Archived Discussion Main / AuthorAvatar

• Herge, the author of Tintin was quite fond of making cameos in his own comics, and later the cartoonseries. Full list here.

Webcomics

• Bob And George. The Author is a main character.
• A thankfully non-canonical take in El Goonish Shive.
  • Dan Shive also appears as a sometimes female Funny Animal in filler strips and other outside-continuity affairs.
• Pantsman of VG Cats is generally Scott Ramsoomair's mouthpiece.
• The character Mab in Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures is based on the author's own roleplaying avatar from Furcadia, and in fact most of the main characters in the comic are based on her friends and acquaintances. The author herself even makes occasional side appearances to either explain or make humorous comments on the events in particular stories and strips.
• "Professors" Foglio and Foglio occasionally appear in minor roles in Girl Genius. This is just the latest in a long line of such appearances by Phil Foglio in his own works.
• Subverted in Penny Arcade where Tycho and Gabe were never meant to be Author Avatars of the creators but fans kept insisting they were or kept confusing them for Author Avatars and wouldn't shut up about it. Eventually, the creators said "to hell with it" and started patterning Tycho and Gabe after themselves turning them into actual Author Avatars.
• The three authors of the now-retired Mall Monkeys showed up in their own comic on a regular basis.
• David Hopkins, author of Jack, has at least two versions of himself that show up in the comic. One only appears on Earth and rarely, if ever, says anything. The other looks very similar and plays the role of the Devil in Hell. Allegedly, Drip is also supposed to be a very dark version of Mr Hopkins, although this troper can't see any similarity between the two.
  • This troper has found that surprisingly, he's very good at playing Dave's version of the Devil. And this is despite not having ever met Mr. Hopkins and living fifteen time-zones away from him, and not being religious at all.
• Chris Onstad of Achewood fame has made a few appearances in his comics as himself. Hilariously, he portrays himself as a huge asshole who's bitter about everything.
• In a strip of Elf Only Inn, the author — in sprite form, a notable change from the typical hand drawn format — descends from the sky, on wires, to announce that "I AM THE AUTHOR. I AM VERY LAZY." Definitely less of the Marty Stu variety of Author Avatar, and more of a Take That! to what the writer sees as hack comics writers.

Film

• The canonical Western example is probably director Alfred Hitchcock, who made cameo appearances in many of his own films.
• Similarly, M. Night Shyamalan has cast himself in very small speaking roles in all of his films.
  • Notable Exception: In Lady in the Water, Shyamalan cast himself as a writer whose work would "change the world" — a part coming much too close to a Marty Stu for many viewers.
• Quentin Tarantino tends to write himself slightly larger supporting roles in his films.
• As well, venerable Marvel Comics creator Stan Lee makes a cameo appearance in every film based on Marvel characters he created. Sometimes he even does it in stuff he didn't create, like in Heroes. However, he's never explicitly appeared as himself, in fact either playing or being mistaken for Hugh Hefner mostly recently, in Iron Man.
  • Though he did play himself in Fantastic Four 2: Rise of the Silver Surfer, where he tried to get into the wedding but the doorman didn't believe he was really Stan Lee.
    • Which was inspired by the comics version of the wedding from Fantastic Four Annual #3, where Stan and Jack Kirby were thrown out of the wedding.
• Colin Dexter made a cameo appearance in every episode of Inspector Morse (speaking in the final episode).
• Robert Fiveson, director and co-producer for Clonus, had a small cameo as a security guard who gets beaten up by the main character. Not exactly an author avatar, though, as Bob later said in an interview this was mostly due to a lack of extras.

