Let’s not lie to ourselves - self insert characters are often seen as a sign of bad and lazy writing.
But are they? Many famous stories include author’s avatar. Dante is the main character of his own Divine Comedy and J.R.R. Tolkien came to be buried under the nickname Beren, one of the heroes of his Legendarium.
The question is: do you do self inserts? If yes, why, how and what do you do for them not to feel lazy and shoehorned?
yeah I have a self insert fight before the elite 4
It’s a dramatic encounter where I confront the player and challenge them with a team that’s almost guaranteed to lose. It’s just for fun, really.
I made a character based on my mom.
I know she isn’t a SELF-Insert but she has that role in spirit, being given self insert like favoritism.
She has her own 1 chapter hack and she is one of the first characters you recruit in the main hack. While she is just a mage having almost perfect avaiability does make her a great unit.
All this stuff is for fun anyway, so I say why not? What’s the point of creating if you can’t put a bit of yourself into it? Plus, power fantasies are cathartic. Go ahead and put yourself in the game and give them the most broken stats ever, there’s no harm in it haha
all of my characters are self inserts, including roy
yeah sure do, i dont bother trying to hide it lol
No, I didn’t include self-insert in my hack. It wouldn’t align with the ‘feel’ of the hack i was trying to make - a narrative that took itself seriously, with a tone similar to the mainline FE GBA games.
No offence to self-inserts, they just wouldn’t align with my vision for that hack. They feel… hacky? I don’t know.
On the other hand, I would say that in the characters we write, there is often a hint of ourselves that filters into them, mostly sub-consciously. So, certain traits of the author end up distributed among the creations, in the end. I’ve read through some of the dialogue in my hack and thought “that’s literally just how I normally speak” 
I don’t think its inherently bad if done right.
At least for my current project, i’m 100% against it since it’s meant to focus on the vtubers themselves.
Maybe in the future if I do something that’s not Holoemblem
I’m guilty of “starting a billion projects and never finishing them” syndrome, which usually sucks, but for once it gives me enough of a sample size to have a conversation.
In general, no. There are no characters who are direct stand ins for me. Usually however, I’ll throw in a side character, usually the protagonist’s right-hand man or bodyguard or something, with a lot of my traits and worldview. They’re not self-inserts in a meta sense, but they’re still very strong expressions of myself as a creator.
It should be noted that there is a pretty clear relationship between the medium used and the presence and importance of these characters. In my prose writing, for example, they tend to be main characters or even the main character, wheras my fangames have those characters take a bit of a backseat and/or throw those traits into a blender and spit out something a bit more unpredictable. My D&D characters tend to be the farthest from myself, actually, which I find pretty weird.
Sometimes I throw in people I know or philosophers I respect though. In my current writing project, there’s a character who’s literally just fantasy G.K. Chesterton
I mean, maybe, yes and no, when i started envisioning the story for my hack, it was a really cookie cutter fe6 sequel but a 500 years had passed, starring a suspiciously sophia looking eyepatch wearing girl, oh and linus reed was there, but things pass and my story got changed into something more unique, helps that my girlie sophie isn’t really a self insert for me at this point and my man caspian, well he isn’t really linus, but he kinda had the same story i was planning for him, actually making ocs has been really fun, between their personalities, their look and some having custom anims, i feel like self insert can be a gateway into making unique characters
I think that modeling a character 1:1 on yourself has a higher chance of feeling out of place in your setting compared to a character crafted for the setting. But, like all art, it is extremely difficult to remove all traces of the self. Everything we create is inspired by what we see or experience first hand, our individual and personalized memories serving as the catalyst to creativity.
That being said, there is a character in MOBA Emblem that may not share my name but sure does look a lot like me. Their purpose within the hack is to be killed by the player. I consider it something like a little gift to frustrated players.
My self-insert is fridged to kick off the plot. Real Gs fridge themselves if they gotta fridge someone
I’m gonna put this for the record; surprisingly no, considering my username.
This username is actually from way years back, same that I use in other communities. Back then I never would had even thought that I would try my hand at fire emblem hacking, so this might be one of the biggest ironies that my username is now facing lol.
Well, more or less, I think. I do have one character that pretty much is similar to me, although I gave him some other characteristics so that it ends up a bit different from me.
Of the romhacks I plan to make, he’s just one of the first units you get in the first game, not a main character but one that still gets some spotlight, more or less like Sophia or Melady. In the second game he gets promoted to being a protagonist alongside another character, and in another romhack you get to kill him (well, an alternate, demented version of him anyways).
But yeah, alongside this just being pure fanworks with null chances of becoming something official, even some official works end up having some characters that are a bit based from their authors, like Shinji Ikari from NGE, Rohan Kishibe from Jojo part 4 (this one differs because the character and the author do end up having different personalities lol), the main character of BRZRKR (the comic made by Keanu Reeves), and maybe that one cameo from Hideo Kojima in MGS5. There’s more examples than these ones, but either I forgot what those were, or they are the ones that do end up going into power fantasy for the author (like the main character being always powerful, always loved, always right, always perfect), therefore the bad ones lol.
Yes, I insert myself into the game as the storyteller
Every character in a work is a reflection of the creator in one way or another, self inserts as they are called just take it one step further into the bounds of being intentionally based off of the personality of the creator. I don’t think self inserts really deserve the criticisms that they often receive.
We often hear the term “Mary Sue” thrown around a lot, ignoring it’s deeply misogynistic origins as the term itself has changed over time, it’s often used as a shorthand for identifying characters with no obvious flaws. This is frequently brought up in relation to the self insert as if the two concepts were inherently intertwined.
All in all the wider FE community has a weird relationship with self inserts in that it actively despises them for their existence, without seemingly even knowing how self inserts function, just seeing them as lazily written characters that get privilege for being the authors self insert. As stated before some of the most well recognized works in fiction feature self inserts so it’s certainly not inherently bad. It’s just a matter of whether the author is able to give themselves a close inspection or not.
What’s a self-insert?
Actual question.
Since you’re referring to Dante you imply the type of character that is literally just the author themselves, either wandering into the world and getting into adventures there, or existing in the background as a reference to themselves. That’s pretty innocuous although I have not ever done that and I don’t think I would really want to. I guess it would be funny to have a self-referential meme postgame fight like the secret Game Freak battles in Pokemon games.
But from your post and from most other posts I assume you mean a different thing when you talk about “self inserts” - i.e. main characters who seem to have excessive author favoritism and who are usually right because they espouse the views that the author agrees with. i.e. sort of mary sue-ish except not as deeply. But not exactly the author transplanted.
In which case… I guess I’ve done something like that? But like people here say, usually to an extent a part of you and your worldview filters into your characters, subconsciously, and that’s normal. It’s no different in my case, and there’s also always some characters you favor a bit more than others, so on and so forth…
All great authors have a self insert that gets unceremoniously killed off.
I’m not a great author (you can tell because I don’t even have a proof of concept yet) so I don’t kill my self insert. Instead she’s a reflection of myself when I was a little younger who exists to be confused and to be confusing. And to do some goofy fourth wall true ending BS because I love anime.
One of my characters began as a self insert. Being completely new to writing at the time I basically had written him as a “what would I do if I were in the situation I’ve set up” sort of thing. But I never ended up liking how things turn out because situations just revolved around him and his decisions. Eventually he morphed into his own character after the multitude of iterations on the story and fleshing out him and other characters who I found more interesting.
That said, while I don’t consider him a self insert anymore, I’d by lying if I said his personality doesn’t still loosely reflect my own. That’s how he started, after all.
