#I HATE FINDING READER INSERTS IN THE OC TAGS WHEN THERE ISN'T A SINGLE OC

[broken-synchronicity]

Something that came up recently in discord with @/shuuenmei and @/klonoadreams and friends

And it has occurred to a lot of us older writers, especially now with the prominent use of the AO3 tagging system, is that younger writers seem to have trouble grasping the difference between the kinds of 'insert' fanfics.

So, as someone who has written all the variations there off, I've decided to try and write a reference sheet for what the differences between an OC-insert, a Self-insert, and a Reader-insert.

The OC-Insert

"I have created a character and will put them in a situation."

Everyone has an OC or a dozen, whether or not you've done anything with them. It's a right of passage of sorts for young artists and writers to create their cringe angsty OP character for their favorite show/game. We've ALL done it, it's how we learn how to make better characters for later projects, or practice new ideas.

In writing, the OC-insert fanfic will often have hallmarks of:

Wish fulfillment often in the form of a fix-it of some form, expansion of Canon, or the proposition of a Canon divergence idea (especially in the case of the OC being related to a Canon Character)

The OC having very little to no (known) traits shared with the author, and is often heavily described or even given a character reference sheet

The OC often is already a part of the world they're made for with taylor made powers or skills, or, in the case of a particular kind of wish fulfillment often seen in younger writers, an OP OC meant to allow the author to do what they want

However, the OC is often still limited in knowledge of events as with the rest of the characters, even if they might find out faster than in canon

Often written in the Third Person (he/she/it/they), occasionally in First Person, and almost never in Second Person

The OC-insert is the creation of a character to allow the author to present their idea. OCs are often ways to practice writing traits or scenes a writer isn't used to writing with a character they know 100% about in a world they mostly know.

Think D&D, you make a character and make them react to situations they are presented with. This is the OC-insert.

The Self-insert

"I am putting myself in a situation."

The Self-insert happens nearly as frequently as the OC-insert, if not more. It is the Author placing themself, or in the case of the SIOC, a very close apprximation of themself, into the show/game of their liking.

The hallmarks of a Self-insert fic include:

Also often wish fulfillment, but in the form of escapism and occasionally power fantasies. Often fix-its when in regards to canon story.

The Author proxy usually enters the world from our own via any sort of means. Reincarnation after death, magic, making deals with deities/demons, anything.

The proxy usually has most of the knowledge of the world they are entering, or on the rare occasion, very little to none. There is often no in between.

The proxy may or may not gain skills or power native to the world. In the case of SIOC, the proxy may already have some minor helpful skills. The proxy can become OP, but doesn't often start like that.

Self-inserts are often more realistic looks into the world they are inserted into, expanding on many issues and hidden scenes that might have occurred in canon

Most often written in First Person (I, Me, My), occasionally in other povs. I personally write Kal in Second Person as a stylistic choice.

The Self-insert is for the Author, to show how they personally would have reacted, or helped, or gone about something. It is a catharsis for some authors in some ways, a way to deal with emotions or situations that they can't IRL.

Think games with player inserts, particularly RPGs with branching paths, or old Pick your Adventure type stories where you pick an answer at the end of the part and then go to the corresponding page of that answer. These are how you, the author, are reacting and choosing.

Most fanfics that follow the story for games/shows like Twst are one of the above two; LiT, for instance, is an SIOC.

The Reader-Insert

"I am putting you, the reader, in a situation."

Reader-inserts are all over, but they most frequent in places where there is a high level of Fandom interaction, like here on Tumblr. Reader-inserts are generally very short, and often only about how canon characters react to presented situation. These are your "x reader" blogs and tags.

Reader-inserts often have hallmarks of:

Almost always prompt based wish fulfillment of the highest order. 98% of all reader-inserts are simply for readers to love on a character of their choosing without consequence

Most have no basis in canon, or only have canon as a setting and are very minorly reactionary to Canon events

There are very, very few reader insert fics that are well written to follow along with a Canon story, and even then, the "reader" character will gain definite traits and can break immersion and even eventually be considered an OC

The "reader" will almost never be described unless it's part of the prompt to help with immersion, and may occasionally be referred to by a nickname of some kind, but otherwise will have a blank space ("____") or (Y/N) to show where your own name may be placed, or any other traits in some case.

