Advice/Help help me add substance to my pokemon ocs?!

[solar sailor]

omg okay so this is stupid but; i’m really struggling to add more backstory to my trio of pokémon ocs? they’re three sisters who are each mono trainers of a specific type each: dark, ghost, and poison respectively. i’m struggling to add to their characters in some ways though! read below for what i have so far

morana: she’s my favorite; my dark-type mono trainer and also my most developed! you can visit her toyhouse page here. her pokémon team is umbreon, absol, obstagoon, liepard, zoroark, and hydreigon. she’s a quiet, reserved girl that has trouble with confrontation and prefers to keep to herself for the most part. i kind of struggle with what kind of job she’d have because she’s so socially awkward? she’s the youngest of her and her sisters. also, i ship her with ingo from pokémon black/white… so any ideas on how to write their relationship would be appreciated too!

guinevere: my ghost-type mono trainer girlie! her toyhouse page is here, but there’s basically nothing on it right now other than some old art lol. her pokémon team is banette, mismagius, gengar, chandelure, dragapult, and phantump. even so, i have a little bit of ideas! she runs a seamstressing business in hammerlocke that is kind of like a small battle facility, called the “battle bootique”. (would love some ideas on how to have her run this place?!) she loves to create unique outfits for trainers and is responsible for created her own and both of her sisters’ pokémon themed outfits! for this reason, she is good friends with elesa from unova. personality wise she is much more mature than her sisters are. she gained an ability when she was a child where she became able to talk to ghosts, and because of this, she can act kind of creepy without meaning to sometimes? she’s still extremely kind for the most part though. she’s the eldest of the three sisters. as for shipping her… i kind of don’t know who with!!! contenders include: avery, piers, grimsley, or leon maybe??? up for ideas!!!

belladonna: she’s my poison-type mono trainer! her toyhouse page is here; only thing on it for the most part is placeholder and some old art though. her pokémon team is seviper, arbok, crobat, dragalge, toxtricity (low key), and scolipede. she tries to be nice, but often comes of a lot meaner than she means to. she doesn’t have much of a filter on her mouth, has a sharp tongue, can be argumentative, and has a tendency to make fun of people’s mistakes. think of her as having a toxic personality type based off of her pokémon typing? but not too bad, because she doesn’t really intend to hurt anyone. for her job, i had a loose idea that maybe she brews potions? since poison is often used as antidotes for things! but i’d like to try and build off of that somehow? she is the middle child. as for shipping, i strongly ship her with raihan! she’s got a stupid massive crush on him and i think their chaotic personalities would be an entertaining match

COLLECTIVELY: these three girls had severely neglectful parents growing up. they were always gone, always traveling for “work” and never being actual parents to their kids. it was triggered by their parents not liking the more stereotypically “creepy” pokemon types; so it started when guinevere developed her ability to communicate with ghosts and her affinity for ghost type pokémon. it only got worse as belladonna started liking poison types. morana was their last attempt at raising what they would have referred to as a “normal” child, but this failed when her eevee (given to her by her parents) evolved into umbreon, sparking her love for dark types.

so eventually, when guinevere was 17, their parents stopped coming back. i had written that they moved to kalos, but this is honestly up in the air. it could be whatever region that makes sense. i kind of wanted them to maybe get involved in some shady business like building their own team or something similar with the goal in mind of trying to eradicate certain types of pokémon such as dark, ghost, and poison types?

i’m open to basically any ideas! also i’m not shy of angst, so don’t be afraid to hit me with much darker themes! i prefer them!

thank you so much if you’ve read this far

 

[nerdy tangents]

So I think your biggest issue seems to be going in reverse with their personalities.

Basically assuming because they have certain types of pokemon they must have certain types of personalities.

In reality the neglect they faced from their parents would likely have resulted in the personalities you described.

The eldest girl became the parent and has dedicated herself to caring for her sisters to the exclusion of all else.

So her arc throughout the story is to learn to live for herself not just give all her emotional energy and time to supporting her sisters,


The youngest I think her avoiding conflict stems from being raised to be a people pleaser by her toxic parents. She was taught that love is transactional, in order to get it you have to be what the other person wants you to be. As such she also has a hard time defining herself because she basically just forces herself to be whatever the other person wants to make them happy.

Her eldest sister does her best to counteract this with positive affirmation but she sometimes gets frustrated by baby sisters inability to stand up for herself.

