Self Deprecation / Fan Works

• Most of the more self-aware Abridged Series do this, occasionally with the creators guest-starring on other people's Abridged Series in order to make fun of themselves.
  • LittleKuriboh of Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series does this pretty consistently. In one extreme case the characters wondered where he had gone for four months. Another time, he parodied his own proposal video and had his characters wonder what kind of "sick, lonely person" would do such a thing. In a later video, Yugi and Yami complain about LK's incredibly boring voice. He's also been deconstructing his entire genre, which he made, named and codified, in a good deal of his supplemental extras and his Naruto Abridged parody.
  • The creators of Ranma 1/2 Abridged are common employers of this trope. Sometimes it is a straight jab at themselves, and sometimes it is done ironically to take a subtle jab at some of the other Ranma 1/2 abridgedments, of which there are many.
    Random Background Character: Yeah, that Sithis Bear guy sounds the same in every voice!
  • Dragon Ball Z Abridged: The first Kai episode^note which further abridges the first season into two minutes of Rapid-Fire Comedy ends with Yami Yugi incredulously asking "This has how many subscribers?!" The second ends with Nappa unsubscribing from Team Four Star's Youtube channel.
  • TeamFourStar's #TIBA abridging contest in 2016 had two of these: Firstly, the award given to the video that got the most audience votes but didn't make it into the judge's Top 30 was called the "F**k the Judges" Award. Secondly, before announcing the Top 30, the guys posted the absolute worst Abridged video they'd ever seen: the very first episode of DBZA itself, with the members of TFS doing commentary and ripping it apart for its poor quality.
  • In Ultra Fast Pony, Wacarb frequently mocks his editing or lip-syncing by slapping a "Quality editing!" subtitle (or some humorously misspelled variant) on scenes he considers sub-par, or by using a "This looks familiar..." subtitle to mock his overuse of certain clips. In "The Longest Episode", he takes a big swipe at the writers of the source material, then follows it up by implying that he's even worse.
    Celestia: Whoever wrote this episode must have had brain damage.
    Twilight: Yeah, I think all the writers do.
    Subtitle: That's why I don't even have a brain!
  • The Narrator of My Little Pony: Totally Legit Recap pokes fun at himself and the brony community, almost as much as he does the actual show, either through captions appearing over the footage or outright stating it:
    • He repeatedly tells himself to shut up through captions after he goes on a long tangent.
    • This exchange:
      Fluttershy: Alright motherfucker you're coming with me and you're getting a job.
      Zephyr Breeze: Dude, I don't need a job! My mane therapy YouTube channel is totally taking off. I've almost got a hundred subscribers and my Patreon—
      Fluttershy: You're getting a fucking job.
    • The ending of "The Cart Before the Ponies" has the Aesop: when adults hijack something that was meant for kids, they ruin it.
    • At one point, he compares himself to a hobo playing a guitar on the street for booze money to help forget about their pathetic lives.
    • He also bemoans whenever he puts a surprising amount of thought into a franchise focusing on magical ponies.
    • In the Rainbow Rocks recap, Brad implies DWK has a really small dick. The same recap also references the Broken Base surrounding the first movie before saying only "fat adults" hated the film while kids loved it.invoked
• The Author's Notes in the beginning of chapter 6 of Eddward Wright: Ace Attorney has John himself making fun of his own Schedule Slip, comparing himself to ProtonJon in that regard (it helps that the two of them share the same name).
• Lyra Heartstrings essentially is this to the bronies. Fan-art essentially has her indulging in pretty much every stereotype that the bronies are saddled with, even to having an all-out sexual obsession with humans, referring to herself as a "humesister" (among other similar names), and watching a show called "My Little Human". And it all stemmed from one little throwaway scene of her sitting like a person...
• Lady Norbert puts this in several of her less serious works.
  • In The Bank Called, Your Reality Check Bounced, she does this several times by having Kyoya, who figures out that the characters are actually in a fan fiction, make snide remarks about her writing style.