It is also often headcanon central, with a lot of authors' ideas as to how a Canon Character will react to a given prompt.

Almost always written in Second Person (You), very, very rarely anything else.

Reader-inserts are often.... poor quality, as stated, because they are wish fulfillment and do not often undergo any rigorous editing like a story based fic. But they can be used to practice how an author can write their idea of a particular character or a specific (often romantic) scenario.

Think otome games and imagine blogs here on tumblr. Most of the time, it's less you, the player reacting and them the characters reacting to your choices.

None of the above things are bad to write. Hell, I was a mod for an imagine blog for years, and it did indeed help with how I write. They all have ways to help a writer grow, but they are all very different forms of fics. You can't look at a self-insert and call it a reader-insert because it's not you, the reader being inserted, it's the Author. It's not an OCxCharacter story if it's the reader who's supposed to fill in the details.

So PLEASE, for the love of god, tag your fics correctly.

[hoe-doroki]

hello! thank you for all your fics <3 may i please ask why you no longer write x reader fics? You don't have to answer, I've just been seeing so much negativity and entitlement from anons making writers stop doing what they love, I hope that's not the reason for you.

Ahh, sorry I don't know when this was sent in; I hope you haven't been waiting long. Don't worry, it's nothing negative. I'm really lucky never to have received any hate or been a part of any drama. I've made lovely reader insert friends and it's been a great community to be a part of. I so appreciate your concern, tho. And I'm glad you've enjoyed my stories. <3

Longer answer beneath the cut.

It's kind of a long story, so I'll start off with the tl;dr. Reader insert was always going to be transient for me. I'm a shipper and always have been, and I kind of knew that from the beginning. If you dig reeeeally deep into this blog, you'll see MONTHS of tags where I say "once I find a ship, it's all over here" and "this ship is calling me over, I swear" etc. Tbh, the breadcrumbs have been laid since near the beginning.

I've been reading fic since I was 12, and it was always shipfic. I never liked OC-centered stories, and was only ever drawn to reading and writing canonverse and stuff that felt similar. I don't enjoy deviating from canon. I talk to reader insert friends who have been into fic as long as I have and they talk about making OCs or pairing their faves with characters they could project onto and that was just...never my game. Idk if it's my demisexuality or my lack of imagination, but it's always given me butterflies to read about two characters who I see as really, truly in love. Whereas with reading and writing reader insert, I never cared about reader-chan. Even when I was modeling her exactly after me. I tried to give her depth and make her a good match for her bnha boy, but it was just that. A match to the boy. She was a stand-in, but not for me. For a character that whoever I was writing for would actually love.

I fell into reader insert by accident. I liked Todoroki upon my first watch of the series, and I wanted to read fics with him, but I wasn't jazzed by his ships. I'm usually pretty easy and get into whichever ships are pushed in canon. Like, if they tried harder with IzuOcha, I'd probably be an IzuOcha shipper, lol. But bnha isn't really committed to its, like, 4 or 5 het ships, so I wasn't either. So I clicked around random stories with Shou, stumbled upon reader insert, and I was like eh, that'll do. If there had been a ship I liked, I never would have read a single reader insert fic ever.

And then I got pulled in. Not by reader insert, exactly, but by the community. The blogs, and the friends I started making quickly, which was crazy to me, because I've never been in a fandom as active as this. In other fandoms, I would make a friend or two, but stuff like discord and tumblr friends and groupchats were new. And exciting, especially in the loneliness of covid.

Then I entered a feedback loop. I started reading bkdk as early as November 2020, and I only started reading reader insert in August, writing it in September. But November was also when I joined my first reader insert discord. All my friends were talking about reader insert, and we were all promoting our stories, reading each other's and so my brain kept on being flooded with fic ideas, headcanons, requests. Especially since I was writing all oneshots, mostly nsfw ones which, for me, didn't take a whole lot of effort or time. I started writing for a more (read: the most) popular character, Bakugou, and my fics were becoming popular, in January 2021 I hit 1k followers, I had decent interax, everything was going well.

