You know, I usually focus my thoughts on how to write well, rather than on good and bad critique techniques or the terminology said critique use. For this post, I was focused on that one term, and why I think it is not a valid critique.
Yet so many of the responses diverge back to my primary interest--how to write well! Is that because I (quite on purpose) have so many writers on my friends' list? Or is it because critique of terminology is twee and just too nerdy?
As to "Gary/Larry/Marty Stu", I strongly suspect that the masculine forms were was coined after somebody heard a complaint that this critique was being applied solely to women characters and women writers, and that wasn't fair. Rather than admit to sexism (which is, after all, a Bad Thing), they cast about for a male character they could similarly denigrate. But then--it would be _terrible_ to call some male a "Mary Sue", so they made a masculine version of the term to use instead. In my mind, the fact that people thought it necessary to re-gender the term to apply it to a male character just underscores the sexism. After all, no one talks about female sleuths as the new "Sherry Holmes", they call them "Sherlock" just like a new male sleuth.
no subject
Yet so many of the responses diverge back to my primary interest--how to write well! Is that because I (quite on purpose) have so many writers on my friends' list? Or is it because critique of terminology is twee and just too nerdy?
As to "Gary/Larry/Marty Stu", I strongly suspect that the masculine forms were was coined after somebody heard a complaint that this critique was being applied solely to women characters and women writers, and that wasn't fair. Rather than admit to sexism (which is, after all, a Bad Thing), they cast about for a male character they could similarly denigrate. But then--it would be _terrible_ to call some male a "Mary Sue", so they made a masculine version of the term to use instead. In my mind, the fact that people thought it necessary to re-gender the term to apply it to a male character just underscores the sexism. After all, no one talks about female sleuths as the new "Sherry Holmes", they call them "Sherlock" just like a new male sleuth.