Anghraine

Thank you! I wasn't sure it'd be coherent or interesting to anyone but me, but I wanted to do it. I did mean it to be a more general one, but I figure I can just do one every once in awhile.

I get Mary Sue paranoid a lot. I suspect you never got that accusation because Mary Sue's biggest flaw is to suck the story in like a black hole, deforming it.

Yeah, I tend to think so too. I mean, my personal concept of Mary Sue is -- it's like we were saying in chat, the common traits are but a symptom of the disease! For me, Mary Sue is all about receiving narrative attention that isn't commensurate with her in-story importance. In Catalyst, she's mostly ... a lens, I guess. (A deeply tinted lens, at that.)

Oh, I totally forgot about -- heeeeeh, that was back in the olden days of yore, before Austen fandom got its claws on any mainstream fandom concepts. Before anybody knew what 'AU' stood for! Heh, of course.

The 'NOT A DANGER NOT A DANGER' thing was definitely ... I mean, there was a lot of Mary Sue paranoia going on when I created her, but OTP BREAKER paranoia was rather stronger. Hence my fairly strident insistence that there was nothing between them ever. (In fact, I originally intended her to be the cousin in TRAAR, and only invented another one because I didn't want to be lynched.)