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Self Inserts

Seranda

Seranda

🎵 Fighting Evil By Moonlight 🎵
Joined
Jan 20, 2013
Location
The House of Hades
I don't know if this is what it is called, but I have experienced those who enjoy inserting themselves into the stories they are trying to write. Firstly I would notice that multiple scenarios feature a character with the same name, same appearance and same mannerisms. I understand that some players have character rosters, almost a band of your personal character actors for whatever role comes next. The difference with a self insert is that you are entering yourself into these stories.

I would like to ask about the allure of doing something like this, as it seems like it can really draw out negative energy if you and a partner reach an impasse, and the character you have been playing is just yourself plugged into a story. Something about it feels uneasy to me (only in my opinion!) and I feel like the line between fantasy and the person at the other side of the screen should be close, but never actually cross. It's just something that crossed my mind and would like to know how it's been working out for those of you who do self insert, and what kind of RPs do you do?

Usually slice of life things? Or in a fantasy, do you take your own self and give yourself pointy ears and longer hair to turn yourself into an elf?

It's fascinating to me, though I would likely never do it. I'm a boring person, I come here to be someone cooler.
 
I think most of us use elements of ourselves or a preferred version of ourselves. Things like kinks tend to be personal or how the character enjoys or experiences those kinks what it means to them. Or how a character reacts to a certain situation. I tend to call my characters the same few names but that is more because in the past I have tended to get them confused when I have multiple RP's going!

I have had some creepy experiences though where it feels like the person isn't RP'ing at all and is talking about something that really happened. That is weird and unsettling.
 
It's a spectrum. What you finish with is what most self inserts are all about. People putting themselves in situations they will likely never get themselves, or to do it without the consequences, minus things they don't care for. True self insertion, flaws and all is pretty rare.

Even those who put a bar between them|character still parse things from their perspective as a person. How much that happens depends on how willing they are to split the difference. Add reasonable guessing how someone with threads of personality might behave and you have how most characters played tend to work.

To strike at the question properly, I think it's priorities. If you don't care to dream up another person, the next bet is using the person you understand best. Given this is a site with plenty of gratifying ERP available, it probably helps a lot with investment and the experience when you don't have to put a layer in between. As long as you can imagine yourself acting in a role, you could do virtually any scenario.
 
We all use some of our stuff but if your characters are all juste the same, I dunno. I had bad experiences.
 
It varies from person to person on a spectrum in my experience. People RP for all different reasons and have all different tastes; the main thing is to be cognizant that not everyone does things the same way and that's okay, so just communicate things respectfully to optimize your experience. I don't really mind it either way tbh; as long as it's an enjoyable story/interaction for me, then that's that. But I definitely understand why someone might be averse to their partner playing a particular style.
 
I think self inserting is unavoidable, at last to a degree. There is always some of the person playing the character in said character. But of course there are levels of that. And I agree that it shouldn't cross a certain line.
 
I'd say I'd do it for fun with someone I know well, but really a full on self insert with always the same name etc freaks me out
 
It's been real hit-in-miss for me. I've met people who are perfectly okay with Self-inserts. I've also encountered people who don't like self-inserts (some taking the opinion self-inserts are the devil). In most D&D campaigns I've played, people had no problem with me playing as a self-insert, some even enjoying how I incorporate my persona into my roleplaying. In terms of the why; I never really thought of a reason beyond "What if I...". I've always thought of it as an extension of thought experiment and just playing with your imagination. Which can be really fun, and help you get in touch with yourself.

It can also be a rather therapeutic escape, for some people. I don't think I approach my self-insert this way, but I've encountered people who do.

But, there's a negative. I'm sure you've heard the term "Mary-Sue"? If not; Mary-Sues are basically the author's pet. They're the character who is shown obvious favoritism at the expense of the other characters and the story as a whole. More often than not, the Mary-Sue is a Self-Insert, and thus not just a fictional version of the author, but an idealized version of themselves; who they wish they were. They look the way the author wished they looked, able to do things the author could not, get the things in life the author wishes they could with little-to-no conflict and consequence. They're a soapbox for the author's views and opinions, put into an echo chamber in which said opinions are constantly validated and rewarded, while anything that opposes them are strawmanned and "defeated".

