It's no surprise that as people grow older, the content they create usually grows and changes with them. Interests often come in phases for a lot of people, and changes in life also tend to influence what we are interested in and what we find important, so I'd really like to hear how people here consider their development as a content creator been so far! It doesn't matter if you're an artist or a writer or consider yourself to be something else as long as it's like... relevant to TH and the original content I guess
Has your art/writing style changed? Have you had phases of focusing on certain themes over others? Has the average age of your main characters gotten higher as you have aged? Did you do something as younger that you'd never do now, or perhaps do something now you never intended or wanted to do in the past? Feel free to answer to these or just come up with your own, as long as you remember to be nice & respectful towards other people on this thread!
yeah my style has changed quiet a lot over the last few years.. mostly because my Ex had pushed me into a corner of style that I wasn't comfortable with at all and I finally managed to break away from that and actually enjoy art again!
for themes.. they change a lot, but I stuck true to my love for fantasy and medieval themes. it was there since I was a little kid and it's still sticking with me!
My character bios have been getting a LOT longer than when I started seriously writing! Apparently I've also been gaining an interest in the supernatural and mythology since like 90% of my characters are gods/angels/whatever lmao
I've also been kinda getting a lot darker with my bios strangely, should i be concerned- i'm kidding, i just noticed that so
My writing also became a bit more... grand-scale I guess? Most of my stories revolve around the individual worlds my characters live in so yeah
Writing-wise, I certainly have evolved my style over time. Reading old prose is a little silly and almost embarrassing, except I know I would never be where I am today if I didn't start writing those pieces all those years ago! I would say I do a lot better with planning out stories, describing environments and actions (though I still have room to improve!), and generally developing a character through actions. I also think I've picked up a distinct style in which thoughts and actions of a character can blur and cross-over in a narrative, and I'm really happy to continue working with that unique style.
As far as just character development goes, I definitely notice my preferences and interests have changed! My characters have definitely aged to an extent with me; I no longer really have a desire to develop or write about teenage individuals, as their life experiences are not as interesting to me anymore. I work with adult characters in their early to late 20s, and while I don't imagine that's going to change (I'm not continuously aging my characters with me anymore), I definitely think that as I mature as a person, so too do the issues that are important to my characters.
I'm a lot more comfortable thinking about sexuality of my characters than I used to be, and with that comes considering the sex life and experiences of my characters, which lends a lot to their development as people. I used to be sort of embarrassed about it, but now I'm not. With that, of course, is why I don't like working with younger characters as much anymore.
Another aspect I've noticed I enjoy is that while initial love stories are always something I love to write, I also really enjoy developing the established/long-term relationships many of my characters have with each other nowadays. Whether it's their relationship several months or years into dating, or detailing marriage and being parents, I think those are much more interesting scenarios to me than they were when I was younger.
Finally, I definitely notice my tastes in character aesthetics have changed as I've grown as a person and as a creator. I may like facial hair on my male characters a LOT more now than I did when I was a teenager. xD (I wouldn't even have entertained the thought back then when designing characters!) I also am a lot less interested in my anthro characters than I used to be. I still love them, but I am definitely much more invested in my humanoid characters lately.
Those are just a few things I've noticed about my creations as years have gone by. I honestly am super happy I've had my characters for so long and have been actively working (on and off) with them for such an extended period of time--they can only get more nuanced the longer I spend time with them. I also feel that they continue to grow and surprise me! ^^
Oh yes, both my writing style and drawing style has changed significantly over time.
Reading any of my old prose... I cringe so much at it and wonder how I ever thought it was any good. Sure, I wrote some of that when I was barely into middle school, but... did I really think it was good? It lacked a sense of direction, characters were shallow and one dimensional, and plot was too similar to other existing stories. That being said, I'm still glad I wrote them. If I never got started at all, I wouldn't be where I am today. It was an important first step, no matter how awful it was then. I feel so fortunate to have such great mentors who've helped me mold and craft my own writing into something I can be proud of. I still have a lot to learn, but I'm much further along than I was in the beginning, and that's worth celebrating.
As for character development, that's something that has also changed a lot. For one, my preferences are a lot different than they were as a kid. It's kind of interesting to look back and see how I was back then, compared to now. :o
In regards to art, that's something that has changed a lot too. In the first place, I never imagined I would be drawing like I do now. Had you asked me around four or five years ago if I thought I would still be drawing and using a tablet, I would've said no way. It's kind of neat! While I still don't draw a TON, I do when the mood strikes me. I have a more solid grasp on what I like in a character's design, as well as what makes them stand out. I think.
