feeling insecure about your OCs/works?

All the time. 

It took me 10 years or so to publically post my writing anywhere. Before I just shared my work with close friends. 

Don't feel pressured to post something, you should feel comfortable with posting your work at your own pace! 

not doing this to impress others, if there's something people don't like then tough luck for them :'D

yeah :( i hid 90% of mine (only keeping some up for commission purposes) and i never fill out any bios cos im too shy to say anything about my own ocs 👉👈 i genuinely hope everyone can feel comfy about their own characters though! think about it this way, if you love to hear about other peoples’ ideas and characters and you don’t judge them, in the same vein no one really judges you and would love to hear about your ocs!! at least that’s how i feel ;v;

I agree with Vessine... i think our biggest critics are ourselves ;o;

ok I am actually the kind of person who likes 2 put myself on a stage both literally & metaphorically -- I definitely have a very strong innate desire for attention, which I don't think everyone shares, but it does drive me to keep putting my stuff out there even if I'm not feeling super happy with it. Ppl who can stay motivated to work without extrinsic social motivations really impress me :o So the struggles I have are probably very different to yours.... but there may be some overlap in places :v just bc i LIKE my work being seen doesnt mean I don't often feel insecure about it.... paradoxically enough hahaha

Do you know what it is that scares you the most? Like, where the insecurity comes from. I think in my case it is... the inherent vulnerability. "If ppl dont like the things I make, then by extension they musn't like me". I think everything that everyone ever creates shows their hand in some way, and letting that stuff be seen by other people can definitely be daunting. Especially if ur characters deal with stuff that u find rly personal/hard-hitting. In my case, I tend to judge the emotional risk of sharing my stuff as being outweighed by the benefits of putting it out there. Even tho that vulnerability never actually goes away, the more I do it the easier it gets. Also... nobody just viewing could possibly truly know where fiction ends & I begin 😏 it's safer than it feels, in that way

I do like the internet for sharing because the stakes really are quite low. Even though it's still vulnerable and there are still risks associated with showing your work to other people, it's still anonymous in many ways-- I'm more comfortable posting about my characters here than I am talking to anyone about them irl. TH especially is good, because there r a lot of likeminded people doing similar things... I think that, for the most part, other creators are very much sympathetic to the emotional struggles of creating & of showcasing ur creations. Also... people who are disinterested in your work will simply ignore it, while people who like it enough to engage will do so. I mean. Trolls n stuff will always exist but it's not like ppl like that are really trying 2 engage w/ ur stuff anyway :'v so they dont count pffft Engaging with stuff, like, really reading and absorbing it does take effort on the part of the viewer. Ppl who r not into ur stuff just won't put the effort in. But people who ARE interested in ur stuff will enjoy having engaged!

But yeah when I'm feeling crappy about my work it does help to think about how much joy other people's content has brought me, both on TH and elsewhere. I truely enjoy reading about and interacting with people in the forums, and it's such a cool feeling to start recognizing various characters n art stules n stuff. If they hadn't put themselves out there I would never have been able to have these encounters :0 and just maybe someone feels the same way abt my stuff :'v even if nobody does, just thinking about a world where nobody was game to put their stuff out there is v sad. So i kinda just go "screw it" & hit upload pffft

As an aside, creating things by myself feels SUPER isolating. I feel I benefit from having other ppls fresher eyes & feedback on my things from time to time. There's also a small (mostly-imaginary) feeling of accountability that comes with giving yourself an audience. It does help motivate me, and I don't think I'd be as productive without showing other ppl my stuff :o so yeah benefits benefits benefits

