if you ever start to criticize yourself for coming up with crappy self-insert AU’s, just remember that when Dante wrote the Divine Comedy, he literally wrote about himself going on a super-special journey with his all-time favorite author as a mentor, meeting basically every famous person or mythological figure he could think of, and getting together with this girl he had been desperately in love with when he was younger (even though he only saw her twice and she probably didn’t know he existed)
I can’t believe Dante Aligheri was the original Mary Sue