OC Stand In / Video Games

• Kaede from .hack//G.U. has absolutely no real importance in the story other than acting like Zelkova's bodyguard, although until she joins your party in the post game you have no idea what her weapon even is. The worst part is she basically vanishes in Vol. 1 after her appearance, yet you can still do the marriage event with her in Vol. 3 despite her having absolutely no development and virtually no game time.
• Ao Oni has had a few over the various versions of the game (due to characters' roles becoming bigger, smaller, changing or being removed altogether), but Mika is the most consistent example. In the most recent version (6.23), she receives very little characterization beyond her attraction to Takuro before dying and coming back.
• Baten Kaitos:
  • The Guardian Spirit from the first game is supposed to be you, and is therefore a sort of Featureless Protagonist. Naturally, there have been several fanfics written about the this character. Unfortunately, too many of these fics end up making the Spirit a powerhouse with a crush on Kalas. The term "Spirit Sue" was created by the fanbase to describe this particular interpretation of the character.
  • Marno from the prequel doesn't get this to the same degree, since he has an actual role in the plot. However, he could still work for this trope, since his actual personality is never shown.
• Word of God has stated that this was the purpose behind not giving Doom's protagonist much in the way of backstory or characterization other than a brief mention of why he's on one of Mars' moons (beating a superior officer within an inch of his life after he was ordered to shoot civilians) — no matter how many other outside adaptations try to shoehorn a name and concrete identity on the Doomguy, canonically he's just supposed to be you, the player.
• Destiny
  • The player Guardian/The Young Wolf is a customizable character who's gender, species, and class are all dependent on player choice, and spends much of the series (especially the second game) as a Heroic Mime. As such, this trope is inevitably going to be in effect throughout any Destiny fanfics you find.
• Final Fantasy:
  • As alluded to in the canon examples on the main page, the Light Warriors from the original Final Fantasy get this due to basically being blank slate player avatars rather than true characters. Popular Fanon includes things like White Mage being a woman, Black Mage being non-human (which actually became canon in Final Fantasy IX), Fighter being an idiot, and much more. Of particular note is 8-Bit Theater, which uses many of these fan-made personalities, invents some of its own, and popularized them all so much that a lot of younger fans mistakenly assume that is really what the Light Warriors are canonically like.
  • The "Library Girl with a Pigtail" in Final Fantasy VIII, who crushes on Zell and seems to have his interest by the end of the game, yet who remains nameless and without any personality beyond "bookish and shy" in canon.
  • Sasasha, a Chocobo raiser from Final Fantasy Tactics A2, had very litte information about them. We never met them, just heard of them. This allowed some fanfic authors like the one for The Tainted Grimoire to shape the character as they pleased.
• Fire Emblem:
  • The tactician from the seventh game. His default name is Mark, but you can change that and his gender. He never says anything (that we hear) and is only spoken to. There are a small wealth of fanfics about him/her, and almost each one gives them a separate personality and backstory.^note Most popularly coming from Bern.
  • New Mystery of the Emblem and Awakening began the trend of My Unit/Avatar, a customizable unit who actually appears in your army during gameplay. They do actually have lines, though, but their personalities (particularly that of the My Unit in New Mystery) are somewhat nondescript. Naturally, plenty of fanfics have been written around these two (more so Awakening's My Unit than New Mystery's, probably because of No Export for You).
  • As an interesting wrinkle to the above, a DLC chapter in Awakening provides the player with an opportunity to weld together the Avatar's backstory with that of the aforementioned Mark's. When interacting with an Einherjar of Lyn (a spectral copy that possesses at least some of her memories), she recognizes the Avatar on sight and feels they could be her tactician once she learns that they, like Mark, woke up in a strange place with no recollection of how they got there. Couple this with several other similarities between the two tacticians that are likely intentional (similar clothing and map sprites or the fact that the Avatar's Prestige Class — Grandmaster — is named for the highest Tactician ranking in the Japanese version of The Blazing Blade) and a popular Fanon theory that the Outrealm Gate of Awakening is connected to the Dragon's Gate metioned in the backstory of Blazing Blade, and she might just be onto something. The player can either confirm or deny the notion, making this an invoked example.
• Golden Sun has a lot of this. Sure, you have some basic personality for all members besides the mute protagonist, but the character development and interaction between the party is almost zero, every time the team talks is about the next mission or quest. That leaves a lot of open space for Fanon.
• Half-Life:
  • The commentary on Half-Life 2 states that this is the entire point of Heroic Mime Gordon Freeman, with the player being the OC in question.
  • Resident Ensemble Dark Horse Adrian Shephard as well. All we have of his personality are a few diary entries in the Opposing Force manual which don't say much.
