forum what is the worst flaw / worst thing your character has ever done?

Started April 27, 2023 by @elektrascomplex language

tune

the reason i ask this is because i LOVE seeing characters with permanent flaws, and it's awesome when characters f up so badly that they can't fix it. i think it makes them more lovable, because if they had no permanent mistakes, they won't feel complex or real enough y'know? i wanna hear some major mess ups from characters because thehyr'e cool to listen to :]

I've got it set in Shade's backstory that he did something bad once, and that sort of formed his present personality… but I don't actually know what that is yet. Crime? Murder? Tax fraud? I am still unsure.

Most of my other characters are pretty straight forward, with either basic social flaws or having been outcasts that doesn't result in any actual wrongdoings on their end. …. Hmm…

Major mess up from one of my characters? Easy.
I made a funny little guy named Naveil. Thing is, he has crazy anger issues and is very much impulsive.
Long story short, he burned down an entire kingdom.
And then he felt really guilty later because he realized his best friend lived there.
Y'know, just the usual assorted shenanigans.

Okay, here we go. (TW: mention of suicidal thoughts)

So my protag, Malissa, starts out kinda hating her magic and judging her worth based on that. She never really learned to control it, and so one day, long story short, things escalated, and she ended up killing an innocent 7-12 y/o child (by accident).
It took her a few months to start using her magic again (using magical pills to stopper her magic), and she never really got over what she did. She grapples w/ self-loathing, guilt and suicidal thoughts (although never attempted) for most of the series.

Even w/ all this being said, I love her even more for this <3

My little guy Renier has abandoned his sisters and friends without bothering to speak to them before leaving or reach out afterward, not only that but he also abandoned his responsibilities until he realized the consequences of doing so would directly affect him ❤️

OH ALSO my other little guy Ines left her group in the marine corps for dead to partake in literal piracy which in the grand scheme of things when compared to what other people in the story have done isn't nearly as bad but it is very shameful to her because she takes the concept of loyalty extremely seriously. The people who were supposed to be watching over the soldiers did not do their jobs very well because of poot funding and generally horrible choices in hiring but she still respects them a ton. She also feels as if she has disappointed her family and wasted her training because of this, even if they don't know and presume her to be either dead or still overseas.

these are all so cool!!i didn't expect so many responses so fast :sob:,, your characters are all so cool

Canarie: Her inability to communicate properly and her constant self-sabotaging in order to protect herself, she sometimes does things without telling anyone first. She's obsessed with finding a way to revive him but she's never asked if he really wants to revived (spoiler alert: he doesn't, he doesn't want her to ruin her own life by being tied down to him). She thinks that reviving him, she can deserve some kind of happiness for herself without being burdened by her guilt of being the only member of her family who's still alive.
andrew (Our Supreme Lord and Overseer): He thinks he's ruined his sister's life by dying (see Canarie), and he's desperately trying to find a way to die so Canarie can live her own life. He essentially views himself as a burden and he's afraid of breaking her heart if he straight up leaves her behind. When he was a human, he fucked up really badly by constantly pushing Canarie away while knowing she wasn't mentally okay (his soul was literally being eaten away by the Nothing disease so that kind of explains his coldness). He's also a complete and utter douchebag to people he hates, like Benny and Crow.

Basically the twins have good intentions, but the way they go about it is only harming them. It's a cycle of constant suffering for the both of them, and they refuse to let anyone intervene so they don't end up being harmed by their actions as well.

Lemon is a fae, and a so her morel standards are inherently much lower than most others. So before flora her friend found her, she’d made a habit of killing anyone she came in contact with, which was mostly travelers and lost kids and what not. So later flora found her and has been keeping her in check, but during the time skip in my books, the two were separated and lemon upgraded from forest to going undercover in a brothel with her girlfriend to get access to more people to kill. She doesn’t feel any guilt whatsoever btw

I have to many character's scattered in different stories so I'm gonna do one at a time at my own pace.
Isabella (she/her): I'm not gonna say she's "flawless". She is the protag after all, but she's simply immature and doesn't make the smartest decisions despite common sense. Definitely like Tommy from DSMP or Luz from TOH, they weren't bad people. They just got roped into something much bigger than them and their decisions (being intently or not) did make things worse in the process. The major difference is that Isabella isn't a "child who chose the fantasy world over reality" or "the chosen one". All of her actions have good and "heroic" intention, but still not the best thing someone could do. I could say it's because of her age + trauma this flaw exist.

