How to Write Good Self Inserts

Yep, I may regret it but whatever. I want to write a good self-insert for Kingdom Hearts. Or more of a Decon-Recon Switch of one. And I kind of want to hammer down a few lessons down.

edited 3rd Nov '13 7:29:39 PM by HeirophantsFool

Carefully....

Honestly, this sounds like a receipt for disaster...a self insert in itself is already very problematic, because most writers are not able to writer their own character flaws. But combined with the desire to hammer some things in? Those are exactly the kind of stories which I avoid at all cost.

A self-insert is another way to tell a story, it's just like playing Touhou on lunatic level, if you want to write a good story. Speaking of Touhou (a fandom that has A LOT of SI fics), I had an idea once for a SI story that would be a Decon-Recon Switch but I abandoned (I even did a comic expaining it).

edited 4th Nov '13 4:28:27 AM by RN452

The most acceptable such stories, to me, are orthogonal to canon. That is to say, the OC or self insert should be off having adventures elsewhere that might influence or intersect the canon line but do not round the stations of canon with the main characters of the story, if they meet the canon mains at all. It makes it far easier to avoid accidentally overshadowing the heroes or making your SI overpowering. For instance suppose you want to do a self-insert into Transformers. If you make your SI a Prime who kills Megatron and Starscream, fans are probably going to roll their eyes and ignore the Mary Sue even if you write with the skill of Shakespeare himself, because you're crapping all over Optimus Prime and the fans like Optimus Prime. But if your SI is part of a small information-gathering team operating secretly in Europe, against an OC Decepticon force, you can go off and do your thing and not really outshine Optimus because he's still off fighting Megatron himself while your character still gets to be awesome against your OC Decepticon nemesis.

The best example of what I mean is probably The Best Seven Years. Technically Calvin and Hobbes aren't OCs but they fill the same kind of role I'm talking about. They go off and have all sorts of adventures at Hogwarts and even run through the war against Voldemort, but Calvin is doing his own thing and Harry is the Hero of Another Story. Calvin obviously is the hero of this story but nothing he does detracts from Harry, Hermione, and Ron's accomplishments in the canon story.

Kingdom Hearts isn't a fandom of mine so I can't advise you on the nature of the story itself, but I might be inclined to look at the existing storyline, spot a major Plot Hole or Contrived Coincidence or three, and then say "What if there was a second, secret hero team causing these? What would their adventure look like"

Most of what I was going to say is already covered here looks like.

Though there is indeed a big difference between a Self Insert and an OC.

What I say is: DO NOT make a self insert at all. People should view the characters they write as their brothers or their children, not as themselves or their Girlfriends/Boyfriends. Even if the characters personality is based off of you, just inserting yourself into a story isn't a way to make a properly developed character. Try viewing them in third person and see where they excel and where they fail, and please, please try to keep the character interesting.

I've always found when it comes to fan fiction, better stories with inserts or OCs work better when they play supporting roles and work side by side with the main cast. Correct me if I'm wrong, but most people read fanfiction to hear more about the existing canon characters rather than hearing about new characters (this can depend of course, I've seen plenty of communities dedicated to OCs on deviant art).

I'd say your best bet is to start by reading insert fics that do work, like the infamous Dreaming of Sunshine of Naruto fame.

Dreaming of Sunshine is a good example of a self insert, but it could have benefitted from going off the rails a little more to show some character interactions outside the slightly altered the stations of canon scenarios.

edited 4th Nov '13 5:11:42 AM by ScorpioRat

I don't want for my characters to overshadow Sora and friends but then again this is a decon-recon switch. Not to mention the size of the cast.

I also plan on doing a deconstruction of those KHIII fics where Sora and friends are trying prevent wars from breaking out. This is in the same fic. Instead of that, there's full blown war with the Warriors of Light (The good guys) the new Organization XIII (Half of them are Well Intentioned Extremists, {{Complete Monster the others not so much.}} The Seekers of Darkness are just straight up evil.

And I'm not going to get sucked into a video

The second party is the B-team. We are following the B-team. For reference in the Five Man Band trope:

The Leader: Three. Aged-up!Warrior of Light. Also the Obi-Wan and the Mentor. Riku. I'm not telling you because spoilers. And it will finally be myself and the female OC. Eventually. I'll have the heart and inspiring Determinator status while the female OC will have strategy and brains to back me up.

