The term as originally coined (initially almost entirely used by women, as both fanfic writers and their primary readers were women at the time!) was about a character who has pretty much no purpose in the story except to serve as a vehicle for authorial fantasy--thus she (or he, for a Stu) warps the story around her, despite never having established skills or training can always manage to save the day, has romantic liasons with the main characters, pushing aside anyone they were involved in in canon, etc. It wasn't simply authorial insertion characters (like, you mean, any Heinlein hero ever, particularly the old men?), but ones that were clearly a thin fantasy that had a very limited (possibly singular) audience.
Switching gears, if I had to point out a single character that got thought of as a Gary Stu in commercial fiction, it would have to be Wesley Crusher in Star Trek: TNG -- a character who was a clear special snowflake (a teen where the rest were adults, an untrained tinker while the rest were Starfleet-trained, and only nominally Starfleet), and yet tended to be the viewpoint character and solve the plot in any character he played a significant role in. But frankly, people didn't need to coin (or use) the Stu term to describe what was wrong with Wesley.
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Date: 2016-01-23 03:28 am (UTC)Switching gears, if I had to point out a single character that got thought of as a Gary Stu in commercial fiction, it would have to be Wesley Crusher in Star Trek: TNG -- a character who was a clear special snowflake (a teen where the rest were adults, an untrained tinker while the rest were Starfleet-trained, and only nominally Starfleet), and yet tended to be the viewpoint character and solve the plot in any character he played a significant role in. But frankly, people didn't need to coin (or use) the Stu term to describe what was wrong with Wesley.