I've always disliked characters that had to say their unique phrase at the end of every speech bubble... makes reading it tedious haha.
One I forgot, If you make a strong, muscled character make sure they don't look like a regular weight lifter. Make them look like this:
*if your character is a monster, one word: spikes
*remember countries you were told by the news that are evil are always evil, so make sure that any character that is Russian or of any Asian country besides Japan are evil.
*Women are either tom-boys or girly-girls, if you choose in-between make sure she's the most average person in the universe.
*every character should be the same age
*villains should always be as visibly opposite as your main character the same is true for personality and motive.
*villains represent the opposite of your beliefs and heroes represent your beliefs.
*your character can't be deep and philosophical if they aren't depressed. Optimistic should = foolish.
*go crazy with hair highlights, everyone has hair highlights.
*totally assume either non-US characters act either exactly the same as US characters with no cultural differences or are completely strange and savage.
*Everyone must be conventionally attractive, nobody is flawed, strange looking, or possesses any interesting unique facial features (like different facial proportions), this is especially true for women. You want as many of your characters to get romantic fanart as possible so make sure you represent that in every panel that all your girl characters are potentially interested in eachother.
*Breasts = humor, the bigger the breasts the more humorous it is if somebody falls into them.
*step-parents are always cruel
*if a guy is tough he will have a gravely voice and is a loner
*if a girl is tough that means she will express no emotions...because no emotions equals tough and cool
*a character can never contradict themselves, people never contradict themselves it doesn't exist in real life so assume characters that have contradictions are a result of bad writing.
*If you are making an alien race make sure to make them human looking enough to ensure you'll have enough alien hotties in your roster of characters.
*What's that? You still wanna make your character unconventionally attractive? Well okay, just make sure it matches a specific fetish and that every character in your story satisfies this criteria.
Uhhgg I made myself want to vomit writing these.
How about the times when you decide you need to borrow that one anime universe ou watched and loved so much that you took it all and didn't even think about it? But it was so cool in the original series!
- Make sure that every single one of your female character's number 1 most important desire is the men in their life. Make all their goals revolve around men. Strong independent women should especially obsess over how independent and manless they are so a man can roll into her life and prove to her how wrong she is.
- All women over 108lbs should be considered fat, and if you do draw a "fat girl" character, make sure she's only slightly bigger than all your other girls.
- Make ABSOLUTELY SURE you have a character that can explain everything to your readers, especially if it makes no sense for them to know it. Your readers will find that character interesting and wise.
- You need to make sure you have a self insert character to soapbox all your opinions. The only other way to make your story acceptable if your self insert isn't going to soapbox, is they need to at least get with the character you think is the hottest.
- You need to constantly give your main character new powers throughout your story. They shouldn't relate to each other either, that would make too much sense. Better yet, just give your character every power at the start.
- Every character also needs super healing abilities so if they get injured in a horrific way they won't have to be out of the story for more than a couple pages.
- The only ugly people who are allowed to find love are men. These same ugly men also have to be unable to talk to women
- All your men have to want sex. That's how it works in real life, that's how it works in fiction.
- If your character is a virgin, they have to want to fix that. If they don't, make sure to write them as stuck up as you can, they can't be liked.
- Your gay couples have to always be super hot and attractive to look at.
- If your main character isn't the most attractive character in the story, make sure all characters hotter than them are jerks.
To add: Any Mary-Sue traits that you give your self-insert character will be accepted as long as they don't look like you...
...but go ahead and make them look like you anyway ; )
Here an interesting thing I noticed:
*When drawing a sexy character completely neglect any other attractive feature besides breasts, breasts are the only thing people find important and sexy, after all nobody likes butts or hips or lips or legs only creeps like those things. How you always want it is "she's pretty + large breasts." That's rather boring but that's how our overly antiquated ideals of beauty dictate us to create characters. "pretty + large hips, good butt with modest breasts" No way! I don't see that in any work of mainstream fiction, so don't do that.
*When drawing an attractive male character remember men always need short hair to portray they are men, historically men always had short hair, girls always had long hair. If you male character has long hair he has to be a loser, stoner, homeless, or dead-beat. For him to become a decent character he must get a haircut sometime in the story to indicate the change.
*Thinking of making a metalhead main character? Don't! If you do, then make sure he/she will completely misrepresent the subculture just try to make the character a hodgepodge of edgy and dark things.
