The worst character design advice

I love thinking of even more horrendous ideas, so:

• Make all your good characters really smart and pretty! Do the opposite for for all the villains! Villains are only pretty if they're secretly good!
• Colour code everything! One character only wears neon pink, and another only bright blue! Your MC, being so special, wears RAINBOW.
• The Villain must wear all black, maybe some red if you're feeling particularly cr8t1ve.
• All villainous henchmen look the same. No exceptions. They're just clones of each other. Also, give them really terrible armor/weapons because they have to be incompetent for the heroes to look c00l.
• Villains musT SCREAM ALL THE TIME and give long, dramatic speeches in their dark, mysterious voices.

Ooh ooh! I got some good advice to give!

Need a badass mofo type character and want to drive home the fact he/she is TOUGH and EDGY? Take a page out of Rob Liefeld's art style and give your one man army every conceivable weapon under the sun and then some. Make sure to also include lots of pouches everywhere on their body. After all, you never know when daddy's little terrorist might need an extra 1,000 ammo clips or a steak knife to help carve up the remains of Bambi's mom to roast over an open flame.

Struggling to draw anything besides basic male and female bodies? Forget that! The only characters people pay attention to in mainstream comics/manga and cartoons/anime are the beautiful people! There's nothing inspiring about a 90 pound scrawny geek or a 400 pound tub of lard who needs to lay off the cheesy poofs or even a vanilla plain jane girl who may be more attractive than the airbrushed busty babe who constantly flaunts what her momma gave her every other minute per episode! After all, there's a reason why comic books and manga sell and it sure isn't because averageness sells!

• Give them a super speshul familiar/bond animal that will always tell
  them how awesome and pure they are and how it will always stay by
  their side.
• Bonus points for it to be a dragon or a unicorn or an eagle, at
  least, a wolf or a raven. Who bonded with protagonist because
  they are so speshul.

• Also all good dragons have colours of precious metals. Or precious
  metals AND primari colours. If they aren't it's obvious that they are
  evil. Black dragons? Totally evil. Albino one(s)? Even more evil.

• They are a warrior woman? Great give them barely there chain-mail
  pink fur bikini! And rainbow hair with pink locks here and
  there. And pink eyes too.

• Bonus points if eyes change colour according to their
  mood. High heels ala pumps are a must. Square heel? Nah,
  forget it.
• She absolutely must be a virgin! So that your audience would know
  that she must wear white.
• Background? Screw that! Just throw in some feathers or flowers or bubbles or sakura petals! So you still want some background?
  Just grab some gradients in photoshop

.

• Always keep atleast one tsundere in a story. People love tsunderes.
• Keep your character in one costume, characters don't need to change
  clothes. If it gets ruined make sure to replace it with the same one.
• Deep friendships between girls and boys doesn't exist, make them fall
  inlove with one another (bonus: insert a disposable rival to make
  them realize their love)
• If a character have glasses, make sure to remove it when it's their time to shine
• Make your female character look strong by slapstick comedy

If you decide to create a loli, make sure you give her as skimpy outfit as possible. Preferably booty shorts and a bikini top on her flat chest.
Also, she should be able to wield a weapon twice her size even without any muscle mass on her thin arms. Bonus points if she can wield it with only one arm. Btw, her love interest should be a plain guy that can't take care of himself.
Trust me, I know what I say.

• Remember - good characters will always have neat, flat scars and
  only in places where it would be cool. Like over the eye for
  example. Or "X"-shaped one on their cheek. Or forehead. Or back.
  Because ugly scars are for ugly evil people. But you can also give pretty
  scars to everyone of you feel like it.
• Unusually coloured/shaped hair marks main character. Okay, maybe
  their love interest too.
• Have a obviously evil character? Don't forget to give them red eyes.
  Do the same, if your protagonist has a secret evil superpowered side.

-If a ordinary man puts on a dress or skirt, he turns instantly into a feminine girl and no one can tell that he is actually a man
-Oh and make this cross-dressing man kinky as hell because you have some fetish or something
-When writing a mother character, make her pretty pure saintly angel, an ugly nagging hag, or really sexy.
-When writing a father character, just make him really really really stupid. Or a boozing abusive asshole.
-The playboy who can get ANY girl should then turn around and just want your plain jane MC.
-All disabled people should have whiny self pity backstories. Like "she was blind and everyone hated her and no one understood her, she had a gift but no one would even give her a chance."

• Designing a monster/alien/ect species? Make sure the females look more like attractive human women while the males look more like actual monsters! It's called sexual dimorphism, you know.

I always found it weird when female anthros would have hair when the males didn't... I usually design anthros with human head hair but that goes for all my anthro characters regardless of gender.

