Thinky thoughts for the evening – really, for the last week or so – that I’m to the point of going “fuck if someone else has said it, or if it pisses anyone off”.

There has been, since I started writing, this concept of the Mary Sue. The “badly written authorial insert”, nominally. Always female. Often young. Always the protagonist of the fic.

And you know what? That discourages people from seeing themselves as the protagonist. It says that only certain types of people are allowed to be protagonists, and certainly not anyone who identifies as female.

That probably has been said more eloquently by people who have more time and faster fingers on the keyboard. I’ve probably even seen it float past on my dash. Still needed to articulate it anyway.

But that definition of Mary Sue has made it incredibly hard for me to be confident of OCs, especially non-male OCs, until recently. Left me wary of shaping characters who in any way resembled me that were meant for anything other than throw-away fic. Stuff meant to be self-deprecating and laughed at. Not with. At.

It’s that which made the post about doing a self-indulgent self-insert thing in January make me stop and think and go… “yes, yes I want to do this, even if no one reads.” And honestly, I don’t think the intrusive, niggling thought that no one wants to see a protagonist who is agender, aro-ace*, with invisible disabilities and mental health issues, deeply introverted, sometimes non-verbal, sometimes can’t be brief to save their life, both badly touch-starved and averse to physical contact (especially with strangers and/or without knowing it’s coming), and prone to severe bouts of anxiety when in unfamiliar non-emergency situations (and sometimes in emergency situations, too, the mess in my head keeps getting worse) will go away.

In short, I keep having this niggling fear that no one is going to want to see me in a story. Especially if I’m doing me from a first-person POV, as I am with the one. And may well do with the other. And doing the “gonna save as many as I can” thing, provided someone believes me, and doesn’t just think I’m crazy.

Anyway. I keep telling myself that this fear is my brain lying to me, and I’ll be fine, but it won’t shut up, because it’s winter and there’s not enough sun and it’s been a crap year for brain chemistry anyway, and yeah. I’m going to go back to attempting to write myself into my favorite universes, and see if I can’t keep my favorites alive because what else is writing self-indulgent fluff for?

(Do not tell me for getting into the pants of favorite characters, unless you mean that literally in the “their letting me borrow their clothes because I only have what I showed up in” sense. For others, yes, it may be. See also aromantic asexual*. I’ll be fine without sex or romance.)

*Asexual spectrum, because seriously, there’s flexibility and fluctuation in there for me, and it’s just easier to say ace and be done with it than try to explain further.