Sometime in April 2020, during the first Covid lockdown here in Aotearoa, I invented an original character for a Dean/OMC fic. His name is Ryan, and I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

Ryan is an Apocalypse World hunter. He was invented for and first appeared in Minutes to Midnight, an angsty slow burn bittersweet S14 fic that may or may not ever be completed and published. I needed someone new and complicated for Dean to fall in love with for the plot and Ryan was born. I wrote a good chunk of this fic, but it was heavy, and I lapsed.

I was finishing WIPs and posting a lot during the first lockdown, but I was also writing new stuff. There's a couple other things I started writing with the intent of wincest endgame but suddenly and inexplicably, Ryan would appear in them and derail my plans.

Sometimes it was the exact same surly, broody Ryan as in Minutes to Midnight. Most of the time he was a little different. Different scars, different personality, different levels of aggression.

But he was always scarred in some way and he always wanted to bone Dean (and vice versa).

So because he kept inserting himself into my fic, I started referring to him as 'fucking Ryan', and it's a fun double entendre. First, he's fucking annoying (that fucking guy), but it's also what Dean wants to be doing, so.

A note from the middle of a post-Carry On fixit I was working on, sometime after I stopped writing Minutes to Midnight:

woops, I'm veering sideways into Dean/OMC territory. Fucking Ryan keeps popping up and wanting to fuck Dean. But it might be easier for Dean to do that with a virtual stranger. It's hard enough to get brothers to fuck much less do that while also giving Dean angsty hangups. I think he'll be freer with someone not Sam.

This was the first time I referred to him as Fucking Ryan.

There was also a post-15x19 fic.

Then there was Scars and Something You Like. I don't know which of the two I have published so far came first, only that Scars was the first I posted, and then, months and months later, I found Something You Like on my hard drive, needing only a tidy, so I posted that, too.

For a little while, I believed that I would never post another version of Ryan after Scars. It seemed weird to have written the same OC (with subtle differences) into two different stories that essentially existed in different universes.

But fuck it. If Chuck can do it, no reason why I shouldn't 🤣

I love this fandom.

ETA: there's now a series based around one of the versions of this character.