Talk:Self-insertion

fourth wall and metafic

What is it called when a fanfic has the characters aware of fanfic and complaining how they always get hurt/are afraid to go outside/are embarrassed about the sex but in a satiric way that pokes fun at fans? Is it close enough to Fourth Wall to be a section on that page? --Mrs. Potato Head 16:59, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

That sounds like Metafic. Metafiction is that which breaks the Fourth Wall.--æþel 22:22, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Is there a difference between fic that has characters actually thinking they are in the "fanfic world" and fiction where characters are aware of fanfic about them? And, from the Fourth Wall page and art that shows characters reading actual zines, could an image or two be moved to the metafic page? --Mrs. Potato Head 00:31, 25 March 2011 (UTC)

the name for writing in your friends?

What is the name of the practice of naming a character after a friend or BNF fan? It's an older term from the SF world, perhaps "bob" or a single male name? I'd like to add it to "See Also" on this page. --Mrs. Potato Head 15:03, 26 March 2011 (UTC)

There's also a common practice of selling or having contests for "name a character after you," mostly in pro-fic & sometimes comics, but sometimes in fanfic. Not sure if that's got a label, but it seems related. (Hm. Must scrounge up details about Niven's Fallen Angels, which had a lot of characters named after fans, and a lot of meta-refs to fandom communities.) --Elfwreck 15:55, 26 March 2011 (UTC)

What is the name of the practice of naming a character after a friend or BNF fan? The term you are looking for is Tuckerized. --Doro 17:02, 26 March 2011 (UTC)

Tuckerized! That's it! (Not even close to Bob...) Thank you, Doro. And Elfwreck's idea on this is intriguing. Must know more. :-) --Mrs. Potato Head 18:49, 26 March 2011 (UTC)

In addition to Fallen Angels, there's Piers Anthony's Jenny Elf, named after a girl who'd been paralyzed by a drunk driver, and I've seen charity auction offerings to "name a character after you in my next novel." I may look for a link for a couple of those, when I've got time. (Or someone else could track them down & add them.) Might have a third spot beyond "canon self-insertions" and "fan use," about buying/winning the right to have your name, but not your traits, in a work of some sort. --Elfwreck 05:38, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

Removal of canon information and thoughts on further additions

None of the canon information that I just removed had any direct connection to fannish history or practices highlighted. It was just a list of trivia, some of which doesn't seem to qualify as self insertion and almost none of which has any kind of citation or annotation.

There seems to be some confusion about the difference between self insertion, cameos, and author surrogates — I'm not sure about most of these, but the "Larry Niven's book Fallen Angel" example should be moved to a page like Fan Cameos which could also have information about things like the way the McElroys name characters in The Adventure Zone after fans who tweet about their podcast.

Essentially, I think that this page should be mostly for purposeful self-insertion. Author surrogates may belong on this page (as suspected or confirmed author surrogacy is one of the things that makes people cry "self insert" by which they usually mean "mary sue") although I think it's prevalent in OOC characterization, Rational Fic such as HPMOR, and various other fannish practices, so maybe it will deserve its own page at some point.

Things I would like to see expanded on, I just do not have the knowledge to do so:

• Wesley Crusher — I think he gets accused of being a Canon Sue much more often, but if there are any relevant fan quotes, reactions, or trends specific to him being a self insert, inspired by Gene Roddenberry, and/or some kind of author surrogate, it would definitely be worth adding the mention of him back in. I'll make a request about this on Talk:Wesley Crusher, also.
• Mark Twain — Whatever the A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court example is vaguely referring to might be extremely relevant, but I haven't read the book or seen the movie. I skimmed the Wikipedia article and it seems like it might be one canon source of the genre, at least as it relates to the Self Insert Original Character trend, so if anyone has any knowledge and/or thoughts about it, that'd be great!
• Supernatural and J2 — I wonder if that episode of SPN where Dean and Sam travel to 'our' world had any effect on SPN's RPF fandom? I'll leave notes on the talk pages about that, too.

