"Everybody has experienced bad service. I just needed to realize that nobody wants to hear me complain about it. This was one of the major drawbacks of my comics’ main character being a slightly fictionalized version of myself."
"I'm Jim, and behind me is George, and Scott is at the computer. We run this game from in here. If you promise not to tell about this place, there are plenty of supplies upstairs you can have to help you on your way..."
— Jim Norwood, Bio Menace Episode two: The Hidden Lab
"But first he tells Jill that they should try and get Michael to a friend of his: Jubal Harshaw, acclaimed author, doctor, lawyer, philosopher, (grumbling) author self-insert, and all-around rad dude, who owns a compound and won't let the government push him around, no sirree!"
— Overly Sarcastic Productions on a character from Stranger in a Strange Land
Weiss Schnee: Who wrote this stupid story, anyway?
Ruby Rose: I did, thank you very much!
Yang Xiao Long: (scoff) No wonder. Red Riding Hood is a total Mary Sue character!
Ruby: Whaaat?
Yang: "Loved by many and known for her hood"? You totally based her off yourself!
Ruby: (growls and pulls on hair) I like to think that art is open to interpretation.
Ruby Rose: I did, thank you very much!
Yang Xiao Long: (scoff) No wonder. Red Riding Hood is a total Mary Sue character!
Ruby: Whaaat?
Yang: "Loved by many and known for her hood"? You totally based her off yourself!
Ruby: (growls and pulls on hair) I like to think that art is open to interpretation.
— RWBY Chibi, "Little Red Riding Hood"
"Lisa isn't really getting trampled on by life and suffering for everyone else's sins on The Simpsons because the writers hate her, but because they are her. Or, rather, she's how most of them would idealize their earlier selves: stifled intellectuals drowning in the misery of their own Springfield, escaping into art, music, education, progressive politics, whatever, and trying not to hate a world too much, even though it was clearly built for the Homers and the Barts more than it ever was for them.
Now, if The Simpsons had been a live-action show and was still somehow on, this would still be relatively easy to see because, at this point, we'd likely be following Lisa as an adult reflection of the writers herself more obviously. But since The Simpsons is able to affect the illusion of a status quo preserved in amber through animation, she remains an eight-year-old with the righteous indignation of an over-educated comedy writer from the early 1990s today, or, rather, a 2018 comedy writer's rough approximation thereof."
— Bob Chipman, "The Apu Trilogy"
