becomes a case of "this is literally an original work with something else's serial numbers".
THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT IT IS, ISN'T IT!!! IT'S IN WORDS!!
Like it's already plenty frustrating when a fic is clearly being written from a "this is how I would react in this situation, and I relate to this character, and therefore they'd also react like this" and then when you try to probe the implications of that, people take it so goddamn seriously because they have brought themselves and their personal work into a fandom space where we all usually agree that we are playing with shared toys!!
It really feels like all fic is self-insert, now. And I say this as someone whose best friend writes reader-insert and does, like... a phenomenal job with it, basically because they're just writing a first-person POV fic with an OC based on themselves. When you just accept that you're writing an oc, the writing becomes much stronger.
I know it's pointless to theorise on the motiations of changers, but I wonder if there's an element of "self-insert and OC fic are still niche" to it, so people try to fish for an audience in the broader fandom without wanting to change how they write. I remember at least one instance where a humanformers fic I was reading started feeling so much like the author just going through their own breakup through the characters that I completely lost sense of what their dynamic was supposed to be. What is a power fantasy to the author seems like utterly deranged, distressed behaviour from the character that it's being projected onto and then when it's not actually recognised as such, it throws the whole story into chaos.
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Date: 9/6/23 07:10 (UTC)THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT IT IS, ISN'T IT!!! IT'S IN WORDS!!
Like it's already plenty frustrating when a fic is clearly being written from a "this is how I would react in this situation, and I relate to this character, and therefore they'd also react like this" and then when you try to probe the implications of that, people take it so goddamn seriously because they have brought themselves and their personal work into a fandom space where we all usually agree that we are playing with shared toys!!
It really feels like all fic is self-insert, now. And I say this as someone whose best friend writes reader-insert and does, like... a phenomenal job with it, basically because they're just writing a first-person POV fic with an OC based on themselves. When you just accept that you're writing an oc, the writing becomes much stronger.
I know it's pointless to theorise on the motiations of changers, but I wonder if there's an element of "self-insert and OC fic are still niche" to it, so people try to fish for an audience in the broader fandom without wanting to change how they write. I remember at least one instance where a humanformers fic I was reading started feeling so much like the author just going through their own breakup through the characters that I completely lost sense of what their dynamic was supposed to be. What is a power fantasy to the author seems like utterly deranged, distressed behaviour from the character that it's being projected onto and then when it's not actually recognised as such, it throws the whole story into chaos.