What do you do when your work becomes tied to drama in your mind?

[SleepingPoppy]

I'm also gonna see if the person I had the falling out with wants their camoes removed from my other comic edible green tea if I can find a way to contact them as well.

I strongly suggest you don't. Regardless of the reason for falling out, your ex-friend has made it very clear they don't want contact, and you need to respect that.

Personal opinion, but since they didn't request you remove the cameos, just move on and leave the past as is. After all, a falling out of friends doesn't erase the good times of the past. You should not use any of this person's content in the future, but leave anything finished as is, unless you personally prefer to remove it. But dont contact the person.

[Rosso]

unfortunately one of the cameos was kind of important to the comic it was a part of

a better way to remedy this situation is to just go over all panels they appear in, change the colors and design to the best of your abilities and their name as well wherever mentioned. So the important character is yours now and you don't have to awkwardly write them off because of this.

Perhaps you wanna leave a heads up to your readers about this change to avoid confusion when and if this character shows up again.

[Kelheor]

It may sound harsh, but the characters are just characters and you can redo them - and it will probably help.

I don't make a comic, but I have a partly written-mostly discussed universe (together with other people), where one of the three main characters is my ex best friend's character. And all other OCs that are linked to this character play a pretty huge role in the plot too.
After a quarrel, all I had to do is to own that character now, so I did my best in making her my character. She didn't change in the core, but overall I tried to change and evolve her and all the associated characters in the way I'd like them to be. So I gave them new plotlines, new hobbies, clothes and features.
If it was just a cameo and they didn't wrote you anything about it - leave it be, if it doesn't bother you much. If it bothers you - redraw it.

If you want to apologize and write them something - please do, get this off your chest. But there's nothing you can do if they don't want to talk to you. If they blocked you, they are probably angry and don't want to have anything to do with you for now. So just own your comic, make the changes you need to make for it to feel like your own.

[aqua03]

So, in good news: The person finally contacted me. In bad news, it's to again tell me that we'll never be friends again and they want me to remove all their cameos from my comics and never even reference anything of theirs again lest they pursue legal action against me.

So I guess I finally have some form of closure on that front, as much as it hurts me.

[yansusu]

Well, at least you know their stance now and don't have to worry about more trouble in the future so you can think about how to solve the issue with the cameos etc and then see if you still want to work on it. It might be sad but at least this way you have a direction to go on.

[aqua03]

Yeah, that is good to know. Though Im now wondering if there's anything I should rework in DRAGOONS given the fact I took incredibly minor inspiration from some of their stuff regarding it.

[yansusu]

Maybe just go through everything first and take some notes what you took from them and then see how all of that could be changed?

[aqua03]

Yeah, that could work. Though the main thing was kind of the power system of the heroes in my comic, so that might be a bit tricky to change.

[yansusu]

Well, if there's anything we can help with, you know where to ask

[aqua03]

Cool, thanks. Good to know you have my back.

[aqua03]

So in other good news: The person I've been umping and erring over regarding copyright only wants me to remove their direct cameos from my comic and they don't really care about my other stuff unless I blatantly rip them off. So that's a load off my back.

[aqua03]

So, reviving this topic because I just realized something that's kind of a problem it feels: I kind of feel that because of how tied some of my characters became to my friend's stuff and how much my characters had their stuff kinda galvanized through the help of them both direly and indirectly that my stuff mina almost feels like a weird subset of their stuff. Like a "Part of their universe, but also not really" sort of thing. I don't know what to do or where to go with that given that said character traits and powers are still 100% mine, but I still feel I have trouble shaking off that feeling that I'm just sharing these characters with someone else if you guys can understand.

[yansusu]

Ah, sheesh, that's difficult I don't know how far you are with the comic (I feel it's far though since I've seen you post for a rather long time on the forums ) but maybe it would help to do what some others suggested previously and change things a bit?
Like, maybe sit down and brainstorm some ideas of what could be changed regarding a) the characters and b) the world so that it'll feel more like your own story again without having to sacrifice the plot?
Actually, if the feeling is very nagging (and you're not that far in (Do I remember you rebooting some time in-between?)), maybe you could also try and see if you could start over from another angle. But I guess that's a lot of work for a comic so maybe the idea isn't very good I'm sorry, I wish I could help more but I don't really see any other way than changing things up to get rid of that if taking a break isn't enough.

[aqua03]

Thankfully, most of that work was just preproduction (I could never find a good story I wanted to tell with the world and characters, so both attempts so far have died a few pages in. ) I'm not really sure what angle to go with if I do start over again, unfortunately, so the comic as a whole feels kind of dead in the water at the moment thanks to all of this. I'm trying to write a new story for it that fits slightly better, but it still feels kinda off to me and I don't know why.