As for job if you want chaos give her a front facing customer service job (ie waitress, working at some sort of retail shop, etc) anything where she has to actually deal with people face to face. It will be her private hell because she has to deal with peoples shitty behavior and entitlement all day.

If you want less drama have her work in a backroom or Pokémon centric job where she doesn’t have to deal with another human being for hours at a time. Maybe something like a daycare or she works in the back of a shop filling orders or something.

As someone who is very conflict avoidant I have had both types of jobs (I tag clothes for a retail store now which is much less stress than working at a front desk of a library. Cuz I don’t talk to anyone I just put a price tag on clothes and someone else puts them on the sales rack.) so think something along those lines.

For her I think don’t focus on romance. Focus on her learning to stand up for herself and set healthy boundaries.

Like yeah I don’t have to be a doormat in order for people to like me. I don’t need to have someone like me to have worth as a person.

Like legit I think of the three she’s probably the one least ready to be in a relationship because it would just compound her own worse qualities.


As for the middle child she is the “problem child” and the “toxic” child specifically because unlike the other two she actually stood up for herself and her siblings. Eldest sister was too busy playing mom and trying to keep things afloat when the actual parents fucked off to wherever. Youngest sister is too much of a people pleaser.

So that means middle sister has to have the backbone to call their parents out on their neglectful BS. Of course the kind of people who drop their kids like a bad phone service the second they don’t get what they want aren’t gonna take any back talk. So she grew up being told she was a poisonous toxic little brat and she just quadrupled down.

Like fine you wanna see me toxic? I will be toxic. You wanna see me be a real nasty piece of work, well congratulations your order is ready assholes.

It’s not that she’s actually a particularly toxic person necessarily she just is very quick to call out shitty behavior in other people. She’s blunt and a little quick to unleash her sharp tongue on people.

She has a hard time letting other people in (possibly including her sisters maybe not). So add that to her liking poison type pokemon and people think she’s a really shitty person.

But if you aren’t an unrelenting asshole and don’t mind some sharp comments she’s actually a good friend. She advocates for you and herself and makes sure no one is taking advantage of you (her role with her sisters).

I think her arc should be to learn that you don’t always have to strike first. Sometimes giving people the benefit of the doubt can lead to rewarding friendships/relationships.


Just some advice from someone who has a real life toxic grandma and whose aunts/mother are some variation of the above personality types.

Toxic parents will really fuck you up and I think sometimes people underestimate how much you can build on that when writing stories.

 

[solar sailor]

So I think your biggest issue seems to be going in reverse with their personalities.

Basically assuming because they have certain types of pokemon they must have certain types of personalities.

In reality the neglect they faced from their parents would likely have resulted in the personalities you described.

The eldest girl became the parent and has dedicated herself to caring for her sisters to the exclusion of all else.

So her arc throughout the story is to learn to live for herself not just give all her emotional energy and time to supporting her sisters,


The youngest I think her avoiding conflict stems from being raised to be a people pleaser by her toxic parents. She was taught that love is transactional, in order to get it you have to be what the other person wants you to be. As such she also has a hard time defining herself because she basically just forces herself to be whatever the other person wants to make them happy.

Her eldest sister does her best to counteract this with positive affirmation but she sometimes gets frustrated by baby sisters inability to stand up for herself.

As for job if you want chaos give her a front facing customer service job (ie waitress, working at some sort of retail shop, etc) anything where she has to actually deal with people face to face. It will be her private hell because she has to deal with peoples shitty behavior and entitlement all day.

If you want less drama have her work in a backroom or Pokémon centric job where she doesn’t have to deal with another human being for hours at a time. Maybe something like a daycare or she works in the back of a shop filling orders or something.

As someone who is very conflict avoidant I have had both types of jobs (I tag clothes for a retail store now which is much less stress than working at a front desk of a library. Cuz I don’t talk to anyone I just put a price tag on clothes and someone else puts them on the sales rack.) so think something along those lines.

For her I think don’t focus on romance. Focus on her learning to stand up for herself and set healthy boundaries.

Like yeah I don’t have to be a doormat in order for people to like me. I don’t need to have someone like me to have worth as a person.

Like legit I think of the three she’s probably the one least ready to be in a relationship because it would just compound her own worse qualities.


