<Snipped quote by BangoSkank>
I had a friend almost do one. Never made it to IC...

i feel called out, rood

I'm lucky enough to have only seen one cringy oc in my time, it was this guy's Starwars oc, I think the name was like Damien or something? His oc learnt how to use the force when he was like 1 or something. And had a bunch of insane feats, he tried playing a main character and got mad when the mods said no. It was pretty funny though and i still think back on it

Oh dear, reading these has brought up old OLD memories of some of the first excursions I've had with rping.

One was a replacement Arrancar for one or two that had been defeated. She was a velociraptor. Szyal Apporo was her "captain" and tormentor. She had a huge crush on Ulquiorra and was a sort-of sibling to Grimmjow. Because of course she did/was.

Another time back when the ForumMotion sites were a thing and chat boxes were part of it too, there was an old old version of some characters I still hold onto now. A friend of mine and I would be up on his site in the chat box just having a blast using all of our cringe characters and cringe versions of their various personalities. I'd instigate chainsaw fights and chases. He'd do complete weapon cleanings and checks within a few seconds. Planets would explode. Dimensions would be hopped. Power levels would be rated and increased as we always tried to one-up each other. They were all some sort of demon hybrid, so they'd bond and fight over that fact. We're still friends today, just a lot more grown up.

Let's not forget the cringe assassin type either. A four lettered code name, all black and leather, knives and guns galore. Police would always be on her trail, but of course she'd never get caught. Lots of diving off of rooftops too. She'd also have monologues about how she hated the color yellow and tried to be fairly philosophical in her ramblings.

OH! AND THEN! The cat people. Wayyyy back in elementary/middle school I made up a mystical world where most of the inhabitants were some form of hybrid, and the predominant species was Catperson. There were subspecies of Catperson who had wings and saw things only in a green-hued spectrum while others were ultraviolet or infrared. There were nasty enemies that I called _____ghouls (can't remember the name right now) that were these nasty corpse creatures that supposedly had no bones yet were strong enough to hold themselves up and crawl around. There were mermaids too, though they were more scaly and fish-like than the pretty popular renditions, but the mermaid totally could be pretty and split her fins into walkable legs. Two Catpersons, a mermaid, and another character had to team up to help save their world from the wicked wind goddess (totally not taken from Wrath: Unleashed) and they were a bunch of badasses but young too, just like the characters in "Ogre, Ogre", the only Xanth book I ever read.

It wasn't an OC, but I still remember this one person played a character so out-of-character it was ridiculous. Every post I saw, public or private, was either smut-bait, being excessively toxic to their "loved ones", threatening harm/suicide (in-character, of course), or being unnecessarily violent (like punching someone through a wall because their food order was incorrect, I think?)

It got so uncomfortable that group chats had to make alternate group chats just to exclude them - which was rude, but lord, you could not have a normal interaction with them around. I tend not to be judgemental, but they were always trying to start things with people out-of-character, too - so at that point, I do get a little judgemental I guess

Now y'all done reminded me of Boner Wolf.

This was way back on the Spacebattles forum. Space opera/mecha game, political machinations, large-scale starship/mecha battles, psychics and transhumanism, the kitchen sink was just the beginning bro. All that good stuff. So the PCs are the créme de la créme, social and battlefield elites, yadda yadda. They're attending an important state funeral where a dozen plots are afoot and we're all going around hitting up contacts and doing all kinds of secret squirrel stuff.

In comes Boner Wolf. Not his real name, but you can guess. He's an eight foot tall lupine. Okay cool, this is a transhuman setting, we have all sorts and nobody bats an eye. Some are sculpts and some are uplifts and some are outright other species. All good.

But hey, in a setting like this everyone is hot, right? So he immediately pops a massive, visible boner (yes, the player explicitly described the bulge) and starts trying to mack on - just everyone. Including the grieving widow and her daughter.

The big thing is that this is cringe not just OOC but also IC. I mean, you're at a high society soirée. Doesn't mean you can't be on the lookout for a liaison dangereuse but hey, the currency of the land is discretion and subtlety. Keep it classy, y'know? But nope, BW just waltzes up to the laydees expecting his bulge to do the talking.

The GM had to talk several players out of having their characters drag him out the back and shoot him.

My cringiest OC, from many years ago, was basically taking an existing delusional edgelord character but making the cringe powers and minions real and putting him in an edgelord anime RP, partially as a joke and partially as an experiment to see if he'd get banned or nerfed. Turned out he got the green light, and much cringe ensued including such battle pets as a fox that runs in light speed, an indestructible metal mammoth, and even a dragon, naturally black, and of course standing around acting important and going off on "cruel fate," "darkness of my soul", and the "burning dark curse contained in my arm", among other lines.