Another thing I like to remember is that no art (writing, character, etc) is ever going to be PERFECT. Perfectionism used 2 bog me down a lot. But nowadays even if I dont think something is perfect, I'm content to share it in its imperfect state bc I think if I tried to mess around with it until it was perfect I would never get to share :'v

all this being said! don't pressure urself to get out there, either :O it's perfectly okay if u don't want to throw ur things out there for ppl to see. U might not experience the same benefits or even the same hangups as me. But yea that's my meandering 2c! Just b gentle w/ yourself.... theres no wrong or right way 2 create stuff, and no wrong or right way to go about sharing/not sharing it, either ;w;

oh ouch definitely been feeling this as of late :o(

i've always struggled with incredibly poor self-esteem when it comes to my writing and my only way of coping with it had kinda just been to a) ignore it b) sleep it off c) post stuff anyways even if it makes me anxious/uncomfortable

i relate to a lot of the things said previously in thread like how i KNOW it doesnt really matter what other people think since my ocs are for my own enjoyment but i cant help but feeling anxious anyways

i've found checking with friends + having them revise my writing helps! sometimes u gotta just take a deep breath too

tho its reassuring to know via the poll that im not alone in feeling this way :')

does anyone else feel like this?

I absolutely feel this way. I was mocked a lot for sharing things I enjoy and I think the feeling of keeping things close and private is now a permanent part of my personality. I'm super passionate about a lot of stuff but I doubt more than one person even understands the breadth of all the things that spark joy. I'm super arms-length with everything, really.

Toyhouse is basically the only place where I share my OCs. ~90% of my stuff is hidden as-is, and what isn't hidden has some odd browsing quirks I take advantage of on-site. I rarely talk about my OCs with my online friends (who have their own, mind you), and I never talk about my collection with my irl friends. I almost never post OC stuff on my social medias or artsites outside of here, and if I do, it's just "art of [OC name], an OC." Nothing about their personalities, nothing about their world, nothing about all the little things I've thought about them. Just a little "hey I'm not dead" art, and then I'm on my way. 

In actuality, I've got an entire magic system and its rules mapped out in google docs, as if it's the basis to a rather unbalanced RPG, because my world is unbalanced. I mapped out a star chart and the corresponding months, thinking about how birthdays and their equivalent zodiac signs would effect said magic and the personalities of those born under them. I have a rebirth system for the gods (one's legitimately dead) and the star system correlates to them and their previous lives, as well. In another world, I've got a rough basis for how their government works and how much rich people suck and how my little group of trouble go about their lives with regards to it. I've also made a stupid visual novel for s*ts and giggles over the course of a weekend and uploaded all the characters shortly after; the VN never went public even though it's hilarious, and incorrect routes did "permanent damage" to the VN long before Undertale and the Writing Club game did. (Do not put me in charge of programming a game with global variables that over-arch all other save files. I will cause trouble.)

I feel like cancel culture has really exacerbated the overall problem of anxiety around shared content. A loud amount of people are overanalyzing and jumping to conclusions over fences a mile away from the actual situation, it's just no longer worth the time to publicize anything that has even a small chance of attracting salt. Like, yeah, there's legitimately bad people out there, but sometimes the things people point out are baffling at best. It's anxiety-inducing.

what do you do to reassure yourself in times that you interact with other creators?

I just remember I am not the only person creating dumb queer fantasy worlds because I wasn't able to be a dumb queer kid nor did I grow up to be an adult who uses magic to solve all my problems. It doesn't help a lot but sometimes I get brave!

for those of you comfortable talking about your OCs or showing your work, how do you do it?

I only share the most basic of stuff. RIP to anyone who wants to learn anything substantial about my characters and world. I don't know who you are, but I apologize if you're out there.

Can't say I've felt this in years. My characters are mine I post them here, if people wanna know more I can go on, but they don't care about me, let alone my characters so I never have to. I like my characters as they are, they're for me, and me alone. Of course down the road I kinda stop liking parts, and I'll edit and change characters around, but it is so I like them better. Even if someone liked my characters more than I did somehow, I'd still do what I do for me, not them.

(Almost) all the time.

Mainly due to subject matter. I kept winding in and out of edgy territory and while I love my characters they make me cringe when I read their bios or their short stories I've written for them. It's like a pantry fI'll of junk food to me, or a reminder of all the projects I started but never finished, or all the stories that never resolved. They often make me melancholy and in turn I feel like others probably see them as gross charicatures of almost-people.

