Confession: I used to write with a recurring Mary Sue.
People who write know what that means--especially fanfiction, though it happens in all genres to some degree. 'Twilight', I'm looking at you.
A 'Mary Sue' is a colloquialism within writing communities for a poorly-written author-proxy character who is perfect and faultless and everyone loves her. She's usually everything the author is or wishes they could be. Mary Sues are beautiful, intelligent, witty, mysterious, and often tortured souls. They often have unnatural features like cat ears, wings, tails, colour-changing eyes, or unusual hair colours. They usually get paired with main characters on whom the writer has a crush.
Mostly they're written by young writers, pre-teens and adolescents who have only just discovered the joys of writing and who haven't yet grasped how to write well-rounded and believable characters. Some are written by adults, but mostly it's a younger thing.
I wrote one. Back when I was about eleven or twelve. And she actually stayed in my mental roster for a good few years.
Her name, I am embarrassed to admit, was 'Tigress'. Sometimes she was called 'Tiger'. She had black hair and green eyes. She also had steel wings and a tail and was the half-god child of a divinity. And she had magic powers. And everyone fell in love with her.
I'm so glad I don't do shit like that anymore.
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