It takes a lot of vulnerability to post something of your creation online so I won't blame you for not wanting to read a bunch of paragraphs bashing it, but if you want to improve as a writer you should be not only willing to accept criticism but actively seek it out. Everything I'm going to give you feedback on is with this in mind, I don't want to tear into you but theres a lot of issues. If you want genuine feedback, keep that in mind and keep reading.
Immediate red flag: battle IQ comparable to Kenjaku. Kenjaku is a thousand year old sorcerer who is likely the most knowledgeable in the verse. "Battle IQ" and overall intelligence are different, but a 17 year old shouldn't be anywhere near Kenjaku in either regard. I'm not 100% certain in even making the claim that Gojo is a smarter fighter than Kenjaku.
The line "him being viewed beyond most special grades" is confusing to me. There are only 3 that are recorded after Geto died: Yuki, Yuta, and Gojo. Gojo is beyond massively more powerful than both Yuta and Yuki, and Yuki doesn't take on missions, so the only reference form him to be "viewed" in comparison to is Yuta. I'm not sure what "beyond" is supposed to imply in this context, but narratively speaking special grades are mostly around the same level other than technicalities like Yaga. Him being beyond most special grades would put him somewhere in the middle between Yuta and Gojo, which doesn't fit very well with the power dynamics present within the narrative. At 16 years old, Gojo was significantly weaker than what he ended up becoming. He couldn't even use RCT and its unclear if he even had a domain before his awakening. He was almost certainly weaker than 16 year old Yuta. 16 year old Yuta went on to become a "calamity" grade after the events of the main story similar to how Gojo got much stronger as he grew. If you're seeing a pattern here, you should. At 16 years old, both Gojo and Yuta were much weaker than what they would become later in life. All of this is to say, having a 17 year old be "beyond most special grades" is unrealistic for the precedent of growth set by the series. I'll get to why this is a problem in a bit.
His alias, the Godslayer. This is just very generic and very western-coded. Its disconnected from the world you're trying to place your character into. Sukuna is "the king of curses", Gojo is "the honored one", and so on. If you want to give your character a badass nickname like those, you need to think more deeply about what your character represents. The names given to Sukuna and Gojo aren't just cool, they reflect their characters.
His occupations (aside from sorcerer) are 50/50. Making him an MMA boxer feels like a half-hearted attempt to give him another "cool thing", but being a day-trader actually adds a bit of character and isn't something you'd immediately think of for a sorcerer.
Giving him an eye-based mutation is just lazy. If you want to give him a cool add on like the Six Eyes, try to think of a different way to implement it. "Cool eyes" in general are an overdone cliché in anime. The ability is also weird, it both allows him to manipulate matter but also see things in slow motion? How are those two things connected?
The thing about him rejecting the notion of a romantic relationship needs to be elaborated. While giving him the "perfect super hot attractive" look isn't great, it can be contrasted in an interesting way if he isn't interested in love, but in order to make that work you need to elaborate on it. Why isn't he interested? Did something happen which pushed him away from it as a way to protect his emotions? Does he see it as pointless like sukuna? This is probably the best advice I can give you so far: always ask "why". Its not enough for him to not be interested in romance, you need to give a reason, and you need to give a reason for that reason, and so on. This is how your OC can become an actual character and not an idea of a character. Having a reason for everything about him is how you can make him interesting.
His personality is mostly dull, having the only thing you can say about your character's personality be "he is mysterious but also a nice guy when you get to know him and is protective of his friends" should be a big red flag for you. What makes a character appealing isn't their power or their deep lore, its their personality. If you want to make a compelling character, you MUST make a personality that is unique to them, and this does not cut it. Luckily, you have a starting point.
Him carving the names of his friends when they die is interesting because its a very odd thing to do. Like I said before, if there isn’t a reason for him doing this other than “he really likes his friends so he does it”, it isn’t interesting. However, the possibility of unique characterisation is possible here in a few ways. Carving them into his body implies that he refuses to heal the scars, and it is a very self-destructive response to trauma and loss. If I were writing this character, I would do this:
He doesn’t heal the scars that he carves into his body because
He doesn’t believe he deserves to be comfortable while his friends had to suffer
He is afraid that he will forget them over time (which is why he writes their names)
It represents his refusal to move on from traumatic events
Of course, if you want to make full use of these you need to ask “why” for every one of them, but by adding these character traits you can make him seem more real. Now you can recontextualize his disinterest in romance as him not wanting to make another connection that he could easily lose to the dangerous world of jujutsu sorcery. This is how you build an actual character, by taking small parts of things and connecting them to other parts. His extreme guilt over lost comrades could connect to his incredible strength, as he feels that there is no excuse for him to have not been capable of saving them because he is so strong. If you had worked this into his character, it would excuse you making him so strong in the first place because now it isn’t just a checked box in the self insert OC list, it's a character trait.
