You misunderstand. I am not against changes in plot. The main reason we write and read fanfics is to take an alternative look at the story and explore what else can be done with it.
At the same time you wouldn't want to take away from the main characters what they achieve. An SI who changes things to eventually replace the main character is simply not done. Not convincingly anyway.
Taking Vapors for example.

Spoiler

It claims to be a gritty fic and yet the only main character who has been killed is Sakura. Why?? Just because. Meanwhile the Sandaime and Jiraiya, whose deaths meant something in the canon are still alive. Sasuke doesn't defect and even forgives Itachi, who hasn't died btw. You'd imagine he'd be a lot more conflicted about this considering he did slaughter his entire clan, regardless of the reasons. Aiko's progress as a shinobi is another thing that bothers me as it borders on Mary-Sueish. Yes I've heard the arguments about it being done well. It doesn't change the fact that it pisses all over the achievements of guys like Sasuke and even Itachi to some extent who are hailed as prodigies. As if all that is needed to excel in the shinobi world is to ne from another dimension.

Her reverse engineering Hiraishin pissed me off as well. It is an S-ranked jutsu for crying out loud and she's mastered it within her teens??? Generations of shinobi failed to do so and Aiko manages it without help with only Minato's notes acting as her guidelines.

And why the hell doesn't Naruto have Sage mode yet? In the canon he learnt it after Jiraiya's death
But he hadn't even heard of it prior to that. Here Naruto obviously knows about it and yet hasn't learnt it??

I've already made my feelings about Pein's one-eighty. And I don't agree with the arguments that were put forward about the combination of Jiraiya's talk-no-jutsu and him losing his paths. I can quote the reason as was stated in the story. It was about how he couldn't achieve what he came to after seeing the jounin sacrificing their lives to save the civilians. The jounin was Aiko btw.
So all it took Pein to convince him of the error of his ways was one self-sacrificing jounin?

Yeah right!

Now I hear she gets the Rinnegan.

Well the jury is out on that

Bottom line no matter how hard you try to otherwise, an SI-OC in canon settings ends up becoming a Mary-Sue. And we all know how we feel about that.

 

All that really shows is that Vapors handles its SI badly or that the author let it get out of hand. It's perfectly possible for an SI or an OC main character to be written well, just as it is possible for any other premise that is usually an indicator of a bad fanfiction to be written well. Most Indy!Harry stories are shit too, but that doesn't mean there aren't good ones.

The only issue with SIs and OCs are that most authors treat them like an author avatar through which to achieve their fantasies and don't have the writing ability to make it anything more than a glorified wankfest. If the writer was good enough, they could pull off a powerful SI or OC without making it an unbearable ego trip, but they usually don't, instead they let their own masturbatory urges take precedence over writing a good story.

It's not a problem if an SI/OC is written as the most important character of the story since the story is presumably about them and not the main character of the series it is based in. It's not even (theoretically) a problem if they become more powerful or more influential than canon main characters. It is only a problem when the actions or effect of the character break your immersion in the story or overwhelm your suspension of disbelief.

This is where Vapors fails, because in a story with an SI/OC its very easy to have your immersion broken since you are constantly aware of the fact that the author is essentially writing themself into the story (unless its an actual, real OC rather than a third person SI). Immersion is easier to maintain if you don't interfere with canon plotlines or have the SI/OC become unusually powerful/influential because this sort of thing stretches the reader's disbelief. Unfortunately, that is exactly what Vapors does and it doesn't have good enough writing to maintain immersion, or else we wouldn't be having this discussion.

Basically, it isn't impossible to write a good SI/OC that is powerful or influential in canon, it's just very difficult to do so and beyond the skills of most people who decide to write SIs.

 

It really is impossible because either way you fuck over a canon character to do so

 

And that's exactly what I've been saying. Even Vapors, a supposed gem from the SI genre couldn't avoid that particular pitfall, how do you think the others go?

 

If the writer has to fuck over canon characters then they're just not a good writer.

 

Blargh, we are talking past each other again.

Hey look, it is an opinion.

Hey look, it is a different opinion.


I, personally, give no more shits about Naruto's canonical "sacred position" in the narrative in Vapors that I do about Nathan Potter's in The Santi's fic. The Santi avoided this problem with strategic naming and by having Harry fuck off to Durmstrang and thus unable to influence the canon storyline...though when the time comes for things to go off the rails, I am sure it will be fabulously well done. More to the point, I care about how events are progressing in the story I am reading at the time. The story has been following Aiko, and I had an enjoyable time reading about her journey. If you cannot stomach such a thing, that is perfectly fine. Don't read it. No biggie.

There are a couple facts off in that spoiler, but I think we have entirely exhausted the topic of Vapors by now.


Fake edit:

Absolutely right - and this entire conversation has only lasted this long because apparently YMMV when it comes to how hard it breaks immersion. After all, we certainly wouldn't be giving a fuck about any of those accomplishments if an AU!Naruto did them in 700k words, just because it wouldn't trigger the reader in the same way.

Knowledge of that is certainly why it was confined to what has become the Naruto Almost Recommendable instead of being put up For Review.

 

As they say no one has been hanged for having an opinion and stating it..... yet.
Having it isn't gonna stop people from writing these stories and there will always be people on the opposite ends of the spectrum.
Authors of bashing fics too have justified why they do it. We hate them for it, but they are still being written.
Opinions are opinions. They are meant to be argued, most of the time pointlessly and sometimes indefinitely.

