What I don't understand about the fear of Mary Sue
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| Title: | What I don't understand about the fear of Mary Sue |
| Creator: | carmarthen |
| Date(s): | 26 January 2003 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom: | |
| Topic: | |
| External Links: | What I don't understand about the fear of Mary Sue, Archived version |
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What I don't understand about the fear of Mary Sue is a 2003 essay by carmarthen.
Some Topics Discussed
The Post
I have seen m/m slash writers say that one of the reasons they write what they write is because they are afraid that if they write about female characters, they will use their own female perspective in the writing, which leads to Mary Sues.
Wait; isn't that very female perspective what helps women write believeable female characters? Isn't the male perspective what helps men write believeable male characters? Granted, both can write both well, but I've seen a lot of male writers, pro and fan, who write female characters like, well, men with breasts (drawing women seems to come more naturally to women, too, and women as men with breasts [visually and characterization-wise] is an even more common phenomenon in comics); and then there are women who write male characters like women with penises, and I don't mean the infantilization so prevalent in some slash circles.
Bringing one's own experience to one's writing, fan or pro, isn't bad. It doesn't automatically make the characters into Mary Sues. Those scraps of experience and emotion are what make writing good; they're what give it life.
Of course, I subscribe to the apparently radical notion that not every strong (or not-so-strong) female in professional fiction, or every OFC in fanfiction, is a Mary Sue. Imagine that.
Ha, behold my inability to refrain from fandom.
Excerpts from Comments at the Post
[mhari]:
Entirely too many people seem to equate any OFC with Mary Sue. I keep trying to impress upon people that the main point of Mary Sue is that she's annoying, not that she's a self-insert.
The gender thing is always dicey. Weirdly, I feel more comfortable these days writing guys, but I'm not sure why that is.
[carmarthen]:
Exactly. And even then, there's a big difference between "self-insert" and "author draws on own experiences for characterization."
Yes -- I generally feel more comfortable writing men in fanfiction, but I think that's primarily because fewer female characters tweak my bunnies (that sounded dirty but wasn't. Really). With original fiction, I can only think of one time offhand where my viewpoint character was male. I don't know why; at this point I tend to think of writing just characters, rather than Male Characters and Female Characters.
But hmm, I can see why people would want that extra level of removal from the characters, particularly for fiction with romantic and/or sexual themes. I think that's why I'm more comfortable with m/m slash than with het or f/f slash.
[sidewinder]:
But hmm, I can see why people would want that extra level of removal from the characters, particularly for fiction with romantic and/or sexual themes. I think that's why I'm more comfortable with m/m slash than with het or f/f slash.
I think that's a pretty big part of it for me...you'd think as a bi-female I'd have more interest in f/f or het, but I can read very little of either of it. Too many personal issues (and hangups, yes) come into play for me to be able to get into the "fantasy" or "romance" of those stories. Writing and reading m/m has a level of removal from myself that makes it easier to just go along with the story, the characters, etc. I also just tend to feel more in tune with male characters; whether I write them realistically or not I guess is another matter entirely, but it works for what I am personally looking for.
There are only a couple writers I know who write het fic and/or original female characters in fannish stories that I enjoy...and (maybe not so) oddly enough these are women writers who are close friends of mine and I feel are on a very similar wavelength with me personally. So I can get into the way they see and write female characters and het romances where I can't with what a lot of other authors do with the subject.
[foreverdirt]:
Ursula le Guin used to be accused of perpetrating sexual oppression or whatever the 1980s buzzwords were because so many of her major characters were male. She said that writing sci-fi and fantasy was all about putting yourself in the mind of the alien, and what could be more alien to her than the male mind?
[stungunbilly]:
There isn't, to my mind, anything inherently *wrong* with Mary Sues, or self-inserts for that matter. It happens in mainstream media all the time. Sure, many of us find it annoying. Others don't. It's opinion, innit?
I say, the more the merrier. It's about time *everybody* got to write Mary Sues and publish them. Fair's fair.
[corinna_5]:
Of course, I subscribe to the apparently radical notion that not every strong (or not-so-strong) female in professional fiction, or every OFC in fanfiction, is a Mary Sue. Imagine that.