• Halo:
  • The Forerunners were practically an entire species (or group of species) of OC Stand-Ins until The Forerunner Saga fully fleshed them out, jossing a whole lot of fan theories in the process.
  • The Rookie in Halo 3: ODST is this to a lesser degree, having no lines beyond grunts, no visible face (he always has his helmet on), and no identification beyond the initials "JD"; the designers claim this was intentional, to better allow the player to integrate with the character. Spartan-B312 in Halo: Reach is this even more so, with male and female voice sets, and armor customization that is persistent throughout both campaign and multiplayer; this was done for the same reasons as the Rookie. The members of Fireteam Crimson in Spartan Ops are also this, as they're literally your multiplayer characters put into the canon Halo universe.
• Hades: Zagreus, the main character, is based on a figure attested to in Greek mythology, but so little information has survived about him to the present day that the game essentially has to create his character wholecloth; this seems to get a nod, with several characters wondering what he's even the god of, as sources don't make it clear (the game seems to imply he may be a god of blood). The sequel does it likewise with Zagreus' sister Melinoë, who is even more obscure, but is definitely mentioned in a few places.
• Inuyasha has Michiru and Kaname Kururugi, the Player Characters from Inuyasha: The Secret of the Cursed Mask. The fanfic series The Legacy of the Cursed Mask Series gives heavy focus to the Kururugi twins, and there are multiple pairing stories where either Michiru or Kaname is paired with a particular canon character.
• In Katawa Shoujo, the students in Hisao's class besides him, Shizune, Misha and Hanako get this treatment, as a piece of official art shows their names, club affiliations and disabilities, but nothing about their personalities or backstories.
• Legacy of Kain:
  • Stories set in the days of the Empire often do this to Kain's Lieutenants, though Raziel himself might not qualify unless his giving his previous incarnations a believably different personality counts.
  • Likewise, stories set in the time of the Sarafan crusade might do this to the humans that will become Kain's Lieutenants.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • Commonly done to Dark Link. In the video games, Dark Link is a mindless, monstrous obstacle, usually representing the evil in Link. But fanfiction writers and fanartists tend to give him a face and personality.
  • Link himself, whose dialogue is limited to the player picking 'yes' or 'no' when asked a question (and "no" usually gets you a re-statement of said question) lends himself to this. The main character of a video game is often a blank slate for the player to write him/herself onto, after all. From Wind Waker onward, each Link is usually given at least one defining character trait (Wind Waker is a bit of a Silent Snarker moments, Skyward Sword is carefree until you hit his Berserk Button, Breath of the Wild is a bit of a glutton, etc.) which makes them easier to write while still being vague enough to made your own.
  • Malon, a minor character in Ocarina of Time, is a common subject of this among Shipping fics. In said game, she doesn't have much relevance other than a sidequest chain that grants Link the use of her horse Epona, but the common Fanon belief that the Hero of Time settled down and had a family with her leads to many efforts to flesh out her character.
• Mass Effect:
  • Fanfiction has Oriana (Miranda's genetic twin sister) and Kolyat (Thane's son) as a relatively popular pairing, despite never meeting, or even coming close to meeting and having no connection to each other in the game besides a certain Commander intersecting with their lives. Kolyat is developed a bit better than Oriana, who never actually speaks or is interacted with until the third game.
  • Preitor Gavorn — a turian whom you only meet outside of Afterlife — is this to an extent, too. He was largely ignored by the fanbase for some time, until a video in Lair of the Shadow Broker showed him with a human male in what appears to be a bedroom. Since then, he has been given varying personalities, though most have some hints of Straight Gay in them.
  • Another popular target for an OC Stand-in is Hannah Shepard, the Player Character's mother if the spacer background is chosen. The Translation in Blood ships her with Councilor "Turian Air Quotes" Sparatus.
  • Of course, Shepard him/herself is also much of a blank slate for writers to do whatever they want, given their open-ended nature in the game.
• Mega Man:
  • Doctor Cain usually gets this treatment in Mega Man X. Despite being a pretty important canon character in regards to the backstory, he barely gets a few lines in the games before vanishing. Most fanfic writers characterize him as a kooky old man and a father figure to X and Zero. Lots of other characters could also qualify, since the MMX games were very sparse on characterization until the later games.
    • Dr. Cain finally did receive some characterization in Day of Sigma, a tie-in OVA for Mega Man: Maverick Hunter X; the problem here lies in the fact that MHX was something of a reboot for the series, the SNES games in particular, and as such, the cast received tweaks to their characterization (some minor, some major) which may or may not be incompatible with the later titles (plans for sequels fell through when the game underperformed). That, and Cain being killed off in a missile strike on Abel City ordered by Sigma, despite original canon stating that he was alive at least until the time of X4.
