I want him to have that kind of personality, and be one of those quieter, polite, super nice guys but I also don’t want him to be unrealistically perfect or too effeminate if you know what I mean??
That’s a familiar problem XD For some reason, it’s always the love interest too for me… XD
I think something that might help is incongruity! You already established a ‘base personality’ for him, but it always helps to give characters a trait that seems to clash with the rest of their personality.
So, maybe he’s a very gentle, soft-spoken person, but he has a hobby or habit that seems to contradict that. Or there’s one specific thing that really makes him mad, this could be backstory-related. Once you have that thing, try to figure out why.
People are incongruous, and it always makes characters more interesting.
Something else that I really enjoy reading and writing are characters who are gentle, not because it comes naturally to them, but because they deliberately try to be that way. Maybe he naturally tends toward some flaw, but he works on not letting it get the best of him.
Something else that helps is letting your characters really mess up. It’s a part of writing to make life hard for your characters. If you establish a flaw, let it get the best of your character and make it ruin or complicate something, and then let them acknowledge that and apologize and fix it.
It’s something that always makes a character more likable to me if they actually put effort into recognizing their mistakes and fixing it.
Hope this helped!
Without darkness, there is no light. If there was no nighttime, would the stars be as bright?
