How people FAIL writing female OCs

Comments · 758

• CO

  @Country_Bee_of_Tireland · 6 months ago

  1. write the men equally as poorly<br>2. problem solved

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• SA

  @SamuraiCake42 · 6 months ago (edited)

  I often entirely forget genders exist :D so all my characters are written entirely around their personalities.

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• HA

  @hannahmiller4663 · 7 months ago

  I want to make an emotionally stunted female character that cheated on her partner, and finds herself in a bar to drink away her pain and never learn from her mistakes. Then the bar is attacked by zombies and for some reason, somehow, she is the only survivor in the bar. There were people who where celebrating an engagement, there was a kid who turned 21 and is studying to be a doctor or something. But no, she survives. I want my main character to have self punishing self sabotaging tendencies, and tend to jump towards new sudden solutions to long lasting problems. I want her to find out who she is and why she is the way she is in the apocalypse damn it.

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• GL

  @Glennkabob · 6 months ago

  Writing people is hard

  588

• SA

  @sabinayeasmin3394 · 6 months ago

  Writing female characters isn&apos;t that hard. Just imagine you are the character. It&apos;s not that hard to imagine yourself as a woman.

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• VI

  @VioletS.Peppermint · 6 months ago

  i clicked on this to try and find a cure. im glad you mentioned that being bad at writing female characters doesnt make you a bad person because ive been punishing myself for it lately. i really think my characters deserve a lot better than just being so and so&apos;s sisters and mothers or just casualties in the war.

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• OL

  @olliecanal · 7 months ago

  Most of my female OCs are idealistic and eccentric enough to shrug off a lot of the attention they get, and tend to share social support networks in order to look out for each others&apos; vulnerabilities. Rather than making them over-complicated I like to work the complications into their interactions and how they work together or disagree with each other, and how that affects their relationships with similar groups of male characters. I think putting them into groups helped develop them a lot more effectively than trying to figure them out as loners or singular relationship dynamics, and you can have a lot of fun and exposition in dialogue rather than with internal thoughts.

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• DI

  @DixieBSka · 6 months ago

  As a female writer, I have an insane amount of difficulty writing female characters. Writing male characters comes so easy to me, but I find myself struggling to not write a stereotype or trope for a female character and it drives me insane. For example, I have a book that I’m working on that’s a fantasy dystopian. My characters are all supposed to represent some sort of idea or or belief or just concept in general. My main character, Wilson is a people-pleasing polite shadowling that always put others needs in front of his to make people around him more comfortable. However he’s not immune to anger and and eventually all the rudeness and ridicule and such bottles up to the point where he explodes, something he actively tries to avoid but can’t help because of how crappy people treat him because they see him as a pushover. Thomas, an avion that works with Wilson is a cold, rude, and sarcastic character that used to be a lot kinder while still being sarcastic just in a more lighthearted way. He became the way he is because of the situation he ends up stuck in and ends up putting up walls and a front so he can cope with how quickly his world was changing. Abram, an orc, is a fatherly type character who will do his best to help the people he cares about, but will only give advice and enough to help them get on their feet before pushing them to take the steps forward themselves because he refuses to walk anyone through anything while holding their hand and comforting them the entire time. He knows he won’t always be there so while he wants to help he wants the people he cares about to figure things out themselves so they don’t constantly need him.<br><br>And then there’s my main female characters. Estelle, also a shadowling and Wilson’s partner, is a character who at the beginning of the book is presumed to be dead but is later found out to be being essentially held captive by the dictatorship and being forced the work for them. I don’t even know what she’s supposed to represent. Then there’s Agnes, a human teenager or child (I haven’t decided yet), she’s supposed to be the lens through which a child would see the world, in black and white, unable to see any gray but since she’s a human and the dictatorship is all human while most of the citizens are fantasy creatures she gets lumped in with the dictatorship by others who cannot see gray either or by those who just stereotype. Only problem is, I DON’T KNOW HOW TO WRITE HER INTO THE STORY, I have four chapters so far (20 pages) and she is only spoken of briefly in the beginning of the first chapter. I don’t know how to write her back in, in a way that would make sense or be important.

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• NU

  @nukeleo3 · 6 months ago

  I noticed people really hate Lanolin (IDW Sonic) for being a flawed leader and blame her for her actions that resulted from not having access to information she &nbsp;would have no way of gaining.

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• SH

  @shadowess2614 · 6 months ago

  One thing I&apos;ve always noticed with self insert or Reader or original characters in fanfiction, especially when they&apos;re being shipped with a cannon character. Is that they are always... Kind, nice, sweet, compassionate. And only angry or upset at appropriate and justified times. Not saying every fanfic writer writes their female ocs like this. But at the same time, whenever I&apos;ve written tempestuous, traumatised, snarky, or just plain there is something wrong with them but you&apos;ll have to read to figure it out, female characters, they never take off.

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• ME

  @menamo745 · 6 months ago

  As a man, one of my favorite characters in fiction is Nana Komatsu from the manga/anime series, Nana. Even though her personality and aesthetic are so incredibly far from my own, I find her so relatable and endearing. I mean, her first major obstacle in the story is that she over spends and has to get a job because she&apos;s out of money. Which is not only funny, but extremely relatable.<br><br>Not to mention that she later becomes the embodiment of quarter life depression.

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• VA

  @vanillaskin1907 · 6 months ago

  I&apos;m a woman and aspiring author, and I feel as though I have the opposite problem. I pretty much only write female characters, and most are asexual or in wlw relationships/interested in other women, so not many men show up in my average story concept. It&apos;s not like I genuinely dislike writing men, they just tend to get sidelined as I find I&apos;m far more interested in my female OCs. This was definitely more of a problem when I was younger as my male characters almost exclusively existed only in relation to a more centered female character. I feel like I&apos;ve improved somewhat as time has passed. I have several stories that focus on men and many more relevant male OCs. However, many if not most of my stories include themes/events that are quite dark. I feel comfortable writing certain events for my female characters because I&apos;ve lived through the same things as a woman myself, but with men I&apos;m a bit held back since I don&apos;t have the experience of how a man would react or develop if those same things happened to him. If I&apos;m going to write about something serious, the last thing I want is to come across as misinformed, ignorant, or disrespectful.

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