[Discussion] Character Birthdays

Do you give your original characters birthdays, or is that something you don't care about?

If so, when are some of your characters birthdays?

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Oh my god, okay, I'm back now. I'm going to edit in all my ocs birthdays in the op so I don't have to keep posting in the thread LMFAO.

So, for me, birthdays are just a little extra information for them so they are I guess, "real fictional people" if that makes sense? When picking birthdays, I'm That Guy I try to find Dates of Significance rather than astrology. But, most of them ended up being release dates for very specific series that have to do with the animal my ocs dna is tampered with. Except for one very small exception.

I don't have a birthday for all my characters, but I guess I'll just list all the ones I posted in my oc thread.

Most of these are deliberately certain release dates of episodes in tv shows or premiere dates of movies in theaters, but some are Animal Appreciation Days. Only one of them is because of astrology.

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For my penguin chimera oc, Kaiser, his birthday is 1/12. This is when the movie Surf's Up 2 Wave Mania came out. A movie about surfing penguins.

For my panda oc, Yinlong, I gave them the birthday of 9/17, which is international red panda day since I couldn't find anything for regular pandas.

For my rabbit twin ocs, Nousagi and Kouneko, I gave the two of them the birthday 8/28, which is the day Sailor Moon first aired in the USA. For context on this, the main character usagi, her names means "rabbit" in Japanese. So, if anything, it's a callback to these characters being rabbits themselves.

My gazelle oc, Parisa, is the only one that is deliberately because of astrology. I made her birthday 6/4, which is a Gemini sign. I never really think much about astrology for birthdays, but this character had to be a Gemini, in my opinion.

For my hawk oc, Robin, he's a reference and expy of Robin Hood in every way from his last name (Truand means "hoodlum" in French) to even being an archer, so I made his birthday 11/21, which is the release date of the 2018 Robin Hood film.

For my falcon oc, Raven, I made his birthday 10/25, which is when the Simpsons episodes with The Raven poem aired. Raven isn't a reference to Edgar Allen Poe or anything like that, I just wanted to have a birthday that relates to his name.

For my jackal twin ocs, Loba and Aega, I made their birthday 3/7, which is when that Arthur episode aired that had that Jekyll and Hyde song. My oc, Loba, has an extremely Jekyll and Hyde personality. Not good vs evil personality, or anything, but sweet and bitter instead, and a lot of what I put into her is Jekyll and Hyde, so I decided I really wanted to make these twin's birthday that very specific reference.

For my scorpion (crocodile brain) oc, Liath, I made its birthday 5/29 because it is National Alligator Day. Its sister has an alligator brain center, so I figured, "why not make Liath's birthday National Alligator Day" because why not?

For my frog porcupine oc, Garran, their birthday is 7/2, which is porcupine appreciation day. I know that's a little silly that I even looked that up, but I just like doing birthdays that are (animal) appreciation days.

For my lynx, snake oc, Naofa, I made its birthday 2/16 because, alright this one is extremely specific, and taken straight from Wikipedia, but it's when the limited edition of volume nine of the Jormungand series came out. TL;DR Naofa is basically Jormungandr, so I wanted its birthday to reference that.

I'm not going to go over the rest of the others in my oc thread, because I have a lot. Like, 36 Genshin ocs OOPS lol, so I'm stopping here, but.

Basically: all my ocs have birthdays that are either very specific publication dates of very specific manga, airdates of specific episodes in cartoons or anime, or animal appreciation days that relate back to the animal they partially are. It's just what I like to do with my characters, I guess. But, if anyone were to ask me I wouldn't give them the whole shebang just "it's a reference to something."

Today (April 27th) is one of my char's bday actually omg!! Happy bday Jordie!

Other than them, I've given s birthday to most of them.

- Debbie - April 1st
- Miranda - December 3rd
- Maritza - May 15th

I know Bruno's bday is somewhere between January 1st and March 31st bc he's older than Debbie. I'm inclined to believe it's on March but I haven't decided anything. I don't think I ever specified Carmen's.

