The Sad Ballad of Mary Sue's Blues
| Fanfiction | |
|---|---|
| Title: | The Sad Ballad of Mary Sue's Blues |
| Author(s): | Pares |
| Date(s): | December 1998 |
| Length: | |
| Genre: | |
| Fandom: | The X-Files |
| External Links: | The Sad Ballad of Mary Sue's Blues |
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The Sad Ballad of Mary Sue's Blues is a fanwork by Pares. It is meta fiction, a piece about how fan writers are viewed by outsiders, themselves, and each other.
Fox Mulder walks into a bar...and meets Hortense Wahlberg. She says, "That's not always my name. In fact, it's never my name. I'm kind of an anti-archetype." She's a fan writer.
The author summary is: Wish fulfilment and You, understood.
Fan Reaction
Due to its unflattering look at fans, The Sad Ballad of Mary Sue's Blues was met with some criticism. Other readers found it unsettling, but praised its commentary on the role physical appearance plays in fiction, and in reality, online and off.
Pares writes:
- "To date, this is the only story ever to earn me hatemail. Some poor kid out there took it a bit too personally, and railed against me in several outraged flames. It seems she got it into her head that because our beloved Te called me Pretty Pretty Pares, I must be a supermodel, and a cruelly unkind one, at that. To her I say (gently, gently): Baby, you missed the point. Also: 'If you do not tell the truth about yourself, you cannot tell it about other people.' --Virginia Woolf"[1]
It stirred up some flames, but the story also got its share of recommendations. Te, actually name-checking Pretty Pretty Pares in the paragraph before, says: "Is it meta? Is it scary? Is it *painfully accurate*? My Lord, yes, and you better believe she took some *serious* flack for this one. I wanted to hide and I wanted to cheer."[2]
Thyme calls it "one of the most truthful stories I've read in a long while,"[3] and Sabine said of it, "Even now in the glory days of meta, kormantic's fic is still prob my favorite meta fic."[4]
References
- ^ kormantic: old school! (Last accessed 26 January 2013)
- ^ X-Files Recs (Last accessed 26 January 2013)
- ^ Fanfic Recommendations (Last accessed 26 January 2013)
- ^ sab: Fans! A Musical About the Series of N00bs! (Last accessed 26 January 2013)