(did I do this right?)

Caroline had accidentally let her fellow vigilantes into a trap made by the heroes, which ended up in many of them being thrown in prison and even left some dead. Everyone tells her it wasn't her fault, but she's still really guilty about it.

Royka's greatest misdeed is certainly allowing Ylaine to be poisoned (although he thought it would be Orkas that died). He crafted an incredibly potent poison that was capable of killing a god, but when he was pressure to use it to kill Orkas and end the conflict between the two religious sects, he hesitated. Orkas was a god who was occupying his lover Dax's body to act on the astral plane. Royka loves Dax and thought he would be killed by the poison as well if Orkas was poisoned, so he insisted that he wouldn't have it done. However, he does hate Orkas and wants him dead, so he left the poison unguarded, understanding that others might use it if he did. His plan backfired; the poison was stolen and used, but the poisoned tea was mistakenly consumed by Ylaine, who was innocent and widely love. She died slowly and painfully. In a moment governed by revenge, Royka would have allowed his beloved to die and in fact directly caused the death of someone pure. He'll never scrub the guilt from his soul.

Ella literally tore entire universes and timelines apart because she got so corrupted and so obsessed with finding a universe where the love of her life didn’t die.

Worst mess up? This’ll be a tough one to pick. Oh well, I can’t go too wrong detailing the three worst things my protagonist did. Why three you ask? Two of them are nearly identical in how they affected those involved and the protagonist while the third one would be a mistake in a different way.

Firstly, the “Exposing a Resistance Group” one.
So to give some context, the protagonist (Io) in question was born in an oppressive underground feudal society run by a Mega Corporation that produces her kind (robots).

Eventually, some of her fellow bots got sick of all the problems that the MegaCorp allowed to happen: corrupt religious leaders, hyper-aggressive police force, sending robots out above ground to serve as foot soldiers, turf wars; the whole nine rounds.
They formed a secret resistance group with the intent to stop all that nasty stuff from happening again. Some of the people who joined this organization were friends of Io. At first, Io held no reservations about the group, thinking that they just wanted to improve the status-quo rather than destroy it.
When she learned of their actual goal, Io was confused and distraught by their seeming “betrayal”, and through a mix of pressure from the High Priest running the religious sect she’s a part of as well as a general obligation to do “what’s right”, she would end up exposing the group and its members O’Brien style.

Io was rewarded for this with a handsome one million credits and the clout for exposing this “terrorist group”.
She wouldn’t think of this incident again until she herself was exploited (that is to say, deflowered) by the High Priest and publicly executed; left to fester in the trash pits.
This experience would obviously change Io’s perspective on the group she’d help to expose.
Soon enough, she’d find out what happened to the friends of hers that had joined the group.
Two of them (nicknamed Deject and Reject) suffered the same fate as Io had, having survived thanks to a freak mutation allowing them to respawn and entering a contract with a hyper-intelligent chaos AI respectively. They hated her for what she did, and it took a long time for them to make amends.
One of them (Metaljacket) was discharged from the Peace Division (War Division) and entered a contract with an insane scientist robot who gave them the ability to survive almost anything in exchange for slavery and extreme pain.
But by far the worst of these fates would be what happened to a currently unnamed character.
They were the leader of this organization and they’d of course get the worst of it.
He was trapped in solitary confinement and was tortured using a variety of techniques including but not limited to flaying his outer coating of metal, inflicting him with a disease that ate away at his inner organs, and using a painful frequency of noise to reduce the once charismatic and compassionate robot to a mad raving lunatic that felt only pain, anguish, and hatred for the one who ruined his life: Io.

While Io would end up making amends to most of her former friends, she still experiences a hell of her own guilt whenever the subject’s brought up, regardless of her friends’ attempts to reassure her that she didn’t know any better.