  • The same can be said for the characters in Mega Man (Classic) (most non-playable Robot Masters especially), since most of them only have a small character profile to hint at their personalities.
  • For the Mega Man Legends series, the Bonnes' parents show up in fics at times despite not appearing in canon. For example:
    • Mega Man: Defender of the Human Race names them Don Juan and Bonnie Bonne, and had them be on constant vacations and overall neglectful.
    • Mega Man Reawakened names them Victor and Anastasia. They died by the time the story starts.
  • Dr. Regal (Dr. Wily's son) is an established character in Mega Man Battle Network, but the nature of the timeline means he likely exists in the Classic universe as well, which has led to several fan interpretations. This can apply to any character in either the Classic timeline or Battle Network timeline who'd logically have an Alternate Self in the other, but Regal is easily one of the biggest magnets for this kind of thing.
• Metal Gear:
  • Decoy Octopus from Metal Gear Solid is one of these, especially since it's part of his job description. He literally can adopt the personality of whoever he's disguised as.
  • Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater has a whole group of these in the form of the Cobra Unit. Several fan writers/artists have done their takes on the Cobra Unit who, in the game, have a total of about three minutes on screen outside of the battles with them, only one of which (The Fury) really gives any explanation for how or why he is how he is. They are one of the most popular topics of MGS fanfic, especially among female writers.
• The Nasuverse:
  • There are several characters only mentioned in backstory that aren't very well described. Thus when these characters are used in fanworks, the trope is present. Perhaps the biggest example is Altrouge Brunestud, Arcueid's sister. We don't even know what she looks like (beyond that she looks like a fourteen year old girl), but that doesn't stop the fan art.
  • Another major one is Guinevere. She played a well-known central role in the Fate franchise's backstory, but we still don't know her personality or appearance, so fanfiction set in her time has to come up with those from scratch. However, at the pace Fate/Grand Order develops, any and all current fan ideas may well be jossed tomorrow morning.
• OFF has several fan works that out their own spin on minor characters:
  • HOME (2013): Valerie, brother of The Judge in the original, only appeared being possessed by Japhet, so all we know about him is that he is mischievous yet kind (he snuck up on Japhet and almost ate him, but was too nice to actually chew and swallow him). Here, he becomes a recruitable party member and is characterized as timid and self-doubting, yet still willing to do everything to help his brother save the world.
  • Continue/Stop/Rise: The Add-Ons in the original game were less characters and more ambiguously sentient floating rings that serve as additional party members. Here, they return as the antagonists, with Alpha and Epsilon being Well Intentioned Extremists planning to merge Heaven and Earth while Omega wants to stop them.
• Persona 5: Kasumi Yoshizawa from Royal has very few discernible character traits due to being deceased by the time the game takes place and impersonated by her sister Sumire, with any personality traits Sumire displays being non-indicative of the real Kasumi. Fics that give her a larger role have to make up her personality based off the scraps of information other characters give about her and what little of her is actually seen in-game.
• Pokémon:
  • Just about any fanfic that places characters from the games (Brendan, Lucas, Leaf, etc.) into the anime's continuity will make use of this principle to some extent, since most of said characters never appeared on the show outside of 3-second cameos, with Leaf never appearing at all. There's no set pattern for what personalities writers assign them, but there's usually a good chance that they will be used for Shipping somehow.
  • Likewise with game fanfics themselves. Almost no one takes into account the NPC in-game personalities of the opposite gender protagonists. Most NPCs get this treatment to various effects. Rivals and protagonists are given whatever personality, being that you really have to look into the text of the games to see any bit of personality beyond "Hot-Blooded, determined Child Prodigy".
  • Due to the fact player characters and rivals can be named by the player, fic writers can freely use any name for any of the above characters, except possibly Brendan and Lucas in the anime. For some reason, writers tend to use their own names for these characters.
  • The Generation IV Frontier Brains (other than Palmer and Caitlin, who have appeared outside the Frontier in the games) rarely appear in the anime continuity, but when they do, they are this trope.
• The same is true of Chell, the protagonist of Portal. The few things that we're told about her character are likely to be complete lies, so any characterisation in fanfic is made from whole cloth.
