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

[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!)