#but god damn if this wasn’t perfectly formulated to hit the Unbearable Pedant button in my brain

[c0rpseductor]

saw this post on someone’s blog i was reading and it strikes me as kind of narrow-minded about escapism and what a reader wants from fiction and takes TO fiction, plus i love the sound of my own voice, so. My rebuttal to nobody in particular

if it were any other form of fiction i’d tend to agree with this take; honestly, i do to an extent even with reader insert fiction. it’s true that not all fiction (or even most!) should be approached with the desire for Relatability of the protagonist as one’s first concern. it’s fine to listen to another person‘s perspective and experience and inhabit it knowing it’s not yours, whether for escapism or to learn. (i don’t agree that escapism ought to be one’s sole aim or concern in engaging with texts, but it’s a still a valid aim.)

but this take irritates me because reader insertion fic promises — or at least purports to promise — an intrinsically “relatable” experience, a more intimate kind of vicarious pleasure. character x YOU, go many of the tags. if i’m being told that this is MY experience, that this fic was written with the aim of giving ME, the reader, an experience where I get to interact with glup shitto MYSELF….why on earth would i not complain if i didn’t get the promised experience, if the vessel i’m supposed to be able to effortlessly project upon is so unlike me that i can’t possibly?

and sure, of course i see the appeal in “what would it be like to be some other person for a bit,” but is that not why we have fiction that doesn’t purport to insert the reader directly into the narrative? for example, if i wanted to read about thrawn and imagine myself as a hotheaded cadet from wild space with a totally different set of life circumstances i would simply fucking make the decision to project onto eli vanto. whether or not the narrative is written in second person is immaterial.

i think it’s important to be able to approach any narrative and know when to say “this wasn’t written with someone like me in mind” and be able to interface with it for what it is rather than what you wished it might be. i read my fair share of reader insertion fanfiction, honestly mostly out of morbid curiosity, and i recognize that absolutely 0% of it is written with someone like me in mind simply because i’m male. i don’t expect other writers to write for an audience that doesn’t include themselves or that doesn’t interest them; none of these works HAVE to cater to me, and i CAN just analyze the storytelling and characters without needing to be anything like the woman usually featured (or, sometimes, person of undisclosed gender).

but — and this part is critical — i’m also not able to derive much vicarious enjoyment from these fanfics precisely because they don’t reflect my experience in any real way. my desires, my thoughts, and my personality are never even really dimly echoed in these characters. i can’t imagine myself in the narrative. is that not kind of the point? if you simply can’t put yourself in that position at all, if the reader insert is so unlike you that you have to essentially pretend you’re someone else, why even bother with the reader insertion gimmick? i, the reader, am not actually being inserted at that point. i, the male reader, am usually reading a second-person POV narrative about an unfamiliar woman with a personality entirely unlike mine and whose name and appearance i do not know. if i actually cared about the vicarious enjoyment angle i’d be pissed. for people who DO care about that aspect of the subgenre and don’t find themselves reflected in any meaningful way, i imagine it’s very frustrating to feel overlooked and then be told you ought to just enjoy the work for the storytelling instead of what you want and were promised.

and to that end i think it’s not a problem with any individual author or even the community in aggregate so much as the actual premise of the genre itself — readers are too diverse! you have to dilute the POV character to less than a whisper in order to make them a suitable vessel for as many people as possible, and in the event where you don’t you’re probably still going to try to go for a broadly appealing set of traits that many readers won’t be able to truly connect with as if they, themselves, are present. in that respect, at least in my opinion, it’s a lot better to vicariously experience things through well-defined characters in more typical fiction, where i’m not given the dashed expectation of being able to relate to them or essentially BE them. it leaves room for richer experiences and, as this post says, an appreciation of the story without the baggage of “relating.” because ultimately that approach i think is widely correct and broadly applicable. but it rings a little ridiculous in the discussion of a genre literally called “reader insert” to tell the reader they oughtn’t expect to be inserted into the narrative. that’s kind of fucking goofy. come on now.