Sailor Earth / Western Animation

• Adventure Time has a large canon cast of [Noun] [Royalty]s, especially princesses, so it's not that hard to invent a new one. Bizarrely, the most popular type of OC seems to be an Ice Prince(ss), who is generally either the child or niece/nephew of the Ice King^note although this clashes somewhat with canon, due to his status as being over a thousand years old thanks to his crown granting him immortality, and nearly everyone finding him too old and repulsive to date, making it unlikely for him to have surviving relatives or any direct descendants. Long-lost relatives of Princess Bubblegum, and additional human characters are both fairly common as well, and sometimes serve as additional love interests for Finn.
• Amphibia: A common plot is to have someone transported to Amphibia at the same time as the Calamity Trio, usually male, usually linked to an extra Calamity Gem, and usually shipped with Anne.
• Avatar: The Last Airbender:
  • The cartoon finishes on something of a cliffer. Though this was expanded upon later in the Sequel Series The Legend of Korra, there are many fics that attempt to write a Book 4: Air (which would make sense, considering how much the show focused on the four elements).
  • There are tales about a previous Avatar: Pretty easy to do, since we don't know how may Avatars there have been and we only know the names of nine of them: Aang, Korra, the five Avatars immediately preceding Aang (Roku, Kyoshi, Kuruk, Yangchen, and Szeto), Salai (a historical Avatar mentioned in passing in The Rise of Kyoshi) and the first Avatar, Wan.
  • Another variation is a story about the complete learning cycle of a later Avatar, anywhere from directly after Aang or Korra to an Avatar in a modernized setting. Very rarely it inverts the concepts and has an Avatar living in a futuristic space age.
• The same setup as Ojamajo Doremi goes for The Backyardigans, but it's for the purpose of increasing the cast. Also, the Backyardigans have the same theme colors as the five main Ojamajos.
• Want to create an original character for Buzz Lightyear of Star Command? All you have to do is decide if you want them to be human or alien and whether or not you want them to be a Space Ranger. Simple.
• Captain Planet — only five of the continents (Africa, North America, South America, Europe and Asia) are represented in canon, so it's not hard to create Planeteers who come from Australia, Oceania, maybe even Antarctica, Central America and Western Europe, as Linka represents Eastern Europe. Just give them a new element, and there you go.
• Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers fanfics often feature Original Characters who just happen to also be crime-fighting rodent vigilantes who end up teaming up with the Rangers to solve some big case, normally joining the team in the process. Less common are rival crime-fighting groups, though these do pop up occasionally (more often in official comic spinoffs than in fanfics). It seems to be the goal of many fanfic writers to eventually add more and more characters to the Rangers, to the point that, for every nonvillainous character on the show (and some villainous ones), there is probably a fanfic somewhere where they join the team (Foxglove, Tammy, and occasionally Sparky are the most common targets of this). Add to this all the Author Avatar characters who have joined the team, and the roster probably numbers in the dozens, if not hundreds.
• All characters in Chowder are named after food, so Chowder Original Characters tend to follow this pattern.
• Clone High It's easy to fanfic writers to make their own Original Characters, usually following this pattern: Take a Historical Domain Character, add any stock teen drama archetype, and turn their personality into complete opposite of their historical counterparts.
• Shoehorning new Lyoko Warriors into the group in Code Lyoko fic is all too common, as they are in a whole school full of potential new warriors, and they have endless need for new help.
• It's not hard to have OCs for Codename: Kids Next Door. Just pick a number. Or become a member of the Safety Patrol. Or be delightfullized. Be Crazy Is Cool as a child or teenage character. Make some sort of villain (just come up with a concept you dreaded as a kid).
• Foot 2 Rue — we never see Tag's mom, Eloise's male relatives, Samira's brothers and sisters, Lil Dragon's dad or Jeremy's younger half siblings, so there's plenty of OC potential there.
• Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends Fan Fics tend to introduce new imaginary friends moving into the titular orphanage. Sometimes, the character may move into the same room as Bloo, despite him already having three roommates. It's even weirder when the author decides, for some reason, that Bloo (or another imaginary friend) should fall in love with this character; he has never shown any affection for female characters except Frankie (that was once, when he saw her in a dress for the first time, and his affection was limited to chanting "She's hot!").
