User blog comment:WhiteCherry/What's the thing every begginer Naruto oc creator does, but is actually a mistake?/@comment-24960276-20191210115906

Focusing so much on the character's appearance, rather than their personality.

Focusing on appearance is fine and all, and sometimes it could be used as inspiration for how the character turns out to become, but when someone makes a character purely based on their appearance, it is almost inevitable that the character would end up more akin to a cardboard cutout rather than a full-blown character with depth and a story.

It is even worse if the person is making an entire family based on appearance.

This is my personal experience, but I do have several failed versions of the Maedayama Clan, before I arrived on the version I have now. All I had in mind while making this 'clan' was their appearance, their abilities, I focused so much on those superficial things that at the end of the day, it felt like it was hollow if you get what I mean.

It is superficial, it is shallow, and at its core, it is empty and frankly does not amount to much.

At the end of the day, the characters only end up as clones of each other with mild changes to appearance and how they behave- and I don't know how to describe it, but when I am roleplaying as them, it really didn't matter to me if I was playing as Kagaya or if I am playing as Ubume because there was little to no difference in how they act, or speak.

Back then, they had no quirks. No habits. No hobbies, no nothing. Even if they had one, it didn't matter to them. Even if I were to swap out their hobbies with another, they wouldn't be affected at all, and to me, nothing screams 'beginner' to me more than that.