#We are all Paul trying to interpret Jesus!!! To say we're otherwise denies our special mortal human soul one way or another!!!!!

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Massive text post that I didn't intend to be this massive (Or weirdly personal) but it ended up that way anyway as I have a bad habit of letting happen (Trying to figure out how tumblr works. This is actually my second time trying to post this lol. I thought the "Keep reading stuff" was done on it's own but I think I was wrong and am trying to figure out how to make this stuff work. Sorry if the formatting is all off, if the post doesn't end up working you're not missing much, it sorta turned into venting fairly explicitly half way through LOL, and I think the original poster did a perfect job explaining their points as is. I was just going into my own personal interpretations and connections that aren't necessary for this post to be perfect as is. Self-indulgent addition, that kinda thing. Anyway..)

I think each of the people missing the point are onto real personal anxieties, or at the very least common anxieties artists have about their own work. They're worried about all these things (Self-inserts, reader-inserts, Mary Sues, or the countless other WhatAboutisms [sorry to be harsh if you made these or similar posts but it feels apt for me to call this kind of stuff whataboutism and i hope i can show why its apt]) leading to their work being "Needlessly rude and harmful toe others" (Which I personally also believe is the quote unquote "Real" problem [saying 'quote unquote' for emphasis even though i still used normal quotes lol]) because they've seen examples of these "tropes" being used needlessly harmfully and so they (falsely [imo of course, but very importantly falsely]) think simply avoiding the trope is the best way to avoid the harm their examples needlessly generated or perpetuated. And perhaps there is something to be said about these tropes that might lead work to be needlessly harmful if not thought out well enough (An example would be how self inserts sometimes are used by artists to refuse to confront their own biases, just as an example). Perhaps there are certain trends associated with certain genres.

However, at the end of the day, these are all just anxieties and they don't actually solve the real problem of unnecessary harm. There are plenty of examples of things going counter to a trend while still deliberately being within the same genre. And sometimes certain perceived trends are only perceived due to confirmation bias (Not all the time, mind you, but that doesn't at all contradict the larger point)!! Sometimes you just don't like a genre or just don't like a trope and that's okay!!! Realizing that it's not for you, realizing why it's not for you, is important for making your own work! But, as I think we all sort of understand but sometimes fail to put into action, just because it's not for us doesn't mean it's inherently bad. Just because we're anxious about something doesn't mean that anxiety always is accurate. You need to learn how to work with it, you can't always just dismiss anxiety. Merely accepting or rejecting it entirely is not always working with it and can be either harmful or paralyzing or both!

Of course it's not always "anxiety" or "anxiousness" but (now speaking about myself to prove a point and to.. well.. maybe vent just a little lol) at the very least that's my personal reason for why I used to buy into these sort of lines of thinking, that it's the tropes that are the issue, and even as I broke those anxieties down it led me to think stuff like "Oh, it's not the tropes that's the problem, it's that authors need to be clearer with their intent" and its like No! That's still playing into trope!! However, working with the fear, it means I can start addressing my own intent much clearer in my work because it matters to me. Not to anyone else, not that anyone else should do this, but it's what I need to do to actually make stuff while working with that anxiety. It's why I use dumb parenthesis everywhere, and (even dumber) put parenthesis within parenthesis using brackets as a sort of stylistic choice to make it slightly more readable. That doesn't mean my style is dumb, I say it's dumb because I know it might make the post overall a bit harder to read, but I need to do it to make the post in the first place, and hopefully by doing that I can get better at being more specific without them in the future. Or maybe I find a hidden beauty in my weird rambling style! Maybe I should keep doing it! But that's, like all these things, a me thing to figure out.

Sorry for writing so much to say something that probably could have been written shorter and more impactful to more people but, like the post was originally going for, I think it's largely fine for me to do all this and that this kind of self indulgence is literally more productive sometimes. Like all things, even if I'm making it to be enjoyed by others, I make all things for me even if that enjoyment by others is what I want.

It really all boils down to the same stuff the anti-"Wisdom of Repugnance" posts are trying to get at, but framed through my own personal experience with the concept. Maybe by being a bit self-indulgent I can show people that they can be productively indulgent too in their own ways!!

Oh and this obviously is focusing on examples where art doesn't perpetuate "unnecessary harm" but if I tried to address my worry of "What if people misinterpret my post as saying 'there is no such thing as unnecessary harm' even though it clearly isn't saying that" it'd not only be counter productive for making the post more readable (it's unreadable enough as is) it'd also be counter productive for me, personally, trying to break these worries that I need to "solve" every worry yadda yadda. If you actually care about my thoughts on what is and isn't "unnecessary harm" you can read some of my posts about Dungeons and Dragons lore (Because holy shit lol, whole other can of worms right there). If you misinterpret my post at some point that's not my fucking fault, I tried my best by adding double parenthesis and everything, so I'm cutting off the head of that worry-snake.... now, by posting! Yippie!!! Thank you for getting through all this regardless!!!

The stigma of self-inserts is so harmful to the creative process. Relax. Admit it. Everything you make is derivative of yourself, always, no exceptions. You can turn the mirror into tinier and tinier shards or you can make it as big as you want to reflect as much as you want. At the end of the day it's always going to show you inside of it. Pretending otherwise is stupid.