Anyway, all canon examples of self-insertion should be appropriately annotated with their effect on the fandom, the response of fans, fannish wank, or... something fandom related, I think? Adding examples that are just examples is better suited for the Wikipedia page. Below are the examples I removed from the page in case anyone wants to spruce them up to re-inclusion or talk about if they fit or not, since I think including them here in a collapsed table will make that easier than making people go back to before my revision.

Canon examples removed from the page

Wesley Crusher on Star Trek is widely considered to be a self-insert character for his creator, Gene Wesley Roddenberry. In the Dark Tower series of books by Stephen King, Stephen King appears as a character in the sixth and seventh books. Richard Brautigan's unnamed narrators in The Abortion and his one fantasy novel In Watermelon Sugar are often presumed by fans to be a character based closely upon himself. He explicitly uses a character named Richard Brautigan in "The Lost Chapter of Trout Fishing In America". In The Abortion, he has Richard Brautigan come into the library with a book called Moose. Amy Tan based several of her characters on herself, her mother and her grandmother, retelling actual events in their lives in The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God's Wife and The Bonesetter's Daughter. Larry Niven's book Fallen Angel, in which fandom saves the world, included nods to several well-known authors and fans, and auctioned off other named characters at SF conventions. Agatha Christie's mystery novelist Ariadne Oliver has what Christie called a "strong dash" of herself. Like Christie, Oliver writes in the bath while eating apples. When she tries to help Hercule Poirot solve crimes, she often makes the same mistakes Christie herself made in her books. Clive Cussler appears as an insert character in several of his Dirk Pitt novels, often helping the other characters in some way (such as giving them a lift). Usually they seem to be unable to remember his name or the fact that they've met him before. Robert A. Heinlein's Lazarus Long in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Jubal Harshaw in Stranger in a Strange Land voice Heinlein's real political and social opinions, often convincing others that they are right. Harshaw is both a physician and a lawyer, with several advanced degrees. He luxuriates in a Xanadu-like home of enormous wealth and is an extremely productive writer, using a lot of pseudonyms. Ernest Hemingway based a lot of his characters on himself and people he knew, especially in The Snows of Kilimanjaro and The Sun Also Rises. Anais Nin's characters were closely based on herself and friends. Mark Twain put himself in many of his stories. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is often cited as this. J.R.R. Tolkien said that Faramir in The Lord of the Rings appeared spontaneously, but was gradually written to be Tolkien himself and how he thought he would behave in such circumstances. He also regarded himself and his wife Edith as Beren and Luthien from the ancient legend; their names are engraved on his and Edith's tombstones. H.P. Lovecraft wrote himself into Through the Gates of the Silver Key in 1932. In case it isn't obvious from the description of the "lean, grey, long-nosed, clean-shaven, and stoop-shouldered" old gent, his name is Ward Phillips. Randolph Carter is sometimes considered Lovecraft's more idealized self-insert. References

I've added the two canon examples I could think of, anyway, and I hope that that's an improvement! I didn't really see how I could work in everything I wanted to say in the canon section while keeping in what was there, you know? - Hoopla (talk) 06:12, 15 October 2018 (UTC)

Wrestling paragraph

Currently, this paragraph ends the canon section, but I think it should be removed or seriously edited:

Professional Wrestling has this in the form of the Evil Authority Figure. World Championship Wrestling's Eric Bischoff introduced this role on the November 25, 1996 WCW Monday Nitro. He had embraced "Hollywood" Hulk Hogan to confirm his heel turn, thus joining the New World Order. A week later, he and the NWO cut a promo where he announced that WCW wrestlers had "thirty days from right now to convert your WCW contracts into NWO contracts." World Wrestling Entertainment's Vince McMahon would turn heel a year later following the "Montreal Screwjob" at Survivor Series 1997 and introduce his overbearing "Mr. McMahon" character, later inflicting his kids Shane McMahon and Stephanie McMahon on the audience. Many other wrestling promotions have had similar characters since.

