I used to be the kind of person who tried his best to avoid having characters similar to me in any manner, until I realized that's very much impossible to me: there will always be something overlapping, and I understood it's better for me to simply let my characters to be who they are rather than force them because I'm insecure as a writer. I also realized if I ever want representation specifically tailored at me, I'm literally the only person who can do that, and if I wish I had seen more of thing X then there has to be someone out there who feels the same way as well.
Posting these under spoiler because I ended up rambling
EDIT/ Changed wording and added a bit more
Cyrus wasn't intentionally designed or created with his disability as the biggest thing (I actually drew the bandages just for the aesthetic and the lore came later), and while his feelings regarding having a disability are not necessarily the same as mine, it's still a topic that is very close to me personally. Having physical limitations, visible to others or not, is something that can be difficult for some people to accept and come into terms with, and there is a lot of denial and bitterness involved for some. Stuff like "why did it have to happen to me" or "why me out of all people" or "it's unfair this happened and ruined everything I had planned". Also, my knee might not be smashed like his is and I can usually walk just fine, but my knees are often infected and limit my movement considerably + I sometimes have to bandage them to make sure I don't pull them into a bad position.
Similarly Daniel's character also revolves heavily around similar feelings but about a chronic illness instead, because as someone chronically ill I just... thought it'd be fun to explore it from a perspective that isn't "mine"? I have an extremely ill family especially from mum's side and I have grown up surrounded by bottles after bottles of medicine, and some of them have been mine too. Illness as a whole is something I have gotten very familiar with and I want to talk about it and explore it.
Adon shares a similar background with me where he's also a child from a relatively poor family, and that's why he tries his hardest to get by in life and get a good job, so he could free his family from the circle of poverty and to not fall into it himself. Having grown up in a family constantly dreading on the poverty line in my country's standards, I recognize it within me that I also turned to overachieving as a way to escape that kind of life, and I remember having been very young when I already felt like this is something I have to do. It's not necessarily a healthy mindset though if it starts taking you over, so with Adon I want to make sure he doesn't end up ruining his own health in the pursuit of a more financially stable life, heh. Similarly Knut also comes from a humble family and feels a little bit insecure about it when surrounded by people of much higher class than him, and Cyrus also falls into this category of me exploring the social effect of being from a not-so-wealthy family. I'm just so tired of assuming everyone is from a well off family where they never need to rely on food aid from the country.
Claude was based heavily on 70s shoujo / blond boy tropes, so with him things were more of a coincidence than elaborate planning really. I guess we share a lot of core traits as a result but we go about them in vastly different ways, so he's actually a very challenging character for me! I intentionally made him more on the smaller side though because of my life-long crusade to portray short and/or very androgynous guys who aren't a pushover or a joke like they often are portrayed in media, particularly in western mainstream. I guess I just wanted to show a character who doesn't conform to traditional masculinity can still be a very capable and respected guy despite Toxic Masculinity(tm). We both have a very androgynous appearance too to the point he sometimes gets harassed over it, and it's something I want to like... talk about. Also, Claude and I both are very good with people but not necessarily as sincere as we might seem to be, and have a cold, reserved way to feel about others at first.
Jonathan I made really kind and considerate by core because I just really think there should be more male main characters that are just... genuinely trying their best to be considerate? There's never enough of that and he's super fun to work on because his worldview is often brighter than mine, so it does me good too to take a less pessimistic approach on thing and explore them deeper. He's genuinely a fun protagonist to work on and I love love portraying a more softer and kinder side of masculinity.
Nicholas is... probably the character who ended up having things most personal to me by accident? His character revolves a lot around domestic abuse and feelings of humiliation, betrayal and bitterness I have also had to work out on in the past, although obviously our home circumstances aren't the same. But I just find it personally important to write characters whose response to abuse isn't always pretty and can warp their sense of self and the way they interact with others, and Nicholas is a very flawed and very pained character at the beginning of his story. But I guess I also want to show wounds can slowly heal and there can be happiness in the future because I'm sappy and also feel like those would have been the words I would have wanted to hear when I was younger, if that makes sense?
Waltz, perhaps by accident, ended up sharing similar feelings of disgust towards himself and his body as I often feel about mine. I have a very unique and twisted relationship with my physical appearance due to developmental issues, and as such from a very young age I have felt like I'm particularly hideous and there is something fundamentally wrong with me. Even to this day I keep thinking about all the doctor visits I went through as a kid and all the tests that provided no pieces to the puzzle, and the feeling of looking different from my classmates when puberty hit. It's just been a vortex of a twisted body image the bullying of classmates and harassment from other people haven't made any better. I don't consider him a metaphor to any sort of body image issues because I can promise nobody has a body quite like his, but there are a lot of feelings that do overlap. Funnily though Waltz has a lot of people around him who don't think of him as a freak in the slightest and some even find his body fascinating and beautiful, and only while typing this post I realized the same thing sort of applies to me, haha. If only I could learn to be at peace with my appearance too.