THE CHARACTER WHO NEVER FUCKS UP
If your character always says the exact thing other people (including their so’s) want to hear, and never the wrong thing – either by impulse, ignorance, pettiness, pride, pure accident, or simply because their values and understanding of the world don’t always coincide with other people’s –, I can’t relate.
If your character’s good intentions and protectiveness is never overbearing to his loved ones, if your character’s huge intellect and passion for what they study never comes across as snobbish and arrogant to her friends, if your character’s grit and leadership is never a cause of anxiety for his charges, if your character’s sweetness and gentle heart is never naive and never puts them (or better yet, their allies) in trouble… then their qualities are universal, and that’s not what I feel about my qualities. I feel like sometimes they’re flaws and they create bad situations for myself.
If all of the conflicts in your story are caused by evil external forces, and never once because your own character did the wrong thing – once again, by accident or not, perhaps even because they were trying to do the right thing but they didn’t know the best way to do it yet –, then once more, I will have trouble relating to your story.
If the only people to ever accidentally say a racist thing, or a sexist thing, or the wrong thing overall, are the villains or (in case of fanfic) the canon characters you clearly don’t like, then I don’t think you understand how systematic oppression makes every person who is not being oppressed (and even them, quite often) an oppressor until they actually stop to deconstruct what they were taught. And yes, maybe your perfect bean of a character has already deconstructed everything off screen and has nothing left to learn, only to teach. But I cannot. fucking. relate.
I have so much to learn and I have made so many mistakes in my life. I relate to characters who fuck up, learn, grow, and then fuck up a little less. Bless everyone writing those. They are the ones who are catered to me. Keep doing the lord’s work, guys!