Creators of Tapas what where the OH NO moments for you?

[Lady_T_Musings]

I'd have to say mine was forgetting about the importance of Link-Bands in my story as they serve pretty much the same purpose as a smartphone do these days, so instead of a character going to a computer lab to look up something they'd just use their link and I was like...This is super convenient Lady and you designed them. USE THEM PLS. Also, remember where everyone's band is placed for the day. yeah, they can be changed, and not even all folks wear them on their arms (and they are super customizable) but I needed to think of them like watches, most folks don't change the location of a watch multiple times a day, or in my case, every panel DX.

[darthmongoose]

I have another Oh No moment related to darthmongoose as well : P

Oh no, this thread is now...
"Raise your hand if you've personally had your webcomic victimised by Kate Holden."

Sorry! But I hope it was ultimately useful!

[nathanKmcwilliams]

@darthmongoose raises hand. (Just kidding XD your review was exactly what I needed to push me further)

---

My first OH NO moment was actually my own fault. Mostly it was that I started my comic in Pixel-art and then realized I was making it way harder on myself for 25 episodes. I changed styles, twice after and now I'm redrawing the first 30 pages (VERRY SLOWLY. Taking my time with it.)

Second OH NO moment. Made some story decisions, impromptu, and while I'm happy with them, I also realize that I made some continuity errors back when I cut some pages from the first draft. SO...that's the other reason for the redraw, it's also a patch to fix some of the glitches XD.

[ninjashira]

Ahaha yeah definitely don't apologize! After having that pointed out to me, it absolutely helped me make my story better. And it wasn't even like I had to redraw anything, just rework some rough thumbnails and rewrite some scenes. And once I rewrote one part, it influenced another scene, and another, and I added more pages, and it's honestly so much better now than it was in my initial draft. So thank you!!

[djourner]

I haven't had an 'oh no' moment in my current version of JTA.
But i had a big one in the first version I wrote.

I always like first person perspective as i tend to find more intimate to the characters... In one of the old version's chapter I actually started the chapter with one character narrating and ended with another one.
When a chapter is too big (mine usually go over the 10pages mark) i tend to take a break in writing, It seems on that particular chapter I took a break when i was writing a sentence for a character that wasn't the narrator, and when I came back i just continued on as if they were.
Luckly i never published it, I passed it onto my mate for test reading and he pointed it out to me xD

I do have a lot of 'oh actually' moments, again, due to the first person perspective sometime i'll begin writing a chapter in the perspective of one character only to find out it would have made it more interesting to have it done from another character's perspective.
That has happened to the current version of my story, but normally i don't mind those, it's just a natural realization and it makes sense to switch, even if I do have to rewrite over 10 pages sometimes, it's for the sake of giving the reader the most fun and engaging experience.

[migxmeg]

Mine was when we first started getting comments and the majority of them were hating on one of the main characters. Mixed in with excitement about getting engagement was this feeling of dread that no one would ever be interested in reading a story where the point is that this awesome girl that we like off the bat ends up with this sketchy guy that we don't trust.

Now that it's 6 months later I have learned to trust that Mig's version of the story is going to be more interesting than whatever I would have cooked up so I try to chill when this character does yet another dumb thing. It's helpful to listen to feedback but it's not a good idea to change the story based on comments.

[juliabbastos32]

when you see a mistake after post a chapter

[crowstories]

I think for me it was the realization that I would be stringing my early followers along for MONTHS before getting to a turning point at which half of them are likely to lose interest. I don't think this will be such a problem for people who get there late enough to read straight through to that point, but this is my first comic, so I underestimated the effects of webcomic time for people who are reading each episode as it's published.

I added a tag to clarify that this will be a thing, in case people actually read those, but then I run the risk of annoying people who find it specifically because of that tag.... because subverting a genre 3/4 of the way through a story is probably a bit of an "oh no," as well. Comic book pacing is just different from what I'm used to writing.