Is there a person real/fictional/abstract that the author likes? Well, they get married with 2.5 children who are all well-behaved and smart in their idealic suburban home. Is there a person the author hates? Well, that person is instantly the bad-guy that everyone hates, and become the favorite punching bag of Murphy's Law.

Now, put such a character in a roleplay, story, or any other medium that people are expected to engage the author and their Mary Sue, one way or another. The story is dull, and/or annoying because they're basically just watching the author equal parts pat themselves on the back, while trying to hide the fact that they hate their lives and their shortcomings. The roleplay becomes a chore, because now you have to share space with a sanctimonious narcist who thinks they're the center of the universe, and you're some piece of the background to prop them up.

Dealing with these people is also a chore, because they take everything incredibly personally. They're inability, or unwillingness to separate themselves from their character causes any critique, no matter how polite and constructive, as a personal slight against them. When you point out that the author's Super Saiyan God Super Saiyan Namekian son of Shadow The Hedgehog and Maria, but also Sonic's long lost twin brother, who's power level is infinityxinfinity and has a harem of the entire cast of Sailor Moon (especially the lesbian "cousins") is a sociopath, because he just murdered everyone who doesn't like anime, or a kid who just happens to look like that bully from the author's real life school, well you might as well call the author a sociopath.

What needs to be understood is that not all self-inserts are Mary Sues. But, while the rp, your character, and such can be a good way to deal with some issues you may have faced, or are facing. One must remember; we're here to have fun, and being made to drop everything to entertain one person's fantasies, while neglecting our own enjoyment isn't fun.
 
If you think about it, life has a huge amount to do with the examples you make. You see something and you compare it, even subconsciously to stuff you already know. I have a lot of me in my alias. Knowing that and knowing what makes me different lets me make aliases that are different. It's worked so far ^.^
 
I did a RP that was supposed to be a romance between an older man and a younger woman. There was a twist to it as well but it was still meant to be a romance. First response I get from my partner was this set up for a miserable character, she was addicted to drugs, bad family, down on her luck, had a miscarriage, all alone. Holy fuck batman this is meant to be romantic!

I saw some of her other posts in other threads as well as the photo she posted of herself. It became obvious to me that she was playing herself and I had to drop the RP, I just couldn't deal with the level of depression coming through in her post and knew it would just get worse and worse.

I've had a few experiences like that where the person is obviously venting/expressing some kind of trauma and it's depressing and concerning as I am not a therapist and I don't want to make something worse whilst assuming it is all part of a game when for them it isn't.

But more fun or lighter self inserts? Sure, I don't care if someone wants to insert themselves and see themselves as a stripper or Pirate or whatever.
 
I play in outlandish settings. High fantasy, sci fi, dystopias, etc. It would be far too immersion-breaking for me to try to play myself in these settings.

Plus, building worlds and building characters is 90% of the fun. Just making a version of myself has no appeal for me.
 
I agree that the majority of roleplayers self-insert to some degree for immersion, myself included. I think the issue for me is when they can't play any character that isn't almost exactly like them. This might sound mean, but...most people aren't that interesting. Either that or they can't write a complex version of themselves that would intrigue me, so if I'm dealing with a 100% self-insert, the RP would be a snoozefest for me
 
When I self insert it's actually with like fictional characters for animes. And my self inserts end up just being ocs that look like me. I don't really give them all my mannerisms. For me self-inserting into stuff is kind of a way of self love and a kind of coping mechanism cause of some things that happened and I don't trust people much anymore. And I mostly do it on Tumblr. Tumblr has a WHOLEEE Self-insert community there and it's mostly people inserting themselves into like animes for characters they wanna befriend or they wanna date. Some people do take it a bit far but I think the ones that take it WAAAAYYY too far have some kind of strong mental... illness? I don't wanna say mental problem cause that'll be insensitive and rude.
 
