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The Game of the Gods is a sustained act of literary criticism that also happens to be a multipart fanfic. Constance Cochrane turned me on to it. In the frame tale, Varda and Morgoth* play at chess. Varda’s pieces and moves assert reality. Morgoth’s gambits are the different varieties of Mary Sues that turn up in Lord of the Rings fanfic. The play of their game consists of Morgoth telling that particular Mary Sue’s tale, while Varda tries to counter it by invoking logic, common sense, and the narrative integrity of Tolkien’s universe.
From the sound of things, LOTR fanfic readers have had their patience sorely tried. For those who haven’t had their patience tried nearly enough, Deleterius & cronies have been collecting LOTR and Harry Potter Mary Sues.
Further words on the Matter of Mary Sue, and related issues:
A Mary Sue story is the literary equivalent of opening a package that you thought would be the new jacket you ordered on eBay, only it turns out to contain a poorly-constructed fairy princess costume made of some lurid and sleazy material. It’s tailored to fit a human-size Barbie doll, not you; and when you hold it up to the light, you can see the picked-out stitchmarks where someone else’s name used to be embroidered across the bodice. The dress has been used but not cleaned, and appears to have last been worn during a rather sloppy romantic interlude …
More formally:
MARY SUE (n.): 1. A variety of story, first identified in the fan fiction community, but quickly recognized as occurring elsewhere, in which normal story values are grossly subordinated to inadequately transformed personal wish-fulfillment fantasies, often involving heroic or romantic interactions with the cast of characters of some popular entertainment. 2. A distinctive type of character appearing in these stories who represents an idealized version of the author. 3. A cluster of tendencies and characteristics commonly found in Mary Sue-type stories. 4. A body of literary theory, originally generated by the fanfic community, which has since spread to other fields (f.i., professional SF publishing) because it’s so darn useful. The act of committing Mary Sue-ism is sometimes referred to as “self-insertion.”
As it says on The Official Mary Sue Society Avatar Appreciation Site, Mary Sue
…is created to serve one purpose: wish fulfillment. … She did not receive her current name until the early 1970s. The original was Lieutenant Mary Sue (“the youngest Lieutenant in the fleet — only fifteen and a half years old”) as immortalized in Paula Smith’s “A Trekkie’s Tale,” which she wrote and published in her 1974 fanzine Menagerie #2.Or, obviously, Galadriel’s secret love-child (Aragorn’s unacknowledged daughter) who runs off to join the Company of the Ring, sorts out Boromir’s problems, out-magics Gandalf, out-fights Aragorn during the melodramatic scene in which she reveals her true identity, demonstrates herself to be so spiritually elevated that the Ring has no effect on her, and wins Legolas’ heart forever. (See also the classic Nine Men and a Little Lady).
Mary Sue, as this archetype became known, was generally a brilliant, beautiful, multi-talented girl Starfleet officer who joined the Enterprise crew and usually either made off with a main male canon character’s heart (or several of them!), or died dramatically in his arms. I’m sure anyone in any fandom out there who’s read fanfiction can make a similar analogy within their own experiences. Mary Sues exist in every fanficdom:— the pretty new Immortal who stumbles into MacLeod’s (or Methos’) arms
— the uberpowered kid who joins Generation X
— the female bronzerider with her firelizard flock
— the kitchen-drudge-cum-HeraldMage out on her first circuit
— the notorious Marrissa Amber Flores Picard Gordon…
Mary Sue literary theory has changed my professional life. Before, when discussing manuscripts with my colleagues, I had to say things “You know, one of those books that keeps telling you how wonderful and talented and perfect the main character is and how much everyone loves her, but aside from that there’s nothing at stake and nothing really happens? No logic, no causality, no narrative development, just that character being wonderful every barfy step of the way?”
Generally they knew what I meant; we see a lot of books like that. But those conversations have gotten much easier now that I can say things like “See if the author will agree to rewrite it from another character’s point of view—that main character is a screaming Mary Sue.” Or: “I sent it back. The agent was all excited about how the author’s ‘expanding into a new genre’, but it’s just a Mary Sue with jousting scenes pasted in.”
So yay for the fanfic universe for putting a name to that. They came up with the idea of formalizing the role of the beta reader, too, which is another piece of really useful literature-generating technology. If that surprises you, recollect that the primary characteristic of fanfic isn’t that it’s amateurish or derivative; it’s that it’s legally unpublishable. Some very smart people read and/or write fanfic.
(Someday, not today, I’ll tell the story of how, years ago, Joanna Russ and I used Star Trek fanfic as a sort of Rosetta Stone to decipher recurrent themes and motifs in fantasy and SF written by women. It’s often easier to see underlying patterns and mechanisms in amateur fiction than in slicker commercial work. This started when Joanna identified and described some recurrent narrative motifs she’d spotted in the Trek slash of the day, of which the inverse relationship between incidence of explicit sex and liebestod denouements was the most obvious and least important. There was much more to it. She laid out her entire description; and I, considering it, said “Which is not to say that The Left Hand of Darkness is a specimen of Star Trek slash fiction.” Joanna’s jaw dropped, and we stared at each other in wild surmise. The patterns not only fitted; they explained some otherwise inexplicable plot twists in that novel. We were on to something. And—hey! What about thus-and-such story by Zenna Henderson? And that one by Leigh Brackett? And so forth and so on, ever onward. For the next few weeks we were stoned on literary theory and the codebreaker’s buzz of seeing a seemingly knotty puzzle resolve into plaintext.)
