What is your story’s message?

Saudade started as a story of a couple where one of the boys suffers a lot and the other struggles to help. It'd be a story about how mental illness looks like (at least in my personal experience) and based on how my best friend dealt with it, dealt with me. And then obviously it'd have all the BL shenanigans that BL stories have.

And I think the core message still is to show the real struggle with mental ilness, the chaotic aspects of it, the instability, the good days, the bad days, the ugly of it, as it's normally really romanticized out there. And the importance of friendships and relationships when you're sick, how they can be our safe port. But I want to tell how you can live with all of it, how you can live even when you're sick, because there's much more then you sickness in your world. That you can overcome your traumas and live with them in harmony. I wanna tell that you're not broken because of it all;

Idk, I think that's it. hahahaha that's not a woooow message neither is my comic something woooow but yeah, I try.

That Stick Figure Isekai is about redemption and finding ways to connect with other people.

my story started 5 years ago as a copy of a popular comic, but with my own characters. then, it became an animation project, then went through a few iterations.. now it's where it is, and.. it has a message, but i completely forgot what it is. oh well

I don't think my story have a clear message or moral of the story, and I agreed with @Lensing.

My focus is telling a story where readers can feel for the characters (while keeping integrity of my storytelling) and giving them a story they can enjoy or even remember.

For Thief of Bones, the message is that it is okay to feel different, to think differently. Your past doesn't dictate your future.

Redux started in 2012 as something I made up as I went for fun.

Now that I'm older and revisiting the characters and themes, it's a story about breaking cycles and dealing with "personal demons" so to speak. I want to explore the ideas of rejecting roles that someone might be expected to inhabit, and breaking away from cycles of violence, inherited trauma, or learned behaviors that a person picks up over time. The title is even a bit of a play on that idea. Putting an end to one, seemingly unsurmountable thing and starting fresh with a new, hopefully better one.

Even if an author or artist doesn't intentionally write with a theme or message in mind, their values, fixations, and lived experiences color what the work becomes. There might not be an obligation upon the reader or the writer to understand or convey a message, but to say that a book doesn't have one doesn't seem right to me. A book about a hero killing a dragon and saving a princess doesn't have to be intentionally written with a message in mind, but the biases and values of the writer will still be present. For example, if it's a traditional hero's journey it might become a story with a message of overcoming obstacles and personal growth, even if the author didn't intend for the reader to come away with anything beyond that. If it's a story about reclaiming the land from the dragon who stole it from the rightful king and it's the hero's job to take it back for the "good guys", it might reflect different values of the author and convey a different message. That's not to say that writing without a message is WRONG or that everything has to be analyzed, but I think something gets lost when we go into a work thinking the only value it provides is entertainment. There are always more layers, and it makes reading and watching things a lot more fulfilling to me to consider them.

It's been fun to see what my characters have to say and realize what ideas and values get reflected in my work, even if not intentionally.

There are many themes being explored in Centris

• The effects of historical discrimination.
• How fucked a society when political power is in the hands of a few who inherit it.
• The pitfalls of mistrust and isolation.

But if I had to pick the one that could be a centerpiece for the story.

• Don't allow society crush your ideals. The world can be whatever you make it if you work hard enough.

I'm ̶n̶o̶t̶ a Sick Boy1 started as a videogame idea so it was purely fun coming up with game mechanics honestly but as it shifted into a comic, the concept of a family setting and dynamic of the two MC siblings had expanded, so I guess it was the latter.
Prefer not to push messages on people but left it so people interpret things in their own way based on the struggles/positive outcomes for the Mc Brothers, amidst the horrors of the outbreak they face and mastery of their superpowers. Themes explored however are brotherhood between a gay and straight siblings, they were once close but drifted because of age difference and interests, the situation of the story revives their close kinship. Also the father and big brother have an argument in the beginning, gain experience dealing with the outbreak and when they cross paths again in the 3rd act they rethink and forgive each other. The brother MCs are carriers of a virus that mutate others into monsters, they make a decision to slay said monsters and avoid further spread which feeds to a themes of selflessness & responsibility.

there's a lot of messages in my story tbh but they're always hard for me to explain (which is why I draw it) so one of the more simple ones is overcoming your demons

I suspect that notion can be over-thought and over-done. Is the story a vehicle to promote the message? Or is the message just something that comes along with the story?

Life is full of little lessons & truths, so I suppose if we write about life & characters living their lives, then there will be little messages in it, too, without the writer even trying hard. The messages won't necessarily be profound but life is like that, too.

I got a couple of themes for mine!

