Anybody else ever have trouble reworking CRAUs into something new?

For me it just goes like:

>miss old CRAU
>everyone has moved on and bringing them out to new people would require a bunch of context and open you up to heavy judgment because of what happened in-game and how the character changed
>attempt to turn the CRAU into an OC!

But the next thing I know, the character has taken on a life of their own and I've had to scrap every element I wanted to play with again.

Take Kumi. As she started to revolve more around the "failed chosen one" angle I made to differentiate her from DDD Retasu while still having that core of "happy ending didn't work out, now depressed and unfulfilled," she became more of a metaphor for gifted child burnout syndrome, and characters and elements I added to her world related to that, such as

another character representing impostor syndrome and a third the people who dealt with low expectations and look at others like "first time?"

And I've thus needed to work on that as a separate verse... and trim out the stuff I missed in the first place.

The string of unrequited pining culminating in the one Most Special Person who's also the least likely person to have ever wanted her no matter what she did, the martyr complex built around knowing for a fact that someone had to suffer and from a moral standpoint it had to be her, the contradiction of an educated mind with an innocent heart leading to the

conclusion that if the sensible solution her brain foresaw came true it must be because she's just not good enough to be special because doesn't true love not care about these things, the in-game events leading her to be okay with strange or off-putting things because she can't be happy for real and isn't her misery the price for other people's happiness?

I had kept the "abusive mentor wore away her self-worth at 15 and got her to unwittingly help with a plot to destroy and remake the world" element, but now even that seems extraneous and a distraction from what this character became.

So now I have an OC whose only real connection to her inspiration is a powerset that's still very different from the original, a name vaguely inspired by the character, and being a depressed baker.

Which is fine, but doesn't solve the problem I made her for.

I haven't found the situation quite as difficult but it is like
> play canon character with childlike wonder who eventually veers into cynical megalomaniac
> in serious situation of game as well as new OCverse, emphasize certain particularly interesting cynical traits

> ...DOES he have the sense of wonder that led his canon self to get bullied and become paranoid in the first place?

I've attempted to repurpose certain canon characters into OCs, though I haven't had the tragedy you ran into

But I have struggled with nailing down what I wanted out of said OC

while not with craus specifically i've definitely let ocs get so far that i'm like, wait, what happened to the concepts i wanted to use at the start,

clasps hands

I struggle to rework CRAU into something new because I'm always like "I DON'T WANT TO BE CAUGHT AND CALLED A CASSANDRA CLAIRE OH NO"

but i've been feeling the urge repeatedly with the current and an old main muse...

You're right that the stigma exists. CC herself got accused of that even when she was writing something new, and so has every fan writer turned pro author. But it mostly seems to come when someone goes pro -- crab bucket mentality, I suspect.

I think it's more accepted in things like RP, and in many cases (mine included) done to avoid the stigma of an AU that's veered far off canon from a game that died years ago where everyone else has grown away from it and moved on.

crab bucket?

If a crab is crawling out of a bucket, every other crab drags it back down into the bucket

tbh if you're wanting advice, my personal solution to "wait, what happened to the thing i was TRYING to do" is to just pare off all the shit i tacked on in the first place and try again until i've figured something out

you don't have to stick with the first pass

sometimes a character takes a few tries to actually realise

Maybe you're right. Or I guess I could just keep what I got as its own thing and start again. /roll flop

Lemme put it this way, Jisu

I've reset Pidonus four times CRAU-wise

Even with OCs, this happens to me too much XD