It's wish fulfillment, innit?

When writing any fiction, I think it's impossible to not insert facets of yourself into the characters you create, but with roleplay (and especially sexual roleplay), inserting yourself into the story to a larger degree probably gives some sort of gratification of living a life and experiencing things that you may otherwise be incapable of experiencing. You're living vicariously through your characters. Personally, I try to remove as much of myself from my characters as I can because that makes things more interesting to me, but still. It's unavoidable to include little inklings of my personality, preferences, and so forth.

You also see self inserts a lot in fan fiction for a lot of the same reasons.

There's also more interesting, meta self-inserts. Stephen King does it a lot to varying degrees of success. Having the characters you create interact with a fictional version of you, the author, within the story.
 
The only time I sort of did this was with my first character ever. I was new to RP and with no experience character-building, I was just like "What would I do if I was a vampire?", but it almost immediately grew into something that wasn't me. I have no urge to play myself in an RP. I generally don't want to experience the things I hope my RP characters do, anyways. I approach RP as a writer/director, not as the lead actor.

I would absolutely not be into playing someone else's self-insert. When I got started on this rando/Craiglist forum want-ad style RP, I eventually figured out my first two partners were doing something like self-inserts. I think the first was playing out his idealized-self in a fantasy of his. The second eventually told me that he had a white streak in his hair like his character. All the alarms went off.

So, if any partner in the future ever does a self-insert, I hope they don't tell me or I'll cringe so hard I'll break my laptop.
 
I do enjoying Rping, Myself "Unleashed" I can play My inner most, My unteathered or simply Me in another place and time, a different realm, a new world, rules askew and bent, or simply broken and walked over. It may be a Hyper, Uber or Mega Me but Me within the new rules or lack thereof. I also do simply play Myself as well, exactly as I would and do act, yet the scenario is with someone different, a place or time I have never been. It can be Very Real.

I know myself fairly well ;) So it's not a stretch even when the world around is quite stretched , for Me to imagine how I would react and feel.

A few things happen when you RP this way, yes some partners dislike that, another is that you can become very invested in the RP, more than a partner who doesn't do the same or understand it. I find it hard and a disconnect to do bad endings, since it breaks a core value/rule in Me (No matter how twisted the world is around Me) so in some ways it could be seen as limiting.

I do RP "Me" in My various ways. I have a Character that has been in My writing for literally decades and have lineages of characters who were the Sons of Him as well. All ( In My eyes at least) Forms and tweaks of Me the Man behind the keyboard, one may be more crude, another more romantic, if you glued them all together and plunked their old asses down in 2023 I can tell you exactly what they would look like ;) Me.

When I go over an RP with a partner, I do let them know what My style is and where I am coming from, it's best to be clear since some RPers dislike that RP style. I also am not opposed to first person RP (which would make sense) and not that many people like first person.
 
I think to an extent, everything we write is something of a self insert. Even if we write as a different persona than our public faces, we are still limited to the abilities of our imagination shaped by experience and knowledge

I am more comfortable writing characters closer to myself than I am not. I will go out of my comfort zone to gain perspective and potentially insight. It's not a bad thing to write from what you know or enjoy. We should do what we enjoy especially in the creative spaces that writing provides. If a self insert makes that enjoyment come easier, more power to that writer.

There's a time and place for self inserts, and I'm not stopping you from creating such things and honesty reality can get just as strange or over the top as fiction. I may be a martial artist, outdoorsman, who works with electrical mechanical devices, and moonlights as an aspiring writer; but we live in a world where a guy became a Navy Seal, Doctor, and Astronaut. I know of a guy who became a professional racecar driver based on being really good at a videogame (it's a movie). A priest who ran an orphanage, paid for the orphanage by side hustling as a luchadore(mexican professional wrestler). So as long as what you write doesn't detract from somebody else and isn't malicious, go be happy and write what you know and like.
 
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