  • In the Contractually Obligated Chaos series, Beetlejuice (who mangles the fourth wall plenty in his original show) is prone to asking Who Writes This Crap?! - the answer, of course, being her. After the story resumed following a three-year Series Hiatus, original character Hugo made the obvious joke by commenting to Beetlejuice, "It feels like it's been years since we last spoke!"
  • Varric occasionally provides this in the Twice Upon an Age series, which credits him as the editor. His editor's notes throughout the narrative sometimes call her out for various things. The bulk of the story actually is fairly serious, but the notes break it up into something more humorous.
  • Varric is prone to this again in the Alternate Universe series Skyhold Academy Yearbook, where he's a writing teacher at the eponymous school. In this case, however, it's literal self-deprecation rather than the co-authors using him for their own ends. He cracks wise about himself on the regular, alternating his showboating and egotistical commentary with self-deprecating humor; he remarks more than once that he has "a face that was made for radio," and observes about his adored Love Interest (and eventual wife) that "her only known flaw is her questionable taste in men."
• garfieldodie's notes for the Calvin & Hobbes: The Series episode "Temporal Delay" start with "Ooh, look! An update that didn't take an entire year to be put up!"
• In Eleutherophobia, Tom has a lot of self-loathing left over from his time as a Controller, which manifests itself as snarky remarks about how he was better that way.
• Raptor-Assassin of Weightless wrote Fifty-Shades-of-Blue as a relief from her serious fic. The fic pokes fun at her trademark style by exaggerating it. Purple Prose, Department of Redundancy Department, sentences that are cut off into small new lines for emphasis, and Anatomically Impossible Sex scenes are all in there.
• In the Wholock story A Stitch in Time...
  Ninth Doctor: What was I trying to do, impress a girl?
  Tenth Doctor: (blushes)
  Ninth Doctor: I was? Aren't we a little old for that?
• Turnabout Storm: Sonata, a Canterlot citizen, has no problems pointing out that she deduced Twilight was from Canterlot because she still carries over some of the smugness present in its inhabitants.
• In Warriors of the World: Soldiers of Fortune Valkron observes how he keeps forgetting about one character's presence. This eventually results in everyone else forgetting about said character's presence, culminating in someone demanding "Why are you such a forgettable person?!" The author's footnote confesses to repeatedly forgetting about the character.
• The Umineko: When They Cry fanwork Redaction of the Golden Witch includes a Prelude presented as a critical analysis of the Forgery itself. Much of this lead-up talks about how the story was utterly rejected by Witch Hunters, and goes on to explain its own unpopularity.
• In a Harry Potter / Superman crossover scene collection by TheBeardedOne, Harry finds a collection of Boy-Who-Lived storybooks. The AI he has analyse them claims that they are badly written with some actually being worse... than the writings of TheBeardedOne!
• The Legend of Korra fanfic Book Five: Legends has Mako finally taking credit for being a terrible boyfriend, though Korra hastens to add it wasn’t entirely his fault.
• Undertale fangame Undertale Red, should you get Red to calm down, going through all the dialogue options will result in her talking about Mew Mew Kissy Cutie 2, where she says that she enjoyed the series, but felt that the new character was a bit "shoehorned in". Said series is considered terrible in canon by Alphys.
• As in Real Life, the four practice this in The Keys Stand Alone: The Soft World. (They didn't do it as much in With Strings Attached.) Ringo is probably most prone to it, a tendency that he's called out for by Mindy at one point.
• The Pieces Lie Where They Fell:
  • At one point in the sequel Picking Up the Pieces, the female Vix-Lei comments to Rex that "You simply do not say those kind of things to a lady! Or me either, for that matter.”
  • In the same sequel, Wind Breaker isn't surprised when he loses to Night Blade at poker, admitting freely that he has no poker face. (Fortunately, they were just playing for candy.)
• In Pokémon Reset Bloodlines, at the beginning of the story, Ash is shocked that Arceus chose him of all people to save the world from collapsing in itself after Cyrus destroys the entire reality, since he's not even able to win a Pokémon League. Arceus quickly proceeds to remind him of all the times he saved the world and assures him that he can.
