Pottersues
| Website | |
|---|---|
| Name: | The Potter Sue of the Day; Pottersues |
| Owner/Maintainer: | Pottersues |
| Dates: | 2003- |
| Type: | meta |
| Fandom: | Harry Potter |
| URL: | Livejournal |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Pottersues is a Livejournal blog devoted to posting Mary Sues from Harry Potter fanfiction. The blog has gone through several owners, and the profile links to numerous other LJs that were inspired by Pottersues to catalogue Mary Sues in their own fandom. As of 2021, most posts received only a few comments, but at the height of Harry Potter fandom, some posts could inspire hundreds of comments. Pottersues was home to several classic wanks and the number of Sues catalogued numbers over five thousand.
Entries encourage other users to pick the story and OC apart for themselves, and while the official policy was anti-harassment of the original author, it was acknowledged that no one could actually stop people from seeking the story out to flame the author personally.
Recent goings-on in deleterius made me think it would be funny to change the subtitle of this journal to Crushing your puny dreams, one Mary-Sue at a time! So I did... but it got me thinking, as trolls and disgruntled Sue Authors often do, about why I do this. croaky mentioned something in her own journal a few days ago about how for people who say we hate something, Sue journals and badfic communities sure go out of our way to seek it out, and I think she hit the mark precisely - I do not do this because I hate Mary-Sues.Actually, having written an assload of Sues of my own (in fact, considering that I pretend to be a romance novelist, one could say I never stopped), I have a fair amount of affection for the genre. A comparison is often made between the sporking of Sues and the reviewing of bad movies, and it's really very apt... especially when you consider that I also tend to like really bad movies. Old B movies (and, for that matter, new B movies) are a lot of fun to watch, and Mary-Sues are a lot of fun to read. I suppose this doesn't come across very much in this journal, but then, I write pottersues trying to be funny, and withering scorn tends to be funny... if you don't believe me, go to the library and take out I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie!. It's by Roger Ebert. A lot of the reviews in it are funnier than the movies.
A Mary-Sue fic and a bad movie are both created by people with the best intentions - they're really trying to tell the best story they possibly can. This doesn't lift the result out of the toilet, but it's a factor in audience enjoyment. (....) I don't doubt that getting bad reviews is probably a bit hurtful to movie-makers, but being adults, I think they probably shrug and go, "oh, well, it made X million dollars, so my target audience liked it, and that's all that matters." Most Sue Authors probably do the same thing: "oh, well, it got X good reviews, so my friends liked it, and that's all that matters." They're not writing these fics for us any more than moviemakers are thinking about Roger Ebert. (...)
So to the Sue Authors of the world: I liked your fanfic, really I did, just not for the reasons you might have wanted me to. After all... if I didn't like it, I wouldn't read it.