• Hazbin Hotel OCs are ridiculously common. Just create a humanoid character, give them a reason to be in Hell and have them land at the hotel for whatever reason.
• Invader Zim is prone to acquiring new Invaders. Or Tallest, if you're feeling ambitious. The creator explicitly mentioned this on the DVD Commentary, saying he would enjoy going to the homes of the little kids who believe they're "Invader Tom" or "Invader Sally" and wrecking their dreams by noting they weren't at the Great Assigning (every Invader, even those that didn't appear, are accounted for). Note that these new Invaders, or any other Irken OCs, almost inevitably wind up going to Earth and ending up in Ms. Bitters' class. Which seems awfully familiar to anyone who watched the "Tak" episode. Also, an alarmingly high portion of these new Irkens have blue eyes — which is explicitly stated to be impossible in-universe.
• The sheer amount of characters in the later seasons of Justice League Unlimited make it easy for anyone and everyone to enter their OC into the League with absolutely no disruption of canon at all.
• To create a Mute group for Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts, just pick an animal species to anthropomorphize and give them some sort of theme and an associated style of music.
• Considering the masses of characters in the Legion of Super Heroes (2006), slipping in a hitherto-unseen OC who recently got transferred to the main team (aka, the relevant team) is easily done. Alternatively, you could just add a character who only appeared in the comics.
• With Stitch from Lilo & Stitch being Experiment 626, fans had approximately 625 remaining experiments to come up with for themselves. However, The Series (as well as some tie-in comics published in Disney Adventures and the Stitch! anime made some time later) showed some of these experiments and The Series' finale movie listed all 625 of the other experiments made prior to Stitch in the credits. All that has done was make giving your fan-made experiment a name and number unnecessary now. Even then, fans often tend to ignore the admittedly bland or ridiculous names for the unseen experiments in favor of just going with whatever they want for their "experiment-sonas"/"Stitch-sonas".
• The Loud House: A number of the fandom's Original Characters are additional siblings, cousins or children of the canonical Louds who are shoehorned into the already full household. Naturally, most of them have names starting with the letter "L".
• Loonatics Unleashed:
  • It's common in fan works to have more descendants of the rest of the Looney Tunes cast, usually as new members of the Loonatics.
• Miraculous Ladybug:
  • Writers are often required by the plot to create Original Characters to be akumatized. Unusually, this functions to keep the story more focused on Ladybug and Chat Noir, as akumatizing any existing characters would require more narrative focus than just having a random person show up for a plot-mandated fight. The pattern for new akuma is very simple:
    1. Give them something to be angry about (it's fine if it's stupid)
    2. Give them a theme and a name (it's fine if it's stupid)
    3. Give them a power related to the theme (it's fine if it's stupid)
  • The Miraculous holders. Fanartists tend to either invent brand new miraculouses and Kwamis, based on varied animals, and their holders; or to represent the people who could have the non-used jewels seen in the credits: the fox, the peacock, the bee, and the turtle. Or at least non-used in season one. Since then, it's been revealed that the turtle, the fox, the bee, and the peacock holders are respectively Master Fu and Nino, Alya, Chloe, and Mayura. The episode "Sapotis" also reveals the existence of an additional dozen Miraculous beyond the main seven, corresponding to the animals of the Eastern Zodiac. And then the episode "Feast" revealed that there are more miraculous boxes than the one that contains the nineteen known ones, and it's implied there's a lion miraculous among them.
  • The American special reveals that there is a Miraculous set based on Native American culture, with Jess gaining the Eagle Miraculous, and Word of God revealing the identities of the others (Both for Miraculous seen and unseen). It's not too hard for a fanfiction writer to come up with holders for those Miraculouses, coming up with individual powers, Kwami, and designs for them in turn.
• Mixels has a lot of fan-created tribes based on different themes and elements. Most of the time, they contain female members. Interestingly, for this series LEGO actually encourages the fans to create their own works with the Mixel sets, thanks to their Fusion Dance gimmick.
