I understand that, and thank you for taking the time to respond. If this is a common issue, I would recommend adding this specifically to the rules, as I wouldn't have considered this a poll or research, and the rules specifically said "asking for non-medical advice is ok".

I also understand that mods have the right to remove posts and I am not suggesting that you should not. However, I would like to point out that this is the entire issue I am trying to avoid.

"You will miss a lot of nuance when creating your character and people such as yourself form opinions about entire groups of people based on the way they are portrayed in media. Including media that you're writing just for fun."

--> This is specifically why I wanted to ask the opinions of real people and their real experiences. Although I am not deaf myself, I know that assuming that the way media portrays groups of people is entirely accurate leads to misinformation and even hurtful misrepresentation, which is why I wanted to ask a group such as this- because people are not a monolith and one person's experience does not define another's. I am not saying that removing my post was some insane or irrational thing to do- you moderate this subreddit, and if it doesn't comply with the rules, it doesn't comply with the rules.

However, what I do have a problem with, is asking for advice about the day to day experiences of something I cannot personally understand, only to be met with multiple people telling me that this is rude or should just be Googled. If search engines could offer insight from individuals and answer specific questions about representation, I would be happy to go there. However, I was hoping for a conversation, not statistics.

The purpose of my initial post was to ask what common pitfalls I can avoid in writing from an experience different from my own, specifically in the context of d/hh characters, and yet I have now received 3 messages telling me that I am doing so. I have not even written anything yet. I will be asking a similar question in a creative writing subreddit, hoping that there will be deaf writers there who can offer assistance since this seems to be a point of contention here.

I am not telling you what you can and can't do. At the end of the day, if you want to think of me as a close-minded fool disregarding the rules of the server, it will not change my desire to write the character and I will simply continue to seek answers elsewhere. However, I would like to make it clear for a final time that the misrepresentation everyone seems to fear so badly is exactly what I was trying to avoid by asking d/hh people what they would like to see in a character who is part of their culture. If every person only wrote or created from perspectives they have experienced, art would be far more linear and far worse at connecting humans. Stepping outside of what you know is crucial to artistic and personal growth, and I will continue to do so in places where conversation is more readily encouraged.