Are self inserts bad? [SPEEDPAINT]

good routines viewer it is I seriously scary and today I'm going to be discussing my thoughts on the question ourself inserts bad no thank you so much for watching and I'll see you guys in the next video bye e okay but really I feel like there's a lot of stigma in the OC community about self inserts and like why they're terrible and how all self inserts are very soothes and they're always terrible characters and if you have a self insert you should feel bad about it and you should delete them immediately and that self inserts are the bane of OC kind and I have to say that I greatly disagree I'm gonna defend my point but probably not very well because it's like oh gosh it gonna be quieter because it's pretty light here and I'm tired but before I get into that let me I want to give the drawing a bit of a disclaimer because I should be drawing dysphonia since she's literally my self insert character like she literally was just me and then she was me but not really it with super powers and then she just became a girl superpowers and I've enjoyed this video way too much lately and I wanted to give some of my other characters some love so I was like should draw puzzles or shadow John Cheney and I was like so torn on which I should draw and then I was like wait I'm just gonna draw both of them so that's the drawing Jamie and puzzles both have aspects of myself but I wouldn't consider them self inserts but yeah let's first define exactly what a self insert is because I feel like the way that people talk about it is very problematic because a lot of times when people say self insert they think of a very poorly written character that's obviously just extreme wish fulfillment for the writer and I feel like I always have to like precursor these or what is the word I have to like qualify all these conversations by saying that if you're just writing a story for yourself or you're just drawing art for yourself and all you want to do is draw yourself and have yourself go to different dimensions or have superpowers or torture all your friends or give all your friends cookies and make everybody like you like go for it as long as you're not hurting anybody like do do you do you like don't don't freaking I like screw what other people say but like if you want to write like a real character and like try to pursue this as a career you do probably need to make your character make sense but plain old wishful filming and plain old this character just being the author but in a much cooler world it's like totally fine have you ever read the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series like that's literally just the author retelling his childhood story I should have researched this but Greg is literally whatever the author's name is it's the same person that's a self insert but they didn't make it like overly obvious and just when you sacrifice the integrity of the story to make the protagonist look cool or do some sort of wish fulfillment for the protagonist that's when self inserts become a problem but a lot of stories are just wish fulfillment like Harry Potter that's just wish fulfillment that's just people wishing that some wizard was gonna take them away from their terrible life and tell them that they were really important and that they were actually really famous that's just wish fulfillment and that's not bad wish fulfillment isn't bad self inserts aren't bad but when you combine the two and you add really weakly written characters and you compromise the story and the other characters to bend around the main character and the main wish fulfillment then that's when self inserts become bad the idea of inserting yourself into a story end up being a bad thing it's such a toxic idea because you cannot write stories without using yourself I can't think of a single story that the author didn't say this was me or this was an experience I had her this was a friend of mine that I used this experience to write a story because stories are just aspects of our lives that have been dialed up to an 11 and I'll say this all the time like my stories are always a reflection of how I was feeling in that time frame and what was happening to me that back in the day of when I was creating dysphonia originally I was in this small town and I was in a very small community of that small town and I didn't fit in with everybody else I'm not like I'm not one of those other girls but like I really didn't because I did certain things that other people were deemed wrong and bad and they were treating me like I was some sort of bad person so to kind of cope with it I created this character who was a bad person and she was the villain and she didn't care she just burned down entire villages and destroyed entire civilizations and was cool and she was happy with it and she was just like screw everybody and it was a really problematic character looking back but it was just my way of venting and I taught a story about this girl who was evil and was a villain and got what was coming to her because I felt like that was me in the moment I feel like I didn't do a great job explaining this is my evolution of my OC video the old versions of this phone yet people were saying like I kind of like old this moaning you better or this moaning you got boring is what I hear a lot not necessarily just from the internet but just around there like you made this phony really boring she's be really interesting and I agree but dystonia it's kind of funny because Jamie and this drawing actually gets a lot of old dysphonia she has the firepower she has the screw everybody mentality she is she very much acts like a villain a lot at