A weird thing that happened to me on discord once

@JoshRaed JoshRaid
Sat, 19 Aug 2023 06:01:28 +0000

@JoshRaed wrote:

I told this story before but I did it very wrong.

Basically it all started with this person posting something on a writing server about letting a character have minor problems, and I gave an anecdote about my own story, but told it badly so I ended up getting a lot of follow up questions. But once I finally explained it, that this character had struggles with being thought of as a one dimensional stereotype of a gay dude by those around him, I was given advice to stop making this character one-dimensional.

For context, I’d already thought of quite a bit for this character:

He is consistently bullied for being an out gay teen in a place that is not accepting. The people who are nicest to him are a group of people who see him as their pet gay friend, and he accepts this because he’s unused to people who genuinely respect or like him. This is because parents are immature and uncaring, treating him similarly to how the bullies at his school treat him. A big factor in this is that he had a lisp, and everyone assumes it’s an effeminate gay lisp when it’s just a regular lisp. He is embarrassed to speak most of the time and will do so awkwardly and slowly most of the time so he can avoid lisping. Because of the way he’s mistreated, he has developed an affinity for 2000’s scene fashion and culture, and regularly dresses like a 2000’s goth.

I didn’t say any of this, but I didn’t need to because I wasn’t asking for writing advice and hadn’t even written a story yet, and was just answering questions about a thing I had said in a non advice channel. And yet people genuinely assumed I had written. No other details for this character based on the single fact that this character had sexuality based struggles, specifically struggles with being pigeonholed as one dimensional, and everyone assumed that made him one dimensional.

In fact this character isn’t even gay anymore, he’s bisexual now (specifically crushing on a girl even), because it was genuinely that unimportant that he be gay, just that he be perceived as such by those around him.

The rest of this conversation was kinda boring. I explained that the character wasn’t flat, elaborated on his character to them, I think got holes poked in the character writing of the description I gave, and then remembered I didn’t even ask for advice. I don’t remember it that well.

I don’t really have a point to this story. Just that this happened and I wanted to talk about it.

PLEASE DO NOT TRY TO GIVE ME WRITING ADVICE UNDER THIS POST. If I want writing advice i’ll ask for it.