"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.

I quite liked Pierce's newest Tortall series-- I bought the first book with the intention of forcing my sister to read some damn genre for a change, but when that didn't work I ended up reading it myself. She's cured herself of the more egregious Mary Sue stuff-- the main character is magic-power-free, and better-written. Much more realistic than some of the stuff she's done.

on edit: You know, i just now realized this wasn't the Literary thread. Oh, well.

We're still ontopic, though at the outer fringes of it.

On the role of sex in YA novels--sometimes, with the novels I'm reading, it really suprises me how much innuendo and often blatant sexual references are in them. I think it's cool, personally, but it still suprises me. They're getting a lot looser with what they'll let in than they ever were before.

Oh dear...

[link]

Oh, that's fucking hilarious.