And it makes it even worse when they look cool and you don't go into detail with them, because it just makes your readers rage quit so hard. Some of the fan favorites in My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic are secondary characters, because they're given great personalities (Lyra wants to be a human, there's a constant "war of the music genres" between Octavia and Vinyl Scratch, and Derpy is, well, derpy.)

On Scratch, I have an adoption project where I put up any OC/RP character that I've stopped using or didn't use very much in the first place. I always ask the other users what they're going to use the character for before I let them have the character, just because I don't want the OC to go unused again by a different person. It's a good idea, really, and I think that's one of the things I'm going to keep coming back to Scratch for once I've officially left. That and checkin' up on the friends I've made.

-Twistey

Ilraen, Derik, and Gall are all recruits I picked up because I really wanted to write them.

Ilraen is an Andalite, which is cool to start with, and I needed someone Nume could be convinced to work with after his original partner, Cameo, turned out to be an awful person I didn't want to write anymore. Then I got to play with the idea of someone who has had to build himself from the ground up, without the benefit of normal childhood formative experiences. Now that he's matured a bit, he's going through some teenage-ish angst about who he really is, and how his human upbringing (if you can call it that) meshes and clashes with his Andalite identity.

Derik was a side-character who existed for more or less the sole purpose of being a visual gag: "LOL, wouldn't it be funny if there was a dragonrider called E'rik who looked like the Phantom of the Opera and had a dragon called 'mask' in Swedish?!?!1" He didn't really do anything, he was just there. I happen to be a PotO fan AND a Pern fan, so I couldn't leave the poor guy like that. I was interested in starting a new spin-off in the DMS to take on the Sues my DIC team couldn't, and Derik was a shoo-in for me.

I originally paired him with Earwig, a kender made up by Phobos, whose shenanigans were intended to be a foil to Derik's drama, but I couldn't write the guy, and Phobos didn't really want to, either. Then Gall came along, and she was just perfect: sassy, no fluff, no nonsense. Ideal for poking Derik in his sore spots and refusing to let him dwell on them at the same time. Since HtTYD is a bit anachronistic, she can also make most of the jokes and references I want to make, too. And she's a girl. I thought I should have at least one girl in my line-up, since I am one myself, and it lets me bring that perspective to Suedo-feminism.

I'll also note that at least one member of FicPsych is on record as hating it when agents dump helpless bit parts on them and then abandon them. {= )

~Neshomeh

I'd also add a slight corollary: "Don't write Agent X because you want an agent of Agent X's cool and/or awesome species/sect/fandom/whatever, write them because you want to write Agent X". It's a principle that served me well from right back when I started - which hS took an active part in moulding.

Wobbles the Clown appeared because I wanted to do a genuine unironic clown, and up she popped; a happy-go-lucky sort whose happiness, luckiness, and (somehow) goness came about because of her previous life as an angstfic refugee who was intended to provide comic relief in the badfic itself but who was instead basically the chew toy of every electrical appliance in a given area. This desperate desire to make people happy (as well as the obligatory FicPsych sessions) made her into the clown we know and love today, but she was in need of a foil.

Then up pops something called the Continuity Council of Gallifrey, masterminded largely by hS and largely concerning the Time Lord agents of various oldbies, veryoldbies, and similarlygeriatricbies. I wanted to take part but, not having quite read the memo, bashed out a few syllables that sounded Gallifreyan and called the woman wearing them The Notary. When hS (via Morgan) pointed out that there were a lot of Time Lord agents who were Time Lords because it was cool, I wanted to refute that, so I began to think more about who the Notary was.

Now, in previous Whovian RPs on a Nintendo fansite that were frankly rubbish, I'd often used an OC Time Lord called the Gardener: righter of wrongs, snogger of aliens, part-time planet builder, and manager of a branch of Little Chef on the A504 just outside Milton Keynes. I liked playing as her, because she was fun to be around, and the original draft of the Notary was going to be much more like her. Then I thought some more about the Notary, and how I didn't want to play into hS's hands and give him a reason to boot me out of the RP... and that's why the Notary is the way she is.

It's detailed here and there in missions and RPs and ficlet responses, but the Fourth Notary was very much akin to my old Gardener OC in terms of temperament, drive, and weird hobbies involving greasy spoon management. However, I decided that that should very much be the past of the Notary, and then I remembered The Twin Dilemma, a Sixth Doctor episode wherein he throttles longtime companion Peri. It was under different circumstances, of course, but then I thought about what that would do to someone if they couldn't take it back, if that lonely old time traveller just let themselves rot in a decaying, unloved TARDIS. Suddenly the Notary's whole life story rolled out in front of me; this tired, defeated woman whose life has just been one indignity after another, until she finally got to be a hero... and then it was taken away, so she thinks. She was everything wrong with Time Lord society, everything that was rotten and corrupt about it... but, as Nirvana Crane once said (of someone else), "Somewhere under that pile of neuroses is someone nice trying to claw their way out".

From there, the dynamic with Wobbles practically wrote itself - Ronald McDonald paired with some ghastly little Napoleon from the local JobCentre has all the trappings of a normal agent pairing. So I decided to amplify those traits, really play up Wobbles' Pollyanna nature and the Notary's superiority complex, as a commentary on how limiting the standard hot-and-cold two person dynamic can be. Then Lola kept poking her head round the door, so I decided to bung her in as an agent, too - and then her story rolled out.

In fact, the only characters whose stories don't tie directly into that of the Oncoming Form are Doktor Trollenfisch und Gabrielle, who I wrote with the specific purpose of being soft and fluffy and having happy endings. Even then, they might not be separate from the rest of my agent stable for too long... though to say more would be spoilers. =]