Mary Sue

[dreamer_easy]

"If members reserved their criticism of female characters for those who fit the Mary Sue stereotype, I would have expected to see many female characters develop in the fan fiction with the support of the community. In fact, Johana Cantor's challenge posed in 1980, 'Why is it that in a group that is probably 90% female, we have so few stories about believeable, competent, and identifiable-with women?' remains substantially unmet. The term Mary Sue seems to expand to encompass the characters women write to overcome that onus... participants at a panel discussion in January of 1990 noted with growing dismay that any female character created within the community is damned with the term Mary Sue.

"At Clippercon in 1987, a panel of women who do not write female characters in their stories described similar experiences as the reason they write only about the male characters that appear in the source products themselves:

-[... [e]very time I've tried to put a woman in any story I've ever written, everyone immediately says, this is a Mary Sue.
- The automatic reaction you are going to get is 'that's a Mary Sue'.

In her analysis, Johanna Cantor suggests an explanation...

...Could it be also that we are afraid, as women, to put into our creations that touch of humanity for which read touch of self, that might make them a little too real?... We're not going to get rid of the term Mary Sue... But we can be prepared to turn a resolutely deaf ear, as we work on what we want to work on."

- Camille Bacon-Smith, Enterprising women: television fandom and the creation of popular myth (University of Philadelphia Press, 1992), pp 110-111.

Comments

[outsdr.livejournal.com]

I think you've done okay; you've only had one Mary Sue that I know of, and she wasn't a bad character at all; she was only a Mary Sue in as much as I recognized her as obviously being a close reflection of the author (IMHO), without being the god-like white knight that saves the day.

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

I theeenk you may have mistaken my intention here. :)

[outsdr.livejournal.com]

Maybe. But my intention was to point out of all the characters you've written, male and female, only one ever appeared to me to be Mary Sue. And I never really saw any of them as being weakly-developed. So, have you as an author ever been accused of Mary-Sueism based upon the characters you've written?


Or am I truly missing something here, which is entirely possible.

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

I think the whole concept is a crock. I diskard it. :)

[dameruth.livejournal.com]

Huh. I have to say, I've never chosen to write (or not write) fanfic about a character because of their *gender,* nor would I particularly give a rip about having my versions of canon characters (or any OCs I would develop) being labeled as such -- *unless* the negative reviewers could give damn good reasons that were worth seriously evaluating.

Though, FWIW, I haven't encountered any particular screeches of "Mary Sue" in my little corner of fandom, at least not referring to fic. I've seen a surprising amount of bitching about *canon,* though; perhaps the phenomenon is shifting focus . . .

[alryssa.livejournal.com]

Oddly, I think DW fandom is something of an oddity amongst fandoms, because its very setup pretty much requires a kind of Mary Sue or Self-Insert stereotype; its use was in fact encouraged and abetted by the show's format, since the companion role is a cipher for audience participation.

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

Oh, that's a very good point - the companion is the ordinary person thrust into the fantastic world.

I can't for the life of me work out what the objection is to self-inserts, though.

[outsdr.livejournal.com]

I suppose it could be argued that Captain Jack is a Mary-Sue of RTD. Which would therefore require an entirely new label ... Nancy-Sue? :o

;)


In all seriousness though, I think Mary Sue is one of those terms that became over-used to the point of being meaningless. I don't follow fan-fic very much any more, so I don't know if the term is still flung around. The last time I really even remember it being used was in the title of The Mary-Sue Extrusion. I haven't read that book, although according to wikipedia you came up with the title. In my head, however, the title always seemed to be the means to destroy the concept by dragging it into the light and taking away its power.

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

Nancy-Sue

lulz

A "Mary Sue Extrusion", in my head, was a visiting entity's embodiment in a new reality. It had something to do with Yes' song Into The Lens. It made sense to me. At the time.

[dameruth.livejournal.com]

Well, in the Harry Potter fanfic world, there's always House Sparklypoo. (http://piratemonkeysinc.com/ms1.htm) Apparently it's a bit of a problem over there . . . XD

[brewsternorth.livejournal.com]

I think it gets used as a rather lazy label to cover a valid objection, which is bad writing with incomplete characterization. (Not to mention frequently poor grammar, spelling and punctuation.) Now, writers worth their ink will get over this, but it is a problem, y/n?

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

Blimey, if "Mary Sue" encompasses everything from "incomplete characterisation" to "poor punctuation", it really is a meaningless catch-all term.

[alryssa.livejournal.com]

Well, speaking purely from a personal perspective, when I used to read fanfic from other fandoms featuring self-insert characters, I found them bordering on voyeurism; they are an undisguised author avatar, without even the veneer of pretending to be someone else. For my part, it makes me uncomfortable; I'm there to read about the canon characters, not someone else's suddenly extremely personal fantasy!

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

Hmmm... that sounds as though it's original characters that are the problem, rather than self-inserts per se. I know personally I read fic for the regular characters - it takes an exceptional writer to get me interested in their original characters. (Although by "self-insert" I don't just mean a literal guest-starring role for the actual author, with name and background unchanged!)

[klgaffney.livejournal.com]

i think i've managed to avoid that; at least nobody's called any of mine a mary sue where i could see them. ;) i think it's just harder for any one to say something like that when there's more than one really interesting woman character within a given story. on the other hand, i think it's more plausible for people to call me on "gary stu"s but i sincerely doubt that would ever happen, because yeah, there is that bias. i've wondered about that too. do you think there's a possibility there that it's the current safe and acceptable outlet to criticize female characters in stories as opposed to bashing other women? because there's even more heroic male characters written by men and i don't see those being called anything.

at any rate, i do remember when the term did actually mean something. much like "emo," i think it's misused to the point where it no longer means anything, and i wouldn't miss it if suddenly went away.

back on a personal level, don't think there's anything wrong with self-inserts. what made a mary sue a mary sue was the part where author's darling syndrome ate all the characterization-- everyone loved them without reason or reserve, the universe magically rearranges itself around them without any good reason for this to be so--but i also poke at that same issue with male characters. if the characterization is believable and consistent? whatever. i've got no problem with it.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

[ex-benpayne119.livejournal.com]

My understanding of the term Mary Sue was not just that it represented some kind of extension of the author into the narrative as character, but that it did so in a wish-fulfilment, idealised way. A Mary Sue is a character who does all the things you wish you could do, a kind of whitewashed romanticised version of yourself.

I don't know if that's its common usage, and as a term it's probably misleading in that the problem is more the lack of depth in characterisation than the self-insertion, although I think it hints at a valid and useful lesson for newbie writers: sometimes it's the characters who we identify most with that we portray with the least depth. Because we understand our own motives already :-)

fwiw I think it's just as, if not more common to male writers as female.

That's my understanding anyway... I could be wrong...

[ajponder.livejournal.com]

Maybe we don't have many stories about "believable, competent identifiable" women because as soon as a woman becomes competent she becomes less believable? Just a sad thought. Oh yes, and as soon as she becomes identifiable perhaps then she is a Mary Sue?

Then again, perhaps the Mary Sue is not so much a negative phenomena as a positive one, redressing (in times not so long past) how women couldn't do anything and so perhaps writers made their somen do the interesting things they were always too scared to do. The bite back was when people got sick of those stories because they weren't so important anymore, but now everyone is still "looking" for Mary Sue's and if you're looking for things - well, you often find them, whether they're there or not :)