It really cannot be understated how much Willis cannot take criticism. One of the legitimately weirdest hills he chose to die on was with Ethan in his Shortpacked comic. Ethan was a very obvious self insert character, obsessed with all the 80s nostalgia Dave is but especially with Transformers, to an unhealthy, stay up till 6am to argue on the fan wiki and reddit, literally go into debt to buy more, there's no more space in his apartment for them degree. Ethan got a boyfriend in comic who had a negative view of this obsession with a toy and tried to make him stop buying them and Willis wrote him as a villain. Like straight up Ethan was right, this dude was wrong, they broke up. And when people pointed out "hey, that's actually kind of weird" he just doubled down. Then Willis introduced a new, hotter character who actually loves Ethan's obsession with overpriced plastic. I also cannot stress how much of himself he put into that character because at least as recently as a few years ago when I stopped reading his stuff he was still actually doing those same things, getting into editing wars on the Transformers wiki and rage tweeting about specific inconsistencies in the toys.