The thing is, he kind of fit in with the other edgelords of the RP anyway, and he had enough sense to lead the others when the plot kicked off, one player even describing him as being God modded in a good way. And while very cringe, he did do some cool fighting against a puppet master ex-girlfriend of his from the rival clan (of course), and culminate in choosing the Romeo and Juliet ending when she died. Cringiest writing I ever put to posts, but man was it kind of wild too.

Now y'all done reminded me of Boner Wolf.

This was way back on the Spacebattles forum. Space opera/mecha game, political machinations, large-scale starship/mecha battles, psychics and transhumanism, the kitchen sink was just the beginning bro. All that good stuff. So the PCs are the créme de la créme, social and battlefield elites, yadda yadda. They're attending an important state funeral where a dozen plots are afoot and we're all going around hitting up contacts and doing all kinds of secret squirrel stuff.

In comes Boner Wolf. Not his real name, but you can guess. He's an eight foot tall lupine. Okay cool, this is a transhuman setting, we have all sorts and nobody bats an eye. Some are sculpts and some are uplifts and some are outright other species. All good.

But hey, in a setting like this everyone is hot, right? So he immediately pops a massive, visible boner (yes, the player explicitly described the bulge) and starts trying to mack on - just everyone. Including the grieving widow and her daughter.

The big thing is that this is cringe not just OOC but also IC. I mean, you're at a high society soirée. Doesn't mean you can't be on the lookout for a liaison dangereuse but hey, the currency of the land is discretion and subtlety. Keep it classy, y'know? But nope, BW just waltzes up to the laydees expecting his bulge to do the talking.

The GM had to talk several players out of having their characters drag him out the back and shoot him.

Makes zap braningan look subtle.

My cringiest OC, from many years ago, was basically taking an existing delusional edgelord character but making the cringe powers and minions real and putting him in an edgelord anime RP, partially as a joke and partially as an experiment to see if he'd get banned or nerfed. Turned out he got the green light, and much cringe ensued including such battle pets as a fox that runs in light speed, an indestructible metal mammoth, and even a dragon, naturally black, and of course standing around acting important and going off on "cruel fate," "darkness of my soul", and the "burning dark curse contained in my arm", among other lines.

The thing is, he kind of fit in with the other edgelords of the RP anyway, and he had enough sense to lead the others when the plot kicked off, one player even describing him as being God modded in a good way. And while very cringe, he did do some cool fighting against a puppet master ex-girlfriend of his from the rival clan (of course), and culminate in choosing the Romeo and Juliet ending when she died. Cringiest writing I ever put to posts, but man was it kind of wild too.

Honestly, this seems like it would be really fun from a writing perspective where everyone's in on it. Like a D&D campaign with the tropiest tropes at play - the horny bard, murderhobo barbarian, broody edgelord thief, etc.

Also shoutouts to the Dark Souls name + pfp. Artorias is so awesome.

I would like to put an honorable mention for players who use AI as a handicap.

The most frustrating was perhaps in a mercenary-RP when another merc was just my character but genderswapped, and doing more-or-less the exact same thing but in the form of one-line posts that somehow tried to one-up/+1 my character in a casual RP.

Pretty much everybody unanimously agreed to put a bullet in their head when the third rescue-chopper arrived, my character got field-promoted.

A case of "It's not what you did, but how your did it after the consequences of such actions were already laid out and you deciding to double down on this other character's mistakes to the point of single-handedly nearly causing the mission to fail."

---

Another copy-pasted Allucard from Hellsing, and not even the funny abridged version. And they expected to get paid for it. Eneded up ramming a news-helicopter into him and dragging him into a river of Flouride-dioxide he had smuggled in himself by using their immortality as an infinite-funding glitch to bypass common-sense safety regulations... all just to get them to stop monolouging for five secends.

He survived that, of course, he ended up dying by getting a case of the zoomies in the woods and dropping a tree on himself in the epilouge. Again, they wanted to get paid for this, and they believed their posts were inherently superior due to being attributed a monetary value.

Well one time I worked with some kid who made a bone mage. A mage that uses his own bones as weapons and then regenerates them. Then the character had a love interest and she got cold, so he...made her a bone blanket. A blanket made of his own bones.

So I am currently in a Dragon RP on a nearly dead, completely outdated Dragon Ball forum. I won't give names or anything because I don't want them to find out, but that group is horrendous rps, so bad that it loops back around for me into fun again.