Cubeth said:

Today (April 27th) is one of my char's bday actually omg!! Happy bday Jordie!

Other than them, I've given s birthday to most of them.

- Debbie - April 1st
- Miranda - December 3rd
- Maritza - May 15th

I know Bruno's bday is somewhere between January 1st and March 31st bc he's older than Debbie. I'm inclined to believe it's on March but I haven't decided anything. I don't think I ever specified Carmen's.

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What a coincidence my main oc's birthday is today, too.
I didn't know that April 27th was such a common oc birthday. Although, I chose 4/27 for mine for a very specific reason, lol.

Anyway, all my characters have birthdays except ones I haven't assigned yet and they're all listed in my oc thread, but I'll edit their birthdays in later when I feel like it.

I have data on birthdays, but whether it actually comes into play (besides for measuring how old one character is) probably would depend on plot. Though, my calendar system is something I made myself and isn't based off of the one we use in the real world.

Birthdays aren't something I tend to consider important for the most part. They're usually not given for any reason but what makes logical sense. I wanted Casey to be turning 16 during or just after his journey, as one of the oldest characters in the cast. Since we started on May 21, I set his birthday a little ways out on June 9. Marie's is still nebulous- I don't even remember if I settled on a date. I think her birthday is in August? Late summer/early fall seems right. Not past September 17 though, because she's on her journey starting then. Sorley's had logic applied to theirs that no longer stands because I chose to age them up at one point after doing a bunch of narrowing down of their birthday, but I'm not going to change it at this point lmao. Their birthday is somewhere between May 1 and May 20. Maybe they don't even know. They're like that.

Of all my characters- and there are many- I think they are the only ones that have anything approaching set birthdays lmao. It is what it is.

Palamon said:

What a coincidence my main oc's birthday is today, too.
I didn't know that April 27th was such a common oc birthday. Although, I chose 4/27 for mine for a very specific reason, lol.

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I don't think I had a reason to have it be that day tbf. I don't believe in astrology personally, so I just picked a random date. Really big coincidence tho lmao

tbh I just pick a random date. Birthdays aren't really significant to my characters' information.

Cubeth said:

I don't think I had a reason to have it be that day tbf. I don't believe in astrology personally, so I just picked a random date. Really big coincidence tho lmao

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Lmfao, yeah, coincidence.

But, for me, I picked it because 4/27 is national hyena appreciation day, not about astrology or anything. Astrology isn't something I even think about when it comes to character's birthdays.

I rarely consider my characters, canon if not already given or original, birthdays as I usually don't have it come up. My FE3H fic though there's one original character where while I don't have the exact day her birthday is in the month of November. There's two characters that are expecting, so for that one I already pin down the exact month and day their baby will be born as that's where the story will end at.

I generally have a vague idea of when a character was born but I don't bother with a specific unless it's relevant.

Birthdays... that's something I've more or less decided for a few characters. In general terms I don't worry much about it because in their general lives, being born one day or week or another doesn't make much difference. Instead I tend to think of their general age range (so sometimes, my characters are not even "10 yr old" but rather, say, "in the age range of 10~|5").

That said, there's a few characters with definitive birthdates in my shown work so far.

Ravir Eisenhorth, the character I submitted to Rise to the Top, is born Nov 17. The intended rival I was planning for his solo posts, Talea Covarrubias, is born Mar 13. Ravir's younger brother Thom, who is a character in some pastebin works and drafts of mine, is born Aug 4. Of my Pokémon characters, Taverna, the Salamence in A Good Year to Rawr, is hatched Feb 4, though it's highly unlikely he even knows this given he's a fully wild Pokémon. Shahinne, my Starly/Staraptor RP character, is hatched Jul 24, and Maekrite, a Nidoran male and another of my RP characters, is born Nov 25. For pretty much everyone else, there's no defined birth date more like a range.

All of my characters have birthdays and depending on each month, I add a little touch of astrology and Zodiac into them. How I see it is making each character I create unique and different. Also, with me doing that, I always have an idea of how to evolve the characters and how each one of them would rival against.