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serynI wrote an interesting comment in response to jack's post asking people not to use the pejorative term "Mary Sue" for all characters that resemble the author:
There was a really linguistically interesting fictional book by Jane Lindskold about a girl raised by magical wolves. After the girl is discovered by humans and they begin to teach her standard language including the words for the camping gear the team was using, she asks what the King's giant cloth pavilion is called. When her instructor says, "Tent." She stops thinking there is any differentiation between things and starts thinking that this human language stuff has no detail or specificity. This colors her entire belief system throughout the series and she is constantly surprised when people (who weren't raised by wolves) have any subtlety or imagination what so ever. Even after she learns there were more distinguishable terms for things and the array of adjectives and modifiers, and understands that her instructor was trying not to overwhelm her, her subconscious perspective still considers most humans to be primitive.
So I agree that the words we choose matter. Even if it's just the inside-out tangent of Sapir-Whorf which says, if you're not using the right words, it means you don't understand the concept.
As for the super-charged wonder-characters that have been pervasive in the recent spate of first-person urban fantasy novels, I don't like it at all. But it's tolerable if the characters are not a blatant rip-off of the author's self-aggrandizement. When the characters are quirky and relevant but similar to the author or author's friends, that's fine. When the characters are godlike and infallible they'd better not be modeled off anyone the author knows or I'm going to stop buying the books.
I prefer the non "urban" kind of fantasy novels where the author has to actually do some world-building and invest something into their own creativity. Many of the non-Mary-Sue urban fantasies still read like low level RPG characters were suddenly cast into the normal world. The problem I have with the Mary-Sue ones is that the author's character is level 12 when all the villains and other characters are level 4 or 5. And the author's character doesn't soliloquy, they're meta or OoC.
So. If I, as a relatively oblivious reader, notice it's a Mary Sue character, then the author has failed utterly at their main task which is diverting me from my everyday world.
I don't know what professional authors call the character inserts that aren't Mary-Sue though, I call them "modeled on a real person" if they are a take-off, or "walk-on cameos" if they're accurately reflecting someone. But I want my work getting top-billing, so I make sure the cameo appearance doesn't take over the story and get their name above the title. And I know I'm not the household name, so I want to make sure it's not my name going above the title either like when they remade Dracula but for legal reasons had to call it "Bram Stoker's Dracula".
jack's post asking people not to use the pejorative term "Mary Sue" for all characters that resemble the author:There was a really linguistically interesting fictional book by Jane Lindskold about a girl raised by magical wolves. After the girl is discovered by humans and they begin to teach her standard language including the words for the camping gear the team was using, she asks what the King's giant cloth pavilion is called. When her instructor says, "Tent." She stops thinking there is any differentiation between things and starts thinking that this human language stuff has no detail or specificity. This colors her entire belief system throughout the series and she is constantly surprised when people (who weren't raised by wolves) have any subtlety or imagination what so ever. Even after she learns there were more distinguishable terms for things and the array of adjectives and modifiers, and understands that her instructor was trying not to overwhelm her, her subconscious perspective still considers most humans to be primitive.
So I agree that the words we choose matter. Even if it's just the inside-out tangent of Sapir-Whorf which says, if you're not using the right words, it means you don't understand the concept.
As for the super-charged wonder-characters that have been pervasive in the recent spate of first-person urban fantasy novels, I don't like it at all. But it's tolerable if the characters are not a blatant rip-off of the author's self-aggrandizement. When the characters are quirky and relevant but similar to the author or author's friends, that's fine. When the characters are godlike and infallible they'd better not be modeled off anyone the author knows or I'm going to stop buying the books.
I prefer the non "urban" kind of fantasy novels where the author has to actually do some world-building and invest something into their own creativity. Many of the non-Mary-Sue urban fantasies still read like low level RPG characters were suddenly cast into the normal world. The problem I have with the Mary-Sue ones is that the author's character is level 12 when all the villains and other characters are level 4 or 5. And the author's character doesn't soliloquy, they're meta or OoC.
So. If I, as a relatively oblivious reader, notice it's a Mary Sue character, then the author has failed utterly at their main task which is diverting me from my everyday world.
I don't know what professional authors call the character inserts that aren't Mary-Sue though, I call them "modeled on a real person" if they are a take-off, or "walk-on cameos" if they're accurately reflecting someone. But I want my work getting top-billing, so I make sure the cameo appearance doesn't take over the story and get their name above the title. And I know I'm not the household name, so I want to make sure it's not my name going above the title either like when they remade Dracula but for legal reasons had to call it "Bram Stoker's Dracula".
