TIFU by critiquing a webcomic too harshly not realizing the creator was in the chat

i have a lot of webcomics i like to read, and i’m in a few different discord servers for some of them. one of these servers has a channel for talking about other comics we read, and last night there was one in particular that a few of my friends and i were talking about (not the one that the server was about, this was a different one). one friend brought up that they hadn’t been engaging with it as much bc it started using a couple tropes they weren’t really a fan of, and another said some of what was going on was too much for them to follow. i do enjoy this comic but i did have a couple critiques of it so i joined in; i basically said that a couple of the characters were set up to be one thing at first but then it felt like they were another & i wasn’t sure if the subversion was intentional but i also wasn’t sure who we were supposed to root for sometimes, i typed & retyped it bc i wasn’t sure how i would come across as but in hindsight my final choice of words ended up being meaner than i intended to.

the next morning i remembered the chat & went to see if anything new had popped up since i was last in there; it turns out, the creator of the comic was in the server and had seen what we were saying after i had gone to bed (i checked to see if they were a part of it just to be sure but they didn’t pop up at first, ig i just didn’t recognize their nickname); that night they explained further the intentions behind their characters & that it was also their first story which made more sense, but then the next morning they read the full backlog of messages & saw some of the harsher things ppl (including me) had said & they were hurt by it. i nearly had a heart attack when i realized; i felt so awful and sent an apology to them for what i said. i tried to explain my thought process (i’m not great w social cues & sometimes i say stuff that ends up being ruder than i intend it to, i also hadn’t gone back & re-read it in a while bc it was really long so some things had gotten a bit muddled in my head & i ended up going off of a combination of what i remembered + what others were saying) while still acknowledging it was shitty of me to say that & i should’ve worded it differently. idk if they’ve seen it yet but i hope there’s no hard feelings in the end bc man that was not my finest moment

tldr: when critiquing a work of art, THINK before you run your mouth, and don’t say anything that you wouldn’t say directly to the creator.