Literature

• In her appearance on A&E Biography, Harry Potter author JK Rowling admitted that Hermione Granger is essentially herself as a child/teen.
• Peter Marlowe in James Clavell's novels is pretty much Clavell himself, although this is justified in that his first appearance is in a semi-autobiographical work.
• Pretty much the point of The French Lieutenant's Woman.
• Hercule Poirot's acquaintance Ariadne Oliver, a mystery author who appears in several novels featuring him, is basically an exaggerated self-portrait of Agatha Christie — like Christie herself, Ariadne loves apples, confesses herself slightly absent-minded, is highly critical of the works of other mystery authors, and has created a fictional Funny Foreigner hero whom she secretly despises. She also occasionally references the Plot Holes and factual errors in previous Poirot stories as flaws in her own novels.
• Harriet Vane from the Lord Peter Wimsey series was based on its author, Dorothy Sayers.
  • Although what Dorothy Sayers did with the character really makes this more of a Self-Insert Fic (or worse), since Lord Peter falls hard for Harriet, puts up with years of crap while he tries to get her to tie the knot, involves her in most of the remaining stories, marries her, and they live happily ever after.
• In the Wayside School books, the author appears as the "yard teacher," Louis.
  • Justified, as the book is inspired by his experiences working as a 'yard teacher' at an elementary school.
• Sci-fi author Robert A Heinlein's protagonists often had avatarish creepy sidekicks.
  • On the other hand, most of his strongest (and allegedly, according to his detractors, most "unbelievable") female leads bear a striking resemblance to his wife.
• HP Lovecraft had quite a few characters obviously based upon himself, most notably Wilbur Whateley in The Dunwich Horror and Edward Derby in The Thing on the Doorstep.
• Stephen King writes about a large number of New England living writers and/or artists. In recent years, crippling accidents have begun to appear in his protagonists' backstories; the artist on his TV show The Kingdom, who like King himself was run over by a van, is probably one of the most flagrant examples. He has also written himself into recent books in his Dark Tower series.
• Two central characters in War And Peace, Pierre Bezukhov and Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, are both Author Avatars of Leo Tolstoy. Thankfully, they are good friends in the novel.
• The main character in Travis S. Tayor's Warp Speed is a multi-doctorate physisist, professional mountain biker, a championship level blackbelt in karate (as well as a few other martial arts) — a list that happens to be nearly identical to the one in the author's offical biography.
• Robert Asprin's fantasy novel Dragons Wild is mostly set in the French Quarter of New Orleans (where Asprin lives lived in real life), and features a "cool" and "mysterious" character nicknamed (sigh) Maestro who is blatantly modeled on Asprin himself. Fortunately he just hangs out around the edges of a handful of scenes. But this is just the first volume of a new series, and he'll probably be back...
• The poet Demodocus sings at a feast in The Odyssey — he is described as "their favourite bard, whom the Muse loved above all others, though she had mingled good and evil in her gifts, robbing him of his eyes but granting him the gift of sweet song." Homer, the author of The Odyssey, is also said to be blind. This might just be Older Than Dirt.
• The sci-fi novel Footfall features a group of science-fiction writers gathered together by the US Government to help brainstorm ways to fight back against an alien invasion. In addition to obvious fictionalized analogues of Robert A. Heinlein, his wife Virginia, and a couple other big-name authors, the two main authors of the book in question are not only part of this group in fictionalized form, but they are the viewpoint characters for that subplot. This is sort of Truth in Television, as there actually was a program during World War Two to try and get sci-fi authors to come up with a superweapon. They quickly realized they wouldn't come up with anything useful before the war was over anyways, and were redirected to help the war effort in other ways, with Heinlein, for example, working as a draftsman at a US Navy aircraft plant. But the failure of this program hasn't stopped conspiracy theorists from believing that they did come up with superweapons, and this is the inspiration for the film The Philadelphia Experiment.
  • Most of the people on the list were also associated with the SDI advisory group for President Reagan, helping to propose the concepts of both Thor (AKA Rods from Gods) and the Brilliant Pebbles Anti Missile Program.
• At the Super Hero School Whateley Academy in the Whateley Universe, there's a group of girls who are known on campus as the Lit Chix, because they write bad lit and then critique each other's work. Every one of these girls is actually an Author Avatar. They all have names very close to a given author, with a personality that's a parody of said author's. They're side characters who really want to be heroic main characters, but aren't.
• Mercedes 'Misty' Lackey appears as Herald-Chronicler Myste in her Heralds Of Valdemar stories. The character started as merely a narrator, inscribing the adventure into the Heralds' library, but became more fleshed-out in later (chronologically earlier) books. This is particularly disturbing because "Herald Myste" takes the opportunity to develop a romantic relationship with long-running character Herald Alberich.
• Professor Kirke for C.S. Lewis in The Chronicles Of Narnia
• Lord Asriel in His Dark Materials, and Lyra to an extent.
• Clive Cussler has made a Running Gag out of appearing in his novels, always in a brief cameo (although on occasion he'll render some much-needed assistance to the protagonist before he exits the story). Long-running characters like Dirk Pitt, who have met Clive Cussler multiple times, always note that Clive seems sorta familiar... and then instantly forget his name the second he's offscreen, because after all, he was just some unimportant passer-by.
• Philip José Farmer inserted himself in his Riverworld series as Peter Jairus Frigate (the initials were an obvious giveaway until the author himself revealed it). A bit of a subversion in that the first Peter Jairus Frigate we encounter is not the "real" Author Avatar but an agent who impersonates him, probably his stillborn brother; we find the real one later.
• J.R.R. Tolkien said that Faramir reminded him of himself. Subverted in that it was an accident and he didn't want him in the story, at first. However, the character that he most identified with was the hero Beren, and he identified his wife with Luthien, Beren's wife. These names are inscribed under theirs on their gravestone.
• A lot of William Sommerset Maugham and Graham Greene's stories will have a author as narrator who gives the impression of being the writer themselves. Maugham also wrote spy fiction about a character Ashenden who like himself was a writer and British agent.
• The character Marlow who narrates several works by Joseph Conrad is generally taken as being an Author Avatar, as is the Slavic aristocrat he encounters in Heart of Darkness. The novel Under Western Eyes also seems to use this, with Polish-born, naturalized as English Conrad represented by an English professor who is fluent in Russian.
• Sheriff Bell in No Country For Old Men.
• Hans Christian Andersen maintained all his protagonists were part him. He said The Ugly Duckling was effectively the story of his life.
• It's not hard to find an Author Avatar in anything by Ayn Rand.
  • There's also a difference between who the Author thinks is the Avatar and the reader. Atlas Shrugged has a very clear bit part that's an Author Avatar towards the end describing a mousy female author whose books didn't sell due to collectivist pressure. Of course the main character may just be a Wish-Fulfillment of the author.
• Kurt Vonnegut is a big fan of this. In fact in Slaughterhouse 5, his Anti-Sue Kilgore Trout meets his Marty Stu Billy Pilgrim, who has met the author himself in the Dresden Bombings.
• Parodied hilariously in Repairman Jack. F. Paul Wilson inserts himself as "P. Frank Winslow." The title character picks up a book in a shop called "Jake Fixx" which seems to parallel his life. He contacts the author, Winslow, who agrees to meet him for coffee. Jack feels like choking Winslow when he refuses to reveal what happens to Jake in future novels.
• Let us also not forget J Pod, in which Douglas Coupland inserts himself as the main villain, best selling author Douglas Coupland, who is also a Magnificent Bastard.
• The middle Bennett sister Mary — or so some scholars guess — for Jane Austen in Pride And Prejudice. While her four sisters are busy contributing to the plot, Mary just reads her books, only noticeably coming up to make a short speech about the difference between pride and vanity.
  • Of course, this only works if you decide Austen wanted to ruthlessly parody herself (which is not uncommon for authors). Mary is an annoying little swot with no real appreciation of what she reads, simply parroting back things she's read elsewhere.
• Jo March of Little Women is Louisa May Alcott.
• In Roger Zelazny's Amber Chronicles the main character, Corwin, comes across a man named Roger, who tells Corwin he's writing a book. He refuses to say if the ending is happy or not.

