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

[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 :)