the times the reason that I changed this bonilla was not because I thought that it was necessarily bad but I just felt like I didn't handle it very well and I felt like her story had worked potential elsewhere which is why I changed her for the concept itself is not necessarily bad like I said it was just an aspect of my life it was a self insert that I just dialed up to an 11 and made a story out of I did the same thing with intelligence I kind of like danced around the issue because I don't want to talk about it when I created intelligence I had just lost somebody very close to me and so I told this story about this person who lived for thousands of years and every time that he got close to somebody he lost them so his best friend obsession and his sister knowledge they both betray him and they obsession dies and then intelligence runs away from knowledge so he loses both of his early best friends and he falls in love with a girl and she dies she falls in love with a different girl and she leaves him and it's just this character who over and over and over again he loses everything because in that moment I felt like I lost everything and so that's just how I tell stories it's a good well you wait to tell compelling stories if you've drawn your own experiences it can create really dynamic characters and I'm not saying that you can't create characters without relying on like aspects of yourself okay there's gonna make it sound like a hot take but I believe that self inserts are the best way to destroy cliches now what on earth do IRA mean by that if we try to write about something that we haven't experienced our natural inclination is fall back on cliches so I see a lot of stories about people going to the circus and I don't know about you but I've never been to the circus if you have been to the circus and this might not apply to you but if I were to go about writing a scene in a circus and let's say that it's a horror story because all the circus stories are horror stories I might come up with like a scary clown and like the character might go into a house of mirrors and the mirrors are he's gonna be like oh no where's the person it chapter two and maybe there's like a tightrope scene where like the main character has to get across the tightrope and it's like it's fine but like we've just seen it all before because I've never been to the circus so I can't like draw my own experiences to write something new and not cliche so what if instead instead of writing a circus scene I wrote a scene where somebody was going to the fair and of I've been to a billing new fairs I don't know if this is the thing outside of the south but there's like fairs in every town the town that my family was living in there's like a Fair every other week I was just at the fair and I rode one of those rides where it spins around really fast and it presses you up against the side and you can like sit horizontally the centripetal force will hold you there and it gave me an idea so there's a supernatural killer that's after this person and she's like trying to get her family to listen to her and her family look like whatever and they take her to the fair and her sister wants to ride on this machine and she's still like I don't know and she's like don't worry about it it's totally fine so she gets on this ride that spins her around and presses her up against the wall and she can't move and then it was really interesting because as we were spinning every time that we went by the door there was like a flash of light and so like I could just see that flash of light and then the killer crawls in and then a flash of light and the killer's closer and but like she can't move cuz she's being pushed against this and she has to like crawl her way out of this spinning thing and like it's so hard because it's like pushing against her and like if I thought about it for more than five minutes I could probably come up with a better idea but that already is a lot less cliched than the house of mirrors things like we've seen a million house of mirrors thing you don't have to do it again but like I think it'd be pretty cool I think that people have done things with the spinning machine but so but like you get the idea okay people keep on calling me professional I'm not a professional okay first of all I don't have a job so I can't be but I'm going to quote a professional I don't know if you can hear but I'm holding a book ASMR this is a book called the TV writers workbook by Ellen Sandler and Ellen is actually author a veteran writer and producer shares the secrets of her phenomenal success the ultimate insider's guide to TV writing is what it says on the back yes she was the co-executive producer on Everybody Loves Raymond and she works on like a bunch of other things anyways she's a professional and she wrote about this so you know that it's legit um and I'm just gonna read was she right am I allowed to read this I can edit it out if I'm the latter okay so she was giving she was telling us how to use our own experiences to find storylines so she says here's an example of how I might use my experience of the Sara Lee brownie Bryn binge cuz she went on a binge of eating a bunch of brownies in a hypothetical story for Everybody Loves Raymond I turns like this guilty pleasure of eating something for a bit into the character Debra she starts with this image that she got from her experience of licking the inside of the tin and starts to ask herself questions like what circumstances would get Debra to the point of licking the last bit of fudge frosting out of the frozen pancake well maybe she's supposed to be on a diet she'd be embarrassed if she got