• Citadel of the Heart has the Author Avatar Grandis who, while described by MF217's friends as being an ideal version of the author himself, is also a heavily exaggerated take on every single negative flaw the author has as well. Grandis barely keeps himself clean in a "normal" sense, he eats just about anything that is normally considered junk food and is incredibly picky about his diet, is an opportunist alcoholic, and he can be a rather nasty Jerkass towards people bordering on Psychopathic Manchild tendencies, even behaving like an ass towards his own son Chronicler. All of this boils down to the fact that despite being based on the author by default, he's also an Expy of the likes of Zeus and Odin, especially the latter of the two.
• Becoming the Mask (Trollhunters): Strickler really does not like it when Jim refers to himself as an "impure."
• Queens uses Maddie's Breaking the Fourth Wall to poke fun at inappropriately placed author's notes and the writer's past experiences with them:
  The Narrator then got very uncomfortable because she realized Maddie would have been self-aware enough to realize this was a fanfiction, and having a self-aware character breaking the fourth wall in fanfiction was gauche in this modern era (and would most assuredly betray the Narrator’s past of writing terrible self-inserts and having extended ‘lolsorandom’ conversations in the author notes).
• Under The Bridge got a MSTing — initiated and co-written by its own author who even appears as a Self-Insert to be riffed upon.
• A Diplomatic Visit: According to Rarity in chapter 15, her own mother has done this, stating that Rarity turned out as successful as she did in spite of their parenting rather than because of it. She and her husband also feel Rarity is a far better parent to Sweetie Belle than they are.
• Hero Chat: Chloe is the one who keeps bringing up the time she had a mental breakdown and exposed her secret identity on live television in an attempt to get her mother to pay attention to her. She is also quick to point out that this didn't work, which was when she finally realized that her mother would never, ever care about her.
• The Boy Who Cried Idiot: When Martin shows up, Rusty comments that he's uglier than him.
• OSMU: Fanfiction Friction has a couple instances of the author doing this, with a good chunk of it coming from resident Butt-Monkey Oswald. There's even a self-insert in Chapter 16 that is basically self-deprecation directed at the author in a personified form, described as being a "sour-looking, sour-smelling, very fat old man with disheveled black-and-white hair".
• Coeur Al'Aran's Arc Royale, an Intra-Franchise Crossover between most of his RWBY fics wherein all the various iterations of Jaune get summoned to the "canon" universe, has a bit of this towards his own work. At one point, "canon" Jaune sardonically notes that most of his fellow Jaunes feel like entirely different people as opposed to alternate versions of himself. In addition, the number of them that have Blake as a Love Interest becomes a Running Gag, as "canon" Blake becomes more and more frustrated that so many versions of her are either dating or married to Jaune.
• In an untitled Miraculous Ladybug fic, Marinette compares the supernaturally-long sex she's just had to something out of a cheap romance novel or online fanfic.
• The Persona 5 fic Nudist Queen (NSFW) has Futaba mention that she's working on a Nudist AU fic based on Featherman. Ren explains the concept to Makoto:
  Ren: AU means 'alternate universe', basically she wants to rewrite the series but have them being nudists- or something.
  Makoto: Right...
  Makoto found the idea questionable; she wasn't sure why anyone would waste that much time writing about fictional characters that aren't even their own just going through the story naked, seemed like a very questionable way to spend one's time.
  Makoto: I guess so long as she's having fun...
• Naru-Hina Chronicles: mattwilson83 (the creator of NHC) added a note above the last panel of page 553 saying "Note: Can ya tell I suck at sound effects. LOL", as the sound effect for a door being opened and then closed in that panel is simply "Door open and close".
• The Mandela Magazine: Sr. Pelo has a Creator Cameo in the Alternate identification section that uses an illustration and a photo of himself. It's the photo showing what he really looks like that gets labeled as an Alternate.
• Things I Am Not Allowed to Do at the PPC: One rule states that people should not show the List to the PPC's resident Obstructive Bureaucrat because while she's the most capable person to organize and clean up all the redundancies on the List, there's a decent chance its contents will make her head explode.
• In Prelude, the green cube calls Geometry Dash "that game that was popular back in 2014" and says he "didn’t know this game was still alive".

---