The second one would be that one time Io flayed off an unfortunate soldier’s face in the gladitorial pits.
In her efforts to make amends for Mistake One, Io would enter herself into the Arena: a gladitorial free for all a la the Hunger Games.
At first she struggled with it, but eventually Io became decently good at it.

In her confidence, Io would encounter an enemy in the Arena and beat them senseless.
Eventually, the combatant (Void Face) would lose his face to Io injecting him with an explosive compound from her needle glove, being killed in the arena.

Io didn’t know at the time, but Void Face was a soldier enlisted by Sergeant Hard Times, and was in debt to the aforementioned Peace Division.

Void Face’s body would be reconstructed from what little was left of it. Unfortunately for him, his face was irrecoverable.

To cut that story short, he became insane and started committing hate crimes against the type of robot that Io was (TV head). Void Face would further lose it when Io didn’t take him seriously in their next few matches. This would provoke Void Face into fusing with the AI overseer of the underground society and destroying the region where Io lived as well as killing what few TV head robots were left.

After these events took place, Io felt horrible; she hates herself for sparking the fire that is Void Face’s rage via mocking and ridiculing him even if she didn’t realize how hard he would take het reactions, as well as killing off most.
Like the last incident, Io’s guilt over the event would never completely fade, even after realizing that Void Face would’ve probably done something like this, whether it was because of her or someone else.

Finally, the big one. The one time where Io impulsively killed the AI Overseer of her society and the executives of the MegaCorp, leading to the uprising of the machines and the deaths of 25 percent of the populations of mankind and 50 percent of all machinekind.

At the end of her attempt to win the Arena’s championship, Io began to see the logic of the group she exposed in Mistake One, and decided to co-lead the revolution with the insane scientist robot from earlier (Arach), his Illuminati-esque cabal of conspirators, and the weapon who was groomed by the MegaCorp to be their champion (Thanatos).
Io and Thanatos would push for a more aggressive assault on the MegaCorp. They would end up getting their way, with their efforts being the main reason for the MegaCorp’s collapse; Io herself would kill the AI Overseer running the corporation and its puppet board of directors.

A time would pass in which Io felt proud of her acts; she believed that she had liberated her kind, and that humans and robots would exist in harmony.

Of course, since there’s still 2/3 parts of this series that didn’t happen yet, Io was wrong.

Thanatos would take control of the revolution’s forces, locking up Arach and his co-conspirators for “treason against the machines” and he would boot Io out of the organization once it became clear she posed a problem.

Long story short, Thanatos’ new dictatorship began a series of attacks directed towards any humans they came across, leading to millions of deaths. This in turn lead to more bloodshed from 3rd party groups.

Naturally, Io felt extremely guilty for enabling and kickstarting the attempted genocide of humanity by machines due to both the death toll as well as the fracturing of man-machine relations from this moment onwards.
Even long after the effects of the war long ceased, on some days Io wishes she didn’t exist so that she wouldn’t be able to ruin what should’ve been a victory for everyone; not just herself.

Wow, that turned out long. If you’re somehow still reading this, then thank you I guess.

Okay, here we go. (TW: mention of suicidal thoughts)

So my protag, Malissa, starts out kinda hating her magic and judging her worth based on that. She never really learned to control it, and so one day, long story short, things escalated, and she ended up killing an innocent 7-12 y/o child (by accident).
It took her a few months to start using her magic again (using magical pills to stopper her magic), and she never really got over what she did. She grapples w/ self-loathing, guilt and suicidal thoughts (although never attempted) for most of the series.

Even w/ all this being said, I love her even more for this <3

Wow. That’s a pretty rough thing to have on your conscience. Sadly, I can attest to knowing that feeling: that emotion you experience when you’ve done an accident that you can’t take back.
Hope Malissa has a decent ending at least; hopefully a happy one.

