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I don't think that's really true at all, except in the way that "all characters are kinda like the author," if you wanted to go that route. There is absolutely nothing about first person which makes it more like a self-insert unless you for some reason just automatically think that because of the word "I". And then, it's probably that you don't know the author nearly as well as you think, if at all.

I've read plenty stories, print published and otherwise, where the POV character is nothing at all like the author. Hell, I've written plenty where the POV character is nothing at all like myself.

And as I said before, it's not unless you're viewing it in the "all characters are like their authors" perspective. Which yeah, is true from a certain point of view. Not true at all from many others. But that's not the point. The point was that first person has no more of this than third person does.

They're basically the same.



This, however, I think is completely wrong. The character is not me, so why would I rely on what I would do to figure out what they would do? They frequently don't do at all what I would do in a given scenario, for a variety of reasons.

Well, it's not wrong in the sense that it's not hard for certain people. It's wrong as a universal statement.

I generally don't like first person because it's too often done wrong. Case and point: Twilight, its whole series, The Catcher in the Rye (I hated the writing style, sorry) and every self-inserting fanfiction ever. It usually feels forced to me-- I mean, what are the chances of your narrator actually being able to write well enough to retell their tale in novel form? The only first person books I've ever liked are Frankenstein and The Handmaid's Tale. I also tend to avoid first person because I have a tendency to kill off main characters, haha.