By this point, I said at least to friends, if not hidden in tags somewhere on this blog, that I was ready to leave reader insert as soon as I had an idea for a bkdk fic. Cold turkey. I was one foot out the door for months before I actually started writing bkdk. But because of that feedback loop, I kept on having reader insert ideas and I wasn't in the same way talking about bkdk, thinking about it, taking the time to try and conjure up a fic idea. I still had wips for reader insert and I wanted to fulfill those promises as well.

Just some discord screenshots with dates, so you can see that the descent is much earlier than you'd think. Plus, past!me says some of this better than I'm managing to here.

The truth is, that I feel nothing towards reader insert now. I kind of want to delete my fics for it all the time because, like, I don't even know who that person was who wrote them. Who was Ana? Not me, and that's why I go by my real name now. I'm not a person who goes through phases, usually. I'm a pretty consistent person, and when I latch onto something, I tend to stick with it for life. Bkdk will be with me for life, I am 100% sure. This was a very strange, out of character blip for me.

And I know that sounds kind of disparaging towards the genre, and I don't mean that at ALL. Reader insert holds so much value as a genre, and it did for me too. You can see from my chat above that it was holding the entirety of my mental health for months. And I'll always value the friends I made. I love that these fics are still enjoyed, so I never will delete them. But I wish that I could fully detach them from myself too. I don't want to give up being able to read the lovely comments and reply back, though. Still, I wish with all my heart that I'd been with bkdk during all that time instead. Bkdk gives me butterflies. It makes me feel warm, makes me feel something like love. Reader insert just doesn't.

There's also a similar story in here about how I got caught in a feedback loop of writing smut too, and I never wanted to be a smut writer. I've written 50 fics or so for bnha, and none of them are my favorites (even the bkdks). My favorite fics, now, are all sfw, shipfic ones I wrote years ago. I don't like that. I want to like my current stuff more. This is why, in addition to retiring from reader insert, I've retired from smut. Smut is also a genre that I love and have mad respect for, but it needs to be as a reader, not a writer. I want to be proud of my fics again, for me, not because they've gotten popular because they're kinky.

So yeah. I left because I never liked reader insert in the first place, but it was a ton of fun to be able to write so prolifically in such a lively community. I'm terribly sorry if this taints my fics in any way to you, like I was flippant while writing them. I wasn't. I always cared about writing them, there was just something big missing for me, and I stayed longer than I should have. That's all. I do appreciate you asking the question; it wasn't an intrusion at all. I give all my love to this community, because it was truly meaningful to me during, as we all know, a terrible, terrible time. But I'm much happier now, and hopefully my next fic will be one I'm truly proud of again.

I hope this answers the question adequately <3

[elvensemi]

how come 'keeping secrets' is tagged solas/you and solas/reader? it's 2nd person, but that's not the same thing at all. the narration uses "you," but "you" is emma, not you-the-reader, unless you have a really unlikely twist coming. i just think using those accidentally misleading tags is going to attract people who are looking for something that KS isn't, and drive away people who hate character/reader fics who would actually love it. (i almost missed it bc of that!!)

Because there’s almost no other way to tag a second person fic within the framework of Ao3. That’s just what those things are called–or it certainly was in 2015 back when I started the story. If there’s a large market for second person fics that involve an OC rather than a self-insert, that’s something that’s cropped up within the last few years. As it stands/stood, tagging it, say, Solas/OC and nothing else, while arguably more accurate (and I would argue about it, believe me), gives a nonetheless wildly inaccurate view of how the story is told, and even what the story is trying to do. 

I’m well aware, since it’s my single most common comment other than, perhaps, “dear god what is your concept of slow burn,” that people who are off-put by self-insert fics can nonetheless enjoy my story. However, that’s never how they phrase it. How they phrase it is “I normally hate second person,” because as it stands (or at least as it stood when I started), the only thing that existed in second person was reader/self-insert. KS might not be a unique occurrence now, but it kinda was when I started. A few people who have done OC second person fics have even referenced me in their creation, which is deeply, deeply flattering. 

And, finally, the story is tagged with Solas/You and Solas/Reader, but it’s also tagged with Solas/Original Female Character. If people can’t be bothered to throw in a little bit of critical thinking with why it might have that peculiar combination of tags–or, you know, just… read the blurb… then I’m not really sure what I can do (or would even be willing to do) to fix that issue. Since /you and /reader are the second person PoV fic tags, I’m going to keep using them, so that people who enjoy reading in second person can find the story easily.