Siirawyn Joselvin

here’s probably the worst thing he’s done

• is kind of a victim of circumstances. knowing his situation and his perspective, he cannot be faulted for the way he reacted later on, but I’m not saying what he did was good, either.
• permanently altered the world he lived in, in not just a physical way, but also society itself. you’d think that him making their former capital uninhabitable by humans and most creatures would make the Ter Kvis stop their Aeth (magic user in his world) user experimentation. alas, no.

how did he change the world?

• for several decades, even a few centuries after his presumed death (the Aeth Beasts knew that to not be true, and some scholars put forth theories he was in a sort of dormant state) he plunged the world into a sort of dark age. many records during this period of time were a bit foggy — not to mention the loss of many records and artifacts within the capital of Ter Kvis. though, there would be a few separate expeditions into the Shattered Lands (the area uninhabitable for any creatures without Aeth — and even uninhabitable long term for non-Aeth beasts) to retrieve such things.
• the levels of Aeth rose drastically within the world, creating a sort of golden age in a way for Aeth users. however, by the time Kyrios came around, many Aeth users were not permitted to use their Aeth openly in larger cities such as the new capital of Ter Kvis, lest they be hunted by the Order of Kvis.
• the creation of the Shattered Lands, a literal scar upon the land. over many years it did grow but never greatly — still, by Josef’s time, it was a concern (and had been years before) that the Shattered Lands may one day overtake the world. if you are a non Aeth user in these lands for too long, you suffer symptoms of Aeth Exposure, which is normally unique to non Aeth users — but oddly enough, non Aeth Beasts could also suffer from it if in that zone for too long. too much exposure results in death. Aeth Users would have the most resistance.
• The Aeth Beast cult. Aeth Beasts were all once human Aeth users, and many of them were also OG followers of Siirawyn back when he was human too. they created Kyrios, who was originally to be a weapon for them, but this would ultimately backfire when Kyrios hunted down one of their important members (leaders? it’s an unofficial group, you’re just kind of ‘in’ if you worship Siirawyn) and killed her (though irreversibly made himself into a corrupted Aeth Beast in the process). ultimately this cult did create quite a few problems for themselves though, including the Aeth Beast “Zaluse” who had a massive grudge against Siirawyn (by proxy, the cult as well).
• Aeth Beasts in general. they were kind of a thing before Siirawyn but not fully understood, and only a one in a million chance kind of thing. Siirawyn made them more common when he began the new era in the world.
• became a symbol of hatred; “do not mention his name” by the people who lived in his world.

But how did he feel about it?

• initially… did not care much. he simply wanted revenge against the Kvis— although he was born within the kingdom, he could not overlook their killings of their own citizens including his own parents. after he discovered their other misdeeds and brutal experiments done on Aeth Users, this solidified his cause.
• he did not know what rippling effects he would have on the world, as he was dormant for several centuries, deep beneath the former capital of Ter Kvis in a system of caves.
• when he woke up he wasn’t exactly in a thinking or talking state to put things lightly
• but when he was, he admitted he would probably still go after the Ter Kvis if he had an option to redo things. he would probably do things differently though; also not being fond of the fact that Ter Kvis survived into the current era — he would make sure to destroy them for certain.
• so in a way, a bit of guilt, but not a lot. this could be because at this point, he hadn’t been human for some time; 1000 years had passed at this point

maybe not the best character of mine to do this with considering there’s not a whole lot of regret there but his actions are definitely up there in terms of worst things my characters have done while still feeling at least a percentile of human emotion. and also he can’t really undo his actions— would he have done them differently, knowing what he did at the end of his life? yes. would he have completely avoided going to war against the Kvis?
no (and honestly…the Kvis are not the good guys, so he can’t completely be faulted. but he is definitely a hated figure within that world’s history)

Siirawyn Joselvin

here’s probably the worst thing he’s done

• is kind of a victim of circumstances. knowing his situation and his perspective, he cannot be faulted for the way he reacted later on, but I’m not saying what he did was good, either.
• permanently altered the world he lived in, in not just a physical way, but also society itself. you’d think that him making their former capital uninhabitable by humans and most creatures would make the Ter Kvis stop their Aeth (magic user in his world) user experimentation. alas, no.

how did he change the world?

