Mal ,'Bushwhacked'
There's more to life than watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer! No. Really, there is! Honestly! Here's a place for Buffistas to come and discuss what it is they're reading, their favorite authors and poets. "Geez. Crack a book sometime."
Mary Sue is a great term, and I tend to apply it to both male and female characters, but I tend to define it as a comic-book-style (in fact, DC-style) superhero in a shades-of-grey novel world.
Except for Big Blue, the dudes of DC are pretty damned flawed and often wrong.
It's part of their charm.
interested in fucking two non-humans all at the same time.
Oh, if it were only two. Two would be monogamy for the new, improved Anita, now with extra ardeur.
Well, mostly two, or three. But no more than 6, I'm sure.
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.
CoughSpenserCough
Is there an official term for a male Mary Sue? Markey Steve, probly not.
I usually see Marty Stu.
I am equal opportunity these days, and apply Mary Sue across the board. I also use it descriptively, to mean any authorial ego-ideal insertion, whether or not it is skillfully done; most people I talk to use it only in a derogatory sense.
Did it seem to anyone else that Leiber pulled a Heinlein and towards the end of his writing career spent more time on soft-core porn and women with shaven "privies" than on adventure?
I wouldn't go quite that far, but I definitely know what you mean. The last one in particular was surprisingly porny. I attribute it to the fact that it was the 1980s by then and he could actually say the things that he could only suggest back in the 1960s. I mean, all of the books have lots of gratuitous sex, he just describes it in more detail as time goes by.
And I could be totally wrong about this, but I suspect including some naughtiness made the stories easier to sell to a high-paying magazine like Playboy.
Leiber always did have a fair amount of kink in his stories. Part of their charm. I suspect Strega is right that shifting standards allowed him to be more explicit. Also, he wrote those after his wife died so he might've been indulging that aspect of his fantasy life a bit more.
Are we discussing Fafhrd's preference for barely pubescent girls? Because I found that very disturbing.