As for the middle child she is the “problem child” and the “toxic” child specifically because unlike the other two she actually stood up for herself and her siblings. Eldest sister was too busy playing mom and trying to keep things afloat when the actual parents fucked off to wherever. Youngest sister is too much of a people pleaser.

So that means middle sister has to have the backbone to call their parents out on their neglectful BS. Of course the kind of people who drop their kids like a bad phone service the second they don’t get what they want aren’t gonna take any back talk. So she grew up being told she was a poisonous toxic little brat and she just quadrupled down.

Like fine you wanna see me toxic? I will be toxic. You wanna see me be a real nasty piece of work, well congratulations your order is ready assholes.

It’s not that she’s actually a particularly toxic person necessarily she just is very quick to call out shitty behavior in other people. She’s blunt and a little quick to unleash her sharp tongue on people.

She has a hard time letting other people in (possibly including her sisters maybe not). So add that to her liking poison type pokemon and people think she’s a really shitty person.

But if you aren’t an unrelenting asshole and don’t mind some sharp comments she’s actually a good friend. She advocates for you and herself and makes sure no one is taking advantage of you (her role with her sisters).

I think her arc should be to learn that you don’t always have to strike first. Sometimes giving people the benefit of the doubt can lead to rewarding friendships/relationships.


Just some advice from someone who has a real life toxic grandma and whose aunts/mother are some variation of the above personality types.

Toxic parents will really fuck you up and I think sometimes people underestimate how much you can build on that when writing stories.

thank you for the time you spent to write this out for me!

i like a lot of your points! in a way i was definitely going for some stereotypical stuff; probably pretty obvious based off of some of the things i wrote.

truthfully, yeah, i think that for their parents to be so judgmental about their preferences, they would have had to be shallow people to a degree from the get-go. soooo there would have to be some trauma there anyways from super early on. i felt like in a way they would be relieved when their parents left, but at the same time suspicious because they never really knew what kind of stuff their parents were doing when they were gone anyways?

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so, i like the idea of morana having to deal with people more than she wants to. honestly thought of maybe having her help piers with managing the concerts he performs for team yell at times, but most likely as only a part time sort of thing? feel like she'd end up pretty overwhelmed with having to deal with team yell so much lol. maybe having her work more consistently in something where she doesn't have to be the center of attention would be better for her?
oh also, i should have noted this; i make basically all of my ocs to ship with canon characters because i'm just... like that lol. however it's really only something i do for fun and it rarely matters much to my characters' stories! soooo basically morana could easily be written to have nothing to do with ingo but also i write her to ship with him because it's fun for me lol.

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belladonna being the type of person to call people out is basically exactly what i was going for. she tends to argue with morana a lot just because their personalities clash quite a bit (ex. loud vs quiet), but it's rarely more than harmless bickering that guinevere shuts down. they do all get along and love each other, so regardless, belladonna is super protective of her sisters too so calling out her parents is definitely something she'd do. she doesn't make friends because of her more volatile behavior but she does cherish friends she has even if she can hurt their feelings without meaning to.

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i guess the bigger conflict thing i had in mind kind of goes as follows:

their parents had created a sort of villain team of their own that acts under the guise of “protecting” certain types of darker pokémon like ghost-types, dark-types, and poison-types, when really, they want to eradicate them. this is fueled mainly by how their daughters turned out. they already didn't like where their kids were going personality wise growing up, but even more so when they developed teams of pokémon that they hated. so, they want to hit their daughters where it hurts, and the rest of the world too.
it’s sort of similar to how team rocket steals pokémon but instead of for world domination, it’s to cause mass extinction of certain species. in a way it’s also similar to team magma wanting to expand the land for humans, but the sole purpose is just because they don’t like certain pokémon and they feel like the world is threatened by them (more so themselves, they’re projecting).
so for this reason, they lie to specific types of trainers to gain their trust so that they can gain easy access to their pokémon teams, and for those who won’t agree, they steal pokémon by force.

obviously their family actually hates ghost, dark, and poison types so they wouldn’t use them, right? which would make their organization look a bit strange to an outsider if they were actively using pokémon vastly different.
sooooo nobody has actually seen the boss’ pokémon teams.
they dress in disguises that make them look as if they are for the pokémon they’re stealing but have other outfits that match their true typings that they prefer to use. i haven't decided which types those are quite yet.