Some of my favorite characters often get called Mary Sues (I'm thinking Harriet Vane and Phedre in the Kushiel books), and while I can see where the criticism is coming from, I really don't care because the characters are vivid and interesting to me. I wonder if this makes me flawed as a reader and/or a writer.

Went to the library yesterday and discovered that Marian Chesney is M.C. Beaton.

Which upon reflection -- makes a lot of sense.

Don't think vane could reasonably be called a mary sue.Phedre I think so. I find it very suspicious when a character almost never makes a seriously bad choice. Vane made plenty, P not so much.

My understanding is that Harriet is a fairly transparent authorial insertion. The thing is, if I like a character sufficiently, I don't care if they're an authorial insertion, idealized or otherwise.

Well, somebody's got to like Mary Sues, or else they wouldn't get published and the books wouldn't sell. They do, and they do. When people get together and snigger at Mary Sues, I think part of that outburst of laughter is the embarrassed recognition that one has loved, and continues to love, various authorial ego-ideal characters despite their obvious tricks.

The other part seems to me a venomous judgement of the ordinary fantasies of women -- who doesn't want to be perfect and talented and loved in every way? I think readers -- especially readers with fingers on the critique pulse -- are crueller to female Mary Sues than to male ones, maybe because 50 years of crap adventure have inured the reading public to perfect male heroes. But maybe the virulence of Mary Sue hatred is related to the intensity of love/hate of celebrities like Jennifer Lopez, whose life is a storybook romance, until she is suddenly a punishing diva ho.

I think I just argued myself into the idea that Mary Sue is a feminist issue. Huh.

Anyway, my thinking about Mary Sues began to change when I found out they used to be the (a) most popular and (b) highly prized genre of fan fiction. It's only recently -- say, ten years -- that people have begun looking down on Mary Sues so consistently. I look down on them generally, because they tend to be unsubtle and clumsy, but I've finally come to the conclusion that they're harmless.

Some people define a Mary Sue merely as an authorial insertion. Other people seem to require a degree of wish fulfilment to push a character over the line.

I said something of the kind in GWW, but I think Mary Sues happen when authorial self-insertion comes without any authorial self-examination.

re: male Mary Sues--It's not as if all those hard-boiled detectives who get the blonde and the whiskey were completely original characters whose authors had absolutely no desire to beat up bad guys and be irresistable to women.

Some people define a Mary Sue merely as an authorial insertion. Other people seem to require a degree of wish fulfilment to push a character over the line.

Mary Sue doesn't just mean that you admire the character and wish you could be her. Mary Sue means that she can do no wrong.

Which means I may have misused the term above. What I was objecting to was Hamilton's saying that the character's tastes were exactly hers, that anything she'd buy the character would buy as well. I think that's a failure of imagination.

Yeah...inclined to agree.