OOC (out-of-character)

OOC is a 20-year-old internet convention: anything inside (( )) is author-to-author, meta, outside the fiction. It was built for forum roleplay and it works perfectly in AI companion chat because modern LLMs have seen it in their training data.

Using OOC lets you direct the scene without breaking immersion. If the model has your character do something weird, you can (( back up, my character would never do that, reset to before that )) without the in-character narrative being contaminated by your correction.

Most models handle OOC cleanly if you establish it at the start of the roleplay. Some apps (Janitor.AI, SpicyChat) assume you know it already; mainstream apps (Candy.ai) don't surface it but still respond to it correctly.