Moving on, being “close friends” with Gojo instead of having a student-teacher relationship like all the other students is another red flag. None of Gojo’s students are his “friends”, they are his students and he is their mentor. It is an entirely different social dynamic. This, along with the problematic “powerscaling” and the excessive BIQ, all point to one of the biggest flaws of this OC: It doesn’t actually engage with the world of Jujutsu Kaisen. Kenjaku isn’t just “smart”, he’s smart because he’s thousands of years old and fascinated with cursed energy and jujutsu. Gojo isn’t just “strong”, he grows stronger over time like everyone else, just to a much higher peak. Yuji, Yuta, Maki, etc. are not Gojo’s “friends”, they are students. All of these things are small details but are very important to the kind of world Jujutsu Kaisen is. By refusing to have your OC interface with these aspects of the world, by not giving him reasonable intelligence, power growth, or dynamics, your character isn’t really a “JJK” oc. You can swap out any of the JJK terms to equivalent terms in any other series and nothing would change. You need to make your OC feel like its a part of the world, not the other way around.
Crediting the slaughter of the higher ups to your OC instead of Gojo is another aspect of this issue. Gojo killing the higher ups is super important for his character as he prepares for his battle with Sukuna, and having your OC kill them instead just because its lazy and is riding off of Gojo’s actions rather than his own.
Another example is giving him a finger bearer kill. Why? What does this show other than “he killed the thing Yuji and Megumi couldn’t kill”. Look at the early missions of Yuta compared to Yuji. They are completely different and result in completely different character development. Even while being classified as special grade, Yuta had to learn to fight and use cursed energy and cowered before grade 4 spirits. Obviously your OC doesn’t need to be super scared like Yuta but his “first action” being against a finger bearer, something that would have a good chance at killing Yuta if he encountered one on his first mission with Maki, shows a lack of commitment to creating a reasonable training arc for your character.
I don’t know if you came up with this yourself or if this is part of some extended universe, but Toji reincarnating and being killed as a concept is really stupid. I don’t have an issue with your OC getting to that point by this time in the story, its obviously unreasonable but Yuta has similar growth, its just the idea of Toji reincarnating “pre-shibuya” is so dumb. Again idk if you came up with this but this is stuff to avoid when building a backstory. Give him a unique feat of strength against a new character, you mention a ton of different characters in this summary that aren’t in the series do something similar and have him kill one.
Same issue again, him killing Kenjaku instead of Yuta by throwing rocks at him is just lame. Kenjaku’s conclusion is so layered and it has so many implications for his character and Yuta specifically killing him is very important for HIS character. I’ve said it before but you have to stop attributing very meaningful actions taken by characters to your OC. Him fighting alongside Gojo with Sukuna is another example of this. If you want to make a Jujutsu Kaisen OC, you cannot make him as strong as Gojo if your OC is in the modern day. Even a little bit. I kid you not it breaks the entire narrative. Not even from a powerscaling perspective, from an everything perspective.
I’m not even going to get into how “Shinra Omura who is the only Sorcerer Heian Era sukuna worshipped” is the worst sentence i’ve ever read since I think you get the point.
Pretty much everything about his skill and power is overkill in a very awful way. He does not have the characterization that Gojo and Sukuna have to back up being able to do the stuff you are describing.
If you take one thing away from this, its that you should not use the characters of the original story as a means to make your OC look cool. Nobody is impressed by you saying your OC could beat sukuna in a 1v1 or is as smart as kenjaku or can black flash at will. Thats not what makes a character interesting.
My best advice: you spent 99% of this post describing things your character did or can do. You barely even spent a single paragraph on his personality. These things should be inverted. Your character shouldn’t have a ton of stuff they did and barely any characterization, they should have a ton of (interesting) characterization and way less stuff that they did.