[Pony_wearing_a_hat]

One of the first pieces of feedback I got mentioned that it "could be triggering to abuse victims" I then immediately added a warning in the description and moved on. Util I went through the following though stream:

"Wait... don't I have a moment written out for way down the line in the story where a character casually mentions suicide? Yeah, that moment that was intended to be grandiosely self deprecating but is now seeming way too blunt and insensitive. Oooooooh.... Sh*t. I have to change this! I'm not Ray Bradbury, and I'm not Rob Zombie either. I don't have the reputation for being brilliant or dark enough for people to take this in stride. F*ck"

So I changed the scene. Instead of mentioning suicide like it's nothing (god, what was I thinking!) I had the character call themselves a loser, in the same tone, after making mention of KYS messages from other people in a much more serious tone. Thank god I changed it.

[alliascompany]

A small one, but I have a character who was taken in by a circus. It was going to emphasize how she was the first circus kid to join by herself without a parent or guardian, and then I remember I forgot that the knife throwing kid didn't have any at all. So now he's no longer an orphan XD.

[Larua1997]

My first webcomic was, naturally, a zombie comic when everyone and their brother was making a zombie comic It took place at a school dance on Valentine's Day, and thus also being winter. So I named it...The Undead of Winter. Get it? The problem is/was, there was an existing and farrrrr superior comic called "Winter Dead" (it is still updating as far as I know).

I ended up at this really neat event called "Webcomics Weekend" that featured tons of webcomickers from the early 2000's. It wasn't the type of event where you could really reserve tables or anything (unless you were a webcomics star ) so I took over a vacated Girl Scouts table and started promoting my crappy comics anyway. I found a dude I had randomly chatted with that day, and waved him over to the table to share my claimed territory. We started talking about our comics, and I was pretty embarrassed to learn he had a long-standing comic called Winter Dead, that was like a bazillion times better than mine. He was totally cool about it and we joked about how our winter zombies took over the table. I still felt bad and did change the name after, and luckily, never finished the webcomic because I outgrew my zombie obsession and the comic sucked anyway.

[Undertaildoof34]

Another OH NO moment was a month after I made my first comic and realized it was utter trash...but hey at least I finished the thing. So I guess the best way to go about oh no's is to see how you can improve or take advantage of the situation. Like with my bad comic. Because I did all that drawing I realized it caused a swift improvement both in storytelling and artwork. It's like this failure is only failure if you don't learn anything. If you learned something from it then it's not a failure is it?

[CytricAcid]

I was too excited to start drawing my comic and thus the first two chapters are out of order chronologically. This isn't terrible, because as of now, chapter 1 has a better hook than "edwin goes to the store and bullies people" in chapter 2, but both are important for setting up the story and character relationships.

aonther big OH NO is that, as an RP first, theres a LOT of things that i took for granted that us RPers knew that just isn't available in comic form. I have to go back and insert a lot of stuff in order to portray things I realize aren't actually mentioned in RP (like why is Edwin in California? how long has he been here? how does he know Pantucci?) as well as certain things that we just didn't RP because it wasn't as interesting or was one sided.

This RP was never intended to become a comic. Part of me is like, "fuck it" and just explain plotholes if they come up, because this was never a story intended to be in this medium, but part of me thinks I should at least try and cover them up if I can see them.

It's a tough learning experience and every time I think about it, I realize there are more things I need to address and go over so the comic people have the same level of knowledge as we did when we RPed these scenes in the first place. It's been a HUGE Oh No moment.

[Undertaildoof34]

Oh, I've done RP's before and yeah I can see how that could happen in RP you just say you and insert buddy are buddies and the dm roles with it. in storytelling, it's much different. you have to come up with why their friends and how it all happened plus when and where. Plus you have to make sure the back story makes sense. So I wish you the best of luck! You know what would be great a forum where people help each other with plot holes...

[Rhonder]

I think my only real "oh no" so far was what happened to my first comic's non-existent "Season 2"

I wrote my first project here to be a short-ish one shot story, but left it with an open-ended cliffhanger(ish?) ending that could either act as a suitable ending point, or lead into a follow up story if I felt like it. The comic took about 21 months to finish, from initial writing to posting the final page on tapas.

Around month 18 or so I felt like the comic was doing really well and I was having a lot of fun with it, so I started hyping myself up to pursue the continuation option after all and create a "Season 2" for the story! I started casually talking about it here on the forums, in replies to comments on my series, in some of the final episode author notes, and even ended the story with a big "End: Season 1" at the bottom of the page as if there was more to come.

