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.
So LKH yearns for orgies. Hmm.
So LKH yearns for orgies.
With her pets, apparently.
Who doe--okay, that one not so much.
So LKH yearns for orgies.
With her pets, apparently.
Not. Enough. Brain. Bleach.
Whyfor must you be so evil so early???
Anita is flawed enough that I don't really read her as a Mary Sue. There are some symptoms -- everyone wants her, including many of the bad guys, and then there's the whole power-of-the-month club membership -- but she doesn't have quite the sense that lint never clings to her black trousers that I pick up from characters that I think of as Mary Sues.
By the way, I explained the idea of "Mary Sue" at my local bookgroup, after saying, "At least she's not some damn Mary Sue" about a book's protagonist. The phrasing came as a surprise to one of the members, whose name is, in fact, Mary Sue. She occasionally tells me that she's still waiting for the psychic communication with her cats to kick in.
Anita is flawed enough that I don't really read her as a Mary Sue.
Early Anita is flawed. What's wrong with late Anita?
