It's a concern. You wouldn't want to capitalize her.

I'm reading Natter 43 (which Kat flat out called Natter's Greatest Hits while it was happening), and it has - among other things - Nutty fighting a cheetah, everybody being called out on their actual height and the first appearance of this:

Tom Scola "Natter 43: I Love My Dead Gay Whale Crosspost." Mar 1, 2006 6:21:58 pm PST

I encourage you all to start at the beginning of the thread and just read through to the end because we're fun.

No you don't! Those links are better unclicked! You were properly warned!

I'm pretty sure they'll automatically correct. And that will be sad.

I was explaining ita more to Tim tonight, including how we all learned the hard way to never click her links. And that led to him looking up Two Girls One Cup, because he -- somehow -- was unfamiliar with it.

ita is STILL touching lives, man. Because now he KNOWS.

See! By the time we got to that one I knew better.

oh Dana, this was you

"A Mary Sue is a thinly-veiled substitue for the author. She's often related to a character. Everyone falls in love with her, she's a genius at everything she puts her hand to, and she's been known to die tragically, leaving behind a trail of broken hearts."

then ita

"I am so in love with the Mary Sue concept. I don't write, but if I did, I'd commit myself to Mary-Suing everything. All genres, everything."

then Dana again

"Buffy stared at the mysterious new arrival.

"Who are you?" she asked.

The stunningly exotically beautiful woman executed a flawless backflip and staked a newly-risen vampire with a twist of her perfectly manicured hand.

"I'm ita, the vampire slayer."

Buffy felt like she should be upset. After all, Sunnydale was her town, and the last vampire slayer she'd known had tried to kill her. But as ita spun around and kicked another vampire in the head, Buffy decided that she needed lessons from this new slayer. Her technique was amazing. Plus, her leather coat was really cool.

"Hey," she said as ita polished off the last vampire with a perfectly thrown stake. "You wanna come meet my Watcher? Giles is really cool, even though he's British."

"Giles?" ita asked. "Rupert Giles?"

"Yeah," said Buffy. "Have you heard of him?"

"Oh, I've heard of him." ita's mysteriously dark eyes smoldered. "He's my father.""

the questions from fater

" ita, are you eye-ta or ee-ta?

ee-ta."

That's the best Mary Sue I've ever read.

to continue the Mary Sue discussion

"I was wondering why I'd never heard of this Mary Sue stuff before. After all, I'm fairly fannish, and I've been using the internet to get my fix for well over a decade now. Then I remembered 12 years ago my thing was comics, and my other thing was drawing, and certain flashes of pictures of Wolverine having his ass kicked by a familiar looking teenager flitted through my head. Save the "everybody loves me" part, I was guilty as charged."

she was a giver

"I'm willing to date 19 year olds and convert them to Buffy, if that helps our case."

I encourage you all to start at the beginning of the thread and just read through to the end because we're fun.

I think I will. I'm 100 posts in and don't remember any of this so that is probably one of threadsucks I have squirreled away somewhere around here...