riverhippo

The problem I have with separating canon and fan-created content to that degree is it suggests that there is a litmus test to what is considered canon in regards to its quality versus something fan-made. When really, the only qualifying condition something has to meet to be canon is: is it in the show? I like to think MLPFiM is pretty flexible when it comes to it's canon, because the setting of the show is based on characters that were all made by humans projecting into this world. And in that way, I kind of see them the same, not that canon must always yield the possible fanon it encounters, however. I remember when Andy Price and Katy Cook were asked about the comics and if they are canon with the show. They always struggled with the answer because there was no real answer that they determined when they made it, or when they reviewed their stories with people overseeing the MLP story property. They basically said "They are canon if you want them to be" which to me was their way of saying that the world of MLPFiM has enough flexibility to contain most of the creative values people can put into it. I know this begs the discussion of the sacrality of the show allowing outside content to infect it, but it tells the story of the creative value in the show being to the same potential as anything else that could ever be put into it. If the question is "do enough people agree that a particular character is good enough to co-exist with the canon of the show?" it all depends on the society built around such circumstances, like Derpy for instance.

It's purely subjective. In order for it to be even close to an objective discussion about the quality of character in an OC, we would have to not only agree on parameters of what makes an OC good, but then also understand the fullness of an OC's depth and background. And even some of the OCs I have made I have yet to figure out completely, to the same degree that I have yet to discover my full potential as a real human being. But overall I think my answer is that they have the potential to be better than canon characters. It's numbers. Will there ever be an OC in MLPFiM fanon in hundreds of years that is better made than a canon character from a show that only lasted a decade in official creativity? Probably. Most wont, but it's a little unfair to pin all OCs to the standard of not being as good as being official, especially since one could argue all canon characters were technically OC creations anyway. Twilight Sparkle wasn't a character that was found in the ground left to be discovered by animator archaeologists, she too was created from the ground up.