The question is if it is necessary to be emotionally attached?

I was never emotionally attached to TinTin but I read all the comics, I love the side characters and also the villaiins, the stories are exciting.
I´m not only not emotionally attached to Mickey Mouse, I dislike him a little bit but I still read the comics.
Asterix was never my favourite character and he was the main character, I was emotionally attached to Obelix.

Luke Skyealker, zero attachement. super boring character, but Darth Vader made me cry when he wanted to see his son with his own
eyes one time before he was dying

You're right about the reader's views on the characters, viewers can never read the author's mind to understand the characters they spend time on.

Although, readers will be more invested on the main protagonist because they are the main focus, that includes the main villain.

Aside from story telling, I bet people will find our characters (Side characters) interesting if there is a twist, a shocking back story or did something epic to remember.

I agree, readers don't just immediately care about characters. There are stories that I read almost only for the characters, and there are also stories that I don't care about characters at all, I just want to know what happens next. I read both, however if there is at least one character I feel attatched to, I care about the story much more. They don't have to be main characters, they just have to be somewhere there.

But I also think it depends on your audience. You can introduce your character in the best way possible, but there still will be people who won't like them and won't feel emotionally attached to them, and that's okay.

I kinda am in the 'rush into introducing a ton of characters and names' bag, though I'm lucky to have readers who seem to care about my characters even more than I do (or they are just being nice, but shh)

I think that how emotionally attracted someone would be to a character can very from person to person..

For example, I watched a bunch of reviews on Turning Red. Some reviews felt very close to the MC with some people saying "She's literally me" but I also saw some people who felt very distant from her. I remember hearing a cartoonist describe reading comics as viewing someone through a window. And I guess that is sort of how I feel about most characters from the perspective of a writer and reader. I tend to not find more people "relatable" in fiction or reallife. I tend to just like observing characters and seeing how they interact with their environment and with other people.

I do think I am a bit guilty of character dumping. But overtime it will be more clear who are major characters and who are more support/BG characters. I have scraped a lot of characters to make things less jumbled, so yes it could have been worse.

While it is true that there are successful works where the main character is unlikeable, or their emotions are not really explored or important to the plot...it's worth applying a little pattern recognition to note that most of those characters are male and they're mostly in works aimed at a male audience... and then noting that all evidence suggests that the vast majority of Tapas users are female.

You could also apply a little research to note that most popular works on Tapas are very character-driven, and so perhaps conclude that while yes, Tintin was a success, that if you made a comic like Tintin to go on Tapas, it might not be a huge hit. In fact, if you look at the guidelines for pitching a Tapas Premium, they even specifically say they're looking for relatable, character-focused stories. So if we're talking about wanting to build an audience on Tapas specifically, yes, you would probably do well to establish sympathetic characters, and to focus your plot around them.

I also think it's important to be honest with yourself about your intent, like if you went in not wanting the audience to relate to or like the protagonist and that's the result, then okay! You succeeded at that! (Might not do great on Tapas, but you did succeed at it) But sometimes you get people failing to make their protagonist relatable or sympathetic because they just kinda.... thought if they plonked their OC in front of the audience that they audience will love them as much as they do. Or they just put the character there and then tell us that they have a really sad backstory... and then think that'll do it. It doesn't.

Just like making friends in real life, your characters have to make themselves known and do and say things that will endear them to the audience if you want the audience to like them! You can't just walk into a party, stand in a corner silently and expect everyone to come over and make friends with you, right? In most cases somebody else telling everyone at the party that your parents died tragically wouldn't necessarily help them to make friends with you if you weren't putting in the effort. It's the same for characters. They need to make a strong impression, so a main character should stand out, which you can do by 1. Not crowding the reader with too many other characters fighting for panel space or dominating conversations and 2. Giving main characters a design and personality that stands out and letting them dominate your panels.
Then the character needs to say and do things that make them feel relatable and human. They need to do stuff like doubting their own abilities or having things not go to plan, make jokes or get ribbed by their friends, get frustrated by everyday annoyances, have crushes, get chewed out by their boss... you know, just very human things that let the reader connect with them as a fellow human instead of a bunch of lines somebody drew.

I'm going to go a little opposite of what everyone has been saying. Characters don't have to be relatable, they have to be interesting. You're not reading about you. You have nothing in common with a demon with a 10,000 year old sword that lives in a fantasy world. But he is interesting. The character has to have flaws, not to be relatable, but to not be boring. A character without flaws can't fail. If you can't fail there is no story. And story is king. Without a story, the most relatable character has nothing to do.

You can make the most miserable, dirty "asshole" character you can think of. Then put him in situations that are fun to see how they are going to make it out and people will love it. They are reading for the situation, the story. They care how THAT character is going to get out of it, not A character getting out of it. Remember most of the popular characters of all time are not good people. You would not want to hang around them in real life. Wolverine, punisher, Urd, almost any character from any tournament manga, etc...

Tapas and most other comics sites want "character drive stories" because that is short hand for "make it a story, not just a character doing cool stuff."

