That was me and my younger brother I was like 13 or 14 and I always asked for his opinion but he never had anything nice to say about my writing or my drawings and I just stopped caring. 
seriously it’s exactly how it went for me what are the odds?
A school friend of mine. We're not exactly friends, just sharing a class at the time.
I used to draw a panel of my OC, post it on Instagram, and tell the story in the caption. I'm really into fantasy at the time, so my OC doesn't look human. Once in a while, I post some fanarts as well.
Then this classmate of mine came to me and said, "I'd rather you post fanarts instead of your weird characters."
I'm not sure if it's considered a critique, but I was very hurt. Not long after, I archived all my OCs' posts and only posted fanarts. I don't make fantasy stories anymore too.
I knew I shouldn't be bothered by her comment, but I was too young to accept such criticism. Now, I don't care what people think. Although I'm still not doing fantasy.
May I see your character in a dm (if you don't mind sharing)? I love fantasy and sci-fi.
Like you said, I am also not sure if it counts as criticism or just an opinion. But it would hurt anyone young to be told such things. It would be like someone telling you "your dress today looks much better than your usual clothing. I would prefer if you stopped dressing like your usual self."
For an adult it would be like meh whatever but for a teen or a young person it would hurt a lot.
It is a hard situation as it feels like they didn't insult you conciously. But it is good thing that now you don't care about such comments.
Yep, got used to it ages ago. Helps to remember a lot of it comes from people who have never created anything themselves, or people who just want attention and get a kick from insulting people online. Honestly, it's just kind of funny, like the one comment that told me my story was bad and I should have drunk bleach instead to spare people my story. I loved that one because they couldn't even spell bleach properly, lol.
People have kind of backed off, mostly because I don't really care for their insults. Now a days, I mostly get people telling me I should word things differently. I would appreciate the advice if they didn't usually give me alternate wording that is worse, so that's fun.
It's hard at the start, but you get used to it. Skin only thickens after getting hurt so much, and it's easier to get through the rough times when you really love what you do. The only criticism that gets to me now is my mother's but that's universally crippling, lol.
It's a very old art of mine. I have never developed the character further. So the art is not the best, but sure! I'll send it to you through DM. 
Yes, this is true. I was too young. 
Psh.
I'll be totally frank, I've looked at probably at least a hundred comics from people in these forums and dropped 99% in the first few pages/episodes. Mostly from the spam advertising threads all over the place. But yours was the first I subbed to, and I thought it was great. The artwork and comedy are really fantastic (and this was before I even put a toe into romance and had almost zero experience reading BL, lol).
I know you've worked hard for what you have because I've watched it myself, so fuck 'em.
Anyway.
This is less coming from a comic/story world and more game dev, because I think we've all gotten shitty comments on our art, so let me give an anecdote relating to 'making it'.
I've worked in the game industry for some time, but I always wanted to make my own. General consensus in the field is that it's nearly impossible for any solo developer to make a full, large-scale game alone. And most do give up. I spent years building a massive world by hand, modeling every character, every rock, every object. I designed complex AI from the ground up, and all kinds of crazy world mechanics. A deep, rich story. Went out and found people willing to volunteer as voice actors. I lost my two best friends (and the only friends I really had at the time) because they both were so viciously toxic and constantly telling me my game wasn't good, nobody would play it, I'd never finish it, etc.
I made 3k sales in the first month of release and I'm still coasting on that revenue quite some time later. It's become extremely popular in it's genre.
Just because something is hard to do, doesn't mean it cannot be done. Just because the people around you might not believe in you, doesn't mean you should give up on yourself. In the end, the only one you know for certain will always have your back, is yourself. If you choose that, at least.
I have always been very slow when it comes to art progression. I've been drawing seriously for longer than some people in this forum have been alive, and my art still isn't the best. That's after a sea of tutorials, classes, studying, piles of sketch books full of figure drawing and gestures, hands and feet, etc. I have been dissuaded by my entire family from doing art of any sort (they think it's rubbish or just satanism or something). Never could afford any sort of formal schooling and I never even went to high school, lol. I was a homeless kid since 13 to adulthood. I started drawing when I was on the street to peddle it to tourists, true story.
All long-winded, but the point is, there are so many things we do in our lives that other people determine the value of, from our relationships to our economic and social status, to who we love, and even, yes, to our artwork. But passion is what drives the artist-- literary or visual or whatever-- and I'd rather do something I love to do, than something other people prefer me to do.
Are you guys annoyed by criticism sometimes?
I don´t feel like that normally with critique but I feel super annoyed
by the criticism by my singing teacher every week.
