The boring answer is that all my characters are both nothing like me, and yet all are me. The thing is, I don't really directly play any characters with my specific personality. It's kind of hard to emulate the whole "crippling anxiety around people in public" turned to "will not stop quipping for 5 seconds" to begin with, but also the fact I'm extremely insufferable to even my friends generally doesn't make for a character archetype anyone'd be willing to put up with. Besides that, I've seen said archetype played wrong enough times to not try my hand. Yet still, that doesn't mean I am not my characters. The way they shine through most is in their dialogue. I don't speak like normal people do, and I find it hard to emulate normal people speech. Therefor, you'll find my general lack of coherent sentence structure in my characters' spoken lines as well. Further, my mind must operate on some 7th dimensional plane, since I manage to always think of the most unorthodox and awkward things. To add to it, you'd be hard pressed to not find one of my personality traits inside any single one character I make. Whether or not that personality trait is positive or negative, however, is dependant on the character in question. Just my most recent example, Danganronpa Alternate: Apologies to Hope, has me playing three characters: Taka/Taya, Ayu and Momoe. Taka is a rage goblin like I am, Ayu doesn't like to share what she's thinking under any circumstance and Momoe must love the sound of her own voice since she doesn't stop hammering on people for even a second. The only one that doesn't reflect me well at all in the moment, the Taya personality of the first character, is only as such because I've barely gotten a chance to play them. The fact you can recognize and author in their characters is simply a byproduct of the inherent biases any particular writer carries with them. Anyone can write a shy character, but no one person will write them the exact same way as another. In some small and insignificant way, the author's personality will always shine through and be reflected in that character. Despite that, there's one character that's pretty much me in a nutshell... unfortunately, it's also the one type of character this thread bans. My old Self-Insert. Dude was a smarmy, self-righteous mischief maker that thought he was a whole lot smarter than he actually is, but still with an awkward caring side to him. Was it me playing an idealized version of me? Yes. But that's also the only time a character ever mirrored me in full. No other character is "like me" in real life. All of them are still me, equally, in their own way.