⛤KittieK⍺t⛤

The Mind Electric but Kris sings about dancing blueberries

Offending Gen-AI users with my doodles again. Love to inform them disabled people can draw without Gen-AI just fine. I’m sure it was a bot but you know if any other one pokes around they’ll see this lol

No real person is cool and composed 100% of the time. Everyone's a little awkward sometimes, gets too excited about something dumb, or has a fear that makes zero logical sense.

Being a bit of a loser is basically part of the human condition, and leaning into that is what makes a character feel like a person instead of a concept. Here's 20 small flaws to work in.

1. Being Bad at Something They're "Supposed" to Be Good At: A great cook who can't bake. A doctor who faints at the sight of their own blood. The mismatch is more memorable than if they were just good at everything.

2. A Genuinely Silly, Specific Fear: Not spiders, something weirder and more specific, the texture of wet paper, a particular sound, mannequins. Specificity is what sells it.

3. Laughing at Their Own Jokes: Before anyone else does, sometimes before the joke's even finished. It's a small thing, and it makes a character feel instantly more human.

4. Being Weirdly Competitive Over Something That Doesn't Matter: Board games, trivia, who can parallel park better. The stakes being embarrassingly low is exactly what makes it funny and real.

5. Holding a Grudge Over Something Petty: Still annoyed about a comment from three years ago that nobody else remembers. It says something honest about how their brain actually works.

6. Being Terrible at Taking a Compliment: Deflecting, downplaying, immediately changing the subject. Tip: this one's a great way to show insecurity without ever having the character say they're insecure out loud.

7. A Guilty Pleasure They're Embarrassed About: A trashy show, a boy band, a food combination nobody else understands. The embarrassment matters more than the thing itself.

8. Getting Overly Attached to an Object: A specific mug, a childhood blanket, a pen that "just writes better." Irrational, a little silly, and completely believable.

9. Chronic Procrastination: Not because they're lazy, because starting feels harder than it should. They'll do genuinely anything else first, and somehow it still gets done at 2am.

10. Talking Too Much When They're Nervous: Rambling, over-explaining, filling silence that didn't need filling. It's the opposite of the composed, quippy character, and it's usually more endearing.

11. Being Chronically Late: Not out of disrespect, just a genuinely broken internal clock. Great for a character who means well and still somehow makes everyone wait every single time.

12. Interrupting People Without Meaning To: Excitement gets ahead of them before they can stop it. It's a flaw that reads as enthusiasm more than rudeness, if you write it right.

13. Overpacking or Over-Preparing for Everything: Bringing five contingency plans to a simple errand. Usually rooted in a deeper need for control that the character probably hasn't examined too closely.

14. Struggling to Apologize Properly: "I'm sorry you feel that way" instead of an actual apology. Not malicious, just genuinely bad at the specific skill of admitting fault out loud.

15. A Weirdly Specific Food Aversion: Won't eat anything that touches on the plate. Refuses a food purely because of the texture. Small, harmless, and instantly humanizing.

16. Being Nosy: Can't help asking questions that aren't really their business, and can't quite explain why they need to know either.

17. Hoarding Things They Don't Need: Receipts, old birthday cards, a drawer of cables to nothing. A small, physical way to show a character who struggles to let go of things in general.

18. Being Bad With Names: Meets someone five times and still blanks. Endearing on a stranger, mortifying when it happens to someone they're supposed to know well.

19. Overthinking Simple Decisions: Standing in front of a menu for ten minutes over what to order. The stakes are nonexistent and the anxiety is real anyway.

20. A Terrible Sense of Direction: Gets lost in buildings they've been in a hundred times. Small, low-stakes, and a nice way to let other characters tease them without it turning mean.

Looking For More Writing Tips And Tricks?

Check out the rest of Quillology with Haya; a blog dedicated to writing and publishing tips for authors!

it's not just "worrying a lot" or one dramatic flashback scene. anxiety can be constant background noise, or it can hit in sudden physical waves, racing heart, nausea, feeling weirdly detached from your own body. PTSD is the nervous system staying on high alert long after the actual danger's gone. ask what the specific triggers and symptoms are before you write it, bc generalized anxiety and trauma-based PTSD work in genuinely different ways.

⤷ panic attacks are physical, not just emotional. chest tightness, dizziness, tingling hands, a feeling like you're dying or completely detached from reality. a character having one for the first few times might genuinely think something is medically wrong with them, not just "oh no i'm scared." it's not just breathing fast and looking spooked, it's the body convinced it's under attack.

⤷ triggers are rarely obvious or dramatic. a specific smell, a certain tone of voice, a particular time of day, fluorescent lighting. trauma responses often get triggered by mundane sensory details that seem to have nothing to do with the original event on the surface, and the character themselves might not even understand why they just shut down. don't limit your triggers to "seeing something that looks exactly like what happened," the brain makes connections that don't have to make sense to anyone watching from outside.

⤷ hypervigilance is exhausting and constant, not a dramatic beat. a character with PTSD might automatically scan every room for exits the second they walk in, sit facing the door out of habit, flinch at sudden movement or noise. this isn't them having A Moment, it's background behavior they've stopped even noticing themselves, bc it's just how their body operates now.

⤷ avoidance isn't cowardice, it's self-protection. a character refusing to talk about something, changing the subject, leaving the room, that's not necessarily weak-willed. avoidance is often the nervous system's own attempt to prevent a flashback or a panic response before it starts. writing forced confrontation as the only real path to healing is a common trope, but it's not actually how most healing works.

⤷ recovery isn't linear and doesn't end with one cathartic scene. a character can do real, genuine trauma work and still have a bad week months or even years later. writing healing as a single breakthrough moment after which the anxiety or PTSD is just "resolved" undersells how long and nonlinear this process actually is for most people, and honestly can make readers who are living through it feel like something's wrong with them for not being "fixed" already.

do the research, and if you can, read firsthand accounts from people who've actually lived through this rather than just other fiction that's already gotten it wrong.

Could I do something to make him laugh?

WHELP okay, might as well go ahead and share all of the design work I did, actually!

These were the actual designs I did for all the characters first, since I knew I'd need those established!

Funny enough I uh, didn't actually do that for final boss Noelle in that one panel. The goal there was mostly just to make something that looked huge and kind of overdesigned and incomprehensible, the way RPG final bosses often are. So, here's a design trying to reverse-engineer from that:

and think about what the Mikes

are doing right now…

A social media post by Matt Lillywhite. It reads:

Everytime I walk into a library I think, "Wow, this is what society looks like when it's actually doing its job."

Free heat.

Free seats.

Free internet.

Free knowledge.

If aliens landed tomorrow, I'd take them to a library first just to prove we're capable of getting one thing right.