More pointers: Writing Likable Characters
Not everyone is a darling little butter pat. Some people are genuinely caustic and want your soul.
...And then? Well, then there's everyone in between, and likability is subjective so really anyone could rank anywhere here.
But that's not what this is about. Let me tell you a story.
So I have this character, Rabbi Isaac Guildenstern. He's a salty little burnt latke type of mf who uses Torah as an emotional crutch, has a persecution complex and thinks of himself as a bag of pond scum. He also paradoxically has an unhealthily inflated ego and will debate you (in English, German, Yiddish or Hebrew) and win. And then not verbally gloat, but it feels like he's emotionally gloating anyway.
I hate him. I also love him, but it's kind of like the love a mother has for her son, the high school dropout and serial arsonist.
(That's the general feeling that people tend to have about him, actually.)
As you can see, a character doesn't have to be wholesome for people to feel attached to them.
What's my secret? Internal consistency, and some well-crafted mental monologue.
This might not mesh with your personal writing style, which is okay. BUT IF IT DOES.
So the thing you need to know is that in general, people can be seduced into going along with anything that has enough internal consistency. Take Lolita, as an example: the story of a pedophile and his obsession with his stepdaughter. Objectively, unreliable narrator Humbert Humbert is a man with an unhealthy psyche and an unhealthy fixation. But because the way the novel is written favours his viewpoint, some readers come to sympathize with him and not with Lolita/Dolores, whom he fictionalizes to suit his fantasy and in general is anything but a good father to. But people have-- people have written essays in defense of this fuck! People have argued that he was the victim, which is consistent with how he tells us about the events that introduce him to us, but not necessarily with reality.
How does Nabokov do this? What's the secret to making people defend scumbags?
Justification. Humbert is straight batshit, but he's consistently batshit, and he succeeds at making the argument that his view of events is correct. And because Humbert's monologues are internally consistent and coherent, because he presents arguments people can be taken in by, because however fucked up a character he is he's still human, people end up writing essays in defense of him.
As long as your OC is
psychologically consistent, written the way s/he's written for some purpose
other than edgy shits and giggles, and
you can stick with your guns, you should have no problems writing scumbags that people identify with and like.
Remember, you can justify anything if you go deeper into the reasons why.
And just writing 12 paragraphs of wolfspeak from the POV of a basic edgy bitch who communicates exclusively in manic laughs and apathy won't cut it. Give me a better account of the apathy than that they didn't care! And give me more facet to the character than death and not caring.
I have a character Ayomide who has a disorder that essentially dulls her ability to emote outside of certain hormonally-controlled parameters. Although she's been kind of icy on the whole, I've gone into detail about genuine efforts to compensate for her lack of emotional processing and about her reasoning for rejecting these efforts. She has killed people and felt no remorse before, but there has been justification, and she responded to events in her life as best she could given her condition. This is crucial: people usually still respond emotionally to events, even if it is directed inwardly, as with people who cannot feel empathy.
And people, when they don't respond the way you're used to, are not malevolent by default.
If you can document it and present the world to which the character responds through their lens, as opposed to your lens as a minmaxing munchkin out for tasty, tasty scrub blood via your edgy, edgy powerhouse, you are well on your way to having a complete bastard of a likable character. Even shitty, overplayed villain dialogue is tolerable if reading the character can put a person in the right mindset.Disclaimer: None of this works if you're an asshole OOC. Then people just see your asshole characters and assume them to be self-inserts, which is generally not good for you.
If you're an asshole or standoffish or reactionary and proud of it, then I've been wasting your time.