On Tue, Oct 23, 2001 at 05:59:50AM +0000, Sally Manton wrote:
<Dang, Avon's bratty little sister is a Mary Sue. Ah, well . . . .>
There are ways round it. Make her as plain as a pikestaff, or built like a Soviet tractor-factory queen, or a bimbette or the bimbettiest (though how she *could* be with Avonic genes I don't know) or be a compulsive chatterer with a voice like a dyspeptic cockatoo ... or Angela Anaconda, maybe?
Actually, all you need to do is make her a geek (not difficult, seeing as she has Avon-genes) and completely oblivious to her appearance. I suppose that fits in the "plain as a pikestaff" category, but not necessarily.
Unfortunately, if you added "built like a pigmy hippopotamus" then that *would* be a Mary-Sue, for moi...
(If anyone remembers the Harold Shea books... which posited that fiction was the expression of a visionary insight into real parallel universes with different laws... If my life were somebody's work of fiction, I suspect it would be some awful situation comedy or soap opera in which I was merely a recurring character...)
Kathryn Andersen -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- "He wondered what ol' Z. Z. would have said to the notion that the plot of one of his novels would endear a woman's family to the idea of marriage to an alien on a world eleven light years from his home in Muscle Head, Massachusetts." -- Empyrion: The Siege of Dome, Stephen Lawhead