God. Yes. Yes I do. I have a really bad ( good, awesome ) habit of making characters "as a joke" and then thinking about them way too much and then they're a main, fully fleshed guy. I'll try to list the guys I remember:

• Stanford, oh, dear Stanford, he was supposed to die for good after One episode but then we got too attached to him. It was too tragic. He deserves a second chance. A chance to really live!

• Abel was also a joke character, it took a while before really finding their footing. It went from "Second Clone" to "Well Second sucks so the joke is that Second's Evil Clone is a nice guy" and then it really clicked when the transhumanism angle came in. And when I realized "No this guy's just as fucked up as Second just in a different way" is when I got really attached. Also yes, they started as a Splatoon OC.

• Actually most of my "clone" characters ended up that way. Oswald was Oliver's evil clone before he became his own guy, and Miller was Miles'. This is a recurring thing because it was a common thing that happened back in the Splatoon roleplay days.

• Speaking of, Miles was supposed to be just a comic relief rival character for Max. He was supposed to be funny and pathetic and that's it. ...And he kind of still is, LOL.

As for ships: Did you know Deadwaters was supposed to be Penny x Second centric. Did you. And then people started shipping Kimble with Second. And it was downhill from there.

Kamal and George is the most famous example, though, I'd say, since I hadn't even thought about shipping those two until their Miis got together in my Tomodachi Life save.

Honorary mention to Second x Stanford who I really really doubt would ever canonically cross paths and even if they did, it'd probably be too late for them to have anything in the canon timeline, but take up more and more of my thoughts everyday.