Mary Sue and Her Cousins

Meta
Title:	Mary Sue and Her Cousins
Creator:	[B B]
Date(s):	November 1997
Medium:	print
Fandom:
Topic:
External Links:
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

Mary Sue and Her Cousins is a 1997 essay by [B B].

It was printed in Strange Bedfellows (APA) #19.

Some Topics Discussed

• it's not misogynistic to dislike Mary Sue characters
• people need to be better writers
• so much more

From the Essay

Certain topics are hardy perennials in fannish discussions. One, which generally pops up in "why slash?" debates, has to do with Mary Sues and whether, in fact, the term ought to be abolished because it scares women away from writing strong female characters and forces them to write slash instead. Ordinarily this cues me directly into my "we don't need strong female characters, we need interesting female characters" rant, but this time around I thought I'd sneak up on it from a different angle.

The classic Mary Sue is an original character who is a blatant stand-in for the author. Canon characters fall in love with her, we hear at length about how wonderful she is, and the general effect is pretty icky. The term has gotten extended to include any character who is or seems to be a stand-in for the author, even if that character is a walk-on or an in-joke rather than a wish-fulfillment fantasy. And, yes, any original female character is at some risk for being dubbed Mary Sue.

Not surprisingly, many writers are quite touchy on this point, and don't see why their assertion "No, this character is not me" can't be taken as authoritative and close the issue of Mary Suedom. I don't want to get sidetracked into the question of how much weight authorial intent should be given in literary criticism, but readers do tend to be skeptical of "oh, she's not me-her eyes are blue and mine are brown." And, of course, authors get irritated when a character that they intended to be Harlan Ellison in drag is taken to be their idealized self-image.

The title of this piece is "Mary Sue and Her Cousins" because I want to argue that when readers call a character Mary Sue despite plausible denials from the author, they are not necessarily revealing internalized misogyny. A character can give off the Mary Sue vibe even if she does not in fact represent the author's effort to shoehorn herself into the story and get the canon characters to act like her fans.

Role Model is Mary Sue's lookalike first cousin. The author wants us to admire her, and to that end loads her down with strengths, virtues, and skills, gives her snappy dialogue and has her win battles with tough opponents ~ and then, to the author's consternation, readers dismiss her as a Mary Sue and go back to reading A/V. Obviously, the author concludes, slash readers are self-hating women. Why else would they prefer to read smut about a homicidal sociopath and a drunken thief when they could be having their consciousness raised with patriarchy-subverting fantasies of female empowerment?

The element of question-begging in this formulation if apparently invisible to its proponents. Although they often identify themselves as feminists, in this respect they bear an eerie resemblance to those men who explain their chronic failure to get dates by declaring that women are not only self-hating but programmed by their biology to desire abuse, and are therefore incapable of appreciating what a wonderful person the dateless guy is. This even after he's given them a detailed list of his plethora of good qualities, with special emphasis on niceness, sense of humor, charm, and humility.

The more the author declares a character to be "the best," (or the bravest, or the most brilliant, and so on) the less likely the reader is to believe it. It's better to show the reader that X is competent than to assert that X is the best there ever was. Assertions of that sort risk what Monty Python fans will recognize as the Mr. Neutron effect. Some writers have gotten the idea that if they show X doing something reasonably intelligent, and then have other characters pronounce it brilliant, this establishes X's credentials as a genius. Actually, it establishes the story as taking place in the Reduced IQ Alternate Universe. In the kingdom of the lobotomized, Mary Sue Average is above average.

Does X have her own agenda, or is she following the authors'? In one sense, of course, every character in the story is following the author's agenda. However, they've got to be supplied with motivations that make sense within the story, as opposed to "I am doing this because the narrative will hit a dead end if I don't." The author may want X to suffer so that canon characters (and the reader) will respect and admire her. But if that seems to be what X wants, the reader is almost bound to see her as either a badly done Mary Sue, or a rather creepy case study.