Live-Action TV

• John-Boy Walton on The Waltons is a thinly-disguised version of program creator/producer/writer Earl Hamner Jr.; the show is, in fact, something of an autobiography from start to finish, and virtually every character in it is a Fictional Counterpart of a real person or persons.
• Supernatural: Eric Kripke has admitted that he had originally based Sam Winchester on himself. But nowadays, thanks to breakages and Hidden Depths? Not so much anymore.
• J Michael Straczynski appeared in the final episode of Babylon 5, as the janitor cleaning the station and turning the lights off for the last time.
• Much of what Sam Weir of Freaks And Geeks did was based on stuff that happened to Paul Feig as a teenager; Feig admits to several incidents that happened in Weir's freshman (and only) year actually happened to him much later in High School.
• 30 Rock is all about this; Tina Fey, former head writer and producer of Saturday Night Live stars in this sitcom about a woman who's the head writer of a sketch comedy. Filmed in the same building as SNL.
• On Desperate Housewives, the Van De Kamps are based on creator Marc Cherry's family, and in fact the only reason that patriarch Rex dies so early in the series is that Cherry's father had died at the same age. Rather bizarrely, during the second season Cherry's personal counterpart Andrew became one of the show's most flat-out evil characters, though he's since gotten better.

Western Animation

• Huey Freeman of The Boondocks shares and frequently espouses the left-wing political opinions of series creator Aaron McGruder. Of course, he also expresses many beliefs much more radical than the author, who once described Huey as "a little to the left of Castro".
• Brian from Family Guy often takes this role, and Seth MacFarlane even voices him with his regular speaking voice. Though at least one time his statements (they should cut down on air-conditioning to conserve electricity) were dismissed as "hippy BS".
• Stan and Kyle on South Park usually represent Trey Parker and Matt Stone respectively.
  • Except, of course, when they mention they enjoy Family Guy.
• Show Within a Show example: In the Homestar Runner episode The Next Epi-Snowed, after Crack Stuntman, voice of Gunhaver on "Cheat Commandos", makes one too many unreasonable demands during a recording session, writer/director A. Chimendez has his character Put on a Bus and replaced with Agent Chimendez, an obvious Author Avatar who's even voiced by Chimendez.
• Ralph Bighead on Rockos Modern Life, voiced by creator Joe Murray.
• Most film historians agree that Mickey Mouse was Walt Disney. Aside from voicing the character, Walt also gave him his humble origins and industrious pluck.
• On his show Invader Zim, Jhonen Vasquez appeared◊ a few◊ times◊.
  • Which is weird, because he doesn't even look like that...◊

Video Games

• Mokap, a motion-capture animator who made his debut in Mortal Kombat Deadly Alliance, is based directly on real-life MK motion-capture animator Carlos Pesina, right down to his physical appearance.

Stories featuring an Author Stand In tend to be autobiographical in nature, although even then they are generally fictionalized to distinguish themselves from the reality (as opposed to an actual autobiography, which is simply a direct retelling of events from the author's perspective). Names are often changed to protect the innocent.

If the Author Stand In is idealised to a fault, then reader beware; the author has just created a Canon Sue. Given the nature of the character, the Author Stand In is often called to deliver an Author Filibuster from time to time.