Of OC's and Mary Sues
by: I am a Critic. Fear me.
In my two years of knowing this fandom, I have encountered many of these sorts. I've seen different OC's out there, different types of Mary Sues or whatever most people want to call self-insert characters that are not too favorable for their own good. Needless to say, I have also seen how people react to OC's. As often as we want to believe it to be, OC's are most likely attributed to Mary Sues.
True, all Mary Sues are OC but not all OC are Mary Sues. We have to understand, and open our minds to see the difference between the two. I'm an OC writer myself (on a different account, of course) and it hurts to realize that most readers favor non-OC fics because they're most likely to believe that they're all Mary Sues when the fact is, they're actually not. I can list a lot of authors that are OC writers, yet they leave off a remarkable impression on the readers who come across their originally written character.
Not all writers who write canon characters are as brilliant as we think they are. Oftentimes, out-of-character-ness is also a questionable issue when it comes to criticisms upon these canon characters that they're too OOC's that they tend to act Mary Sue-ish themselves.
We are here in Fanfiction to demonstrate freedom of expression. We write what we want, say what we want, post what we desire and nobody can take away that freedom from us. Just because a writer had written an OC doesn't mean s/he's the worst writer out there. An original character is not a basis of judgment with regards to the writer's ability to narrate his/her story. It's not a basis that we should all think of and compare against his/her excellence with his/her works.
Lots of commercially published works out there have Mary Sues as well that corrupted large sums of money from different publishing companies. They were simply too sneaky to have survived the intense eyes of our beloved critics. How they did that is out of my knowledge. But I can think of only one example for that.
So, STOP THE DISCRIMINATION FOR OC'S! Just because they're not canon, doesn't mean they're all Mary Sues. Be more open-minded and stop the prejudice!
Post this on your profile to spread the word. OC writers also have hearts that feel, ears that hear and eyes that read!
Yours sincerely,
I am a Critic. Fear me.