• Being in control of your own story: Basically a lot of characters struggle with having agency over their narratives in the story and they do get that agency in the end.
• Being brave means doing something even if you're scared: A big part of the story focuses on Max's anxiety, which is almost exactly the same as my experiences with anxiety when I first developed it. I believed that I couldn't be brave because I was scared all the time, but realized that I'm actually a lot braver than I thought I was. Max believes he'll never be brave and that he's going to be a scared kid all the time, but he's actually already a very brave kid but it takes him a long time to realize that he is.

There's a couple of other themes that I'm working in, mainly relating to grief, letting go of the past, and forgiveness.

Privilege can be a tricky thing.

Sometimes it's impossible to tell what side of any major issue is right if you don't get to know both sides.

When is your perceived determination actually nothing more than foolhardiness?

At first, I didn't intend for there to be any kind of deeper message or theme for Sapphire Bay Reaper Company. I just doodled some characters in my college notebooks during class, and decided that some of them belonged to the same world and thought "hmm yes, now I will write about their adventures and struggles hunting ghosts on a budget in a small run-down beach town."

But as I developed the story more some themes that surfaced were: 1) characters struggling between others' expectations and being true to themselves 2) regret and what different people might do if given a second chance at life 3) learning to ask for help when you need it 4) death is supposed to be something everyone faces equally, but it really isn't.

Although, these themes don't appear too much yet since I haven't gotten very far in terms of writing/publishing my story.

Dunno about art not having to mean something. Meaning nothing... Is still meaning. The STALKER example is exactly that: by having no message, its message became reflecting like a mirror and the viewer's own experiences dictating how they project.
It's the art argument. There's no minimum requirement, it's art if you want it to be, good, bad, ugly, beautiful... Nothing and yet everything? yeah, that counts.

Personally though, I'm super direct, and Splitting Image is about atonement. Isn't it messed up that people look for scapegoats instead of solving a problem? Who gets to pick the exact time and amount of punishment - will they know when to stop? If you wish death and suffering on someone out of imagined slights that could happen(eg; people thinking a dangerous fellow is gonna break into their house and they'll be brave and kill them and everyone claps), don't we have two bad people instead of one? Something something the Paarthumax quote

Loads.
Though not outwardly obvious mine is about how one person's issues affect others around them. Having the courage to defeat their insecurities through challenges and experience.
Other aspects are greed, abandoning loved ones enticed by their ambitions and becoming prisoners to their aspirations even when they do it for good reasons.
Some things that I personally mull about/experienced.
Love comes with sacrifices.
But it's a gag comedy too. Like life! XD

I agree with what @TheLemmaLlama said about direction. Because of all the types of artists out there, I think it's the easiest to tell when a writer does not know what they want. ^^; Stories are meant to communicate something, whether it's a moral or a message or an emotion or just an experience. A great story knows what that is and conveys it well.

Personally, I usually have to have some kind of message in mind when I write a story...I need a guiding objective to prevent me from derailing the entire project into a showcase of whoever my favorite character happens to be. ⊙u⊙;
Besides, I never really get anywhere until I have something I want to say. For me, that's the difference between having a collection of cute character designs in a setting, and an actual STORY.

Take two recent fantasy novels I have in the works: One of them started out as just that, a collection of cute character designs in a setting. Only, at the time I came up with the idea, I had already matured enough as a writer to understand that I needed a goal to work towards if I wanted to have a story.
I decided on one pretty early on, and I keep it tacked up on top of the Word doc as a reminder: "I think that Monastery! is a story about how people can be saved by love and acceptance, at any age and at any time."

Seeing that every time I open it up to work really helps to keep me focused...it was my first time writing a coming-of-age/slice-of-life story in prose, and I honestly expected to make a mess of it. On the contrary, I'm happy to announce that I finished its first Volume last night. ^^

Now, the other story I've been working on recently is actually a reboot of a very, very, VERY old idea that I've failed at a few times already. I did a couple new character designs, fleshed out the worldbuilding, polished up the lore a little bit, and I was feeling very excited...only to suddenly realize that the story did not have a plot. ._.

Worse than that, it never did have one...I'd spent so much time working on this fantasy story as a kid, struggling to get it started without realizing there was no destination in sight. The characters had no development, their adventure had no real purpose...all I had was the vague idea of an epic fantasy and some cute character designs. I did have thousands of words' worth of lore, yes, but there was nothing I wanted to say.

...It was really demoralizing, realizing that. ^^; I felt like such an idiot for not seeing it sooner...I'm still a little mad at myself, tbh. But now I'm working on finding a message for this story, and for each of its characters, and I think that someday when I am actually able to write it, it'll turn out great.