Characters are definitely better than before, and luckily I improved mine that remained from that time, and they're all good now.
Writing is about the same or worse since I haven't bothered to do it in so long it fell back to 2011 levels. I did write before 2011 sure, but it was for school stuff so it was all an asspull to get a grade.
And art always escaped me, so art wise I am 100% the same. Maybe worse.
So I improved in one place, but am a total failure everywhere else, so compared to before when I was just a total failure I'd say there was improvements.
Figured I should contribute here too lmao it kind of slipped my mind yesterday
Anyway I originally started out with art and only then moved to character creation and finally to story writing, so all these things are kind of in different stages for me. My art style has definitely changed and so has my writing style, and I feel like with both I have just sort of taken this turn of being as extra as possible haha.
The ages of my characters have definitely changed as I aged, like I just have this tendency of making more characters of my own age, but surprisingly I also have a lot of children characters like under the age of 15, which is something I never really had as younger; they were all proper teenagers or young adults. I also used to have nothing but female characters up until 2013 and after that majority of my characters then have been male followed by a bunch of non-binary identities, I guess. And the amount of gender/sexual minorities I portray nowadays is 100% higher than as a teen: I grew up in a homo-and transphobic family and my attitude changed only after I realized at the age of like 15-16 that I'm not straight either and only then started becoming more familiar with the terminology + started learning more about gender minorities too by extension. I think I was particularly afraid of having trans characters at one point because I was super worried of accidentally being a jerk and doing something harmful or not portray them well, but I'm trying my best to be respectful & sensitive. I mean, at the end of the day they're people first and foremost, and I should write them as such!
I feel like the character types I like have remained somewhat the same throughout the years & I enjoy going out of my comfort zone in writing, even if I don't post every single character I have written since that'd be impossible. But uhh I guess I had this phase where almost all my characters full fantasy and always some sort of immortals or long-living species, whereas now I have a lot of almost ordinary people in urban fantasy? I mean I think everyone has something special in them but majority of my characters here especially are those who don't have magical abilities or don't really believe in that stuff, even if they do live in a world where magic is technically real and possible - people just have forgotten it.
Surprisingly I used to write a lot of drama and angst as younger! Like up until 19 all my stories were really sad and tragic and my characters always suffered, but nowadays I have a complete opposite view: I love happy ends and endings where people find closure and some sort of ray of hope, and I genuinely enjoy exploring more healthy dynamics between characters. I guess it has a lot to do with the fact my own family situation and life in general are pretty miserable and were particularly bad back in 2014-2015, so I kind of wanted to give my characters what I couldn't have myself. Naturally not everything can be fun and all my characters struggle with something, but at the core I want my characters to find comfort and happiness by the end of the road, because I think in this world we now live in stories of kindness and hope are rare, yet much needed.
Looking at art itself, it definitely got better. My early works are the exact cringy material other people make fun of lmao. Thank god I deactivated those old dA accounts. Though after drawing my mermay pic I realized how much I strayed from my early stuff in term of themes. Everything is ugly and gross lmao. Now I understand how my old stuff was more popular than what it is now, it was at least pretty anime to look at, although very poorly drawn.
The only things I ever wrote were essays for school, I started doing some actual oc writing for their profiles just several months ago so that is still painful to read. But I guess better than nothing tho lmao.
For the characters themselves.. it's currently bad. It really is. My old ocs were pure shit when it came to designs, they were generic, edgy and just plain ugly but the themes were somewhat better lmao. Maybe it was the lack of research or because I was lowkey copying the anime I was currently into at that time but they were more.. fun? Interesting for other people? I'm not confident with my characters atm at all and everytime I get a fave notification on a character with a written profile I scream internally because there's a chance the person actually read my shit writing lmao. But the designs are much better than what it was back then so there's that I guess.
Hmmm.... My art has gotten technically better for sure haha
At the same time I'm not really sure my change of direction is reflected very much yet? It's still all just figures in voids, but figures alone are no longer the most interesting thing to me; I'm getting more interested in scenes and environments. I'm only just starting to take this ~next step on my artistic journey~ and I am excited about what happens next re: my art skills.
