Self-inserts

Argent Dawn
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What’s your take on it, Argent Dawn community?

  • in terms of how it affects RP

I for one have always struggled with such players - I struggle to find their characters believable, I struggle with all the imposed limitations, I struggle with the OOC-overload that tends to take place when interacting with their characters.

  • in terms of actual RL implications of said individuals

I’m of the belief that some take it to the extremes, to the point where they live their earthly life through their characters in a virtual environment. This, as far as I’m aware, is tremendously unhealthy. Am I right in assuming that one reaches this place due to certain reasons, and that the self-insert-approach also acts to handicap one’s attempts at bettering the self; an evil circle of sorts, if you may?

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It can be annoying especially if its wish fulfilly but it’s not actually as common as its sometimes made out to be.

It’s normally harmless, people like to pretend to be a big strong attractive fantasy character. It might not be the most interesting thing to RP with but it’s hardly that weird.
If you’re at the point where you’ve dedicated your whole being to a World of Warcraft character there’s probably something else up. Or you’re a streamer I guess.

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All of my characters reflect parts of my personality, to be quite honest. I feel it’s incredibly hard to portray a character you don’t relate to on at least some level. Self-insertion is a healthy part of roleplay and giving a character depth; I feel the term has been conflated with “Mary Sue/Cringe”, when, well, we could just call it that.

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Fair point in terms of reflecting a part of one’s personality. I suppose I’ve been doing the same with all my characters, creativity taps into that which you already know to some extent.

I mean, to some extent it works fine. I guess what I was saying above was aimed mainly at players who “take it to the extremes”, where they become overly attached to their characters. I can’t help but feel that in such cases, the characters are nothing short of mirror-images of the players’ potential-selves that they themselves would have preferred to achieve IRL, if that makes sense?

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It do be making me heavily cringe.

Walking around Stormwind and randomly seeing a human male character approach some female elf character to ask about a date, get declined and throw insult at the female character IC are pretty solid evidence of a self insert and a hurt ego. It becomes especially :b:ad when my character talk to that female character later to ask who does that, and the player whispers me that the guy whispered some heavy insults after.

On another note:

when X character is just a Mary Sue. Oftenly Mary Sues and self inserts go hand in hand. No matter if in roleplay or stories.

Your assumption is not wrong, but be careful to downright jump to conclusions.

The question is if it’s really unhealthy or just a way to escape reality. Sadly, there isn’t a straightforward answer to this. People can roleplay, their character being a 100% self insert, yet they step away from the PC or get into a bad situation IC and don’t have any issue. Then there is the one that have a complete meltdown when you say anything against them either IC or OOC. I witnessed both.

To the example of someone playing a self insert but having no issue with accepting consequences and such on their character: I wouldn’t say it’s unhealthy. You can 100% play a self insert, if you don’t take what happens in roleplay too seriously.

The ones who self insert and then get offended by even minor things are the ones that need help. Shunning them or “haha you’re a self insert bro xddd how sad xddddd” is not a good way. Most of them have not the best life and perhaps even feel rejected from society over all. Have no achievements in real life and just feel overall sad / have mental issues.

Sure, by no means is this a “just care about them uwu” from me. It’s just an insight of how and why people do self inserts and to be maybe careful of what to say to an individual since they just might be very insecure and/or over all not happy.

“BuT wHaTs ThE pSyChOlOgIcAl ReAsOn?”

My observation is the same as you bring up. Themself + insert any random positive attribute. Playing (any) type of elf because “It’s me but pretty”, especially night elves have this problem. People like that would not play a gnome, a dwarf or anything “unattractive” to society IRL. Their vaules are “I need to be pretty”. Which often reflects in their characters speech, as well as behavior as the character has a boring and bland personality. For a character to have personality, you need IRL some personality yourself. A boring person IRL, can’t portray an interesting character in roleplay.

A character that answers with 1 word sentences, is not unlikely to have the person behind said screen also do the same in chats. Not everyone does that, but oftenly personality and roleplay, as above mentioned, go hand in hand.

A person IRL that is shy, will likely have a shy personality in roleplay plus no means to approach someone else. This is why you have so many people writing in their TRPs that “I’m shy”. That’s completely fine, it really is. It just showcases that you can’t cover certain traits.

And the same goes for the self inserts. They may be able to cover their lack of confidence when it comes to their appearance, but at some point, their problems will show.

TLDR:

Self insert bad unless it’s a goblin then good

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Definitely. It’s probably some sort of depression.

Past the pay grade of any RPer, though.

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I’m still going to have to google self inserts. It sounded kinky and then it got sad and then I got confused…(just like IRL).

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Nonsense, Kael did it to Jaina. It’s lore accurate.

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Unavoidable; even if you go the extra length to change up a character it’ll have something from you in it. The reason for that is really quite simple; online roleplaying merges the roles of an actor and a writer. The real difference is how far a certain player allows their preferences to influence a character and its design, and how far they allow their own persona to reflect in the character’s portrayal. Usually, design is less annoying/disruptive as portrayal.

Now there’s also a couple issues I’d mention around the topic:

  1. Brian Mitsoda had a wonderful interview on character design; he was the writer behind VtM Bloodlines which is a game specifically known for excellent character writing and portrayal. When discussing his design ideals, he mentioned exaggerating character qualities to make his creations immediately stand out and leave an impression.

Without this exaggeration, most characters will be simple NPCs; one from the many. People believe a good design idea, a cool backstory or awesome transmogs will make their characters memorable - truth is, it’s all about the first 10 minutes of you interacting with others and how much character you can portray in it.