• The originally-intended but eventually scrapped protagonist of Psychonauts, Dartagan, appeared in the game for less than five seconds. There is a huge range of interpretations of him within various different fanfics, roleplaying accounts, and even Creepypasta.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • The series has accrued several such characters, though since these often turn up in the comics, said personalities are often used. Nevertheless, Ray the Flying Squirrel, Mighty the Armadillo (though he's almost always put as the lost fourth member of Team Chaotix due to appearing alongside them in Knuckles Chaotix), Bean the Dynamite, and Bark the Polar Bear (often paired together, for being introduced in the same game), often end up being OC stand-ins, as do Ashura the Hedgehog, and Wechnia, Tiara Boobowski, Nazo, and Honey the Cat, though these five are very rare to see in fanfic, not that the first four show up often — original characters are far more common.
    • Additionally, with Ray and Mighty's return in Sonic Mania Plus, along with the Sonic Mania Adventures shorts, their personalities have been fleshed out quite a bit (rather impressive considering they don't talk in either), putting a slight damper on fan interpretations.
  • Sonic Forces lets the player create their own Rookie Hero. They join a resistance against the Eggman Empire and eventually rescue and work with both Modern and Classic Sonic.
  • In Sonic the Hedgehog (2006), Alberto Robert is a minor character who gives Sonic a quest at the start. In Ghabulous Ghoti's Tomodachi Life Let's Play, he's an immortal comedian who made the game intentionally bad and put himself in it as a joke.
• The Splatoon series has the player characters from its various campaigns, due to them being Heroic Mimes. Fan works generally have Agent 3 be a stoic Perpetual Frowner who is also a Closet Geek, Agent 4 as a jovial, constantly joking Bunny-Ears Lawyer, and Agent 8 continuing off her Amnesiac Hero storyline to be a curious and innocent Cephalopod Out of Water with traces of PTSD due to the Kamabo Co. experience. There's also a tendency to make Agents 3 and 4 constantly bicker, either in jest or due to some actual dislike caused by the personality clash. Finally, Agent 8 is often shown to live with either Pearl and Marina or Agent 3; this is despite Word of God stating that Pearl and Marina don't live together, and implying that Eight becomes roommates with Agent 4 (hence why they have the same gear — they happily share their weapons and clothing).
• Spyro the Dragon:
  • Introducing characters from the "classic" titles into the The Legend of Spyro reboot is a popular thing. Fans figure if Spyro and Hunter exist, what's stopping characters like Bianca, Elora, or Ember from too?
  • In a more traditional way, certain characters such as Flame are barely in the games but are expanded upon by fans. Flame is often a love interest for Ember.
  • Following the release of the Reignited remake of the classic trilogy, the elder dragons from the very first game — most of whom only appear for all of ten seconds and get one or two lines at most — often appear in fanfics with greatly expanded roles and fleshed-out personalities, owing at least in part to their memorably diverse redesigns (in contrast with the borderline palette swaps they were in the original game). The Artisan dragons in particular get this a lot, with Nestor — the very first dragon most players will free, as he's literally right in front of Spyro at the beginning of the game — often depicted as the leader of the Artisans and Spyro's father figure.
• Stardew Valley:
  • In the game there's an exhausted-looking cashier at the JojaMart and she is implied to be the same person attending the movie theater's concesions stand later in the game, she has no name given and only a few lines. In the unofficial fan-made expansion mod, Stardew Valley Expanded, she is named Claire and she's revealed to love to dance, dreams of becoming an actress, and she is a potential love interest.
  • Ridgeside Village, another popular fan-made expansion mod, does this for the player character's grandmother, who in the original game only appeared in a picture during the opening cutscene but went completely unmentioned in the rest of the game. The mod added her a backstory and fleshed her out more.
• Story of Seasons:
  • The player characters, being Heroic Mimes who's only real characterization is "friendly and hard working." Real OCs only come into the picture when fic writers want an exotic-looking character (90% of the time, female).
  • Mason is a secret bachelor in Harvest Moon DS Cute. He's never seen on-screen, can only be courted by phone, and the game ends when you marry him. He's so obscure that not even major fan-sites like FOGU mention him. All that's known about Mason is that he's the grandson of May from Friends of Mineral Town, he is shy, he likes to cook, his parents are out travelling, and he's good at sewing. A 2011 thread on FOGU forums had fans make a fan-design that essentially is a black-haired Cliff with purple clothes.
• Super Smash Bros. has an Original Generation, but they primarily serve as the Final Bosses of the various games and are given little attention compared to the playable characters. While most fans similarly focus on Smash's playable cast, a few have fleshed out the Original Generation in their own right.
• The Pyro of Team Fortress 2 often gets this treatment, having the least characterization of all of the classes, no backstory, or even a set gender. This practice has presumably lessened since his/her 'Meet the' short finally came out.
