Writing Self-Insert Characters

[Bob Schroeck]

To go back to part of my original third point ("Some of the *heroes* should find him suspicious, or too mysterious to be trustworthy, or just plain annoying (*especially* if he acts like a typical SI)"), let me point people at the abandoned Worm fic A Prison of Glass by "McSwazey". In it we have a character who is clearly an SI of the Twister mode, but she is never the POV character -- she's only ever seen through the eyes of a native of Earth Bet. To them, the SI is an utterly terrifying creature, borderline sociopathic with inexplicable omniscience and unstoppable power. It's very well done, and an excellent deconstruction of the heroic SI, and very worth keeping in mind when laying out how an SI interacts with the world they're in -- unless you're doing a complete deconstruction of the very idea of an SI, much like Gregg Sharp did with his "Greylle" character, there are always going to be people to whom your SI is incomprehensible and borderline monstrous because of what they know and do that they simply shouldn't be able to.