difficulty. games that are hard to be good at. preferably with a lot of options on how to do things. my brain is usually too fried to focus on stories in games because the times outside them i mostly spend writing.
you can also do some more obscure religions to shine some light on them. there are lots here in africa, differing from tribe to tribe. perhaps the khoisan might be of some interest.
most people use dedicated sites for that like AO3 and, as you said, Quotev and Wattpad. again, i think you'd do well with it here. perhaps you should contact a publisher and see what they have to say with what you have.
what ruins characters is mostly dependant on the potential for that character being squandered just because the writer/s were too incompetent to realize what they could have had instead of what they chose.
one character that stuck out to me in this sense was Isaak Sirko. such a demanding...