oopsy i meant this to be quick but i wrote an essay 😛

it's probably a bit late to be thankful posting but i'll do it anyway.
lately i've been feeling kind of low--mostly academic and financial and social stressors. the works 🙃 i'm very close to the end of my current semester yet this last week feels insurmountable and my fall break is almost over even though it feels like i've just started it. i also still don't have a job because i had planned to spend time with my FAMILYYY over the break so all the places i applied to told me to kick rocks. among other personal dramas, it just hasn't been a good time for me.
but, and i know this is gonna sound very corny, whenever i think about my original characters or my characters in a similar situation to me and how they would react, or just picking up a storyline i had for them that i hadn't thought of in months.
it's nothing glamorous or exciting, it's pretty well accepted that having some kind of creative outlet is a good way to alleviate stressful periods of life, but it very much makes a difference to me.

i bring this up because i often reminisce about the creation of my dearest ocs. they were originally fandom characters that i wanted to be free from the pre-existing lore of since it was becoming more of a creative burden than asset. i wrote in my notes that i was skeptical i would ever get attached to them and that i would just end up drawing the fandom characters anyway, but i ended up becoming so deeply bonded with them that i actually wanted to expand their story and characters beyond the limits fanfic imposed on me. and to this day i still continue to sculpt them. my life experiences get directly fed into their development, which is why they hold a very significant role in keeping me sane lol.

furthermore, the existence of these characters i care a lot about is significant because i thought i would never get to this point, of having my own original creations.
idk if this is a common experience, especially among the "anime fanartist in middle school" crowd, but i was sooo insecure about the fact that i only drew fanart. like it was cheaper or lesser because these characters were made by someone else. i guzzled down a lot of art youtube content at the time (i do not know if this made me better? at least the more harsh/critical ones. the most learning i've done artistically was through being a jojo fan and observing araki's work lololol), and i subscribed to the myth of "originality". i'm sure we all know that originality in art is overrated if it even exists at all (originality is when you copy many things instead of one, as i say), and i'm sure we DEFINITELY know that fanart is a perfectly valid thing to center creative energy on.
but i thought that this path made me like, morally bad. so i entered this kinda shitty era of creating ocs with surface-level appealing designs to compensate for this badness. if i don't have original characters or original stories or original ideas i am a failure artist, and the fact that i "still" didn't have any after many years of drawing meant originality was an ideal that i was just... not capable of achieving.
and then! because i did not attach any information to these ocs beyond a name, i didn't care about them after the fact. why should i?? they were a means to protecting my fear of failure that happened to be shaped like cute girls.
(i am aware that people are more than capable of creating an oc simply to be a dress up doll/art model with not much story beyond that but for me i NEED something to tether onto in order to put any creative investment into. it's why i found genshin characters or my dress-up game creations boring to draw; i only cared about the looks and not the character, which is like half the equation when drawing characters!)

all that's to say is that it feels very cathartic NOW to not only

1. realize i was completely wrong in my assessment of originality and drawing fanart, and i can just do it as i please (as you may observe from my page, i do it all the fucking time), and
2. i now have original creations ANYWAY that i expend much creative time into many years after inception. it's possible, i can do it.

i am very thankful for my ocs, both as a creative well and comfort object and an affirmation. hopefully my ramblings and pep talk to my past self may help artists reading who are in a similar position as i was to know that what you create is valid! you are creating you are making something that you love and that is GOOD!!!! do not let negative forces take that away!!
and i hope other oc parents extremely attached to their creations are also thankful for their existence, in one way or another. whether you dote on em or torture them or just default to doodling them they are all very valuable because they are all a fragment of you 😼 so keep it up!