Important note regarding this chapter: I have never been in a severe abusive scenario, everything I'm saying here is through research and some of the bad stuff I've seen on wattpad.

Another writing tip, this time about tackling the emotional, physical and sexual abuse of your characters.

Writing abused characters is very common, especially is characters for fandoms. Tragic backstories and horrible people cause conflict for characters and can help push the plot forward if done well.

You do not need to make a character abused in order for their past to be tragic. You don't need a character to even have a tragic backstory to make them interesting. But, we're not talking about this today.

Sadly, real-life abuse is common and a very serious issue which is why writing it properly is a must for it to be presented in a way that is respectable. However, it can't shy away from the horrors of living with this sort of thing. That's why it's so hard to write something like this and I highly recommend new authors avoid this for a little while whilst researching and finding their own writing style.

The main issue I see, especially on wattpad, is the glamorisation of abuse whether it be physical, emotional or sexual. Whilst people absolutely need to get out of abusive situations, I'm sick of seeing the love interest just swoop in and save the day by standing up to the abuser. In an ideal world, that would be amazing, but that's not what we live in. In most scenarios, this wouldn't be enough to help the victim (unless the love interest contacts law enforcements) and there is normally a backlash.

Using abuse to push forward a relationship, normally romantic, glamorises the situation and makes it seem like a prince charming will come and save the day. This is dangerous.  It's incredibly hard to get out of abusive situations and outing this idea in people's heads that someone will come to save them isn't realistic. As bitter as it is, normally the victim must leave themselves or get the police involved.

You need to research different kinds of abused and the physical and emotional backlash that comes from it. A common occurrence after traumatic events is PTSD, but as stated in my tips on mental illnesses, you need to research a mental illness before even trying to write a character with it.

Emotional abuse is harder to spot normally, but it is still an incredibly severe and damaging experience to an individual suffering with it. Something I'm sick to death of seeing is the glamorisation of emotional manipulation. How many 'bad boy' stories are there on this site? And how many of these 'bad boys' guilt trip, force and outright bully our protagonist? Yet she still sees him as the perfect guy. Stop teaching people, girls and boys, that people are mean to them because they have a crush on them. 

This also goes for controlling behaviour, which is often masked as "protective" behaviour in these pieces.

In a situation where someone is under threat and there is a character that can help the person under threat, or even if they're just uncomfortable around someone, then yes, absolutely have a protective character help out in the situation. That could be seen as romantic or familial/platonic love and wouldn't cast your character in a bad light.

If the character is naturally jealous, talking romance wise, then this could be a good point for character development. They could get jealous over their love interest being around others, but that is that character's problem and could be used to show that the character isn't perfect and could be something for them to get over.

But if there is a situation where someone is stopping someone else from seeing another person, simply because they don't like them and/or are insecure and jealous, that is not okay and it's controlling. Please don't romanticise this, it isn't healthy in any relationship. This one is particularly common in toxic friendships or relationships.

I could go into a lot of other traits that are romanticised in wattpad stories regarding the 'bad boy' type, but I'm not going to since I already have a very biased opinion on those books.

Instead, we're going to talk about one of the more rare things I see in character's, but I have seen it and it's so bad that I have to mention it. Sexual abuse and rape are incredibly traumatic things to happen and should never be romanticised. Now, I've seen my fair share of bad ocs during my time on the internet, but nothing gets me quite as mad as people using sexual abuse to make their character seem more attractive to the audience.

Before anyone says that this doesn't happen, you would be surprised. An example of this is a creepypasta oc called "Yinko" that I heard about a long time ago. I'm using this example because the character has since been rewritten (I think) and even at the time, the part of interest was quickly removed. I'm not going to go into detail about this character and if you want to know about the older version of this character I recommend checking out her oc court of justice video on YouTube by ZendettaSama, who describes everything better than I ever could.

Sexual abuse/rape can happen to anyone, whether someone is attractive or not does not matter. 

In most scenarios, the abusers are one-dimensional characters that don't get much time in the spotlight. Whilst this is a good thing, most abusers in fiction have reason for their actions, if you're going to write an abusive character be very careful not to over justify their actions because then the reader is less likely to see them as a bad person. They might have had a rough past but they still did the bad thing, therefore they should be held to account. They still chose to act when they had the choice not to.

If you don't take anything away from this chapter, whether you're writing an abused character or an abuser, make sure to research and be respectful. Whilst this might not be the best writing tip about this topic (mainly because I choose not to tackle abuse in my writing due to the fact that I personally prefer writing stuff with often comedic undertones and it wouldn't be fitting) these are the things that I see done wrong most on this site.

I hope that this at least gives some assistance from a reader's point of view.

*These tips are things I've thought of after spending nearly five years on this site and been reading nearly my whole life. If you disagree with anything I've said, that is completely fine and you obviously don't have to follow anything I've said*