it's more acceptable to write Mary-Sues for the young adult market

That is the case- although I'm not sure it's an attitude I like. I suspect it contributes to the number of Mary-Sues at ff.n and suchlike places.

Wrod, Hobgobble, and also wrod, Theo.

Although my main urge, when I come and reread the Pierce books that I recently bought for my ten-year-old sister, is to write Pierce and ask her for a lesbian character.

Of course, it'd never happen, so I never even started writing the letter, but it amused me on the walk home from the train station for a few weeks. "Dear Ms. Pierce-- your books are so begging for it!"

My niece is way into Pierce right now. She loves them because, as she says, "they're not scary." Unlike the stuff I give her, which leans heavily towards Ursula LeGuin and Garth Nix.

Thirteen-year-olds love comfort-reading. And the Pierce/Lackey/McCaffrey novels supply that in spades. I guess I'll have to track down a copy of the Harper Hall trilogy for her now...

I've met Tamora (and her husband) at Boskones and Worldcons, and she's mentioned how hard she's had to fight to get intimations of unmarried het sex into her books! Alas, the fight for same sex relationships on an other-than-symbolic basis doesn't sound like it would be likely.

"Dear Ms. Pierce-- your books are so begging for it!"

coughfanfictioncough

The Harper Hall books to me are McCaffrey at her best.

I think it's more acceptable to write Mary-Sues for the young adult market, who as an audience tend to be able to get more whole-heartedly into a protagonist who is perfect. I mean, I'm speaking from my own experience as a young reader here. :-)

Yep. When you're 14, you read the books and think, "Yes! She's so cool! She exactly what I want to be!"

When you're 23, you re-read the books and think, "Oh dear God, she's exactly what I wanted to be when I was 14."

I've met Tamora (and her husband) at Boskones and Worldcons, and she's mentioned how hard she's had to fight to get intimations of unmarried het sex into her books! Alas, the fight for same sex relationships on an other-than-symbolic basis doesn't sound like it would be likely.

Oh, I know.

It's just-- okay, I read them first at eleven, and I think I kind of knew how, er, Mary-Sue-ish they were; there was a host of reasons for why I really like them; but then I read them again at fifteen and my biggest response was, Wow, Alanna's such a little dyke.

IJS.

The weird part is, books written and marketed as "YA" or older children's fiction may be virginal, but what great numbers of 12-15 year old readers find is not. I was pretty clear, reading MZB's Heritage of Hastur, that the two male leads weren't being symbolic with each other. That fiction was marketed as plain fantasy, but somehow I found it at that age.

I tend to think that all the bad Mary Sue written by beginner writers who don't know better is therapeutic: it helps one work out one's fantasies, follow postulated realities to their logical conclusions, explore the implications of mastery [albeit mastery at everything]. The only trouble is that, for an experienced reader, reading this kind of beginner fiction is kind of boring and sometimes embarrassing, the way it's embarrassing for me to sit in a middle school classroom and listen to the kids talk.

In sum, I don't have that much of a problem with bad Mary Sueism in fanfic. It's the internet that is to blame, for causing what was once the sole province of my brain, my three-ring binder, and sometimes my 7th grade English teacher, to become the province of everybody.