I find it interesting to hear what characters my readers get attached to, who they like and who they dislike. I also try not to fret about it because from my experience in fandoms I know it just comes down to what characters are relatable or interesting to someone. And my readers might have different taste than me. It's also fun to see the readers react as more is revealed in the story.

It takes time to reveal a character to the readers through the story in a compelling, believable way, so we as creators just need to have patience. And it's so hard keeping it a secret while they're on chapter 1 and I already know how the character's journey goes.

I think a character's most interesting trait isn't exactly their actions, but their personalities and they way they interact. The people you enjoy in the real world, how often do you like people because they do something? Yeah, sometimes, but people like people for they way they are. How they talk. How they interact with you.

Make those characters flourish in simple dialogues. People love the small details. Because you can load up SO MUCH PERSONALITY in two characters by having them talk about if they want pizza or mac n' cheese for lunch.

Yupppppppp. I watched a movie recently where I actually didn't give a shit when a character died and all the dramatic danger didn't matter because I just couldn't care if the main characters were going to survive. You can kind of compensate with an exciting plot/fun world-building/relatable situations/amazing style and visuals but only to an extent, for me at least.

It's not that characters need to be likeable but they do need to be interesting and feel like they have a personality for me to enjoy a story.

Having just come from working on my 'react' thread, I'm acutely aware of this. ^^; People will regularly try to just 'get things out of the way' by introducing all the major characters at once...without realizing that to a new reader who doesn't know this story, it's just a meaningless info-dump that they'll probably forget about in a few minutes, so they'll end up learning the character's names organically anyway. If they decide to stick around that long...

This is why I think it's better to start with just one or two characters at a time...readers will learn to care about the things that you signal to them to care about, by spending your time on them. Introduce 5 new people at once in rapid succession? The resulting message is that they are not important; that knowing who they are is incidental to the story and probably won't matter that much.
Spend a chapter exploring a character's thoughts and feelings? Use an existing character to introduce a new character by having them work together on the plot? That's when the reader gets the message that these are important people, because you're actually dedicating words and time within the story to showing who they are.

Technically no, but I think the readers still do need to care.

Like with all the comic-strip characters you mentioned: obviously, just from the way the stories are written; the authors don't expect you to have a deep emotional bond with them. They're just 'plucky heroes' for you to follow on fun adventures; as long as you care about what they'll do next and 'how are they gonna get outta this one', they serve their purpose.

On the other hand, in the case of something like Star Wars, I think that's less about emotional attachment not being necessary, and more about you finding your own way to enjoy the story regardless.

I don't care about Luke Skywalker either, and my response to that was simply having no interest in watching the original trilogy (even though I do like Vader). You decided to watch it despite that...but I don't think either of those was the intention. ^^;
With the amount of time they spend on Luke's character and adventures, clearly you are supposed to have at least some attachment to him, and you will probably enjoy the films more if you do. Instead of rating it a 7, for instance ("dull MC, but interesting setup with a great twist"), you might rate it a 9 ("great series, loved every minute; Luke is the best sci-fi hero of all time!").

Basically, if the intention is for the audience to be emotionally attached to the characters, then it kind of IS necessary for them to have that if you expect them to enjoy the story as it's written.
If they don't like Luke, but 75% of the movie is about Luke, they probably aren't enjoying 75% of the movie. They may still watch the movie and decide they like the movie, but their overall experience isn't as good as it could be.

This makes a lot of sense even for writers, thanks for the insight!

On the topic of relatability, maybe it's true that we don't always have to find a character relatable to care about them, but I found with most if not all my favourite characters, it's ultimately because I relate to them that I feel strongly about them. Why do you find that fantasy demon with a 10,000 year old sword so interesting? Are you sure you have absolutely nothing in common with him?

I think the issue is people think a 'relatable' character is similar to the audience. That's how you get generic self-insert protagonists; if relatable = similar, make someone who is similar to the majority of the target audience; that means the character is super relatable!

Lots of characters I relate hard to are very different from me, even polar opposites in terms of personality. But I still relate to them because they embody a little part of myself that I don't always think about, or show to the world, or perhaps even notice is there. They take that part of me and turn it up to 11, take it to its logical conclusion, and display it with unabashed sincerity. There's something cathartic about seeing someone like that in a story; it makes you feel seen. Or it hits surprisingly close to home, and really takes you off guard, and you feel exposed.

Conversely, a character can be very similar to me on a superficial level, but I feel no connection to them at all because they don't get to the core of how I tick.

I'd say that's attachment! Sure, you don't need to care that much about the main character, but you do have to care about some character. Or at least some element of the story, I guess, though I can't really think of a story I enjoyed where none of those elements were character o_o

I've had a lot of people tell me my main character is whiney or petulant but he's supposed to be like that in the first few chapters. He's like that for a reason.
I actually had to re-write a bit of my first chapter so he doesn't come off too brash right away, so I didn't turn away too many readers.

(also since it's coming up in conversation, I thought Luke was pretty cool ;w;)