You can quote me under my fan name and link here; that's fine.
The rest of it ... I think this doesn't fit, quite, for me. I mean, what you're saying here is perfectly valid, it just doesn't fit my own fannish experience. That's not an accurate description of how I relate to things, or what I'm getting out of Rey as a character. But then, I've never done self-insertion the way most people in fandom do, and when I said self-insert above, what I meant was not my OCs in Star Wars (I never had any) but rather, my original characters in my own post-apocalyptic landscapes.
This doesn't make your point invalid; it's just that my reaction to this comment was a pretty hard knee-jerk "No", but I had to stop and think about it for a little while to figure out why that was. I don't think any female character would have done it for me in the same way this particular archetype did, and I never had the feeling of having to "put myself" in Star Wars because I had no trouble empathizing with, and relating to, Luke and Han et al. I never felt alienated by it, and I still don't, and no, this doesn't feel like my-fanfic-on-the-screen to me, though I've heard other people describe it that way, because that's not the kind of fanfic I would ever have written about it. But there is definitely a part of me that is very deeply satisfied by having Rey in there, so I guess I get what people get out of self-inserts a little better now. (I mean, not that it was ever incomprehensible to me; it's just that it wasn't something I usually felt compelled to do. Although my use of the word self-insert above is very confusing, I know. I knew what I meant when I wrote it, I guess ...?)
no subject
The rest of it ... I think this doesn't fit, quite, for me. I mean, what you're saying here is perfectly valid, it just doesn't fit my own fannish experience. That's not an accurate description of how I relate to things, or what I'm getting out of Rey as a character. But then, I've never done self-insertion the way most people in fandom do, and when I said self-insert above, what I meant was not my OCs in Star Wars (I never had any) but rather, my original characters in my own post-apocalyptic landscapes.
This doesn't make your point invalid; it's just that my reaction to this comment was a pretty hard knee-jerk "No", but I had to stop and think about it for a little while to figure out why that was. I don't think any female character would have done it for me in the same way this particular archetype did, and I never had the feeling of having to "put myself" in Star Wars because I had no trouble empathizing with, and relating to, Luke and Han et al. I never felt alienated by it, and I still don't, and no, this doesn't feel like my-fanfic-on-the-screen to me, though I've heard other people describe it that way, because that's not the kind of fanfic I would ever have written about it. But there is definitely a part of me that is very deeply satisfied by having Rey in there, so I guess I get what people get out of self-inserts a little better now. (I mean, not that it was ever incomprehensible to me; it's just that it wasn't something I usually felt compelled to do. Although my use of the word self-insert above is very confusing, I know. I knew what I meant when I wrote it, I guess ...?)