Self-Inserts, and Why I Hate Them

Enough of me gushing about games that nobody cares about. Time for me to get a thing off off of my chest.

Writing characters is hard. Everyone who reads this blog should know this, and anyone who's attempted writing longer than a few paragraphs should know this, too. And as we all know, the human mind is conditioned to try and find the easy way out of any problem the world throws at it. I remember waaaay back in secondary school (or whatever you Americans have in place of it) when I suddenly got the urge to write a fantasy novel about a civil war between knight and ninjas. The title would have been Ninjas vs. Knights, which shows you how much of a creative drive I had back then, and would have featured a roster of characters based loosely on myself and the circle of friends that I was a part of in those days. I figured that since coming up with proper characters is hard to do, I'd simply use our personalities as a template - a phenomenon that hive of scum and villainy TV Tropes calles "Write Who You Know".

I got as far as the first chapter before realising "Why would I want to do this terrible thing?"

See, I appreciate that it's hard to give depth to a person who doesn't really exist - all that nonsense with backstory and justifications is like trying to untangle a giant knot in a shoe-lace factory. But if you go to all the effort, then it can be hugely rewarding - a character can become something else entirely. They end up having their own voice and thoughts, and they fit into the world you've built as smoothly as a hand in a nice warm winter glove. Writing them can become second nature once you have all their quirks and characteristics down. And when that happens, it's wonderful.

But creating a character who stands in for yourself or a person you know, as far as I'm concerned, is a cheap and lazy tactic. When you do that, you immediately show your audience that you have all the imagination of a brick, that you have absolutely no intention of putting any kind of effort or creativity into your work, and would rather just paste an established personality into a setting. As a person who likes to spend the effort making sure that his characters make sense and have credible personalities that the audience can identify and sympathise with, it grinds my gears to see people trying to cheat their way out of one of the most vital aspects of story-telling. If you're going to skimp out like that, then there's a good chance you're going to skimp out on everything else too, you talentless hack.

And it becomes even more obvious if the kind of person you've based your character on does not even fit into the setting - your skater cousin might be a cool and infulential person in this modern world of wonder, but even if you made him a bard who spoke in the generic fantasy English of the setting, he'd still get chucked in the dungeons in all probability because he called the princess a funny street name. When you create a character, you have to ensure that their personality is not only credible, but makes sense in the context of the worldbuilding you've done - their race, history and relationships with people around them. There is no excuse for cheaping out and copy-pasting your own personality, because then that raises the question of why the palace guards haven't shot you for using the world "dude", which, for the sake of example, might sound vaguely like the Dwarvish word for "prostitute".

But there's an even bigger problem with self-inserts that butters my crampons more than anything else. Often, the writer is literally putting himself into the story for the sake of wish-fulfilment. To elaborate, here is a quote from Yahtzee Croshow of Zero Punctuation fame in one of his many snarks against Ctrl Alt Delete, that lurching zombie of a webcomic:

"But while you are a repressed, socially retarded dullard who no one would ever honestly admit to liking, your author insertion character is a fantasy, so they will be a charismatic eccentric who is unconditionally loved by everyone, even while he's setting their dog on fire."

Do you see what I'm getting at? The one big reason for making a self-insert character is to stroke the author's ego - they want to snog the princess, slay the dragon and do all the awesome things they can never do because their copius cheeto-dusted bulk is permanently glued to the chair in front of their laptop. I went into writing Ninjas vs. Knights with a similar mindset - I only wrote it because I wanted to turn myself and all of my friends into a quirky action squad worthy of a Power Rangers film directed by Michael Bay (Let's hope that never happens), and as I mature I look back on this and wonder how I possibly could have been so God-shockingly retarded. Was my self-esteem really so low that I had to steal the name of a rejected Mortal Kombat character and put myself as the head of a ninja clan to make myself feel better? Had I become so bored with my otherwise decent life to even consider writing such a hopeless fantasy, regardless of the fact that ninjas and knights didn't even exist in the same fucking time period? It goes without saying that this is why author-insertion is considered a symptom of the Mary-Sue disease - because the character in question is basically the author doing what he wants in a world of his own making in order to make him feel more worthy of existing than he really is.

Phew, that was a big paragraph.

Anyway, let me just clear this up right now, because I know someone is going to call me out on this - Gooper, I'm not attacking you. The thought never crossed my mind. It was brave of you to admit that Widow Maker was an author-insert, and for the most part I have no problem with that, because at least you're not trying to fulfil some deranged wankfest. But I am of the mindset that a character should be their own thing, and have their own personality and depth. Using a character as a mouthpiece for your own beliefs is generally a bad idea, especially in RP'ing situations such as DnD and whatnot. But sadly, there are some people out there who just don't seem to understand this (I'm looking at you, B^Uckley and Dominic Deegan).

Welp, rant over. Tune in next time, when I gushingly review Street Fighter X Tekken and drop subliminal hints telling you to play as King.