Testify!
The next time I hear someone refer to a strong or especially capable female character in fiction as a Mary Sue, I may have to punch the person's teeth out. This is especially difficult when you have to reach through the computer, but I am feeling very motivated...
[thete1]:
And while I *have* come across OFCs that weren't Mary Sues (and OMCs that weren't Marty Stus, for that matter), it's rare. Maybe it's Sturgeon's Law, maybe it that so many of the people who write self-inserts and OCs are so inexperienced as writers, maybe it's something else altogether.
When I want to read about the hero of a given Star Trek: TOS story, well, you know? I'm kinda expecting that character to be *someone* I'd recognize from the show. Love interests, major characters in other formats... it's all the same. If you want to throw another character in there... well, you're going to have to show me why.
Or not.
After all, I'm just one reader.
But if I think an OFC's a Mary Sue? I'm gonna call it a Mary Sue. *shrug*
As for not writing female characters for fear of using my own female perspective... I have to admit that's a new one on me. I write the characters I identify with, period. Sometimes I try to challenge myself with characters that are particularly alien to me, and wind up writing from the POV of characters like Buffy, Cordelia, and Willow. *rueful smile*
I don't make a very good girl. Eh. It's a shade of the same old argument, I think.
[tanacawyr]:
male mary sues:
A main annoyance I have about the prevalence to heap contempt on any female character as a "mary sue" is that, frankly, the world is filled with male mary sues, and no one seems to mind. What do we all think James Bond is but a glorified "identify with me" male mary sue? Lots of slashers like "Phantom Menace" for the fic potential and while they might have rolled their eyes at the notion of a ten year old boy winning the pod race, they didn't spit endless streams of bile over it like they would have had it been a ten year old girl.
The world is full of idealized, perfect glorified male mary sues. I might not want to read the power fantasy of a 15 year old girl, but I don't think there's a thing wrong with her writing it when we're surrounded by power trips of 15 year old boys.
When push comes to shove, only women are ever accused of writing mary sue as if there's something wrong with it. Even the name, mary sue, presupposes the stupidity and laughability of a FEMALE self-insertion only. Sure, lots of you will admit to the possibility of a male mary sue, but only the female ones ever garner anywhere near that ocean of bilious contempt.
When it comes right down to it, male self-insertions are accepted, and female ones are laughed at. And keep in mind that I've been slashing for a decade now, so I'm definitely on that end of the spectrum. I can count the number of shipper pieces I've written on less than one hand.
I don't mind mary sue at all. What I mind is bad writing. When the two intersect, I dislike mary sue. But I will not drool over stories (movies, TV shows, etc.) that invite idealized male self-identification and then turn around and sneer at ones that do the same for women and girls.
[alara r]:
Canon characters are *allowed* to be unrealistically competent. It really kind of shoots a hole in the whole *concept* of heroic genre fiction if we're not allowed to have overly competent heroes.
Though perhaps I wonder if what people are reacting to is the "everyone wants to have sex with them" thing. Because people are a lot more likely to mock Kirk, the hyper-competent captain, than either Spock, his even more hyper-competent first officer, or Picard, an equally hyper-competent captain. James Bond and Anita Blake both have every single member of the opposite sex in the stories wanting to have sex with them; Mara Jade doesn't.
So maybe people are willing to suspend their disbelief to imagine a hero with a whole assortment of super powers, but the moment that hero is presented as sexually irresistable, suspension of disbelief goes splat. And the reaction seems just as strong, to me, against men as against women. (In fact sometimes I see the reaction being *stronger* against men... perhaps on the grounds that most fans are women, and any woman who isn't sexually attracted to James Bond or James Kirk is going to go "Why the hell aren't there any women who *don't* want this guy? I think he's fugly." I mean, me personally, that's my biggest problem with both Bond and first and second season Angel-- the "why is this guy supposed to be so hot when I think he sucks" thing. Whereas straight women aren't really in a position to say whether Anita Blake really is all that and a biscuit or not, and besides, she's a book character, so she's constructed by the imagination.)