The Lancer: The Male OC is going be an Idiot Hero at first but is slowly going to grow out of it.

The Big Guy: The Male OC and myself.

The Smart Guy: The female OC and Shin, a character from a visual novel.

The Chick: Shin and the female OC.

The Sixth Ranger: Riku in-story fits this. Also Kain Highwind trained!Max.

edited 6th Nov '13 1:52:49 AM by HeirophantsFool

First of all, the viewpoint protagonist has to be an interesting person. They have to have valid motivations and fears. They have to be rounded out and be more than just "I know what's happening and I'm the author". Like any good character, really.

Second. The universe must react to them. They do something, the universe does it back to them. They change one thing, and it cascades through the entire system. Well meaning actions based on foreknowledge can backfire. If Shinji knows who the pilot of Unit 03 is - or if he has encouragment - he may try to mount a rescue mission. It may even succeed - but the risk is that it fails and all Evangelions get defeated by Bardiel, forcing Commander Ikari to order the remote self-destruct of Unit-03 to save the world.

The pilot, well, you can't save the world without breaking windows.

And everything then follows on from that. A main character is now dead. Even better, change the pilot of Unit 03 to someone the audience likes.

What if your insert character manages to defeat Zeruel all by him(her)self? Well, Shinji loses his motivation to return to NERV and continues home, certain in his belief that he's not needed, and that he made the correct decision for himself in light of the abuses his father is willing to inflict to achieve his goals.

And then your viewpoint character reacts to this. They have feelings and opinions. They have limits of despair and courage.

And never forget that, this is a big world still turning beyond the view of the protagonist. Things may happen that baffle, or to them come out of nowehere, which are actually the consequences of their actions echoing back or the unseen plannings and ideas of others.

I suppose, Tl;dr, don't be a boring.

Thanks for the advice Dartz! I needed to hear that, actually.

I know only one good example of how to do a good self-insert and that's the guy from Sleeping with the Girls. He hits every single point Dartz mentions, and he's always in balance with the story.

Or New Perspective Evangelion

Which also shows about 6 years worth of development in writing style along the way. The amount of things I've checked and considered for it are freaky in the extreme, including prehistory of the Evangelion program, the fact that all the Children are the result of early genetic manipulations as part of the Artificial Human Evolution program, along with what the AHE actually was and why it came about. What metaphysical biology actually refers to as a science, along with some form of cosmology that makes everything seem possible by the rules of the universe as presented and not in the silly 'Holy Fuck I'm in Eva' way.

Very little of this has an effect on the story, or is even visible. Beyond a few notes washed through google translate. But it does inform everyone's actions.

Then we go into actions and the 'why' of things. A surviving pilot allows NERV to leverage for the early release of Unit 03. An early Unit 03, being functional, allows for software testing and checking to be performed which feeds into Unit 04 and prevents the initial startup accident. Meanwhile, Seele try to hedge against NERV having so much power by sending their agent - Kaworu - early in Unit 04. This is visible in the story solely by the early arrival of Kaworu...

Having both of these early, changes up Bardiel. Touji was pilot of Unit 03, who might be the pilot of Germany's second production type? What happens when the pilots try to rescue and are defeated...

The Angels ramp up the difficulty in mechanical response to the increased capability of their opponents. The response from NERV also escalates. Misato uses Nuclear weapons to defeat one Angel, for example. What is the fallout from this action?

Lets blow Rei's apartment up and have Misato assign her to Maya Ibuki. What happens then?

Finally, we are limited by the viewpoint character who only knows what she can see. She doesn't know that Misato lobbied quite hard to take her in, and only finds out later that Misato sees her as something of a younger version of herself, forging a connection. She doesn't know her mother cheated with Asuka's father - then again, neither does Asuka. Noriko is 'That Girl' from the Manga. They may even be half-sisters, but I haven't decided. She doesn't know that Ritsuko was originally slated to be her lawful guardian, and part of Ritsuko's sour demeanour around her is a result of feeling Gazzumped. She also doesn't know what NERV has spotted about her and the unusual things she's been doing - and only has the merest hints that they're aware that she's odd. They're actually quite worried about her mental stability.

