My hobby: looking at people’s OCs and trying to imagine what conceivable mishap could plausibly have resulted in a scar like that.
any memorable examples?
I don’t want to put any particular artist in a position to be made fun of, but I will observe that, judging by the conditions of their faces, a lot of people’s OCs have an implied background in German-school fencing.
elaborate
Duelling scars are part of Western popular media’s visual lexicon as a shorthand for “this character is badass and probably somewhat villainous”, and a lot of modern artists give their characters duelling scars without knowing what kind of scar it is or where it typically comes from – they just know it’s the kind of scar that edgy badasses tend to have, without knowing why.
In some contexts, this is unremarkable; it doesn’t take a lot of mental gymnastics to explain how a character in a generically medieval European fantasy setting might have gotten jabbed in the face with a smallsword, for example. Conversely, if your character is from, say, present-day Baltimore, the range of possible explanations is much narrower! Being a hobby practitioner of German-school fencing is one of the less implausible ones.
(Well, that, or some other historical martial arts re-creation thing that involves maniacs whacking at each other with live steel and no facial protection, but German-school fencing is by far the most popular.)