Hm, a lot of interesting stuff had showed up of a recent.
Never heard of the OC/TW division before. Interesting. I think I fall mostly on TW side of the divide, crafting characters to fit in with the story, changing them as I see fit and spending
ridiculous amounts of time on world-building rather than character-building.
So here's another thing to consider: are you really sure your character would "never do that"? There are so very many reasons/excuses I can think of for seemingly OOC behavior, but I'll use Minna's own example of Onni from the (fairly) recent pages. When he showed up, people were saying, "Minna wouldn't have Onni act so OOC!" After page 451, they stopped saying it, because she demonstrated that it was a struggle for him to act so OOC.
I would say the better statement would be "character would never do that
unless X". You can always push a character to become a horrid person doing terrible things, and you can always put them thorugh a redemption arc that would make them do a lot of good things, it's just that, like Róisín pointed out, you have to
show the passage where the character changes to accomodate for a new thing they would now do. It also gets the audience used to the "new" version of the character. Makes it change with them, in a way.
Tew way that I've personally found works best for worldbuilding is: take some other author setting, find a barely elaborated upon locale/historical reference and then build the story there. Goal is that the constraints imposed on you by the existing universe should make it easier to work on the elements that your plot/characters actually need. Once you got those necessary setting details, you can start separating your "extended universe" for the originals author's.
Literally how a lot of my stories had started.
Although usually after a while of world-building the original element I started with goes away or is so buried under the rest that (hopefully) it would take a clue from me to figure it out.
Then again, sometimes I design a world I think is original only to realize that I unwittingly took inspiration from things that I like. And I'm not talking small things, like name of the character looking kinda similar if you squint - I mean huge elephants in the room that I should've noticed much earlier. For an example, the thing I'm currently building has, among others, two gods, one of which is a bird-themed mischievious deity of magic and future-sight who has blue as his colour, and the other a crazy berserker war-god with "KILLKILLKILL" mentality and red colour motif. It took me
three weeks to realize that their description is virtually identical to that of two gods from W40K, my second favourite fandom I'm spending
way too much time thinking about.
Ever happened to you?