A male, canonical character cannot by definition be a Mary Sue. That's a pity, since it leaves us without a critical vocabulary to discuss Beloved Adversary or The Void Aflame Like a Bonfire. Another of Mary Sue's cousins is what we might as well call the SuperCharacter. Some writers see fanfic as an opportunity to cut through all that ambiguity in the canon and prove that their favorite character really is perfect, or at least clearly superior to everyone else. The chosen character doesn't merely have a starring role, he's head and shoulders above the rest of the cast. Unfortunately, the way this is achieved usually involves digging a shallow trench and forcing the other characters to stand in it. In B7 fandom, the problem is especially common in Avon- and Blake-centered stories. Avon fans sometimes write Blakes who are self-righteously and murderously moronic, while Blake fans sometimes write Avons who not only can't win an argument with Blake, they couldn't win an argument with a bumper sticker. The theory is that the favored character not only looks good by comparison, he gains reader sympathy for what he has to put up with. This is, I maintain, as much wish-fulfillment as the classic Mary Sue, and it gives me the same sense of embarrassment as a reader.

In discussing the cause and cure of Mary Sue, one is in danger of ending up with nothing more than the revelation that if people were better writers, they'd be better writers. But I think there's more to it than that. Mary Sue and her kin are a form of bad writing that results from an author's inability or unwillingness to see the world from a perspective other than her own. That failure of imagination has consequences which go beyond lousy fanfic.

It may seem that I'm making unreasonable demands on fanfic. This is, after all, a form of writing we do for sheer love: there's no profit involved and only the narrowest sort of fame. So, why shouldn't an author commit Mary Sue if that's what she wants to do? It's not her job to help people avoid being victims of crime, or to keep arguments from degenerating into self-righteous posturing. Besides, any artist who expects to see her work make a dent in such problems is courting the kind of despair that killed Kurt Cobain. (He's not the only one, of course. But he seems to have been especially unprepared to have the same kind of thugs who made his life miserable in high school buy his records, attend his concerts, and continue to be thugs.) This is all true enough, but it overlooks the reason why writers bother to put their fantasies down on paper in the first place. They don't just want to "express themselves," they want to share with other people. (Which in turn brings up the vexed and flammable subject of criticism in fandom, but that's another essay.) The reason "Mary Sue" is a pejorative is that characteristically, sharing doesn't happen. The author's pleasure isn't communicated to those she is trying to entertain. She's like someone who invites other people to dinner, and instead of serving them food allows them to watch her eat.

There is no such thing as Mary Sue fandom in the sense that there is slash fandom or h/c fandom. Yet classic Mary Sue has her defenders. Some are the sort unreflecting feminists who assume that women writing about women must be a Good Thing, and the quality of the stories is irrelevant. (Or invisible. Tone-deaf people usually at least concede that other people can perceive tone, but style-deaf people tend to think that style is illusory, and their inability to perceive it shows their superior honesty and/or sophistication.)

Others are concerned that the stigma of Mary Sue has led women to place their own lives and experiences off limits as a source of writing material. While this concern sounds valid in the abstract, as a practical matter there are writers of Mary Sue whose lives are far more interesting than their fiction. The difficulty is literary rather than political, and I say that knowing full well how difficult (OK, impossible) it is to disentangle the two completely.

Some may also have chosen to rehabilitate Mary Sue as a reaction against the "What can a woman know about (fill in the blank)?" brand of misogyny, the brand which assumes that ignorance of life is crime of which a male writer is innocent until proven guilty, whereas a female writer is guilty by definition. If one has had to deal with certain fanboys' delusion that their terror of catching girl cooties constitutes a defense of literary standards, one may well want to beat them over the head with Mary Sue or anything else that comes to hand. They're as incapable of seeing multiple perspectives as any fourteen-year-old penning her first fanfic, and there's less reason to hope they'll grow out of it. Still, one really can't justify bad art with the fact that some critics deserve worse.

Usenet is a great place to people-watch and be exposed to different subcultures and interest groups. It can be a humbling experience to discover that what one supposed to be an amazingly perceptive insight into other people's lives is regarded by those other people as What Every Clueless Newbie Says. If you're there to learn, it's wise to lurk (that is, to read without posting) and watch other clueless newbies do things like post to soc.bi asking whether bisexuals aren't really homosexuals who can't admit it. Lurking at flamewars can also be educational, not just for the points at issue but for the chance to observe people in conflict. A good many writers seem to have trouble writing argument scenes in which both characters are actually trying to win: instead, one character is there to provide the other one with an opportunity to spout what the author hopes will be ringing lines.

Mary Sue is bad art, and the cure for it isn't slash (as witness the number of SuperCharacters who pop up in slash stories), or the elimination of original female characters, but better writing. Fandom's ambivalent attitude toward criticism seems to have left some writers with the impression that not only is it wrong to say that one finds someone else's work deficient, it may even be in some sense unfannish to care too much about the quality of one's own writing.