• Monkie Kid being based on Journey to the West and featuring other characters from Chinese mythology allows for a lot of OCs based on other literary or mythological figures. A popular choice is basing characters off the two other Celestial Apes mentioned in the book, or Sun Wukong’s named generals.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • The six main characters are each themed around on of the Elements of Harmony, magical artifacts that represent a virtue associated with friendship. As such, a common concept in fanfiction is that of a seventh Element of Harmony and associated virtue, alongside Evil Counterparts to the Elements (Generosity vs. Selfishness/Greed/Avarice, Laughter vs. Despair, etc.), usually known collectively as the Elements of Discord. Note a bogus Season 2 episode list that got widely circulated and believed included an episode about the Seventh Element of Harmony.
    • Trixie making a Heel–Face Turn and becoming the Seventh Element was a fairly common story outline before her reintroduction into the show.
    • In a bit of irony, canon would eventually have Sunset Shimmer add a seventh color to the rainbow generated by the Elements when defeating the Dazzlings, which naturally added fuel to the fire. It's since been explained that hers is Empathy, and that it's not officially one of the Elements.
  • Fan favorite Derpy Hooves is often depicted as hanging out with and interacting with the Mane Six. Her fanon-established daughter Dinky is similarly often included with the Cutie Mark Crusaders (despite having been repeatedly depicted with a cutie mark, although it keeps changing).
  • Fan species, or fan expansions of canon species, tended to have them in a pattern based on the internal division of the pony species, often with a race with overt magical powers, one with flight and/or weather control, and one with earth-based powers, greater strength, or nature powers, with one or two immortal demigod rulers over all of them. This gradually faded from prominence as more species were introduced and expanded on, as none of them fit this pattern (with the only exception being the changelings' own large, alicorn-like rulers).
  • The Ursa Major and Ursa Minor are giant, blue-purple, star-studded bears that appear prominently in an early episode and reoccur in the show from time to time. In the fandom, this popularized the idea of other similar creatures, usually referred to "Astral Beasts", "Star Beasts" or something similar, based on other constellations, although this does not happen as often as other Sailor Earth trends in the fandom.
  • There's a common trend for fans with pegasus OCs to make them members of the Wonderbolts. In the show itself, there are about 12-15 members of the main team, with Spitfire and Soarin' being the most prominent and a few others like Fleetfoot and Misty Fly also having recurring appearances. That doesn't even take into account how many members of the reserves and cadets-in-training there are.
• Ninjago: Due to the show having a very broad definition as to what constitutes an "element" (known elements in canon include Mind, Speed, Smoke, and more) it's very easy to create your own Ninja/Elemental Master. Just select an attribute for them to be a master of and go from there.
• Numberblocks: Since the main characters of this show are anthropomorphic numbers, there are lots of fan-made designs for numbers that haven't appeared on the show yet. There are even two galleries compiling them!
• OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes: Since the world is a Fantasy Kitchen Sink full of superheroes, villains, and generally fantastical people, such as ghosts, anthropomorphic skateboards, werewolves, and time-travelling cyborgs, nearly any type of character imaginable can fit into the show's world quite well. Creating new alter-egos for KO (or for some Alternate Universe Fic version of him) is also mildly popular, due to him already having a canonical one who is often treated as more-or-less a separate character. The creators of the series even made an official template for OCs, styled after the in-universe trading cards for every hero and villain.
• The Powerpuff Girls:
  • Since there are only three main Powerpuff Girls around, in came a rainstorm of PPG OCs, mostly being Powerpuffs for any other color besides pink, blue and green. When it's not the rest of the rainbow, it's just a new-and-improved Bunny brought Back from the Dead and beautified, or sometimes it's the introduction of new Rowdyruff Boys (usually in stories where the original ones had a Heel–Face Turn). One of the most well-known Powerpuff Sailor Earths around is Bell, the white Powerpuff from the Powerpuff Girls Doujinshi by Bleedman. Even then, she's an antagonist.
  • Many OCs who aren't even supposed to be related to the Powerpuff Girls also tend to use the same body design and shape as them.
• Ready Jet Go!: Pick a type of family member, and give them a vegetable name. Congratulations, you now have your own Propulsion family OC.