My illustrations less so. Honestly I had to get over that years ago since I went to art school. Still, I always feel like a fraud, especially considering how little I feel like I've improved.

I feel like this too tbh. With the stories and bios I create, I worry it’s poorly put together/written or it doesn’t make sense. :’) 

I think it’s from the trauma of having my OC be put on a fucking mary sue tumblr blog (mary sue parade), and being bashed on for being so. But you know what? Who cares. People are slowly coming to terms with what we used to call “cringey” at the past, and folks who call out people’s enjoyment (that is obviously not immoral; you get my point.) for being cringey is just plain bullying in disguise.

i always have the underlying worry that my OCs, writing, and art are not good enough, but i just keep reminding myself that my OCs and any works associated w/ them are for me and if i'm happy w/ them then that's all that matters! it took a long time to get to that point tho, i regularly gave up drawing and deleted my works bc they never got enough oitside attention but now i'm finally content i think!

Oh man, you're absolutely not alone!

I think this falls under the idea that you're your own worst critic. Like, anyone on the outside can come and say that your ideas are great, you write awesome characters, etc but you just... don't believe it hahah.

I really, really struggle with this lol. Actually this past weekend I was in a severe depressive funk and really considered leaving an RP group I'm in because (among other less petty reasons) I just... can't see why anyone would enjoy the character I write hhh. This... isn't true, as was made abundantly clear by the other members lol, but it's just hard for me to see it from that perspective.

This isn't just limited to characters, but to art and writing as well.

Something I've learned (that fails to help me but I hope it will help you hhh) is that this is natural for... a lot of content creators because we are too close to the content being produced to be able to view it objectively. We look at what we've created and see the negatives. This isn't how I wanted x to look, I wish y was more z, I can't describe a to my satisfaction. But the audience? They don't see that. 

In fact, one of the best critiques I've ever gotten wasn't about my art or writing, but about my artist's notes. I had a tendency to berate my art in artist's notes, make little jokes about how bad it was. This critique snapped me out of that, told me that no one was thinking such things until they saw I was thinking them. In my attempts to beat people to the punch in what I thought were obvious flaws, I was really drawing attention to them.

I guess what I'm trying to say through that is, to accept your insecurities, but also to trust your viewers :) it's not so easy, I know I am still suuuuper bad at accepting compliments. And I think this whole.post makes no sense lol. But. In short, use your insecurity to push yourself to improve, but trust that your viewers see something you don't. Even if that something is "potential," it's still a net positive :)

//GOD i hope this makes sense at all HHHHH

i think im mostly pretty comfortable with my OCs but sometimes i'll just think damn my characters designs are really boring or they're really poorly developed compared to other people's characters on here. honestly it's really hard to not compare yourself to other people sometimes and just feel like those people are doing the same to you and thinking your ocs are shit compared to theirs too. but what I've found helps is to just remind myself that they're my OCs, even if other people think they're boring and stupid it doesn't really matter because you make characters for your own enjoyment not other people's. also generally people aren't judging you as much as you might feel like they are. I've gotten to a weird point with art and writing where i am completely comfortable sharing or posting the most low effort shitty drawing but I'm super self conscious of my writing and wouldn't even share it with close friends. i think because i'm a lot more experienced with drawing than with writing and therefore more comfortable with it. what ive started doing to help myself be more comfortable with my writing is just entirely focus on writing for myself stuff that I know 100% isnt going to be seen by anyone else. which seems very counter intuitive but the idea is if you can get comfortable with private writing it'll help you be more confident with your work and you can start feeling like you can publicly share it. im not quite at that point yet but I think I've definitely become a lot more confident with my writing for the past few months I've been doing it like that. like today i wrote 15 pages of lesbian warrior cat fanfiction and didn't cringe once, which is definitely an improvement from back in January where i could barely write a few sentences because i hated what i was writing so much. literally just being able to feel like my work is mine has made me feel so much better about it