It´s pretty much her job to give me critique but 70% of it really
annoys me and doesn´t help me. 30% is good and things
I want to work on.
English pronounciation / Expressing are the most annoying points
for me. 1 I´m working on it and you will always hear that I´m a german
and that´s ok for me and 2 she is probably right about that but it´s really
hard for me to understand how to put it into my singing, especially after
watching her singing the songs with "feelings" and thinking that this is
not how I will act on stage
Not since school days, honestly I’m more bothered by unsolicited “well meaning” advice than harsh criticism 
I know people like that 
One of my best friends always points out the things she doesn´t like but she
does it in a nicer way than the person you mentioned. I told her once, I like
the honesty but that it feels like she doesn´t like anything I do
It sounds like you guys are still friends, which is good. I still have mixed feelings about my former friend. We started talking during the pandemic and she made me feel "valid" as a writer. But then I realized she was a toxic, pick-me girl who only wanted to be around "yes" men. I'm better off without her.
Yes, but just because people are always confusing opinion with critique, confusing who criticism is meant for, and operating under the belief that they're owed an audience.
If someone wants me to improve then they MUST put in the work to show me how they think it can be done. That is a critique. If they don't then it's merely opinion and a creator is within their right to entertain or dismiss it as they see fit.
Criticism is a form of opinion writing isn't meant for a creator. It's meant for the audience. Foolish is the creator who pays attention to it and assholish is the critic who brings it to them.
If someone is going to come up to a creator unsolicited, they should come up correctly. It's rarely done correctly and the end result is a waste of pixels.
Thanks for sharing this experience. I can relate to it since my project is like yours a sort of one person moonshot. I'm creating a website that teaches Japanese using what's called the 'nature method'. In other words it does use translation. Here is a screenshot of the first page to give you an idea.
So far I have created 100 pages and it covers for now about 500 words. My plan is to at least triple that. I made this because this is the kind of resource I wish existed when I started learning Japanese.
General consensus in the field is that it's nearly impossible
Same as in my case. I have even read comments saying it would be something 'undesirable' (I still wonder why lol).
Just because something is hard to do, doesn't mean it cannot be done.
Indeed.
Congrats for what you've achieved. It's sad you lost friends on the way.
I totally get it. For what it's worth, I think your app is a cool idea, and I can easily understand it. You have the hiragana for monkey, with the kanji below (which is cool, because most apps don't teach kanji at all) and I think katakana for the banana?
Yeah, one thing I've come to realize is that the people most likely to put you down or try and dissuade you, are often the people who either couldn't go through with something themselves or have some other sort of confidence issue and they're just projecting out of spite.
Once you develop a style which is "different" from the mainstream you can expect that the audience checking out your art is always going to be very polarized. My style looking the way it does has always brought unwanted critisism no one has asked for. For about decade and half I was received very mixed feedback. People who don't wanna hate mostly appreciate the huge amount of work I put into my drawing and just go with they don't like the style so much which is fine.
There was one incident which has hurt me for a long time and I even thought of canceling myself as an artist lol There was an anthology of comics and I happened to be picked to so the cover. I was glad that I'd be basically the "face" for the book and put back then as much effort as I could. NONE of the covers before me got basically only negative comments. Esp one comment sticked out from the crowd where the guy mentioned that children in pre-school draw probably better than me. I felt really hurt. I knew who were those people behind this. I wrote a private message and got back basically a statement that everything I do is bad
It's a memory which sticks to me for years now and has still very bitter effect on me. It hurts always the most if you put your heart and soul into something, feel kinda proud and then you get smacked by people like that.
I use to get extremely harsh criticism, I realize I have a color blindness between subtle reds and greens. So people unintentionally would criticize my use of it. I didn't think it'd be just me until 3-4 years ago.
When I was a teenager, my art would be placed on a Snark website, where people would often point, laugh and make fun of my work at the time due to how my anatomy was since I was still trying to teach myself on how to draw bodies properly. My characters were colored drastically and I'd often use bold colors because it makes it easier for me to differentiate between characters n such. My writing wasn't /bad/ per say, but it was definitely something a teenager would do. But more often than not back then I was told, "Your art will never go anywhere, you suck, why are you so bad at XYZ", recently the harsh criticism I've gained is "Why are you so bad at backgrounds" in the middle of a call of my own comic discord, and it was someone legitimately shaming me out of anger and what felt like jealousy.
I´m really sorry to read. That´s really mean.
I don´t know how old you are now but I´m 47 and I had zero anatomy knowledge when
I was 40 and then started learning every day and I have been doing that for 7 years now
and it´s still really hard for me. It just takes a lot of time and anatomy, balanced / dynamic
figures is not easy