• Recess always has the possibility for "The New Kid", or any other of the nameless kids (or their nicknames) present on the playground. It wouldn't be that hard for something like "The Slide Climbing kid" or "The Video Game Kid".
• Many Road Rovers fans loved creating their own, by simply picking a breed, gender, nationality, and maybe superpower.
• There are an insane amount of South Park fanfics that involve a new kid (usually female) moving to town and becoming friends with the four main boys. If the character is a girl, as is the case with 99% of these stories, a romantic relationship is guaranteed, with Kyle being the most popular boy to pair her with.
  • Interestingly, the official video game South Park: The Stick of Truth opens with this plot (minus any romance).
• Star vs. the Forces of Evil: Given how canonically much of the early history of Mewni, including the records of the queens that ruled before Lyric Butterfly, were lost in a fire because Lyric chose to save a book on fashion instead of those records, it's not uncommon to see OC's of those predecessor queens. Some also had toyed with the idea of queens after Star, starting typically with Star's daughter with whomever they shipped her with but that's died down somewhat with the finale in which Star destroys the magic, effectively ending the need for a royal family.
• Steven Universe:
  • Since the show involves a race of magical alien crystal people called Gems, it quickly gave rise to "gemsonas"—pick a kind of gem or stone for the name and design a character, given them a personalized weapon (scythes are famous for this), and you're good to go. Naturally, this only became more popular after the middle of Season one, when new Gems began to appear on the show itself. While canonically the Gems are all female (excepting the title character, who's a Half-Human Hybrid), gemsonas match a fan's preference. There is a limited amount of names to pick from (a few hundred that are well-known and/or have easy-to-pronounce names, and a few thousand that are obscure, hard to spell, and less desirable overall), and thus, the inevitable One-Steve Limit (pun not intended) is bound to crop up when two people pick the same name or when an OC's name later gets taken up by a canon character, it's not a huge issue as multiples of the same Gem can coexist (the show has several Rubies, Pearls, and Amethysts, for example). Lampshaded in a fan animation here.
  • Since Fusion Dance is also a big part of the series, some fans instead choose to make their OC a fusion of two or more canon characters who have not fused in the show. If one has multiples OCs, they can also create fusions between their Gemsonas to further increase their character pool.
• Another fandom that makes this easy is the Storm Hawks fandom. All you need is to either pick a pre-existing species (Merbs are the most common in fanfiction) and pick the name of a bird. Most of these also tend to be a love interest for Stork, of all people...
• Every version of Strawberry Shortcake also allows the creation of infinite Sailor Earths. The characters are named for food. Limitless, eh?
• Teen Titans fandom contains PLENTY of fics where a new girl or boy (far more rare) shows up in Jump City with powers and joins up as the sixth Titan.
  • Plenty of these new Titans seem to indeed be Terra clones, in that they're either working for or related directly to Slade. Original Character apprentices were a dime a dozen for quite a while.
  • The series ends on a very open-ended note, leaving that opportunity wide to the masses to make something of the sort.
  • Another popular route to take when creating Teen Titans OCs is to make a Titans North or Titans South (or a Titans Whatever-country-or-continent-suits-the-story's-purposes), using Titans East as both justification and inspiration. This way, an entire team of new characters can be made without interfering with canon too much. Yet another option is to add a sixth Titan to Titans East (some might not even consider them a "sixth" member, claiming that Mas and Menos count as one Titan) to pair them off with Speedy or Aqualad. And of course, it's perfectly reasonable and very popular to simply create new OCs that are Honorary Titans, residing wherever they want and tied down only to a duo at most. And that's just when it comes to creating heroes. Villains and neutral characters are popular among creators too; after all, what fun is a new hero without a new archenemy to wipe the floor with? So in all honesty, Teen Titans is among the easiest fandoms to create characters for, no matter how the creator decides to pull it off.
• Quite a few Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles OCs are fifth turtles. Sometimes they're female, and usually they're named after Renaissance artists like the canon turtles. It helps that canon has dabbled in the idea with characters like Slash, Venus de Milo, and Jennika.
