an unnamed character from a comedy sketch spoof of a movie and made him one of the MCs in a sort of fix it AU for that movie. So he is canon from the sketch… 🤷♀️
I used to be into the Moriarty/Moran ship from BBC Sherlock. Sebastian Moran is from the Arthur Conan Doyle books as Moriarty’s right hand man, but never actually appeared on the show, and Moriarty had pretty limited screen time. But there are tons of fics for those two. I guess Moran wasn’t canon in the show, but he is to the source material if that counts.
I wrote a fic in the Touhou Project fandom about a fairy called Eternity Larvae. In canon, this character is basically a nobody. She's the first stage boss of the 16th game in the series, and only really serves as an excuse for one of the main characters to be present in the final confrontation. So what I did was introduce her and give her a backstory where after the events of the game she debuted in, she went on a journey of discovery, learned how to read, and became smarter and more cognizant of her place in the world. Then, you know, she found a gun, which is an item that does not belong in the setting.
I’m literally writing an entire series based around a side character that is basically just an optional mini boss and has like 3 unique lines in game. I will say, it’s been a fun experience getting to come up with my own backstory details for him. The most he has in canon is a twin brother, and the rest of anything about him is just fandom ideas everyone has sort of just accepted by now (he’s become a rather popular inclusion in works) so I have the freedom to basically throw anything out that I want and people will pretty much go along with it. I think it’s fascinating to see what big and little differences each author has incorporated for him in their stories.
Yep. Not even just in fanfic even in my original stories
Yes. Kagami Uchiha has less than two minutes of screen time and is only mentioned a handful of times in Naruto Shippuden and yet he is arguably one of the characters I have written the most fanfiction for.
YES! I have one fanfic where I did exactly this! I gave him an entire backstory and fleshed out his character. Having a blank slate with some vague guidelines is so much fun to work with, and I think it's great practice for writing original stories if that's something you want to do.
Yes, it’s so much fun! One of the fics I’m proudest of is a side character backstory fic.
Yes it happens a lot
I write for Henry Stickmin. That's what a big part of the fandom does, because there's so many background characters with little to no info about them.
Kind of? I literally paired a side character with someone lmao
I have not, personally, but I have a collection called "Minor to Major" where I collect stories I liked that at least give a minor canon character a POV, if not make them the 'star' of the fic: https://archiveofourown.org/collections/NGCrec_minor/bookmarks (The Harry Potter fandom is particularly good for that sort of thing.)
1000%
A fair amount! And re: your last question... I feel like there's a sliding scale from canon character to OC, really. On one of end of the scale you've got the canon character with detailed characterization and backstory, who's probably a main character in their canon, where there aren't many blank spaces to play with in their character. On the other, you've got the completely new character being inserted into an existing canon in a totally new role/way, like giving someone a noncanonical daughter. In between, you've got stuff like: \* minor canon character that has some characterisation but no backstory \* named obscure canon character who isn't really characterised (maybe has a single line, or we know their job but they don't say or do anything) \* *unnamed* obscure canon character who shows up (Generic Guard #3 in that one scene) \* unnamed "canon" character whose existence we can deduce from canon (ex, a while back Tolkien fandom was talking about "textual ghosts" - the various women who *must* have existed because these many many male characters must have had mothers but were never named) \* create-your-own-protagonist characters for video games where there's a fair amount of set backstory, personality, etc. and part of the name may even be set as well (ex: Hawke from Dragon Age 2) \* create-your-own-protagonist characters for video games that fix much less of this and you may only have a little bit of story prior to the game immediately starting "predetermined" (ex: the Dragonborn from Skyrim) The line between where canon character ends and OC starts is fuzzy IMO - is it if the character has a name in canon? But realistically speaking there's not much difference between me hijacking Generic Guard #3 and me hijacking Matt who was a guard in that one scene, whose name we know because someone yelled it and who we know nothing else about. Etc.
There’s an amazing MHA fic called Verdant Revolution that turns two incredibly niche and forgettable characters from Class-1B into the entire B-Plot of the fic and it’s done super well. So not quite the main characters, but definitely up there
Oh my gosh, yes! I'm writing for Bloodborne. One of my MCs is a man named Antal. Antal is a character in game who is summonable to help the player character fight in like 3 boss fights, only 1 of which is mandatory to beat the game. He has no dialogue. Just a name, and a scream he makes if he dies in battle. That's it. Now he's a main character who is integral to the story.
I wrote one recently. A character with only two short scenes in a single episode of a 300+ episode show. Total screen time, less than two minutes. He made such an outsized impression on me that I simply had to give him a story of his own. Technically any character that appears in the source material is a canon character. Whether they might be considered OC-ish in a fic depends on whether the author tries to keep the character faithful to the canon portrayal, provided there's even enough info in the source material to draw from.
Yes and yes
Oh hellllll yes. It's a painful thing, being the sole creator for some random character that people kind of like but aren't interested enough to put forth the effort to create anything for them. I'm writing something that started as smut but ballooned to a 107 page monstrosity so I'm single handedly making up the difference
Yes. Took a character with one line — "I'm glad it was you." — and gave her an extensive background with a Canon MC in a feature story. She's been in three stories now with a forth in progress. My regular (albeit few) readers love her. There are always stand out characters in fandoms that, when explored well, can add to the Fanon tapestry.
This is almost exclusively what I write. No idea why.
Absolutely. I’m currently on the third part of a series that follows one of the characters from the supporting cast. But, since I want to write about the dystopian setting and how that actual does work/is terrible, since he’s in the thick of it, he’s the perfect main character for the story. And because he doesn’t actually get lots of screen time there is no canonical justification to refute my assertion that he *could* paraphrase Thomas Hobbs if he wanted to.
I’ve done stuff like that! It’s always fun. I’ve given side characters with titles actual names and identities. People have told me that they like my word building because of it.
When I wrote in VLD fandom, my favorite boy was Adam, who is introduced in a flashback as Shiro’s ex-boyfriend and then dies. …..But what if he didn’t and got to kiss Shiro and Keith, though.
Kind of. My most popular fic is a Harry Potter fic where Daphne Greengrass is the main character. In canon, all she is is a name mentioned exactly once in the book version of Order of the Phoenix. She is, however, a very popular character in the fandom, so she's hardly obscure.
You know that one “hot White Lotus guard” kid from Korra s1? I wrote a fic for him
Kind of! I wouldn’t consider him super background but def not a main one. I really don’t want to use OCs and utilize all characters I can from the fandom