[yansusu]

Ah, that reminds me of this thread (if you haven't seen it yet):

Ever since i was a kid i had the habit to create new stories, most inspired from personal little experiences, every now and then by music, other times by meeting interesting characters from tv shows or comics and wanting to create other original characters with similiar personalities and traits. At some point though, i was still inventing stories, but always ended up disliking them or not being really interested in them (getting tired) and trashing my own ideas, leaving myself with no story t…

There are lots of tips on how to come up with a good story that you'd feel like working on and several people described their way of doing it. Maybe have a read and see if there's anything that might help?

Personally, I found this answer very helpful:

How do you come up with stories and comics that you're too excited about to put down? - Very simple. Discipline. No one will absolutely love their story at all points. This is the problem behind waiting for "inspiration", which is in effect what you're doing. That, and it seems you've having some trouble with your own self esteem in coming up with a story. What you need to ask yourself, and I mean truly sit and ponder on this for a while, "why do I get tired of my own stories?" As for them lack…

It went over different ways on how to create stories (even one I never would have thought could be classified that way) and I think it was very well explained so maybe one of these ways might help you as well

[aqua03]

Unfortunately, the more I think about it, the more I realized that it seems to be nigh impossible to have a clean cut of my comic DRAGOONS from the people who helped influence it and all the drama that came out of that without completely butchering my comic in the process given that they've had such a hand in helping me codify and galvanize my characters, concepts, and world that it'll just feel weird to carry on without them or their characters around.

I'm honestly not quite sure what I should do now.

[yansusu]

Mn, your situation is really tough Maybe it's better to start completely from scratch? Like just trying to regard this as gaining experience in doing worldbuilding, creating characters or storytelling and using that in your next project to make that one the best it can be might be easier than trying to morph this current one into something you're happy with. I know it's super hard to abandon/not finish projects if you've worked on them for such a long time but maybe now is just not the right time for this project.

[aqua03]

Well, in better news, I think I've managed to cut DRAGOONS mostly from the previously mentioned drama by mostly binning much of the old stuff apart from the names, settings, characters, and general ideas and moving ahead with a newer (and much better in my book) story and world. So I think I can move on for the most part for now thankfully.

[hannahlaine]

Look, I don't know your whole story here, but a similar thing happened to me but in my case I was the other friend.

A girl I was friends with in university and I were working on a novel together. It was a lot of fun, but it was more like she was writing it and I was going behind her and cleaning it all up, adding description and details, etc. I did not mind doing that at all. I actually enjoy doing that because it takes a lot less effort to clean up someone else's work than it does to come up with my own, sometimes.

The novel was not why we had our falling out... I'll leave it at that. I doubt you are anything like she was. Honestly, for me, I needed to get out of that friendship, it was toxic.

Back to the important part: She kept the novel. Honestly, it was her story idea. I was just helping. When we stopped being friends, I didn't care that she kept the novel. I was more concerned that she was not going to return the book I lent her. LOL (She did, unharmed)

If Dragoons, is your "baby" then keep working on it.
If you think that your friendship is salvageable, maybe take a break from creating and work on your friendship.
But, if your friend is not your friend because you wanted creative license on your own creation, or you were "spending too much time working on your book and not hanging out with them" then keep working on Dragoons. They are not a true friend if their needs come before your needs. It goes both ways.

One of the big reasons that girl and I are no longer friends is because it was her way or the highway. And any time I disagreed with something, like I did not want to wear matching costumes at Halloween or I wanted to hang out with my boyfriend and not her, then she got mad and I had to apologize.

Also, don't look at Dragoons as a reminder of a failed friendship. Look at it as a reminder of the good times you had. Like a kid caught in a divorce. Don't stop loving the kid because your SO and you are no longer together. Don't let Dragoons suffer

[aqua03]

Thanks. Yeah, I've been trying to not take my anger out on my "baby" as I work on it more.

I think the problem is that I've tried to take steps to repair my friendship with them multiple times that unfortunately never work because they just don't wanna talk to me after what happened and I'm still not quite sure why or what happened to get to that point due to said lack of communication.

Honestly, it seems that the biggest problem we had is when we worked on both of our stuff together, there was always disagreements on which direction we should take our own stories given that we kept accidentally meddling with each other's plot lines and stories we wanted to tell with our stuff. It's just that I'd often voice my problems with what was going on in not the best way most of the time unfortunately.

I think I will keep working on DRAGOONS for the time being, especially since of managed to cut it mostly from the drama and my old friend. So I guess I should just keep working on my own stuff and hope that maybe one day a door opens up to at least partially settle things between us given that I'e already done a lot to try to mend things between us to not much success even though I also managed to repair the friendships for the most part of those who were unfortunately caught in the crossfire of me and the other's feud.