Hey! Don't think I'm hating on you Hamsterdude, I will just keep my comment simple. PLEASE KEEP THE CONTENT SAFE FOR ALL AUDIENCES. In other posts you have described very grotesque and inappropriate stories. So...if you are making a jerk character don't take things too far and listen if your audience tells you that you are being inappropriate because you seem to have trouble with boundaries. That is not hate, people want to help you. Good luck, I wish you are feeling better.
I kinda of disagree with keep it safe for all audiences. He should be aware of what audience he is trying to appeal to. If he is trying to appeal to people who like dark fiction disturbing content is a given (as long as it follows community guide lines). If its for people looking for a shonen action romp, content has to be turned down. He should figure out who his comic is trying to appeal to before he writes.
That's just my 2 cents.
Isn't he trying to make a comic about hamsters though? That might be easy for children to stumble upon who can't really judge such works well enough yet.
OH MY GOSH another Ashita no Joe reference!! I love this place!!!
I stopped drawing because two people on a Discord chat made fun of my hamster drawings.
I posted about it here, and some person said "There's two types of people in the world: Those with talent and those without it. And hamster dude, I certainly, without a doubt, can clearly see that you're the type of person with no talent."
I do imagine lots of cool stuff in my head though. I'd be a great choreographer or director or something. I'm more motivated to draw, too!
The more this goes on the more I wonder if this isn't just a huge troll trying to hype up your comic/novel at this point.
Each reply is more out there than the last.
I'm not trying to hype up my comic/novel.
I'm a really scared and anxious person. This always happens and stuff. I'm not trolling! My ex-girlfriend really did say that stuff! She started talking to me last year but I made a mistake and now she doesn't talk to me anymore. It is all real and stuff and people always make fun of my work so I'm not trying to hype up my comic/novel cuz I know it won't work anyways.
Edit: fine I edited out the stuff I said in my last post. I really wanted help with how to deal with that, though. But I don't want people to think I'm a huge troll or whatever.
Alright. I said I wasn't gonna get into any of this anymore, and it looks like I failed on that.
So let me cut to the chase.
Please, stay on topic.
I've been trying to go over what you want out of your story, and I had to legit copy&paste before CUTTING OUT a lot of your replies in order to understand what you were getting at. And a lot of the stuff I omitted dealt with your personal business.
I do not want to know about your personal business.
I am a stranger on the internet who is not close to you. I shouldn't be hearing about what happened between your ex-friends, your ex-girlfriend, nor should I be hearing any of the personal business you give about those people.
The stuff you said about your mother should be kept PRIVATE.
You're giving way too much information, and you're kinda lucky that a lot of the people here are telling you this and not being outright hurtful.
That being said, let's also get to another thing:
I can't tell if you're blurring the lines between fiction and reality or not.
Look. I'm gonna be honest. I have made stories that have been loosely based on my own experiences and feelings. I have made characters that represented a part of myself or a part of the people I've known. But never have I:
A) Made it an obvious representation of myself or of the people I've known.
B) Told anyone that it was based on people I know or me.
The key word is "loosely".
Because I know at the end of it, none of what I write will ever represent or speak about myself or the people I know. There may be feelings there, but that's it.
You, on the other hand, are claiming to make yourself into the main character, people you know into the main character. You can't be doing that -- it makes it harder for you to take criticism, and quite frankly, you'll be giving out information some of these people don't want given out. You're still not understanding the idea of "boundaries".
Now, to answer your question -- Yes, you can make a MC that's a jerk.
But your problem is that you're not making a story. You're essentially making an auto-biography and oversharing a lot of stuff you shouldn't be sharing. That's my thing. There's a time and place to do so, but for what you're going for, I don't need all of that information.
@Freemints30 hey, I totally get your point and I would NORMALLY agree, but I'm giving that advice specifically to this user because of some posts he has written in the past...I really don't want to describe, but his posts have been blocked by the de administrator because they are disturbing (yes, they were that bad). I'm not against violence, darkness, and wickedness, This specific user has a trouble understanding where the limits are and are, and is worrying that he thinks that help is hate. That's why I encourage him to listen to the audience when they tell him he has gone too far because he doesn't get it.
@amortelito You're wrong :x I'm sorry about that. Like I said in the thread that got closed, I did not want to write the disturbing story at all. I was confused when the person said I could write a doujin about her, and people somewhere told me that a doujin means something sexual. And I told her that I hated writing her the messed up story, but I forced myself to even though it scarred me for life cuz I thought the reason she was mad at me was cuz of the doujin thing. It was a misunderstanding. I don't wanna be offtopic but I wanted to clarify.