Make it up as you go

Make your characters look exactly like your favorite character, with perhaps some small changes like hair color or a different name. Boom. Instant fame.

The protagonist must wear black all over, top to bottom. And the bad guy has to wear white (also have white hair) and make sure it's all over as well. The one trait both have to share is they must have lots of zippers. Zippers on their shirt pockets, their arms, shoulders, down the sides of pants, on their butts, double zippers in front, zippers EVERYWHERE! Oh, but for some reason their shirt is a button up shirt, very important.

• Oh! Don't forget goggles! But make sure that protagonist never ever
  uses them for actual eye protection.

If you're going to have any kind of atrocity within the back-story of any character like if a character was once raped make sure to use it purely for shock value and titillation DO NOT approach it in any serious philosophical or intellectual way.

I've always disliked characters that had to say their unique phrase at the end of every speech bubble... makes reading it tedious haha.

*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!

Does your character have a lot of scars? Make sure to keep 'em inconsistent!

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.

Oh, I don't blame people for finding it odd. I can't blame anyone for feeling "weirded out" over things, that's not really an on-off switch people can control. But my question still stands that why are some harmless kinks still so much more shamed than others? And I mean, just like how people can't control if something is weird to them, people can't control what turns them on. My girlfriend likes vore and she was so fucking ashamed and felt legitimately worried when she came to terms with it because of how much people shit on people for liking it. Even though? Her like for it literally affects no one? She isn't shoving it other people's faces. Literally nobody I know with an unusual kink is shoving it in people's faces, in fact. They keep it to themselves and if something pops up that happens to include that kink, they post about it maybe on a private twitter at most or something.
I know far more people sneaking their guro and non-con kinks into media, and those are far more "problematic." Once again, this isn't a question of why do people find it odd. I totally see why it's odd (speaking as someone who isn't into it myself). It's a question of why does it get shamed so much more than other far more common and dangerous kinks?
And my point is, nobody should feel ashamed for something they can't control when it's not anything harmful to others (so that we can't bring the entire shota/loli issue into this). I don't know, maybe a bit embarrassed for liking something odd? But not ashamed.
This isn't exclusive to vore by the way.

I'm still just wondering what's the point in making people feel bad for having unusual tastes? How is it affecting you? Is someone into vore following you around and trying to eat you? Probably not, but someone might be trying to snap a photo up your skirt.
If someone draws a lot of an unusual kink just...don't follow them? I know there's a few comics on here who are very obviously sneaking in their author's kinks, and it's not my cup of tea so I just don't follow them?

I'm just not comprehending how making people feel bad for harmless things benefits anyone? Making my girlfriend feel gross and weird for liking this thing she has no control over isn't going to "cure" her or anything. It's just gonna make her feel bad.

Now if someone is going and commenting on every page where your character is eating something and going "God I wish I was that sushi roll," then that person probably needs to be put in line, but nearly everyone I know with unusual kinks just keeps stuff to their own pages or pages of people who share whatever kink. It's honestly the more normal stuff I see constantly forced on people, like creepy comments on female characters in situations that aren't meant to be remotely sexual.

Doesn't a kink basically mean "something unusual that turns you on"? Because most kinks are weird AF lol.

To the question how it's affecting me? It's not actually, everyone is free to like whatever they like, I think I'm free to think some kinks are disgusting or disturbing. Though vore isn't harmful as far as I know, badly drawn vore is kind of popular on DeviantArt for some reason? I wrote it in bad design choices because it's very unappealing to the majority of our population, and I just don't understand vore at all.

But then again, I probably like stuff that other people would find weird or offsetting. So I'm sorry if I offended you or anyone. u__u

Nah you didn't! If anything, I appreciate your understanding. Honestly, before my girlfriend, I would have probably hopped right on conversations poking fun at it. But the day she realized she liked it she literally came to me almost crying because she felt so bad? She felt like a freak and like there was something wrong with her. And that was such an eye opening moment for me because it made me realize "why should she feel like this?" She's not gonna go around leaving creepy comments, she's not gonna look at people and go "god I wanna eat them." She might just draw it occasionally or favorite some vore pieces and that's about it. Why should she feel ashamed of that? She's not hurting anyone.
And that's kinda how I feel about all unusual kinks. You're right, everyone has every right to find kinks weird or disgusting. One of my friends just confessed they like omorashi, which is something that can literally make me gag, but unless they come over and piss on my couch or something then? Uh, whatever. I might unfollow if they draw it a lot or something, but it's their account to do what they want with and it's not like they wouldn't tag/warn for content like that.
Unless it's something that could be potentially dangerous like pedophilia or non-con, whatever? That's how I've always viewed it. :'D