• The abundance of British locomotive types has made making original characters for Thomas & Friends extremely easy. Road vehicles, boats, planes, humans, even non-British locomotives are also no-brainers, to the point that foreign locomotives like Hank, Bash, Dash and Ferdinand (USA), Flora (Ireland), Hiro (Japan), and Millie (France) are canon.
• Comes up from time to time in Thunder Cats fanfiction, both for the OS and the reboot. There are many cat species not used in the show for writers to choose from. Add in how the reboot expanded on the species of the other animal races, and there are even more possibilities.
• The Total Drama series, by virtue of having its contestants based on teen and elimination game stereotypes, is particularly suited to such knockoffs:
  • Remakes of the first season often have one or two new characters join the canon cast. If there is only one, it will usually be an Author Avatar.
  • Stories set in new seasons tend to use ostensibly original characters that have remarkably similar characteristics to the canon cast. This is easily—sometimes explicitly—justified with the conceit that the in-universe producers are screening for certain types, and has the benefit of freeing the writer from having to acknowledge canon relationships, for example.
  • More audacious fics such as Total Drama Battlegrounds may introduce a whole new cast of stereotypes while keeping the original cast as well.
• Transformers makes this even easier, even if you don't take a toy that never got to the screen or one of the base characters not already in that reboot, and characterise it for yourself. Pick a cool alt for your Original Character (thanks to Hasbro, even Triple Changers are allowed now) and a name that fits the "Code Name as real name" motif (there's freaking name generators out there), and you're ready to roll out. You don't even need to say why they're there, because they're there for the same reason everyone else is there — there's a war, dammit! This is okay because Hasbro uses the same method for inventing their own toy-only characters — and their not-toy-only characters — and the writers of the various cartoons, comics, and other fiction use it for their non-toy characters. It's one of the few fandoms where the "Sailor Earth" approach is not only acceptable, but accepted as standard operating procedure.
  • Beast Wars has the question of the unrecovered stasis pods, which leads to the uniquely Fandom-Specific Plot of Beast Warriors continuing the fight on other continents (to explain characters with non-African beast modes), or long after the show ended (some of the comics operated on this concept).
  • Transformers: Cybertron has the various themed Planets with their Cyber Keys as a core concept. Some fans have taken to creating their own Planets with various potential factions and alternate modes represented—popular ones include 'sky worlds,' typically a World in the Sky that favors aerial alternate modes, and 'water worlds' for aquatic modes.
• It's pretty easy to create a fan-character for Trollz, due to the Rock Theme Naming. Emerald is a particularly popular choice, as green isn't on the color spectrum the girls have.
• TUGS revolves around two fleets of tugs. To introduce a new character, all that's needed is for one of the fleet's captains to suggest that they need another tug because there's too much work, or (in the case of the Z-Stacks) to make them more evenly matched against the Star Tugs. The series also suggests there are lots of other tugs, and there are plenty of locations in and around the port that we haven't seen yet. And then there's the many background characters that were never developed during the series run.
• Winx Club allows the creation of infinite Sailor Earths, as each planet of the Magic Dimension can have as many Guardian Fairies as needed, not counting the Witches nor the Specialists. And even when the show has its own share of fanfics, its visual and fashion-centered approach prompts the fandom to create new fairies with their own outfits and their own transformations. And yes, there is such a thing as Sailor Enchantix and Enchantix Moon.
• W.I.T.C.H. being similar to Sailor Moon (five girls chosen to be Magical Girl Warriors as part of an ancient tradition) gives plenty of fodder for entire teams of original characters with team names made of the first initials of the characters in fanfics and fanart. There is even a fan-created electronic paper doll makers so users can create a Guardian here.
• Xiaolin Showdown gets this a lot too, though the fanfics seem to be split evenly between making a new kid show up, or making Jack a Xiaolin monk as well. As with the Digimon Frontier example above, this always involves making a "new element". The most common choices are metal, plants/flowers, and on occasion, Heart. The follow-up series, Xiaolin Chronicles, does exactly this by introducing Ping Pong, the Xiaolin Dragon of Wood.
• Because of how common it is for X-Men: Evolution fans to create Original Characters, some people have advertised stories where the basic premise is 'Create your own OC for my new OC group of Students'. Bringing in characters who only appeared in the comics is also popular.