You
You're missing the point.
You didn't HAVE to write that stuff about her―you could've done ANYTHING else and it still would've been a doujin bc doujin are the same as fanfiction. You should've researched this before making that, istg. Doujin CAN be perverted, but you aren't forced to write shit like that.
Yea it's funny, I mean as you know, Wattpad hadn't always had the discourse. I used to be on here a lot more.
Anyway, as for the topic at hand, oui it depend on how you approach it. I'm in the middle of trying to draw my comic myself for the first time, and my character is basically a vampire.
What it depends on is how such jerkiness is handled.
A good writer/artist will make even a serial killer compelling, but it doesn't mean they'll make them likeable. Is this the question, as I'm understanding it?
I'd just like to say if a mod is looking, it'd be nice if you closed this topic. I got my answer and its de-railing sometimes. Partly from my mental issues I think. I'm sorry for making yet another topic that should be locked. I'll try my best not to do it again!
I kept wanting to delete this topic, but I like looking at some of the replies here, especially the encouraging ones with Ashita no Joe references.
a final word of advice...
all i'm getting out of your story is just you venting out your thoughts and feelings (which is fine)
while very closely following Real Life people who used to be your friends/best friends/enemies/etc
one scene they are supposedly even "celebrating" the death of the main character
making THEM look malicious, even if that wasn't your intention.
you keep repeating you're struggling a lot with friendship and heartbreak and confusion.
This story, the way it is now, is not gonna win you any more friends.
if anything, it'll only make the people you cared about even more upset.
Do not get too attached or emotionally invested in fictional work.
You cannot truly move on with your life otherwise.
please sit down and reflect on this very personal story of yours.
what are you hoping to get out of this? entertainment? new friendships? or just sympathy?
perhaps it's best to keep this kind of work something private.
and think up something new, something that has nothing to do with people you knew or things you went through. and write it down instead.
Put adorable hamsters and make them interesting in their own right.
And please, for your own safety.
read over your post at least once before sharing.
People on the internet are quite mean and like @Jenny-Toons said, you're quite lucky the people over here are very kind and patient.
That is all
GOOD LUCK
AND TAKE IT EASY!!
I don't know if I should add to this, but this is more about the innicial post and I haven't seen it mentioned here before but I still consider it very important when dealing with a jerk MC.
When your MC is a jerk, give the audience at least one other character they can actually sympathise with and show that the jerkiness of MC actually has consequences that harm others and are not funny. Have people identify MC as a jerk and not as "uwu he is just one misunderstood creature" (which the "yay he's dead" scene makes it look like atm) - acknowledge him being a jerk because he harms sympathetic characters. Some people might thrive off simply of having a jerk as MC, but that usually is the minority. You need some sort of hook, and especially in a character driven story, you need a character that people actually like and want to get back to know more about them.
Let his character growth come from within. If his "I won't be a jerk anymore" just stems from "well, everybody hates me for my ~quirky~ behaviour so if I change that, they will actually like me" is just... cheap, in lack of a better word. It is just an external motivation and doesn't actually demonstrate any sort of growth because he doesn't become a better person, he just keeps his jerkiness bottled up without actually acknowledging that he is, in fact, a jerk. Let him realise that his behaviour actually hurts people and that that is inheritly a wrong thing to do. Make him genuinely care about how other people feel instead of what they think about him. He is not the victim. He is the bully, the oppressor, and THAT'S why people don't like him. Make him realise that. Make us believe that he actually wants to be a better person for the sake of others and not for the sake of himself being treated better.
About the blurriness of yourself and the character, one way to make the character less yourself, maybe add personality traits that you think you don't have, or not that prominently. If you don't know where to start because you really can't differenciate yet, give him hobbies that you don't have. Start to slowly extract him from yourself because to be frank, it will never end up good if it's a 100% self-insert (even in the form of a hamster.) Later exchange some personality traits that aren't inherently plot relevant and go from there. I wrote a fair share of self-inserts when I was younger, and editing myself out of them step-by-step helped me making them more their own character and even though I still identify with them, it's more on a meta level than right on "this is 100% me and my story."
I'm not sure you'll read this or acknowledge my advice but I hope you'll consider it at least in some way.