• for several decades, even a few centuries after his presumed death (the Aeth Beasts knew that to not be true, and some scholars put forth theories he was in a sort of dormant state) he plunged the world into a sort of dark age. many records during this period of time were a bit foggy — not to mention the loss of many records and artifacts within the capital of Ter Kvis. though, there would be a few separate expeditions into the Shattered Lands (the area uninhabitable for any creatures without Aeth — and even uninhabitable long term for non-Aeth beasts) to retrieve such things.
• the levels of Aeth rose drastically within the world, creating a sort of golden age in a way for Aeth users. however, by the time Kyrios came around, many Aeth users were not permitted to use their Aeth openly in larger cities such as the new capital of Ter Kvis, lest they be hunted by the Order of Kvis.
• the creation of the Shattered Lands, a literal scar upon the land. over many years it did grow but never greatly — still, by Josef’s time, it was a concern (and had been years before) that the Shattered Lands may one day overtake the world. if you are a non Aeth user in these lands for too long, you suffer symptoms of Aeth Exposure, which is normally unique to non Aeth users — but oddly enough, non Aeth Beasts could also suffer from it if in that zone for too long. too much exposure results in death. Aeth Users would have the most resistance.
• The Aeth Beast cult. Aeth Beasts were all once human Aeth users, and many of them were also OG followers of Siirawyn back when he was human too. they created Kyrios, who was originally to be a weapon for them, but this would ultimately backfire when Kyrios hunted down one of their important members (leaders? it’s an unofficial group, you’re just kind of ‘in’ if you worship Siirawyn) and killed her (though irreversibly made himself into a corrupted Aeth Beast in the process). ultimately this cult did create quite a few problems for themselves though, including the Aeth Beast “Zaluse” who had a massive grudge against Siirawyn (by proxy, the cult as well).
• Aeth Beasts in general. they were kind of a thing before Siirawyn but not fully understood, and only a one in a million chance kind of thing. Siirawyn made them more common when he began the new era in the world.
• became a symbol of hatred; “do not mention his name” by the people who lived in his world.

But how did he feel about it?

• initially… did not care much. he simply wanted revenge against the Kvis— although he was born within the kingdom, he could not overlook their killings of their own citizens including his own parents. after he discovered their other misdeeds and brutal experiments done on Aeth Users, this solidified his cause.
• he did not know what rippling effects he would have on the world, as he was dormant for several centuries, deep beneath the former capital of Ter Kvis in a system of caves.
• when he woke up he wasn’t exactly in a thinking or talking state to put things lightly
• but when he was, he admitted he would probably still go after the Ter Kvis if he had an option to redo things. he would probably do things differently though; also not being fond of the fact that Ter Kvis survived into the current era — he would make sure to destroy them for certain.
• so in a way, a bit of guilt, but not a lot. this could be because at this point, he hadn’t been human for some time; 1000 years had passed at this point

maybe not the best character of mine to do this with considering there’s not a whole lot of regret there but his actions are definitely up there in terms of worst things my characters have done while still feeling at least a percentile of human emotion. and also he can’t really undo his actions— would he have done them differently, knowing what he did at the end of his life? yes. would he have completely avoided going to war against the Kvis?
no (and honestly…the Kvis are not the good guys, so he can’t completely be faulted. but he is definitely a hated figure within that world’s history)

Yeah, I can see why he didn’t like the Kvis.
On another note, creating a cult that ended up hating you certainly is baggage (That’s probably an understatement.)

Sounds like a nice flawed protagonist by the looks of it. I’m a real sucker for that type of character. It’s really interesting reading them and of course diving into them.

Just like murder some people

Just like murder some people

I guess that's one way to put it.

most of my characters have killed 1 or more people. a lot are murderers. however, one of my most sweetest ocs, an Italian mama of 2 boys beat a man to death with her shoe. why? they told her son to off himself. ^^

I don’t think I have any characters that are innocent of murder… glances around then fades away…

most of my characters have killed 1 or more people. a lot are murderers. however, one of my most sweetest ocs, an Italian mama of 2 boys beat a man to death with her shoe. why? they told her son to off himself. ^^

That sounds oddly wholesome ;)