And that they assume it's a natural consequence of the damage she suffered somehow.

Oh, and the big thing the fic hinges on. She both hates Kaworu because he is responsible for what happened to her and for ripping her from her home and comfort, but at the same time tends to put too much trust in the information he feeds her because he's the only person who 'knows' and who she can talk with about it.

Forgetting that Kaworu is the Angel of Free Will (of manipulation of such) and at some point will state that the primary purpose of Angels is to survive ( And ensure that their kind of life dominates). Noriko - and likely the audience - never realises that everything has been a result of Kaworu carefully manipulating her, to ensure the destruction of the other Angels while giving himself the best shot of succeeding. And if he fails, setting the system up to give himself another shot due to how badly the metaphysics of Third Impact breaks the universe and forces a hard reset.

Which feeds right back into the background of the series with the Seeds of life as automated terraforming systems producing paradigms of life that are trialled against prevailing conditions on a planet in an iterative improving process until something sticks.

And surprisingly little of this is actually visible in the story. For one thing, Kaworu's betrayal will come as being somewhat sudden. My biggest worry is that it'll come across as "Haha! I was evil all along...."

Of course, you could say the same for all writing. But it's really something to be aware of with such a limited viewpoint. See Dresden Files for another example of this.

@Title: Deconstruct their OPness, disembowel their opinions, then anticlimactically kill them off.

I'm actually doing a Campfire in Writing.com that plays with this very concept a bit Self Insert: This is Going to be Painful partly inspired by the Protectors of the Plot Continuum, it technacally isn't really self insert in the truest sense, since the 'Author Avatars' live in an alternate Earth with Raygun Gothic Technology I was also inspired by a comment on the MNT Gaiden Page which to paraphrase 'A lot of this reads like TMNT Self Insert fic gone horribly wrong' and I thought to myself 'That sounds awesome!'

So the only reason our Author Avatars are being sent to a cartoon universe is because of the Witness Protection Program, not only are their identities being changed they are being sent into the bodies of Petting-Zoo People to make it even harder for the Galactic Mob to track them down, my Avatar, currently a Porcupine Anthro named Violet Berry, seems genre savvy enough about this trope, to advise everyone not to get involved with the main characters so not to mess up Narrative Casualty, also, Violet seems to be aware that if she tells the heroes they know them because they see them every Saturday morning on the tube, the heroes are going to have a humongous freak out

By the way, in the Toon Universe, it is my Space Beasts Universe, with the 2003 Ninja Turtles guest staring as visitors, a lot of the story, will have me musing on my relationship with the 2003 show, how it affected me growing up and the ups and downs with the things I liked and didn't like (Like Leo's downward spiral is season 4)

In my experience there are two kinds of self-inserts. Type A is where 'you' from our reality get dumped into the story, and may or may not have experience with the over-arching plot lines if 'you' are a fan. Type B is where a character that is like you in most important ways (or like you would want to be, more often) is naturally born and raised in that world without extra-dimensional knowledge, meaning it's more like an Author Avatar. both have their ups and down if you want to preserve suspension of disbelief.

For type A, the problem is that you have none of the skills or powers needed in this world. A self-insert dumped into the Naruto world, for instance, can't use chakra and doesn't have the years of training needed to be a ninja, so the most you could believably do is adopt an raise young Naruto—and sooner or later the 3rd Hokage is going to notice that Naruto's hanging around someone with no birth certificate or legal documents and drag you off to T&I. For type B, you mainly have to avoid god-moding, so go out of your way to let the insert get worded or proven wrong on occasion. A Naruto story I'm writing where the author avatar becomes Team 7's sensei has him get beaten a few times and eventually killed, since it's the Team that's the focus and not him.

Other than that, the main thing you can do in type A to make it good is have there be unexpected character developments/revelations: for instance, your Insert thinks Dumbledore is secretly senile/evil, but he turns out to have good, logical reasons for most of his actions despite making a few mistakes. Basically, don't let them always be right, and have them stick their foot in their mouth once or twice.

edited 10th Nov '13 1:49:00 PM by ASHDEVIL

I personally struggle with this my self, if anyone would like to constructively critique my aforementioned above post story, to see if it's a good example of what we're talking about, please feel free to do so

Coming from someone who's written a few self inserts, here's a veteran's take on writing good self inserts.