Here it comes- I'm gonna- yep this time no joke- Bluuueeeehhgghhh....alright I'm okay now.
When you have female characters, you don't need to design them too uniquely, or give them personality. Just draw 'em cute, that's all that's important!
Remember, your main character HAS to be paired up with someone in the end. I mean, what kind of story would it be if the lead had no romantic interest?! Even if their love interest is just arm candy with no personality, we just have to make sure the audience knows that the lead isn't a single loser! Sure, they saved the world, but what are they without a lover?!
Try to make your characters look like Sonic as much as possible! Also draw in Sonic's style.
Use trendy spelling for the name. Emoji's, signs or numbers in a name are totally fine. Makes them more original!
Make sure their hair falls over their eye, this way you'll only have to draw one eye!
Every character should be like one color, so you can recognize characters just by color. Super convenient!
Make sure your character has a twin that looks 100% alike, but has a different gender! That's spicy.
Also make sure your character's parents died. Is great for a sad backstory, and readers don't like parents anyways.
Vore is very cool, make sure too include vore in your designs! HMMMMMM VORE
For research I recommend looking through the "newest" category in DeviantArt! The best designs are from DeviantArt!!!!
BUT MOST IMPORTANTLY: Never ever EVER ask for feedback! It's YOUR design, others wouldn't understand!
A lot of it is either up to personal taste (I don't like some professional studio's styles but that doesn't mean they are objectively bad) or it is an amateur artist thing and they are just starting to learn.
The thing I try to do personally is avoid having too many characters that look too similar, and even more so try not to make all the girls too samey (while making the guys extraordinarily different or cartoony, because it makes it stand out even more)
I would say the things I say to "avoid" are somewhat "pet peeves" rather than saying you absolutely shouldn't do them. It does come to down to preference sometimes.
When writing a horror story, the ethnic minority always dies first. Case in point, The Killer Shrews. The first guy to die in that is the Mexican guy. The second one is the black guy.
People from the South are either charming Scarlett O'Hara-likes or inbred hillbillies. You might include a black person if you're in Atlanta. There isn't any kind of Latino, Middle Eastern, East Asian, ect communties, of course.
"My momma hit me!" is a valid excuse for wanting to murder orphans.
Going off topic for a moment, but I saw a Youtube video once where someone accused Miyazaki of putting vore into his Nausicaa comic. The scene showed the main character being swallowed up by a monster, temporarily.....I just took it as that, the main character being swallowed up by the monster - a scary/tense scene from my point of view, it didn't look like it was being 'suggestive' of anything else, but the person who made the video swore off anything Miyazaki when they found this, assuming it was a fetish thing.
I know Miyazaki is absolutely against that sort of stuff, so that's just ridiculous to assume he had that mindset when drawing that scene. I guess I wouldn't know anything for certain, but had I come across that scene while reading the comic myself, I wouldn't have gone "HOLY CRAP VORE WHAT THE HELL MIYAZAKI?!"
So yeah, it feels like the line is a kind of blurred. I mean, if someone were to draw bare feet should we assume the artist has a foot fetish? XD Come on now people, get your head out of the gutter a LITTLE bit.
Sorry for continuing the off topic-ness, but by that logic, Attack on Titan is just one giant hard core vore fetish fest. : D
Honestly though, why does anyone care? So someone slips in something that gets them going. How's it any different then someone slipping in unnecessary fan service? They're both just serving the purpose of turning the artist on (and others if that appeals to the readers).
Some people get their rocks off by seeing characters in pain so they torture their characters, others like big boobs and tits so they throw in some pantie shots. If Miyazaki or the AoT guy did really get off to vore, how would that be any different? And at least their's would contribute to to the story. :'D
Btw, this isn't all directly at you, @VermillionWorks, this all just happened to land in my response to your post. :'D I just never got why some harmless kinks are so much more taboo than others?
(And queue everyone thinking I'm into vore now for defending it. I'm honestly not, but I have several friends who are and yeah "kink shaming!!!!" I just never got why THAT one is so weird to people when there's far more actually harmful fetishes out there that are blatantly slipped into popular media all the time. I mean, nobody into vore is ever gonna actually try to eat you, but there are perverts that are gonna check out kids and assault women. And most people into vore just kinda silently appreciate anything "vore" related in media. Other fetishists aren't so good about keeping shit to themselves.)