So, yeah, ego.  An ego that was stroked for years due to being the one artist and writer in one group of friends and then further fueled by the interwebs.  Needless to say, I’m an excellent candidate for experimenting on creative groups – I have more interest in the numbers and what they represent than how they reflect on my own work.  Hence my current experiment on the Castle fandom regarding review to read ratios, speed of reading and quality of reviews between FF.Net and the castle_fic LJ comm.  I mean, hey, if I’m going to be writing Castle fic like the fantard that I am, I may as well get some data out of it.

Hopefully I’ll be able to rope in some other authors who crosspost between LJ and FF.Net, plus ones that only post on FF.Net or LJ so I can get a proper set of data.

But I digress.

Last week, in a fit of boredom and annoyance, I decided that I was going to enter an OC contest for the #CriminalMindsLovers group on dA.  Yes, seriously, an OC contest.  Yes, I am 21, not 12.  Actually, that’s sort of why I entered.  You see, when I had decided to enter, the other entries consisted of hilarious emo Sues.  Because, yes, the BAU needs another child genius – Reid more than fills that role… and at least he’s in his late twenties, not eighteen with a pseudo-Japanese name.  So I was all, oh fuck you kids, I never created Sues as bad as that, even when I was your age!  (I haven’t – all my Mary Sues were the right age and they never had a ‘special power’ that detracted from the canon characters.  Rather, they were almost complimentary to the cast.)

So I created Ana Novak, a geeky researcher/consultant who spends more time in Quantico than in the field.  Also, she’s in her thirties, isn’t stunningly beautiful or a genius.  She’s just an ordinary person with a fascination with overly violent crimes.  In other words, someone who could actually show up on Criminal Minds, unlike the eighteen year old punks that Hotch somehow allows to dress more extravagantly in the field than Garcia does in her batcave.  Riiight.  You’re representing the FBI (unlike Garcia – she’s a consultant/tech analyst and on a CIA watchlist and, thus, more valuable than the profilers), you’re not going to be allowed to wander around in ripped jeans.

So, yup, I went through the process of hacking up an admittedly bad drawing, submitting it and waiting until Sunday for the results.  They were exactly as I predicted (Sarah will corroborate - she was pretty certain of the opposite outcome) – I didn’t win.  Didn’t place anywhere.

Wanna know what charater won?

A sociopath.

Yes.

A fucking sociopath won a CM OC contest.  Fuck me – it’s Criminal Minds, not Dexter!

Oh!  And to make it even more hilarious?  Hotch doesn’t care that he’s a sociopath and the rest are creeped out by him but not sure why.

Yes.

A team of highly trained profilers, one of whom was involve with starting the fucking unit, wouldn’t notice or care that there’s a potential serial killer in their midst.  Cuz, y’know, it’s not like it is their job to notice these things or not.

dA is special.  I swear to god, fandom is always a dramatastic disaster but dA?  dA takes the cake in stupidity.

(At least the guy who won could draw… in a generic anime style, but, hey, better than nothing.)

PS:  Yes, I really don’t care that I won or lost – it was just a test to see what they were judging based on.  Clearly it was the ‘coolness’ or ‘uniqueness’ factor, not the ‘will this character actually fit in the universe’ category.  Besides, I got more than I expected out of this – Ana Novak actually fits quite nicely in the Caeverse.  She’s going to be the department’s profiler and violent crimes expert.

But, out of all the fictional characters I follow, my favourite ‘group’ has to be Jeph’s Questionable Content characters.  They talk to each other (and only each other) regularly, there’s no breaking of the fourth wall or out of character moments.  (As a runner up, I’ve got to say that WriteRCastle is pretty awesome – for one, Nathan Fillion is following him and, for two, Alexis will also tweet from that account.)

For whatever reason (I don’t understand myself either), that got me thinking… what if a small group of people got together and each made a Twitter account for someone they just made up.  You know, sort of like a RP but on Twitter?  Travis and I sort of started doing something to that effect – we both made accounts for two of our characters and started tweeting from them. But then we got bored and moved on after less than 100 tweets.   That is, less than 100 tweets between all four accounts.

So what I want to do is to try doing that again but with more people involved than just Trav and I (we’re evidently bad at motivating each other.  Probably because we’re both too lazy to even bother prodding the other person) and with brand new characters.  The only question is, how are we going to go about this?  Are we going to set this in the real world and just have ordinary people tweeting at each other?  Or is it going to be a different world altogether?  Are we going to set it up so that it is just a bunch of people using Twitter as, well, Twitter or in a more traditional RP sense?  (I say using Twitter as Twitter because, well, then what’s the point of using Twitter?)

Leave your thoughts in the comments and hopefully we’ll be able to get this thing up and running!

Unless, of course, the only person this amuses is myself.  In which case you all suck and I’m going to go play in THAT corner of the sandbox now.