Cenonn's How to Holofic and Writing in General

Who's the MC? You, the reader!!

Ah... Reader-inserts, Wattpad's favorite. There's a joke that went something like this "Wanna be popular in Wattpad? Turn your fanfic into a reader-insert!"

Now then... I don't have any experience in writing reader-inserts. Or at least I haven't published that one yet. Also, I don't read much reader-inserts since well... "Y/N" just ruins my reading flow.

HOWEVER!

For your sakes, I'm going on a journey across the land of reader-inserts and see how they work. And no. I won't just read online guides. I'll read reader-insert stories for the sake of this forsaken guide. May Matsuri help me.

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Now then... I read a few reader-inserts and I noticed that they use "Y/N L/N" (Your Name, Last Name) when referring to the reader. I also found out that there are many approaches to the reader-insert.

For one, there's the GNReader (Gender Neutral Reader). This one has the greatest reach since it both caters to the female and male readers. I'm not going to discuss gender identities of the other characters especially if it's a HololiveXGNReader cause this one's a guide to write Holofics and not a crash course on the gender spectrum.

However, the GNReader has its few downsides in terms of storytelling. For one, you'll have a harder time with deciding on what pronoun you would use when talking about the character. You could always get away with it if you use 1st person POV or 2nd person POV but if you tried 3rd person in the GNReader, it'll be a bit tricky.

One GNReader fanfic called Man Eater (Gawr Gura x !GN!Reader) by Gl1tch3dOracle used second person. So that meant the narration used "You" instead of "I" or "He/She." They got away without using any pronouns in referring to the reader-insert MC. However, in Chapter 2 of the story, the narrator referred to the reader as "they" in order to maintain the ambiguity.

If being vague is hard for you or for some reason, you want the Hololive girls to be straight, you can write a MaleReader instead. This is what happened in HidenSeekers_'s Hololive Madness! (ReaderxHololive) and in Zeonchilling's Infinite Soul (HololivexMale Reader).

By making it a MaleReader, you can have no worries about writing the appropriate pronouns since you somehow defined the reader's gender. So that means you can use 3rd person POV in your narration.

Now then, I went ahead and asked HidenSeeker_ about how a reader-insert should be written and they replied with:

"I actually learned from someone about not giving Reader-insert characters that much depths when it comes to their background history so it makes the readers not have a hard time inserting themselves as that "Reader Insert" character. I actually learned about that fact pretty late cuz now every readers commenting on my Fanfic are referring "Y/N" as "he or him" instead of "we or us", so I feel like I failed in that department since my readers doesn't see this character as their own. If I've known that was the case then I should've just gave my MC a name lmao."

I also went to Zeonschilling and asked them with the same question and this is how they responded:

"Well, one thing I learned over my time is that making a Bio for the reader isn't required. It's okay to put a picture to use as an example of the readers look but let them choose what they look like. That's why I tend to put stuff like (h/c)/hair color or (e/c)/eye color helps make it more immersive. Then have an idea of how the reader is in this story. Is their personality random or calm. How would their interactions with others be because of it. Also try to not limit yourself with something like this is how I want the story to exactly go. It's a reader insert so their opinions and feedback matter. Take it into consideration but don't let it control what you're writing."

To analyze their responses and upon further research, reader-inserts should be really vague in order to make the reader easily insert themselves in the story. You can't be specific about height, weight, or any other details because it would ruin the immersion.

That means sentences like "Botan looked up to Y/N" wouldn't work because you would be implying that Y/N is taller than Botan and I'm pretty sure there are readers who are shorter than 166 cm (Me included. Pain Peko).

That also means that sentences that go "Polka liked how deep Y/N's voice sounds" wouldn't work because you would be implying that Y/N has a sexy deep voice which I'm pretty sure some readers don't have.

You can circumvent these restrictions by becoming more specific with your reader-insert like FatMaleReader, TallMaleReader, DepressedMaleReader, and etc but you'll just be lessening your reach.

Aside from these differences, you can treat a reader-insert like any other character. That means they will interact with other characters in the story and move the plot along.

Anyways.... I just finished talking about the three types of characters in fanfiction which are Existing Characters, Original Characters, and Reader-inserts. I'll talk about World Building in the next chapter and hopefully, you'll check it out too.