Following the ending of my comic I took a bit of a break, I had a large commission project come up that ate a couple of months, spent another month or so after that just chilling, then I sat down to start writing Season 2. I had begun outlining it months before, but I hadn't gotten down to the nitty gritty details or anything yet. And... I quickly realized that I didn't like where it was going and didn't think that it warranted another 1-2 years of my time

The issues were multi-faceted: from the hasty world building decisions that were made to service the specific story from "Season 1" but didn't work as well as I had hoped for a larger world, to the increasingly hard to work with insert characters (the MC was a loose self-insert, and the rest of the main party from season 1 were friend-inserts, season 2 was only going to retain the MC but still), and just realizing that the series didn't really have the long-term potential that I kinda thought it did a few months before.

So I had to kind of haphazardly go leave comments and author's notes on tapas and webtoons explaining that Season 2 wouldn't be happening anymore and to "expect news for a new comic soon!" like a year ago... and my new comic just launched earlier this month lmao. Certainly not the biggest "oh no", but it still wasn't a fun time xD Especially since a lot of my most invested readers had been quite looking forward to "Season 2" since I had been hyping it up for months and then... I just didn't deliver anything beyond some inktober art of the new cast in 2019 x_x

[Undertaildoof34]

Yeah, I can see how that lead up to where it's all like oh wait trigger warning. But I don't entirely see it being a bad thing to ad some kind of trama to a character. I feel it's the level you go into depth with it. My story involves magic warfare and a child getting involved in said warfare. I want to include in the story how violence can affect people. Via the main character going from a friendly little kid to a character hardened from war. Via sometimes I'm thinking that there triggered by certain things that normally would be hostile on the battlefield versus not being on the battlefield and say the sound of a kettle screaming could be mistaken for a child screaming or the sound of incoming enemy wizard spells. There aren't any panic attacks in the current manuscript on tapas.
But I plan on publishing and I'm going to include this in the published version. One thing I thought to be a theme through the story is that someone who is strong is someone who can go through trauma and still come out ok. I thought that would make a good main character that young adults and teenagers could relate to. SO yeah.

[Pony_wearing_a_hat]

Oh he's still traumatized as all hell, he just explains it in a more sensitive way, in the part of the speech where he's letting himself be sad instead of later when he starts trying to laugh himself off. I absolutely think that difficult subjects should be in web fiction, I just think I handled it poorly in the first draft.

basically he originally claimed only semi-seriously that he would kill himself one day (which is not true) but now he mentions KYS threats and death threats and implies that he agrees with them on some level.

Also your depicting ptsd is very important, good on you for doing so.

[Undertaildoof34]

Oh i see! and yes difficult subjects in fiction. I kind of hate how some shows are all like "oh we throw this kid into stressful situations have them fight a war and there totally fine. No trauma here. we just want that pg friendly rating." I hate that. It makes the character feel like semi alive clay. Now a recent cartoon that actually addressed it to where it was still friendly but enough for an older audience to know what was happening is last kid's on earth. Its about these kids stuck in a monster/ zombie apocalypse. I like how they did the main character Jack. Jack in the beginning of the story is shown as an orphain who's stuck in a not so great family. He is also shown going through crazy measures to fix a walkie talky so he can check if his friend Quint is still alive. (Quint is and the two join up.) But through the apocalypse the main character and his friend meet two other survivors. Through the story it showed how Jack goes through crazy situations to make sure the team is happy. Typically referring to the group as one big happy family. This is a big showing of how despite the situation Jack is happy because he finally has a family. Thus every time one of the other characters talk about the hope of the apocalypse ending and things going back to normal. Like the kids going back to their families. Jack get's scared and tries to desperately change the subject. Because unlike the other characters Jack didn't like how things were before the apocalypse.(note the show is on Netflix.)

[Pony_wearing_a_hat]

I was not expecting to find another Last Kids on Earth fan today. I freaking loved that show so much I blew all the money I had on the books.

[Undertaildoof34]

Gasp! I LOVE That show! I ain't got the money though for the books because I'm paying for an editor. But alas someday I'm going to have every single one of those books! /owo/
Also great to meet another creator who agrees on addressing trauma in stories.