First: I'm not sure that this counts as self insertion.

• Are people who have stage personas that share their name self-inserting? (eg, Stephen Colbert's run on the Colbert Report)
• Are people who play themselves on a show written by someone else considered self-inserts? (eg, celebrity guests on the Simpsons)

I don't really understand most of what's said here because I'm not in wrestling fandom, but I don't think show producers/writers/"On-Air Officials" being written into a show count as self insertion.

Second: Per Fanlore:What Fanlore is not, this wiki is not interested in collecting plot summaries or other canon information unless it's related to fans and fannish culture. I included Hiromu Arakawa's and Andrew Hussie's self-insertion because there are things to say about how fans reacted to those instances of self-insertion and, in Hussie's case, some of the self-insertion in Homestuck is a direct comment on fannish culture.

Fanlore is not TV Tropes and we don't need examples of canonical self insertion on this page unless there's something substantial to say about how fans react, deal with, ignore, and/or encourage it. This wrestling information would be more appropriate on TV Tropes or a wrestling fandom wiki.

If we do keep this paragraph in any form because there is something specific and significant to say about how fans reacted to this self insertion, I think we should eliminate the external links and streamline the information to only the bare necessities to understand that reaction.

Also, I do think that this is indicative of a wider problem on Fanlore with canon information, especially for tropes, and we should probably have a general conversation about the purpose of canon information on this wiki and then... like... write our consensus down as a policy or something so that there's no confusion.

@JKFAN: I'm pinging you because this is your edit. I also want to ask you to be more careful about adding information to pages because as you can see here before I moved this paragraph it was between a paragraph about Hussie's interaction with his fans and a quote illustrating those interactions. All it would have taken was a few more moments of looking over the article for you to see that the paragraph was in the wrong place, you know? - Hoopla (talk) 18:04, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

I agree that paragraph is problematic. Part of the problem is that it has too much canon detail while at the same time not actually explaining its relevance to self-insertion. Is Eric Bischoff a pro wrestler pretending to be a producer of the show or a producer of the show playing himself in front of the camera? Or is this paragraph a different trope altogether and should be its own page, a pro wrestling Evil Authority Figure trope? Also agree that Fanlore is not TV Tropes and we don't want every canon self-insertion on this page.--aethel (talk) 04:07, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

Removal of canon information... again.

@JKFAN: I've removed your paragraph about Pearls Before Swine because it doesn't have anything to do with fanworks, fans, fannish tropes, etc. This page is not meant to be an example of every instance of self-insertion. Please see my previous section on this talk page and the section page before that. - Hoopla (talk) 02:25, 9 April 2019 (UTC)

SI OC vs. Self-insert as canon characters

This page doesn't really seem to talk about the story trope of self-insert into canon characters -- is there a different page for that, or should I add some discussion of this trope here? -- Quaelegit (talk) 01:33, 10 August 2022 (UTC)

Oh, wait, looks like the SI OC page covers it? It's got the sentence "The SI OC's new body may be that of a major canon character, a minor or background character, or a completely new original character." -- that was not my understanding of the term but I guess there's some variation in how fans use the term? Gotta go now but will come back to re-evaluate whether the new examples I added to this page should actually go over there. Would appreciate anyone else's opinions on this too. -- Quaelegit (talk) 01:46, 10 August 2022 (UTC)

Quaelegit the arrangement and texts in SI OC left me very confused when they were translated, it seems that the only difference between this and Self-insert is the character being original and distancing himself from the characterization as an insertion, like creating a life of its own, but the explanation is lost in the translation and it took me a long time to understand the difference because the way the text is written is strange in the Brazilian Portuguese -- Ellakbhesse (talk) 16:41, 10 August 2022 (UTC)