During one iteration of the RP (they frequently restart the RP when it gets 'stale'), I was playing one of my frequent characters. A little six-armed alien loosely inspired by Stitch and the Skitterfolk from Starfinder. He was the smallest character on the board, being like 3'6 or so. He was this weird little purple guy who was very sweet and kind, but had a very short lifespan and was a bit childish. A lot of his story focuses around his species being under the thumb of the Frieza race, and having all the resources from their planet stolen from them. Being one of the strongest of his admittedly weak race and the burden that leaves him with.

One of the players there is seemingly incapable of creativity. Every character he makes boils down to "it's this character but I am writing it" which isn't the worst thing in all honesty, until he decided to take my character. He makes a 2'10 little purple lizard guy from a race that has a short lifespan, so he acts childish. He's also one of the strongest of his race, which is being subjugated by the Freiza race.

Unfortunately, he does not know how to make someone endearing. His childish character is impish if anything. Just causing problems for the sake of it. All but immediately everyone expressed their distaste for this character purely because he acts like a total jerk then bats his lashes and says 'goo goo gaa gaa I'm just a baby'.

I joined a game that was created by AI. All the players (save maybe another player and me) used AI to generate majority of their posts. Due to writer's block, the game never made it to page 2. 🤷🏻‍♀️

@Mole Writer's block and AI prompts regurgitating the same output just with different names and personalities, probably.

Cringiest OC outside of my own? Players who cater their characters specifically to romance another or immediately go into "flirt" mode as soon as they've latched onto an interaction. Had it happen to me once way back when. It was genuinely creepy when I realised everyone else was dimsissed with a cold shoulder or threatening remark, and my character got literally paragraphs worth of response. Eww...

That isn't to say I mind flirty characters or despise potentially romantic dymanics if they genuinely work (or are written from a mature perspective at least), but it just triggers my "Are you getting off to this" response and makes my skin crawl when it's done so blatantly. It's always broody, dark and edgy characters too, weirdly.

As for personal cringe? Well, several kid-like characters with years of assassination experience, broody emos for the sake of brooding and a brief obsession with giving my characters Japanese names even if it didn't fit the setting. That last part I stopped doing pretty fucking quick when I got more into the hobby.

@Mole Writer's block and AI prompts regurgitating the same output just with different names and personalities, probably.

That was the implication induced with a shoulder shrug. I also wasn’t aware the prompt was AI generated until the posts started coming. I need to be more vigilant about these sort of things.

@Mole I gathered that, yeah.

Hm.

Long time ago I ran a small forums.

There was a user who joined. They roleplayed as their OC, Naomi. Their art and I suppose face claim was B. Jenet from Fatal Fury/King of Fighters. Skimpier pirate character with large assets, you know the drill. Doesn't matter, pretty common to see fighting game adjacent characters in RP.

But they put a unique twist on the formula.

The character has a superpower. What you might ask? Conjuring a queen sized bed, candles, wine - mood setting. Purely to try and force other people's characters into fornication. Their slogan, their signature, was to the effect of "Hi! I'm less slutty!" They harassed multiple users in DMs and were generally a nuisance. If done today I'd believe they were an AI ran chatbot of some kind. True force of nature type shit.

With a bit of detective sleuthing, I discovered they were not in fact a 21 year old college woman who had shown up at a forums predominantly occupied by young teenagers (I was 13 at the time!), but in fact a 43 year old man named Melvin who had a MySpace discussing his physical supremacy over others.

Upon discovering their more heinous actions I permanently banned them.

On the exact same forums, and this is part of why I stopped my would-be webmaster ambitions, I ran into Tiberius Fox. Guy got mildly infamous on 4chan later on. Anyway, Tiberius had a Tiberius Tavern when taverns and inns in open RP were all the rage. I never paid attention to it because it sounded boring. But it had absurd amounts of posts.

One day I felt guilty. Here were active users on my forums and I was acting like I was too good to write with them. The conceit. I talked to my older friend (could satisfy an entry here given the phoenix-fox fusion furry knights he and his soon to be ex-wife from ID fraud played but I don't want to get too long winded!) and convinced him we should team up, read a few random pages, get immersed, and then go roleplay with 'em. And so I picked a page.

I think I'd break ToS here if I described what I read with too much detail. Let's just say an advanced age fox grandma was grappled by many, many enthusiastic uh, tiger and wolf and bird wrestlers yes, as a tree with Italian Bratwursts rained uh, protein fortified milk all over the scene. Quite right.

