Innocence (Male Reader x Dead By Daylight)

Afterthoughts

Chapter: Afterthoughts

To everyone reading this, thank you for being interested in my writing! Without further ado, let's get into it. 

Y/N: To start off, the biggest thing with this story is the Y/N character. My idea was to make him arc, and I think he did, and I am happy with that. I think that it may have been a mistake to do that, though, or at least give him the more extreme character arc that I did, as a large portion of the story's comments are about how stupid he is. It was meant to be that way, but I could see how it may be frustrating for the reader. I wouldn't change it as I think it has satisfying payoff in the later chapters, especially the finale. However, I probably won't do that going forward, or at least not to that extent. 

Other characters: I think that this is something that I am both happy and disappointed with. On one hand, I enjoyed writing each of their arcs and slowly having them grow as the story progressed. On the other hand, don't think the character's personalities were unique enough. I don't know how you guys felt as there weren't many comments about this topic, but I feel as if I could have crafted and highlighted specific character traits that made them different. Because I didn't do this well enough, I feel like the characters lost a lot of charm and interesting/fun character moments that could have formed with unique personas for each. 

Megan was definitely a fun one as I didn't start with the intention of making her a specific character, but I decided like halfway through that she would be. I don't know exactly how I feel about her arc and theme, but it was there, so that's something. The theme of unsupportive friends happened to be on my mind as it is something I dealt with my Junior year of Highschool, so I thought it would be fun to write. Obviously, the events of the story are so much more exaggerated than its inspiration, but I decided to do it that way as I made Chad such an overexaggerated character because I thought it would be stupid to make him the biggest Jock he could possibly be. As he was a core character of this theme, I decided to exaggerate all of it. In the end, I don't know if the theme worked as well as I thought it would, especially with its rushed ending, but yeah.

Themes: Building off what I was saying with Megan, the themes that each character represents are all something that have been in my life in one way or another. It's easier to write that way as I can have a better grasp on what I'm writing, but also, as it's something personal, it gives me a reason to continue writing about it. To an extent, every character is some sort of self-insert that carries a part of my experiences -shaped and molded to fit the setting and outlandish suspended belief Wattpad stories tend to take- within them. I would argue that I am happy with this part of the story.

Depression: Not to get super heavy on anyone, but I tend to write on this site when I'm going through some level of depression, and I think you can see that across the different chapters. I went on hiatus for almost three years because, honestly, I was doing well almost the whole time, and when I wasn't, I was either too down or not down enough for me to come back. Eventually, though, I was at a point where I was inspired to continue, and I read the previous chapters from start to finish, and I could kind of see how I was feeling when I wrote the chapter based on how well written or even how it was written. This section was more for me as it's kind of cathartic writing this out, even if only a few people who I will never meet are the only people to read this. Thank you for listening, and I hope you're doing okay. 

As for how I'm going to apply all of this to my next story, I'm not sure, as I think some things (like specific character personalities) may just be out of my reach as a writer, especially looking at the first four chapters that are released. Most of these criticisms I have with this story are highlighted in the new one, but there is still plenty of time to flesh it all out and make it better. To be honest, not having any sort of plan made writing the new story a clusterfuck, and it took me much longer to write them than I expected. Hopefully, now that they're done and the foundation is set, it will get easier, and I can put much more focus on applying these criticisms to make the story as good as it can be.