 

Urgh this Vapors talk again? Anyway, your points have been made however at this point everything is just being reiterated for no particular reason. So please be the more mature person and go back to discuss SI's instead of having this becoming like spacebattles.

To remind people:

@spacebattles
Person x says something
Person y replies
Person x sticks with his opinion
Person y feels obligated to make his point again
Person x does the same
Person y does the same again

We are in an unending loop, which goes absolutely nowhere. So for the sake of being the more mature person please let this matter on Vapors be put to rest. Everyone already knows that YMMV in regards to this fic.

 

I tried didn't happen hope you have better luck

 

Stop trying to kill the conversation just because you don't like it. You are not the arbiter of what we can discuss.

 

The only two self-insert stories that I have enjoyed, and would read again are:

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/8774090/1/Reincarnation-Roulette
https://www.fanfiction.net/s/8139663/1/Little-Acorn

The reason Dreaming of Sunshine isn't on here is I read it non-stop for a couple days, but eventually I just reached a point where I got bored of it and it didn't interest me. I think it was largely the canon contrivances, and when I looked into the latest chapters awhile ago all I saw were the movie plots which weren't great on their own.

An interesting take on a SI I wouldn't mind but which I don't think has been done would be where a person is reincarnated into the Naruto world, but doesn't know it's the Naruto world. You get to explore all of the Naruto world from their perspective with their previous experiences of their society and education but it won't have the canon contrivances with their prescience of future events which should allow far greater divergences and character interactions. For all they know they have just been born in a world where magic exists, where the impossible can actually happen and a world where people are clearly and explicitly not born equal and where people are capable of becoming God among men.

 

Questions for discussion:

1.) Which is the greater crime: to make a canon character OoC to fulfill a role or to invent an OC to take the role? Are there particular times when one is worse than the other?

2.) Why are SI-OC's preferred over a character who is just an OC? It's been said by some of you that SI-OC's are a refreshing addition to the fandom. So why are OC's in general so reviled?

3.) Why does a SI-OC need to have foreknowledge of the manga/anime?

 

1) In answer to the first question, if making a canon character OOC was a crime, 90% of the authors in the Naruto fandom atleast would be criminals.

Some of the best Naruto fanfics have an OOC Naruto. Inert's Patriot's Dawn comes to mind. At the same time he does a decent job of explaining why Naruto is OOC.
In short a canon character behaving out of character is fine as long as you do it convincingly.
Using an OC to replace a canon character in my book is a worse crime by far. It reeks of arrogance on the part of the author and nothing is more putting-off than a self absorbed author.

2) Don't know about others but I definitely hate SIs more than regular OCs.

3) I think that is one of the pre-requisites for being an SI. Otherwise it'd be just another OC

 

Depends entirely on what you mean by "fulfill a role" and the role in question. Take the mission to the Manufactorium in Shezza's fic (fresh for me because I just reread) - a canon team wouldn't have worked, so an OC team was created. They did their job, did it well, and the story moved on.

Making a canon character drastically OoC is probably worse, if only because we already have an emotional evaluation of the character and that overtly fucks with it - but that doesn't mean it can't be done. Of course, having an OC seem to infringe on a canon role with that character still around is a problem too. That is most of what had people up in arms about Vapors.

Are they? An SI is an OC, there is just another plot twist inherent to the premise. No reason you can't have an OC who is just naturally part of the universe.

They are reviled the same reason anything is reviled - they are usually shit. Now, most of everything is shit...but with OCs, we can probably comfortably say they are, on average, even more likely to be shit. SI-OCs even more so than that.

There was just a recentish influx of them, so they were the new thing for a while.

They don't. That's just usually the entire premise. It's like asking why a crossover has to involve another universe. As has just been pointed out, you could make an SI have no foreknowledge and instead frame the early conflict about coming to terms with this radically different society...it would just need a compelling writer to make work.

 

Why does a SI-OC need to be written in a more compelling way if the SI does not have foreknowledge of events? For that matter, why does the SI-OC even need to be someone brought to the universe from real life? If I write an OC who has my personality and is, for all intents and purposes, "me as I think I would be if I was born in the Narutoverse," does that not qualify as a SI?

 

As always, I will rec A Cage of Blood and Circumstance. A SI into Hinata's body which somehow manages to be Hinata+, instead of a complete OC.

Goddamn but do well written Hinatas get my dick hard. Rarer than diamonds.

 

Write what you know? I know me. I can write me very compellingly. Any good fanfic requires semi-serious writing chops anyway, right? So what's the difference? In the end, do we find countless waves of stories where a character has foreknowledge more interesting than stories where the characters have to work their way through problems unknown?

First we had time travel, now we have SI-OC's. I think there are more fanfics out there where the main character already knows about Akatsuki before graduating the academy than not.

Edit: for that matter, do problems unknown have to mirror canon so precisely? I think I could most easily tolerate barely passable writing in a story that doesn't just ape canon.

 

So basically, as long as you write the idea well, you can do basically whatever you want. Same as any other good author, really.

I think that's the problem most people have with Self Inserts, really. They've been done badly way too often for most to give the benefit of the doubt to an SI story.