Profile Guide | ZeninaD

Relatable Male OCs

The hardest part of writing for me is coming up with relatable male OCs.

No seriously, it's really hard to write male characters even but then trying to make them relatable... It's like Helena and Hayley's first Spyral mission that I still haven't written a word for (literally the chapter only has the title [07] and two words in the text section. And those two words, you guessed it, are: first mission).

And to think that on my other account I wrote an entire chapter in my fanfic guidebook elaborating on how to write with a guy's perspective, identifying the clichés and giving tips to fix it... Damn, I am such a hypocrite at times.

(When I open that account, it seems as if it belongs to a completely different person who I lost contact with the second I started writing DC fanfiction).

I don't even know why I am writing this chapter, I might even delete it later on. Just needed a place to rant because I am having troubles writing my male OCs. 

So there are two main male OCs that I am working on right now. One is Zachary Smith from A Million Reasons | K. Danvers and the other is Reece Parker from Falsetto | T. Drake.

And the one thing I have noticed which is common for all the male OCs I have written till now, they are just too nice.

Like I don't remember ever writing a thoroughly mean male OC, or a male OC who's not nice. [Except for Sebastian Royce, he's a literal piece of shit and I hate him].

We can rule Neal out because I guess he deviates from that spectrum. But he still was a nice character, deep down all those layers of bad reputation I had spread over him.

So here's the main problem, I think I always write nice characters and that's kinda restricting me. I want to explore more options but then I get stuck.

If you have read my fanfics, you would know what I am talking about. 

In all the male OCs I have written so far, we have Alexander Beaumont, caring elder brother who is hardworking, devoted and nice. Then we have Dominic Hayden, once again a very caring brother, sweet person, a literal ray of sunshine. We have Mathias Lawrence, I never really paid him much attention anyways, he's just an average guy who befriends people too quickly (once again, nice). Ryuu Ishikawa a daring warrior, self sacrificial, loyal and again falling in the nice category but then I did not give him enough presence in the fanfic (yeah, he's from Katana | R. Grayson, in case you're wondering) since he had died before the story even began....

Neal Hastings is the only original character I've written who did not have a nice first impression, in fact I guess I did test my limits with his character and broke my norm here and there. But still he was a nice person with his habit of taking care of street children and looking out for them.

I know it's not bad to have nice characters because people want to read about characters who they can idealize or look up to (in some cases). I bet people won't like to read about a straight up rude person who goes through no character development in the entire story and is just there because he's hot and mean but has a bad past so that makes up for it (a cliche stereotypical bad boy to summarize and oh look, here I have the majority of Wattpad audience preferences disagreeing with me since such bad boy books have reads in 100Ks sometimes even millions).

Maybe people do like to read about hot assholes (excuse my language).

But I don't like writing about them so it's no wonder that I don't have any such characters in my stories. Most of my characters have reasons to be how they are (and that reason is not necessarily a traumatic past), they undergo character development (I try very hard to incorporate that) and to me they are perfect. But then I also think there should be flaws in characters.

Nothing and no one can be perfect.

So just to prove my point (here I go judging myself brutally again), I will be stating the flaws in my male OCs, considering the main protagonists/antagonists and not counting the side characters as of now because then I might never be able to list them all.

1. Neal Hastings: self destructive, can do anything for the adrenaline rush, kind of like a know it all but I don't think my readers have noticed that (I guess it's because he's too observant and he believes he knows people very well so he sometimes ends up doing things according to his knowledge of people but that lands him into trouble mostly).

2. Ryuu Ishikawa: suffers from hero complex, saves others to the extent that it is self destructive, highly opinionated, thinks that he knows what's best for everyone, will always be the leader and does not follow orders.

3. Alexander Beaumont: trusts too easily, gets taken advantage of because of his kind nature, has very low self esteem.

4. Dominic Hayden: thinks he will never be enough, blames himself for a lot of things, self sacrificial.

5. Sebastian Royce: toxic and very emotionally manipulative, possessive to a dangerous extent.

6. Zachary Smith: too optimistic, extremely devoted, won't take a hint (spoiler alert but yeah like really he should have figured out that if a girl gives him a million reasons to stay away from her, he should just move on. Don't waste your time, man. But no, he didn't take my advice so...)

7. Reece Parker: dual personality (deep down he's very different from how he appears to others), highly competitive (to the extent that it's clearly a flaw), extremely self conscious and cares a lot about what people think about him.

And by writing all of it out, I've realized that most of these can not be termed as solid flaws (except for Sebastian's flaws). But maybe that's because I walk on the grey line since I am a Gemini and so do my characters (because they are my creations, not because they share my zodiac), their flaws can become their strengths if they figure it out or ruin them if they do not...

I don't know why I am still writing this, I am sorry you all have to read a whole chapter of me being indecisive and ranting without any direction whatsoever.

Anyhow, if you made it so far, thank you so much for reading it all. And yes I do want a little help in here. If you guys could tell me in the comments what flaws I can consider to assign my OCs, that would be great and I would appreciate it a lot.

I want to make my characters relatable and for that I need to add flaws, they can't be perfect no matter how much I would want them to be.

So what flaws do you think I can include? Or what flaws would you want to read about?

Also I wish you all have a lovely day. 

I just gave my fourth exam and there are only two more left so I am really hoping those two to go by as well so that I can finally have an off from studies (this semester was exhausting).

Adios amigos.

Looking forward to the comments.