caught if this is going to be Everybody Loves Raymond story I want to get ray into the action I want it to be most embarrassing if ray catches her how can I do that what if I set up a challenge ray claims golf is as important to him as food is to her Debra scoffs to prove it ray challenges her he will give up golf this weekend if she gives up sweet for a day then I think more about Debra's circumstances she's a mom she's not a good cook then I think I'm a mom I would go cook but I don't have a lot of time to cook and I remember when I felt pressured to make something for the Halloween bake sale at my kids school so what if Debra commits to baking cookies for school bake sale but then she ruins them and here's what I came up with Debra's baking cookies for the kids school while on a diet race stuffs raw cookie dough in his mouth and makes fun of Debra he predicts she'll never be able to stay away from sweets later the cookies come out rock-hard Debra's too proud to ask Marie for help Stud she gets the tin of Sara Lee brownies from the freezer to replace the bad cookies she ignores the brownies but she's drawn to them they aren't even defrosted yet when she cuts a very thin slice out of the tin and savors it it is heaven she cut another very thin slice than another less savoring more gobbling this time ray catches Debra running her finger along the inside of the now-empty Sara Lee brown eatin and licking the chocolate off it she gives up on the finger and licks the pan ray watches her until Debra realizes she's not it alone and ray wins the challenge I used my own guilty experience to create a revealing moment for a character if I hadn't done the exercise to discover my own real experiences with gluttony I probably wouldn't have come up with this idea for the story but even if I did I might have used some standard cliche of emotional overeating like having Ray catch Debra eating ice cream out of a container that's okay but dull we've seen it too many times before anyway so she goes on to explain how we can do that you know I'm writing it's a very good book you should get a read even if you aren't into TV writing as I am I'm by note meaning saying that Ellen in that moment is using Debra as herself insert Oh see I know that it's a very different connotation but I'm just using this to warn against the idea of people seeing self inserts as this terrible thing because it makes people scared to like draw on their own experiences and I just wanted people to know like it's very okay to draw on your own experiences in fact you should always like drawing your own experiences whenever you're trying to write something that's how you make things real I feel like I'm getting around the idea and there's like some like perfect thesis statement to what I'm trying to say that I don't really understand um let me think I'm a writer I can come up with this you should use self inserts to write stories you should not write stories to use self inserts its weak characters it's okay Opie characters are fine weak Opie characters that are poorly written are not fine self inserts are fine weak poorly written self inserts are not fine Mary Sue's are fine really weak poorly written Mary Sue's are not fine that's the thing I'm not saying everybody but a lot of people point to these external factors oh it's because the character is overpowered that it's bad it's because the character is a self-insert that it's bad it's because the character is obviously the author and obviously just wish fulfillment that it's bad but no because there's there's characters that are Opie that are good there's characters that are self inserts that are good there's characters that are self inserts and super full of which wasn't like that are good this week characters that break stories not these external factors so please don't feel bad if your OC isn't it's self-insert it's totally fine never be scared to draw on your own experiences to write a story because you're scared it might be a self insert in fact do the opposite use your own experiences to write stories if you are really interested in making characters and telling stories and doing your own art please seek out the advice that somebody who is a lot more experienced than me because like if I get the book go to school do things I know that I'm such a hypocrite but you probably should yeah you probably shouldn't lose it yes oh yeah I have a I have an imino now it's called overseer zoom you know and it's for people who want to make overseer characters or just want to discuss overseers or just want to support me because honestly everybody that makes overs hero sees makes me so happy because I made the overseers in a way that people could make their own o'seas because I wanted people to do this and the fact that they're already doing this without me even having to like go through the absolute death of trying to make my own TV show just makes me so happy every day so if you want to go check that out I'll leave a link in the description right now we're running an Oct which is an original character tournament if you don't know what that is you should totally look into it if you're into writing in OCS because it's so much fun it's very collaborative it's very interesting we have a bunch of posts on the amino talking about it yeah so please join my immuno I hope you enjoy watching self inserts aren't bad and I'll see you guys next time ie [Music] [Music]

Channel: HilariouslyScary

Views: 48,474

Rating: 4.9767861 out of 5

Keywords: oc, original character, writing, self insert, bad writing, cringe, but not

Id: uaEB2ZECHGM

Length: 15min 35sec (935 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 11 2019