• Touhou Project:
  • Mainly seen with the dialogueless midbosses^note except Te(w)i, who got plenty of canonical characterization later. The standouts are Daiyousei, Koakuma, and Momiji, who have managed to become fairly popular. Most of the time they remain Satellite Characters to the boss whose stage in which they appear.
  • Daiyousei and Koakuma don't even have any stated non-danmaku powers in a series where virtually everybody has a random superpower, so fans are required to make up a power for them. They didn't even have names originally, the ones used here invented entirely by the fandom (translated as "big/greater fairy" and "little devil", respectively).
  • Part of the reason for the massive doujin and fanfiction community that has arisen around the games is that, despite the large cast, only a small portion of the cast receive anything more than a brief character profile and some dialogue, and even fewer receive any form of backstory, leaving writers with enormous wriggle room. Even the two Universe Compendiums are written by Unreliable Narrators working with a lot of second- and third-hand information, and ZUN himself is notoriously unhelpful and even outright contradicts himself.
  • Rin Satsuki is also prone to this treatment, being a Dummied Out character from Embodiment of Scarlet Devil. The only remaining piece of data is her name, though fans sometimes associate her with this image drawn by ZUN◊ (later confirmed to be a random sketch which doesn't represent anyone) and a throwaway line of dialogue where Marisa refers to a nurse.
  • Despite just being someone's quick M.U.G.E.N creation, the character "Sendai Hakurei no Miko" (The Previous Hakurei Shrine Maiden) was picked up by artists and fully fleshed out as the Miko who existed so long ago everyone has forgotten her name. Depicted as a well-endowed Boisterous Bruiser, she fights without Reimu's spell card rules. As such, she ended up Covered in Scars. Also depicted as a Mama Bear, depending on the artist.
  • It's extremely easy to give this treatment to the bosses from the very first game (Highly Responsive To Prayers, for PC-98) because literally nothing aside from a name and a title is known about them. No dialogue, no backstory, nothing. Sariel is apparently an Angel of Death, and that's the extent of the canonical information we have. Konngara, meanwhile, is even more ambiguous — her title "Astral Knight" and theme "Swordsman of a Distant Star" suggest an extraterrestrial origin, her horn resembles an oni's, her apparent lack of legs make her look like a ghost, while her name seems to reference a deity's attendant. You can do literally anything with the character and not violate any sort of canon in any way.
• Twisted Wonderland: Thanks to the fact that the game's protagonist is a blank slate, a number of fans love to turn them into someone matching their interests. Are they male, female, or nonbinary? Are they twisted from a Disney character like the rest of the cast, or wholly original? The possibilities are endless.
• Undertale:
  • The protagonist of Undertale, Frisk, is almost always portrayed as an extreme pacifist who ends up living with Toriel, the caring motherly figure. Their parents are, with few exceptions, dead, waved aside in some way, or never referred to, and sometimes their past is never even mentioned. While they may be portrayed in different ways, often sweet or funny, their overall character is usually very positive. It's common for them to have completed a Genocide Route in the past and regret their actions. To be fair, this does make sense in the regard that a vast amount of Undertale fanfiction is set after the True Pacifist ending of the game, in which they would be very kindhearted and determined. Also, the majority of players do choose to stay with Toriel at the end of the game, due to her emotional significance. However, even in works where they have chosen the Genocide Route, they are usually possessed by Chara, the first fallen human. In the game, the protagonist is a completely clean slate, with the sparse dialogue options being chosen by the player as well as any decisions to kill or spare monsters. They are genderless, and although a fair amount of fanworks keep them that way a huge number portray them as a girl. Male representations are very hard to come by, the same applying to Chara.
  • We know very little of the owners of the six colored human souls. Their weapons and armor can be picked up throughout the game, but this is all that we have in regards to discerning their personalities.
  • Several fan fictions expand on Grillby's backstory, some making him a soldier in the war between humans and monsters. His personality varies from Deadpan Snarker to calm and controlled to a high-strung ball of anxiety. Sometimes he's the father or uncle of fellow minor character Fuku fire. In-game, he runs a bar and has a single line of dialogue.
  • We know almost nothing of the obscure character W.D. (presumably WingDings) Gaster. Most players will not even know he exists until referring to the internet, as he is only described or (presumably) seen in unlikely random encounters. His portrayal vastly differs within the fandom, although it is common for him to be the father of Sans and Papyrus.
• A few shopkeeps from The World Ends with You get this treatment, and HT Masuoka in particular is a favourite of slash writers given his suggestive dialogue. Eri is the minor character who gets the most mileage by far, however, since she has a confirmed pre-existing relationship with Shiki and can be believably integrated into the main cast.

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