Nothing much

I plot and plan.

Something of little consequence should be posted later today - either I'll sit down and write a chapter, or I'll finish up the thing I'm writing about self-inserts.

Sleepy Farla is sleepy

So there's some more lulzy stuff happening. ^_^ I was worried once the thing with Silawen died down it'd be done, but ha! My evil meany-ness has evidently outlasted her feeble attempts at usurping my throne of being hated.

For starters, there's this ( review )

I'm not quite sure where "The story wasn't finished for a year" = "You spent an entire year just writing the story" comes from. Evidently, other people have way more work ethic than I do. Also, they're really, really slow.

Bonus lulz can be found in the fact that this person (yes, I know I should try to figure it out, but tired, remember) is apparently trying to convince me my bit about Serebiifen is an inaccurate generalization. By behaving like why I hate Serebiifen. The fail blinds.

Probably started off over in this Serebii thread here. (Over here Unoriginality is mentioned, which is probably why the review is there rather than on Lucki, where it'd make marginally more sense.)

There's also some stuff on the Yami drama on Psychic's lj, and a bit back is some recounting of a few other well known dustups. I should be sympathetic for the whole "unfairly blamed despite best efforts" bit, but reading them all I get is "after my numerous acts of incredible favoritism, they were still jerks to me and kept causing more trouble". (The case is not helped by the fact that this hasn't so much "changed" as "moderately toned down, slightly, for these particular people". I suppose arguably it suggests this idea wasn't the best, but it seems to be because it didn't work out, more than that the act itself was wrong.) It is kind of interesting in that it suggests the old-school alliance system is dissolving, but seeing as this took years to finally out itself, there's no reason to think there isn't something similar going on right now that replaced it and won't be really known until it's been around a few years.

Which is all interesting in light of the discussion going on in whinier corners of lj about anon communities, namely yet another point in favor of them considering how incredibly fast such alliances seem to appear on any forum and how inevitably toxic they seem to be.

Why self inserts suck, courtesy of hearing some really bad arguments in their favor

I've been pondering self-inserts since the topic first showed up over there on Serebii and then later on Silawen's Lj, because while they were in general wrong, I wanted to find a good way of vocalizing the specific flavor of wrong I was getting from their posts. And I think I've figured it out, which is pleasing.

( An argument in a number of parts )

In conclusion:

I've tried this, I've poked it a lot, and I'm still loathe to say anything should absolutely never be used...

But that's how it's shaping up, and I'm only more convinced with each new iteration I run into. The arguments people raise in their favor just end up raising new ways self-inserts go wrong I hadn't even thought of.

The three versions I've got running myself support the conclusions I get from seeing other people. Alison is easily the weakest of the three, and this when she's a technical failure (I'm writing me, except years younger, severely detached and reacting as dreaming, which is to say, not particularly me.). Kimi, meanwhile, is great – she's a created self-insert who's made to work with the story. Throw in Alison or even Adalia and the story would have veered off the rails and become unworkable within the first few chapters. Adalia, where I draw details from my life to fill in gaps is the only version that seems to work at all, and it's only applicable to real-world stories. In fact, she's little different than Kimi in many ways, as the character itself in both is entirely invented for the story and Kimi also draws from "real life" to the degree her references are by necessity limited to games and information I'm aware of.

The basic self insert model is completely unusable unless the author can make it so they start off in a similar real world situation, which rules out their general inclusion in Pokemonfic or pretty much any other fantasy world. The contortions required to manage a starts off in the real world, bamfs to fanficverse are not something to pull out to justify anything – they can't be used as anything short of your entire plotline and should be what you're contorting everything else for instead, due to how intrusive they are.

And even if you're already doing that, creating a new character to fit your intended storyline simply works so much better that there's vanishingly little excuse for it to be a self-insert.

There may be a thin space left for self-insert types as a writing exercise/open ended story where there's no intended story and the author's good at character-driven writing, as well as in a setup that's forgiving of going off in all sorts of unintended directions (and where the bamf part is not such a huge investment of plot), but the more I try to find ways to use them the more I see they simply aren't usable.