BTW folkss, Mary Sue concepts aren't that bad, so long as you know how to use em. Think of em as a plot device, and you're in business!
Explain.
I admit, I'm using a couple of em and they've turned out to be pretty neat!
By your standards, or the standards of your critics?
Both; but of course, my critics haven't even realized yet which of those characters is a
Mary Sue/Gary Stu, since they were downright awesome. Basically because those terms only seem to apply (blame human emotions) when a character follows the traits of it and goes bad.
When people do something, saying
this method works unlike the other so don't touch the other, I do it
completely opposite. For once thing, I've always believed that in our world there's no item that's without a purpose besides being negative, which makes me want to try things other people haven't. When I once read about people being annoyed with the rise of Mary Sue-ism in fiction, telling everyone to drop the topic because nothing good can come out of it, I decided to experiment this myself and wrote a
whole god-damned book (unpublished) about it. At least 20% of the characters are based on me, but are pretty well developed to have flaws and strengths alike, and yes, a couple of them also have those tragic pasts you worry about, but funny enough none of them were emo. Only a few trusted folks have read the manuscript, but they're pretty rational and dang awesome to help me correct any kind error or flaw, and none of them complained (or even noticed) about the concept I was secretly following.
Can't tell you
how I did it (it's all confidential), but the most logical fact would be that Mary Sue is nothing more than a plot device, either intentional or unintentional, but tricky to pull off nonetheless. Sometimes people fail, sometimes they get pretty awesome results.
Oh yeah! I also have werewolves and vampires in (the sequel of) my novel. And no, they aren't like Twilight. :S I'm more fond of Mystery/Thriller genre, and involved a little supernatural to it.