I haven't done any writing for years and years so I wouldn't say I've actually improved, but my areas of interest have indeed changed!
I think my concepts have become a lot more... shamelessly open-ended? These days my OCs are more like toys rather than characters. So I imagine their backstories and contexts in extreme detail, and then, rather than even trying to write them into an actual narrative from there, I'll endlessly re-imagine them in different isolated scenarios. I know this is probably advised against but ah, I'm having fun & that's what matters! It kind of means that nothing goes anywhere though. So like, what I write is more like an episode of a sitcom or Star Trek or something rather than the more narrative stuff I used to write. It's less effort and more fun. It's also less good for my writing abilities, but again, I'm only writing me so I Can Do What I Want. I do have character arcs imagined for most of them as they grow as individuals, but I'm not quite willing to actually slog through bringing it all together and writing an actual narrative just yet, so I just pick out points that interest me more now. One day I will actually sit down and write something bigger, but for now I'm just playing & experimenting.
My concepts have gotten much less grandiose too. Focusing on """real""" people and their everyday lives is becoming more interesting to me than the exciting fantasy/sci-fi adventures and dramatic romances I used to favour. The old plots I used to write had huge stakes, y'know, Good Guys vs Bad Guys for the Fate Of The World type stuff. These days I like smaller things, with less consequences, that are less clear-cut. Normal people have become more interesting than these big epic heroes. Similarly with genre-- I used to be really into high fantasy and space opera type stuff but these days I'm way more interested in the mundane. Where people make and deal with their own problems rather than having to deal with really drastic global-scale stuff. Not that either is better or worse! It's just been interesting to see the shift from fun, larger than life stuff to smaller, quieter stuff. While the former can have it too, I think the latter is more relatable, and it lets me get all that sweet, gritty nuance happening more easily.
Also I'm less afraid to draw on my own experiences these days. Even though my life isn't super interesting there are experiences I have which not everyone has and I can use them as a source of inspo. Also me finding out I'm trans and neurodivergant has definitely made me more interested in writing LGBT & neurodiverse characters c': as I get older and experience more things it's getting easier to portray realism, I think. Not that I'm actually anywhere near actual "realistic" writing (and nor do I necessarily want to be there) but I definitely find my stuff seems to have more dimension to it these days.
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I didn't mean to bump this last time I was just on my phone and it messed me up!
But yes! I've changed quite a bit since I first made characters! Back when I was young I had made a lot of problematic characters, not because I was aiming to offend people, I just wanted to be edgy and write a cool character. But as I grew older, I started realizing how these weren't okay and how they were problems, and I started to think more on that while I made new characters, even revamping some.
As for age, just about all of my OCs have gotten boosts in their age the older I got. Some of this is because I realized, "Hey, they shouldn't be able to do stuff like that in their late teens/early twenties". But also it's easier for me to write older people rather than younger now.
And designs too! I've grown fonder of buff guys with facial hair, though this is purely because I always hang out with Milkman aka a THOT KEKEKEKEK.
All in all, I've come a long ways since I first started!
My writing has definitely changed a lot since the days when I first started writing and rping . . .
For one thing, my approach to character creation has changed immensely . . . I used to make a million smaller characters for specific rp plots, and never keep them . . . but now I put a lot of effort into building up characters, and all mine with "smaller" profiles have some significance in a set world . . .
In that light, my characters have gotten so much more realistic and developed . . . I used to make a lot of uwu insane people, portray mental illness badly, and make woe is me characters with no real purpose but to be pitied . . . Now I actually give my mains equal amounts of strengths and weaknesses/good and bad traits, think much harder about how mental health (if it's an issue) affects them, make sure not to portray them in extremes, and (in the case of the Indigo Whispers trio) moved them on beyond their trauma so that it's not a defining trait, it instead becomes something that they develop from in the plot and heal from in their futures . . .
I also, when I was younger, was much more obsessed with wanting to write a book . . . and with wanting to make Indigo Whispers a big public thing . . . In recent years I've both decides that's not for me, and become less focused on needing it to be written out . . . I'm okay with keeping the extent of the plot to myself, and simply writing short stories about my characters when I want to write + writing up the background, basic plot overview and other details . . . Even if it's not professional or conventional like my original goals were, it makes me much happier this way, and that's what's important to me . . .