First, you being the main character isn't a bad thing. Rather I should call it a protagonist, but whatever. I find writing from your own POV can be fun, as we as normal folk might view the fictional world in a way different from the usual suspects.

Second, think carefully about how you would work in canon. In one fic, I had my insert find herself stuck in the body of the main character. Obviously, stories who have a Create-Your-Character feature to be the easiest to work in, as you can easily fit yourself into that.

Third, think about how you will appear in the story. In my mentioned fic, my character was fixed in another person's body, meaning she no longer had her appearance. Still, it affected her dialogue and how she thought of herself. Romance will especially be messy since she might get confused on whether the guy likes her for her personality or body. So making your insert look different than how you look in real life isn't bad, so as long as you work out the problems that this character might struggle with, such as body image and identity confusion, etc.

However, if you choose your own appearance, don't change your look unless it's absolutely necessary. If you're chubby, make your OC chubby. If you have a wart, keep that wart where it's at, etc.

Four, and this is key; think about how you, in real life, would respond to the canon world. Using my own example, my insert is super cowardly in the beginning due to her background and fear of war. I know if I saw a sword, I'd run in the opposite direction.

Also, don't be afraid to have your insert make mistakes. You make mistakes all the time, so reflect that on your character. Do you talk too loud? Do you maybe interrupt people? Can you read the mood well? Have those questions reflect how your character responds to their environment.

This is just some tidbits to take away alongside the above pieces of advice. I find writing in a humorous setting easier, especially if written in my POV. I know I'll be very snarky, so my inner narrative will reflect that. Also, don't be afraid to cop out of being killed after your character makes a supposed fatal mistake. These closes calls can actually allow your character to grow as a person, for better or not.

Anyways, that's what I've got say on the matter. Let the Force be with you on your imaginary adventures with fictional characters.

I think a lot of it has to do with making sure that your self-insert character isn't just blatant wish-fulfillment. Make your character go through some kind of challenge or conflict that tests their integrity and skills. Also be sure to avoid having your self-insert become best friends with the main characters instantly.

They'll think he's weird but later creepy awesome.

I think it honestly depends on the fandom.

Fandoms where guest characters come and go are probably more open to self inserts than others wrapped around a few core characters. Anyone can run off with the Doctor for a trip in the TARDIS, or anyone can show up on the Enterprise, and anyone can be stuck in a city being stomped by Godzilla. The list goes on.

I came across a pretty well-done Doctor Who self-insert fanfic with a strong anti-bullying message. I experienced some pretty bad bullying myself and the story hit me in the guts. It's on the "A Teaspoon and an Open Mind" website and its title is "It Gets Better."

The author basically tells an autobiographical account of her bullying experiences in high school, except she added in the Doctor showing up as a sub in one of her classes. That's how she meets him, but she doesn't find out he isn't human until later when he interrupts her suicide attempt. The Doctor takes her on one of the crazy adventures you might see in a normal episode and during it she inadvertently helps him figure out how to save a planet. The most touching moment is after they come back; the Doctor tells the girl she'll grow up to do something fantastic and that she truly matters. The story finishes with a list of affirmations she did actually write and put out on the internet to help people dealing with bullying. Basically, it feels like it's something that did actually happen to her.

To me, that makes a good self insert. (But do not get me started on "author gets sucked into ______ universe" fics because those drive me nuts.)

Does "the Heartless invading and destroying our world" count as being sucked into the canon world?

No, it counts as your world being consumed by the canon world.

Oh, good. I'd like to think it makes sense, considering it being my fan-plot for Kingdom Hearts III.

edited 30th Mar '14 3:36:42 PM by HeirophantsFool

There are exceptions and if there's a good reason worlds are crossing, fine.

The kind of fics I'm talking about are something like modern American teenagers falling into their fandom world of choice for no reason and hanging off their favorite characters. Sure, those are fun, but only to the authors.

Anyone who can pull it off well will always get a nod from me. I'm willing to make exceptions to cliches when they're done well.