I think it's valid in its original context: discussing characters in fanfiction who look like unconscious, straight-to-the-page projections of their authors' fantasies (although that opens the entire question of what fanfiction is, if not projection of fantasies: maybe not if I were on the show, but certainly if I wrote the show) to the point that the levels of special make the reader want to scream. I do not think it can be applied to original fiction, because who determines what's an acceptable level of authorial stand-in or autobiographical detail or fill in the blank, really? Elizabeth Taylor had violet eyes. I very much doubt that makes her a Mary Sue. And when it becomes used as a term for any successful female protagonist? Pass the tire iron, please.
See, that's the thing. I will admit, up front, that, to varying degrees, almost all my characters are autobiographical, that they are all, in one way or another, projections.
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I think it's valid in its original context: discussing characters in fanfiction who look like unconscious, straight-to-the-page projections of their authors' fantasies (although that opens the entire question of what fanfiction is, if not projection of fantasies: maybe not if I were on the show, but certainly if I wrote the show) to the point that the levels of special make the reader want to scream. I do not think it can be applied to original fiction, because who determines what's an acceptable level of authorial stand-in or autobiographical detail or fill in the blank, really? Elizabeth Taylor had violet eyes. I very much doubt that makes her a Mary Sue. And when it becomes used as a term for any successful female protagonist? Pass the tire iron, please.
See, that's the thing. I will admit, up front, that, to varying degrees, almost all my characters are autobiographical, that they are all, in one way or another, projections.