Self-insertion tends to put a break on it because we’re inherently “reserved” and “civilized” in real life; the very opposite of a character hook. Thus my point; the first thing that comes to mind about self-insert characters is that they are generic, boring, uninteresting.

  1. The OOC side of self-insertion is rather obvious. The more detached you are from a character, the least likely it’ll be you’ll get triggered by others dissing on the character. Same time, the more you exaggerate a certain negative trait, the more obvious it will be on an OOC level to fellow roleplayers that the specific trait is not yours, but the character’s and is part of the portrayal. This is /especially/ important with portraying common RL qualities like arrogance and pride.

The latter reasoning is inherently bound with the idea that the best way you can manage your own self-insertion is to either consciously subvert a quality you know about yourself, or to exaggerate it to comical proportions.

  1. People often forget that self-insertion goes the other way around too. I call it reverse-metagaming, you could also call it “roleplayer deficiency”. I’m referring to people portraying characters that should have X quality or Y talent - but they lack them OOC.

No, not speaking about the ability to cast spells or to swing swords. I tend to make my opinion on HEMA RPers pretty clear; this is about the “thinner” lines. The most frequent example I see are “diplomatic nature”, “eloquence” and “silver-tongued” characters.

Example, and here I root back to my initial “issue” that I mentioned. Have a writer and an actor who know absolutely nothing about eloquence, dialogue and negotiations create a movie. You’ll see some really weak and weird stuff; imagine Arnold Schwarzeneger and Steven Seagal doing some negotiation scene from Game of Thrones season 8. That level bad.

Now compare that to a situation where both the writer and the actors had the necessary skillset. Inglourious Basterds comes to mind and Landa’s portrayal - phenomenal. Truly phenomenal. The difference is stellar.

The point here is simple; people /should/ self-insert to a degree where they are conscious about what they can portray and what they can’t. Roleplay friends are excellent reference if you ever want to know your RP strengths and weaknesses.

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It’s basically why most of my characters are “”“smart”“” but have zero understanding of innuendo/double-entendres/puns etc. since it takes me about an hour for that to process.

In broad and general terms I think it’s impossible to create art without putting the self into it, it’ll happen either consciously or subconsciously. With self-inserts you have what I’d call Honest self-inserts (e.g. 90% of my characters being ginger, enjoying fencing, etc.) that are not done to satisfy ego or fulfil power fantasies, while you then have the Dishonest self-inserts that are just a Perfect Ideal of yourself that can do no wrong and you get aggrieved IC and OOC about anything that goes against them. Self-insertion is fine when you have an ounce of emotional maturity on your side, imho.

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After reading Highwarden’s statement about art being impossible to create without putting a bit of your self into it, I suddenly have to think back to those people that vehemently insist that they are totally detached from their characters.

You know, the ‘This is what my character would do’ crowd that often use it as an excuse for some pretty terrible behavior.

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Those people aren’t roleplayers but method actors. Our characters are not fully detatched sentient entities that we simply happen to watch, instead we are the ones that pull the strings and give the go-ahead on any given action.

Back on topic though, the degree in which one inserts themselves into a character can be good as it can add authenticity and grounding to a character, because they’ll have that aspect of realism in them. The negative is pretty well known; if you put all of yourself into a character, then when someone elses character thinks badly on yours, then it can very much start to feel like that character has insulted you personally even though that wasn’t the other player’s intent.

Honestly RPing with heavy self-insert characters is a real pain. Roleplaying by walking on eggshells because you’re scared of causing legitimate upset to another person is stressful and a real exercise in patience, and it’s patience that I no longer have, so when I see characters that show blatant signs of self-insertisms (typically in the OOC info on TRP where they say the character behaves as they do) I make a mental note to NEVER engage with that character. It just isn’t worth the hastle for me.

That’s only for the case of the really obvious self-insert though. People who just use one or two personality traits here and there are a-okay in my book.

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HEMA RPers?

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Roleplayers with HEMA as an alleged hobby; EG. Historical European Martial Arts. It’s usually a derogatory term referring to RPers who go above and beyond to use historical fencing terms and overcomplicate fights.

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I mean, I am not any of the characters I RP but by necessity of their being RPed by me there is a little of me in them.

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Put the dragon down!

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NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO YOU CAN’T JUST PARRY MY BLOW, THE BODY PHYSICS OF MY MOVE MAKE IT IMPOSSIBLE FOR YOU TO AVOID MY ATTACK, YOU DON’T EVEN UNDERSTAND HEMA!!

haha katana cuts through tank goes brrrrt

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Self inserts aren’t bad. It’s the people who think any and all RPers are self inserts/Have part of the player’s personality in them that are bad.

A. K. A. the people who think if you rp a NOT NICE villain character then you IRL are NOT NICE.

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This is a problem I discovered and it’s odd! I heard of so many people who wouldn’t approach because I used to RP Vaxir. Friends would say “X is scared of you because of Vax” and the truth is that I was more scared of them.

It’s sad it happens :frowning:

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The ic and ooc should always be seperated. As mentioned above a mean character does not mean the person behind the character is mean. I have played evil characters that tortured people, never done that irl and never plan on doing so because i’m not that kind of person. However i do believe that we all put a bit of ourselves into our characters. I have only met one person of which i think that their rp is unhealthy. What we normally do i pick a race/class we find interesting and add a background and personality to it. This person however picked the character based on how she wish she looked irl and gave her complete own personality to that character and everything that happens to that character is taken personally by her because she is the character.

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