What images are you getting sick of seeing? (NSFW ALLOWED)

I get more tired of Big Mac drawn with a body builder frame

Wow, look! An Original Character! And she’s female! I wonder if she’ll have any sort of original personality traits- Nope, she’s just a generic vaguely-cheery girl. And her personality traits are… She likes nice ponies and good things, and does not like mean ponies and bad things. Maybe if we’re lucky, she’ll have a slightly more advanced character trait such as ‘Likes X’ or ‘Does not like X’. This character likes this particular food, this character likes snow, this character likes NSFW stuff, this character likes video games, this character likes being easy, this character likes art/writing because it’s the artist only with all rough edges sanded off to leave nothing behind, this character likes the colour green.

It’s like the artist is so afraid of colouring outside the lines, the artist chooses to never colour the picture at all. So we just end up with another cookie-cutter character indistinguishable from every other character just like this. Which is a cleverly ironic statement, considering how the different colours used to colour in these same old factory-default lines and what character gets its mane and tail ripped off tends to be the only thing that distinguishes these characters from each other. You could put five or twenty or two hundred even ten thousand of these generic OCs in a room, swap their minds around with a spell, erase everyone’s memories of what they’re supposed to look like and nothing else with a different spell, and you’d be left completely unable to match the names and personalities to the bodies and so would every single one of those OCs.

And the same goes for a whole lot of male OCs, too. Way too many are just “Guy”. Might be somewhere between 1 and 10 on the manliness scale, like how the girl OCs might be ranked somewhere on the 1-10 girliness scale. But that’s it. Girly stallions, manly stallions, girly mares, and stallionly mares. SPECIAL character builds have more variation to them than this. Who decided these four archetypes are the beginner-tier OC archetypes everyone should make to try and practice making a more original OC? He was smarter than whoever decided these are the only four acceptable OC types out there due to being sufficiently inoffensive and bland. It’s like someone told these people “Don’t make your OCs unique for the sake of being unique, no weird dragon eyes on ponies or random cyborg limbs” and thought “I must be hearing this advice because making unique OCs is bad”. Overly-unique characters don’t suck because their uniqueness score is too high, they suck because the uniqueness is so goddamn inauthentic. You’ve taken whatever mismatched ideas you could think of, then thrown them onto your template OC to try and spice him up and make him seem more appealing. Your subconscious knows the character inside the body is too bland, so instead of trying to flesh the character out and add layers of depth, you mess around in the character creation menu until you have some Randomize-Button-looking monstrosity.

Look at the mane six. Bring up a list of activities you could invite them to, in your mind. You can see each of the different mane six ponies loving some, mildly enjoying others, hating others, and outright refusing to even try others. Rainbow Dash would enjoy rock climbing a lot more than Twilight would, and while Applejack and Fluttershy would both enjoy gardening, neither would enjoy being taken to a library as much as Twilight would. Bring up that same list of activities, remove all NSFW Activities and whatever the OC’s Cutie Mark is in from the list, and then ask yourself which activities the OC would enjoy more than others. Behold, one of many of the questions character creators can ask themselves to flesh out their characters before just yelling “Done! Wow, I made that in under a minute! Time to make another one!”

I’m exaggerating for comedic effect for a lot of this post, but still.