I think your statement, combined with what @Shuck wrote, hints that good writers sometimes are not empathetic, because if they cared too much about their characters then they wouldn’t have the ability to have them go through the wringer the author puts them through.
There was an Oatmeal comic a long time ago disparaging the Twilight novels (well, maybe not disparaging but poking fun at them) because the work put into them isn’t in fleshing out the protagonist, but in fleshing out the objects of interest. Scott McCloud made a similar point in Understanding Comics, about how details are interpreted: less details, the better we are able to identify with something, but more details separate it, make it apart from us.
This is just a musing on why it seems that the overlap in the Venn diagram of creepy assholes and creative types is what it is, not excusing the creepy assholes, mind.