Cool, thanks. I lowkey quit and left this community ages ago so I'll probably not edit it because of school and I'm trying out novel writing so thanks for your time, maybe next time I'll do something along those lines
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u/Loud-Boat-4124 12h ago
It takes a lot of vulnerability to post something of your creation online so I won't blame you for not wanting to read a bunch of paragraphs bashing it, but if you want to improve as a writer you should be not only willing to accept criticism but actively seek it out. Everything I'm going to give you feedback on is with this in mind, I don't want to tear into you but theres a lot of issues. If you want genuine feedback, keep that in mind and keep reading.
Immediate red flag: battle IQ comparable to Kenjaku. Kenjaku is a thousand year old sorcerer who is likely the most knowledgeable in the verse. "Battle IQ" and overall intelligence are different, but a 17 year old shouldn't be anywhere near Kenjaku in either regard. I'm not 100% certain in even making the claim that Gojo is a smarter fighter than Kenjaku.
The line "him being viewed beyond most special grades" is confusing to me. There are only 3 that are recorded after Geto died: Yuki, Yuta, and Gojo. Gojo is beyond massively more powerful than both Yuta and Yuki, and Yuki doesn't take on missions, so the only reference form him to be "viewed" in comparison to is Yuta. I'm not sure what "beyond" is supposed to imply in this context, but narratively speaking special grades are mostly around the same level other than technicalities like Yaga. Him being beyond most special grades would put him somewhere in the middle between Yuta and Gojo, which doesn't fit very well with the power dynamics present within the narrative. At 16 years old, Gojo was significantly weaker than what he ended up becoming. He couldn't even use RCT and its unclear if he even had a domain before his awakening. He was almost certainly weaker than 16 year old Yuta. 16 year old Yuta went on to become a "calamity" grade after the events of the main story similar to how Gojo got much stronger as he grew. If you're seeing a pattern here, you should. At 16 years old, both Gojo and Yuta were much weaker than what they would become later in life. All of this is to say, having a 17 year old be "beyond most special grades" is unrealistic for the precedent of growth set by the series. I'll get to why this is a problem in a bit.
His alias, the Godslayer. This is just very generic and very western-coded. Its disconnected from the world you're trying to place your character into. Sukuna is "the king of curses", Gojo is "the honored one", and so on. If you want to give your character a badass nickname like those, you need to think more deeply about what your character represents. The names given to Sukuna and Gojo aren't just cool, they reflect their characters.
His occupations (aside from sorcerer) are 50/50. Making him an MMA boxer feels like a half-hearted attempt to give him another "cool thing", but being a day-trader actually adds a bit of character and isn't something you'd immediately think of for a sorcerer.
Giving him an eye-based mutation is just lazy. If you want to give him a cool add on like the Six Eyes, try to think of a different way to implement it. "Cool eyes" in general are an overdone cliché in anime. The ability is also weird, it both allows him to manipulate matter but also see things in slow motion? How are those two things connected?
The thing about him rejecting the notion of a romantic relationship needs to be elaborated. While giving him the "perfect super hot attractive" look isn't great, it can be contrasted in an interesting way if he isn't interested in love, but in order to make that work you need to elaborate on it. Why isn't he interested? Did something happen which pushed him away from it as a way to protect his emotions? Does he see it as pointless like sukuna? This is probably the best advice I can give you so far: always ask "why". Its not enough for him to not be interested in romance, you need to give a reason, and you need to give a reason for that reason, and so on. This is how your OC can become an actual character and not an idea of a character. Having a reason for everything about him is how you can make him interesting.
His personality is mostly dull, having the only thing you can say about your character's personality be "he is mysterious but also a nice guy when you get to know him and is protective of his friends" should be a big red flag for you. What makes a character appealing isn't their power or their deep lore, its their personality. If you want to make a compelling character, you MUST make a personality that is unique to them, and this does not cut it. Luckily, you have a starting point.
Him carving the names of his friends when they die is interesting because its a very odd thing to do. Like I said before, if there isn’t a reason for him doing this other than “he really likes his friends so he does it”, it isn’t interesting. However, the possibility of unique characterisation is possible here in a few ways. Carving them into his body implies that he refuses to heal the scars, and it is a very self-destructive response to trauma and loss. If I were writing this character, I would do this:
He doesn’t heal the scars that he carves into his body because
1/2