My older mod friend pulled up Tiberius himself. Man was playing a kitsune, of the same name. A Nazi kitsune. A Nazi kitsune, who hated Hitler but adored Nazis but hated racism but loved white nationalism [?], loved violence and adored very not cool interactions when your mommy and daddy love each other very much. Had full Nazi memorabilia, just meandering around the forest this tavern was housed in, doing things that'd make God weep.

Banned the living shit out of them all.

Those aren't the worst I've ran into. That'd probably be the alien loli that had separate 90 page documents on individual components of their organs I'm not going to describe here who's mission in life was to forcibly have the Stork bring home a baby with inanimate objects. But they're noteworthy.

The most bewildering one was on Ye Olde Guilde (the previous version of this forum) when I was running one of the many, many incarnations of my GEARs RP. GEARs is a sci-fi RP set solely on one world, with a fairly detailed setting that has various mysteries to it. The tech of the setting is quite explicitly detailed too. It features smallish mecha (the titular GEARs), a bit bigger than powered armour, but much smaller than your regular giant robot. The people in the setting are all anthro animals too, which is also an intrinsic part of the setting and plot.

Anyway, the game was in Casual, but it could have easily sat in Advanced, IMHO. Someone submitted a character app, and they clearly hadn't read anything about the setting or RP at all.
They had made up a vulpine character who was from 'another planet than Landren' - Landren being a country in the setting, not a planet. Let alone space travel not even being a thing at all.
Their mecha had 'laser particles'... (in it's legs!) I don't even know what that means, let alone the fact that energy weapons were experimental tech in the setting and not readily available to the players. It had a bunch of other nonsensical things too, but I remember that being the standout one because of the odd wording.
The whole app read like it was written by a little kid.
I rejected it as it clearly didn't fit anything, but I made sure to do so politely. I was still completely bewildered by it, and we did used to joke about 'space fox' afterwards in the RP group.

There was also a dude who joined the same RP or another version of it, who clearly was just there to get his rocks off with furry smut RP - or at least, to try to. He had no knowledge or interest whatsoever in the setting or anything about it, and was just constantly trying - very, very poorly - to hit on every character that was there. I remember this specifically, because he offered to be someone's co-pilot, and when asked to do something in character, he replied his character had no idea what that meant... not sure how they'd have ended up in a hi-tech war machine if that was the case.
He also tried to start a 1x1 with me, and his characters were as deep as a dry puddle, and he had no interest in discussion about setting, story, or anything. All his characters did was just keep 'looking at' mine with no elaboration.
That was just eye-roll worthy.

Otherwise, I had a friend who was a dyed-in-the-wool weeb when we were teenagers, and first getting into TTRPG's.
We had just started out on our journey into playing TTRPGs, and a slightly older friend was running a high fantasy RPG for us - it was from an old paperback book called 'Dragon Warriors'. Tolkienesque high fantasy stereotypes through and through. Simple system, great for a beginning point for anyone new to RPGs.
Me and my other friends were all playing fairly familiar - if a little childish - high fantasy characters. We all knew the style and the tropes, and were playing to the setting.
Weeb friend, well...
He was basically using anime stereotype jokes all the time. Describing his character having anime sweat drops, giant jiggly boobs, fireballing people for disagreeing or upsetting her (as if it was a cartoon and they just shrugged it off like Wile-E-Coyote), and so on.
Needless to say, everyone got very fed up with this, and the GM eventually had to say that their character did not fit at all with the others, and to tone it down. They got pretty huffy about this and didn't understand the issue.

They had their own OC too, and talking about that RP makes me remember him. He was an absolute Mary Sue; half vampire, half demon, and cribbed looks, powers, gear and everything else from basically anything and everything you can think of. Adamantium (or equivalent) skeleton, giant sword(s) that were supernatural, Super handsome (apparently; they basically looked like Vincent Valentine and Sephiroth's lovechild) but brooding, all the girls love him, but he's just too cool and angsty to show his super deep feelings. A plethora of magical abilities (naturally) a spaceship that would make the SDF-1 Macross look puny (oh, and it was full of his own Space Marine chapter, and crewed by a mixed assortment of anime babes from various franchises who all lurrrrvvve him) A bad boy because 'heroes are too goody-goody'. All the personality of a small radish and so overpowered that nothing at all feasible was a challenge to him and his 'weaknesses' weren't really weaknesses of any relevance.
Typical teenage power fantasy, I know; but even now any time I see some overpowered OC on DeviantArt or somewhere it makes me smirk as I remember the excesses of my friend's character.

Not that I don't have my own characters who had silly moments, especially when I was younger. But I always think they've been much more restrained by comparison.