At 21:31 28/12/01 -0800, you wrote:
Question on opinions of Mary-Sues...
In your opinions, is it bad to do a self-insertion fanfic?
That depends what you mean by 'bad', and what you want the fiction to achieve.
If you mean 'bad' in the sense of 'fewer people will want to read it', then almost certainly yes. I think it's generally true that people who read fanfic want to read about the canonical characters, or variations of them that fit their preferences. This is a problem with *any* OC, not just self-insertion. As soon as you start giving OCs of any flavour a large part to play in the story, then you're going to lose the interest of that portion of your potential audience who want to see just canon characters.
What you then have to decide is whether or not you care.
I don't suppose that's much of a description, but does that sound to fans who know the series like an interesting spinoff or a mere excercise in vanity?
I don't think I'd read it. However, I don't read any Harry Potter fanfiction, so I'm a rotten test subject. :-)
One way to look at it would be to ask yourself--*honestly*--if you'd find the story interesting if it involved characters in the same situation but who weren't closely based on yourself and the other people you know. Or were someone else's self-insertions. If you'd still want to read it, then there's a chance other people would like your story.
However, in the end, what I'd say is: write it if *you* want to read it.
That's why I, personally, write fanfic--I want to read the stories myself. It's a bonus if other people like them too, and an even bigger bonus if they tell me so, but esentially I'm just happy to have a big pile of stories on my hard drive that are the kind of stories *I* want to read. The fact that most of them are in an very variant AU involving few canonical characters and lots of OCs taking up most of the plot is irrelevant--since I don't go around strapping other people into chairs and forcibly reading my fic to them, who cares?
In the case of your idea, writing it for myself and the other people being put into the story would be plenty enough for me. Publishing is not compulsory, nor is a large potential audience the only measure of a story's success.
love Anna