I have. When it comes to Pokémon stories, I have never bothered to read much about canon characters. I've always been more curious about OCs. Probably because my canon is the games and, for the most part, the characters in the games are so one note that even if you are using them as the characters, they still come off as OCs with how they are fleshed out.

And I love it. So when I finally got around to writing a Pokémon story based on a nuzlocke run, it was filled with OCs.

It's a fandom thing though. There are plenty of people in Pokémon who are interested in OCs too or only interested in OCs, as I am. I don't notice a similar interest for me in other fandoms. With them, I'm much more interested in the canon characters. An added OC can steal my heart, but they usually have to start as a secondary or tertiary character. I find I'm less likely to be interested when the OC is the main character for most fandoms.

So if you are interested in Pokémon, look up nuzlocke-based fanfiction. There are some gems of OCs in those!

Like a-mac-and-con I'm also in the Pokémon fandom and thus, it's steeped in OCs and OC-Stand Ins. OC-Stand In is the term for original characters from the franchise that have so little characterization that anyone who uses them has to personally expand them themselves. And thus, are technically an OC.

For me, the point of fanfic is to explore things the original cannot. So this is my norm. Fixing plotholes and enjoying how others fix them in different ways from me.

Good luck on your first OC project!

Whoops I missed this post =')

I don't think I've written for fandoms with a big enough cast to have characters qualify as "obscure" but I've definitely written for characters with less time in the spotlight.

As for OCs, my personal taste when I write is to use OCs when I have a story idea and no one in the canon cast can fill a much needed role. Given that I focus on character psychology, "a story idea" means something centered around at least one canon character, so I never wrote a story with an OC as main character (except if you count reader-insert, which I don't personally like reading but have fun writing for prompts). I did have an OC as second main character just behind a canon character once, though.

So yeah, in short I agree with your "padding the cast" idea, even if I tend to keep my OCs count very low.

That being said, as a reader I'm way more open to stories with lots of OCs.

As the others said, the overall presence of OCs can vary wildly depending of fandom. For example I've dabbled into the Vampire: the Masquerade – Bloodlines fandom, and given that this is a video game with a fully customizable player character, every fic using that player character writes them as an OC. Other fandom, other habits: in Lobotomy Corporation and its sequel Library of Ruina you have lots of characters that have a purely gameplay role and don't appear in the story at all, and they're all customizable, so players tend to get attached to their versions and it translates to lots of OCs in fanart and fanfic. Like, a lot. I think there are more fics for OCs than for any canon character in the Lobotomy Corporation tag of AO3 xD But when I read about games with no custom character, OCs are extremely rare.

Anyway, OCs can be absolutely great and don't deserve their bad reputation =)

I love fics focused on obscure characters and I've written a few. I've been toying with the idea of writing an OC. As pointed out by LeGaosaure and others, certain fandoms definitely lend themselves to it with blank slate player character roles. That said, even a fully customizable player character build will often take a backseat to that NPC who had 3 lines of dialogue that just hit right. XD