Do your OC's reflect parts of your personality?

Sometimes when in the process of creating certain characters, I find myself reflecting back to my own behavior, moods, and actions, especially after I finish creating a character I often see certain aspects of their personality in mine, even their flaws can be equal with mine, but I believe these flaws that some of us may put into these characters help us cope with who we really are, or recognize the positive and negative attributes of ourselves. So the question really relates to how you go about creating the personalities of each of your respective characters, and are these characters anything like you or share anything similar to your own behavior, or do you keep these factors separate from one another? I'm just really curious about this....

For us certain traits do tend to bleed through. Not all, but a few. they often tend to be plotters rather than those who are born of and to action. They also tend to have flaws. We don't like characters that are "perfect".
Some characters deviate from these, though they generally always have some flaws, even if they are not apparent at first. (sometimes we add flaws later)

There are many personality types and behavioral patterns that we simply never make character with.

I don't consciously think about making characters who are similar to me, but, it does happen. Usually I won't really notice until I've RPed as that character for a bit, but, I do usually notice.

Part of me thinks that it's sort of impossible to make and play as characters that don't relate to you somehow, like it's an unconscious thing, but the flaw in that argument would be canon characters, which I can play without noticing any resemblance to myself.

But, yeah. I get what you mean, OP. Except for the part about reflecting about your own personality through your characters, since I've never really thought about it that in-depth before. Plus I think that sort of thing is a bit of a stretch in the first place, seeing as how our characters may have aspects of our personalities, but both ourselves and (hopefully) our characters are more three-dimensional than that, so it doesn't make much sense to me to compare two personalities side-by-side just for having one aspect in common- whether or not one of said personalities is fictional.

Making characters who share at least a couple traits you find idealistic or which are part of you is pretty well unavoidable. :p

Even as a GM where I've created hundreds of NPC's, there has always been some small part of me in those NPC's.

That's not a bad thing either. It's how one relates to a character, or a group of characters. It's also a method into which one can understand their character(s).

Hmm, how to describe this effect in action in a media outlet...

*Grabs Anime & Western Film portrayals of Japan* This is probably the best example you'll find of this. Before you groan and leave, really think about it for a minute. Anytime they attempt to portray western characters, they come off as comical at best, downright awkward at worst. Why? Because they don't behave like a real westerner would in those situations. They behave like a Japanese person pretending to be a westerner would. It is very rare to see it get pulled off correctly. The same applies whenever a western-based film crew attempts to tackle Japanese culture. They are notorious for accentuating certain, "strange" parts, and thus make a fairly awful or downright bizarre presentation as a result, again with only a few golden exceptions.

And that's just a difference of culture.

That's not even getting into personality traits which you like or dislike, or a combination thereof which you find appealing and idealistic, or unappealing and grim. That's not getting into physical traits. (Think about it: Without having to consciously think and change the ethnicity of your character, has any human you've created strayed from your own ethnicity before?) The answer to the question in brackets is probably "no." No, that doesn't make you a racist. That's just you subconsciously implanting a familiar, trivial trait onto a character, which in this case is a physical trait.

There is a hell of a lot we take for granted in our individual minds, bodies, and hearts, which we don't even think about and subconsciously implant into whatever we create.

It's not good, or bad, or right, or wrong. It simply is. :p

tl;dr: My answer is yes, they do. Because it's about as inevitable as the sun rising in the morning.

does it count as "yes" to your bracketed question if the character is an alien of a near-human species that has asian-style eyes,brovo? (and the author isn't asian)

its very hard to write out a convincing character that doesn't share any traits with yourself. To write truly convincingly, you have to understand how the character thinks, even if you'd normally never think that way.

For example... lets go into another kind of evil. Rape.
How many people can easily write out a storyline from the point of view of an assault rapist and do it "right", including what the rapist thinks the whole time? or for that matter, the reverse point of view, from the one raped?
This scenario is naturally based on the theory that the author has no experience with either of the two situations. Something we sincerely hope nobody has.

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Originally Posted by Ellri

does it count as "yes" to your bracketed question if the character is an alien of a near-human species that has asian-style eyes,brovo? (and the author isn't asian)

its very hard to write out a convincing character that doesn't share any traits with yourself. To write truly convincingly, you have to understand how the character thinks, even if you'd normally never think that way.

For example... lets go into another kind of evil. Rape.
How many people can easily write out a storyline from the point of view of an assault rapist and do it "right", including what the rapist thinks the whole time? or for that matter, the reverse point of view, from the one raped?
This scenario is naturally based on the theory that the author has no experience with either of the two situations. Something we sincerely hope nobody has.

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If it's an alien, you consciously had to think about physical traits that were non-standard to you. Like asian-style eyes from a non-asian. So the answer is no, it doesn't count, but it does show that you thought about it. :p

Considering I was almost raped before in my childhood, I can write a rape scenario all fine and dandy, including and in great detail the actions of the rapist and the mindset of the victim, including the severe emotional and mental trauma afterwards. Do I think others whom weren't can do it justice? Yes. Do I think they can really and truly understand it? Fully?... I don't know. I haven't seen someone succeed at it yet.

Note: I have enough class to "black out" adult content for the sake of the forums and because, artistically, it's typically the tasteful thing to do.

I'd say yes. Even if it's an antithesis of yourself, it still is based on what is you, and then taking those traits to their opposite.

A bit of me shows through all my characters, whether I want it to or not. Of course, I like to see how varied I can make it. I have a wide cast of characters I've played, and each of them are unique, but often that's by stretching different parts of myself, and exaggerating them, or plumb just making them the opposite of me. People are complicated. You can make hundreds of characters, such as Brovo said, and each of them will embody a different piece of you. Sometimes we don't realize how complicated we are, because we try to pigeon hole ourselves.

I tried making a drunk character though once. It failed spectacularly because I'm a sober person, and I just couldn't get into their head. I couldn't move the characters. I'd say this is true for most of us. We can't really roleplay with what we aren't familiar with.

A great example each of us can see how having a piece of our soul makes our characters live, try taking someone else's. It will be extremely hard to do. Even if you manage it, and pull off the character, you'll insert a piece of yourself into it, and they will change just by switching hands of the player who has that character. No two people write exactly alike, because we all have different experiences, and different thoughts.

I argue that you can't write what you don't know. At least not believably.

That said I write things from rebelious, insecure teenagers to gruff but retired veterans to monsters whose thought patterns most closely resemble pure instinct.

Yes. At times. Many times my characters act nothing like me, but they are extenstions of different patterns and intersts I do not dwell into myself.

Mmm, bits and pieces of the OC does. Most of it is more like the person I'd like to be. Well, the personality mostly.
The appearance, when I write it instead of using a photo, tends to describe me to the most part.