Some almost random stuff for calibration:
I rapidly gave up on David Feintuch's The Still, because I found the main character to be a selfish, spoiled, unempathic little git - but you look at the reviews on Amazon.co.uk and other people mostly liked it. I wouldn't ever write a review trashing it, because it was just not to my taste (and because I didn't finish). I also admired his attempt to do something different, even if I didn't like it.
I've never read the Flashman novels by George McDonald Fraser - where the villain of Tom Brown's Schooldays is the main character because I just didn't fancy it - but I do know it did really well.
In fact, a lot of grim dark fantasy has relatively dubious or unlikeable characters and that is massively popular.
Lois McMaster Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan - he is likeable to the reader (well, most readers), but when you look at his impact on the people around him and their reactions, he is very difficult to live with.
There was a ghost/romance/mystery I read a year or two back (can't immediately remember the title) that was fantasy lite - set in San Francisco, a historic house restoration business and they find a recently deceased body there and then there is ghost activity, the murder is solved and the MC meets again someone she used to date who is now a building inspector and the romance might be about to be rekindled in an alpha male-ish sort of way. I mostly enjoyed it (except the alpha male-ish bit which annoys me these days) and thought it a perfectly reasonable book. There was one review trashing it, really upset as they'd been sold it as a cosy mystery and there were all these silly ghosts in it.
Oh - and I personally out in real life occasionally accidentally provoke people into yelling at me that I am horribly negative and other rude things. So, I am someone who has worked a lot at bug finding in software and am a problem solver - but to solve a problem you have to first spot it. If someone comes to me going "what do you think of my plan" my first response would be to find what might make it fail and tell them about it so they can fix it and succeed. Most people appreciate this, a few think I am a flawed and horrible negative person - nice people only say nice encouraging positive things. Or in other words, there are a wide range of personalities out there and you can't please all of the people all of the time.
Today it sounds like you need to take a break of some kind - writing something else, not writing and doing critiques, whatever - hopefully tomorrow won't be such a black dog day.
And as Harebrain said - stuff targets. I see threads about
reading targets. Wot? I read to relax not meet targets.
Wrote this before your latest post came up Mouse. Having spent the time on it posting anyway
Will add - is the genre you are writing in very rule bound and picky? I think someone already highlighted that further up. Your characters may be perfectly well developed characters who fit the story you wrote, but don't meet the expectations of people reading in that genre. Some people don't like to have their envelopes stretched.
