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]

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