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Hooray for Mary Sue!
Sep. 17th, 2013 07:02 pmHooray for imagining ourselves powerful and complete! Hooray for reinventing ourselves unique and triumphant against all odds! Hooray for making ourselves the heroes, the centre of borrowed worlds, or worlds of our own making!
I want to tell you about all my paraselves and their paracosms, but there are so many I've forgotten quite a few. Some survive only as drawings. The most important ones are easy, though.
The first was Hora, Daughter of Horus, whose DNA included Supergirl, Hawk Girl, Princess from Battle of the Planets, plus the adventures of Asterix and an early interest in Egyptian myth, and the sensation of flight engendered by our backyard trampoline. Tsuchi the rabbit-woman, somehow inspired by Watership Down - framed for murder and thrown out of her tribe, wandering warrior, lost princess, who rode a dragon-winged flying cat. And perhaps most importantly, Irin-Zhazh, the Weasel, sometimes a character I inhabited and sometimes a more of an image or symbol, an early experience of Goddess. It took me a long time to see her roots in the feminist sword and sorcery movie Hundra, with its hardy Amazons and sinuous eponymous warrior . We take from fiction what we need.
None of these were Mary Sue in the strict sense - a flattering authorial self-insert into a derivative work. They're all her cousins, though. I wrote some fanfic last year (which you simply may not see, unless I turn it into a novel, as I hope to) and found myself inhabiting the story absolutely directly in a way I haven't in a very long time - the same way I would inhabit these childhood/teenage stories as I told them to myself.
Let me see if I can't post some of my adolescent drawings of these. In the meantime, I dare you to share yours. :)
I want to tell you about all my paraselves and their paracosms, but there are so many I've forgotten quite a few. Some survive only as drawings. The most important ones are easy, though.
The first was Hora, Daughter of Horus, whose DNA included Supergirl, Hawk Girl, Princess from Battle of the Planets, plus the adventures of Asterix and an early interest in Egyptian myth, and the sensation of flight engendered by our backyard trampoline. Tsuchi the rabbit-woman, somehow inspired by Watership Down - framed for murder and thrown out of her tribe, wandering warrior, lost princess, who rode a dragon-winged flying cat. And perhaps most importantly, Irin-Zhazh, the Weasel, sometimes a character I inhabited and sometimes a more of an image or symbol, an early experience of Goddess. It took me a long time to see her roots in the feminist sword and sorcery movie Hundra, with its hardy Amazons and sinuous eponymous warrior . We take from fiction what we need.
None of these were Mary Sue in the strict sense - a flattering authorial self-insert into a derivative work. They're all her cousins, though. I wrote some fanfic last year (which you simply may not see, unless I turn it into a novel, as I hope to) and found myself inhabiting the story absolutely directly in a way I haven't in a very long time - the same way I would inhabit these childhood/teenage stories as I told them to myself.
Let me see if I can't post some of my adolescent drawings of these. In the meantime, I dare you to share yours. :)