Trek fanfic writers may have identified Mary Sue and her brother Gary Stu, but they didn’t invent them. I imagine that tales have been told of Mary Sue since storytelling was invented. The folk process tends to exclude her (nothing so unattractive as using someone else’s Mary Sue), as does stern editing; but the minute you have single-author vanity publishing, lo! There she is!
Seminal fan articles on Mary Sue-ism include Dr. Merlin’s Guide to Fan Fiction, with its equally influential accompanying Original Mary Sue Litmus Test, both by Melissa Wilson; and Sebastian’s Self-Insertion and Mary-Sue-ism. For a longer view, try Pat Pflieger’s Too Good to be True: 150 Years of Mary Sue, or Writers’ University’s startlingly accurate Fan Fiction Historical Timeline.
Caches of Mary Sue-related resources can be found at The Official Mary Sue Society Avatar Appreciation Site, with its extensive links page; at Writers’ University, which has either the largest or second-largest collection of
If you don’t have time to read all this stuff, but want to grok Mary Sue in fullness via the quick immersion method, some notably sharp-tongued and inventive Hunchback of Notre Dame fans put together a superior Hunchback of Notre Dame Mary Sue Litmus Test, plus their original Create your own gypsy character generator, complete with plot outline and important details!
Mystery Science Freezer, a site for MST3K fans, has developed a useful vocabulary of additional terms for the ways stories go wrong. See their Who Is Mary Sue? and its accompanying glossary. I particularly liked “Aura of Smooth,” which they define as “The proverbial energy field self-inserted characters generate to bend the regular cast to their wills—i.e., trusting and/or falling in love with them for no stated reason.”
Shameless Setteis and Mary Sues, a candid, thoughtful, and unsettling article, discusses “head stories,” and Japanese manga and anime’s shamelessly enthusiastic use of all the cheesiest wish-fulfillment and poor-me cliches.
In Whatever happened to Mary Sue?, Eshva argues that Mary Sues have undergone defensive diversification in reaction to the fanfic community’s greater sophistication.
If you’re a writer and are now feeling painfully self-conscious about the possibility that you could be writing Mary Sues, Meet Sarah has some good commentary on how such things get written, and B5 Help for Mary Sues has pithy advice for getting in touch with your inner Mary Sue and viciously mugging her. Alternately, just read How to Write a Mary Sue Fic in Seven Easy Steps and check to make sure you’re not following its advice.
If you’d rather just make fun of the whole thing, start by reading The Netiquette of Badfic to keep yourself in the paths of righteousness. After that you might try The Godawful Fanfic Message Board, or possibly Melvin’s Mauve Mansion of Manlove. I don’t guarantee that those sites will have the best fanfic parodies on the web, but they definitely have the best names.
Addenda: PiscusFiche, in the comments thread, has contributed a splendid link to a five-page cartoon about the metaphysical effects of having too many Mary Sues converge at one spot: Hogwarts.
Also: At least one reader has reported being puzzled at my reaction to The Game of the Gods, which he described as an inconclusive episode that’s only about one page long. He’d fallen afoul of Fanfiction.net’s visually inobvious navigation links. If you’ve had the same problem, look for the pulldown menu in the upper-right and lower-right corners of the page. If you prefer, just to the right of the pulldown menu there’s also a button marked with a tiny forward arrow. Either one of them will enable you to access all the episodes, of which there are thirty-five total.
____________________
*I was going to explain who Varda and Morgoth are, but it occurs to me that if you don’t already know that, you aren’t going to understand the rest of the frame tale anyway. Just ignore it and enjoy the parodies.
(Admit it. You thought I’d forgotten about that footnote marker.)
Darn you, Teresa! Did you have to link to the Badfic site? I could be here all NIGHT.
(Very fun write-up on the topic, though. Number 2 reason I don't read fanfic unless directed to something someone vouches for. Or I'm really bored.)
Sigh. And yet, no guide to Mary Sues and Marty Stus in Jack Chick tracts. (The household gag about The Bible Series usually involved talk of "Mary Sue-Bob.")
Specifically on the topic of Lord of the Rings fan fiction, I found this page quite amusing; the conceit is that it's the character's job to get rid of the Sues and restore things to the purity of canon.
Though they use 'Marty Sam' for the male version.
re Nine Men and a Little Lady:
oh ... my ... god.
I haven't seen anything so appalling since Mike's Bertie-at-Minas-Miglie ("Mirkwoad", I'm told it's called). Somebody's imagination is in gross violation of the leash laws....
Must read this again when I'm awake; I might actually be able to follow some of the litcrit.
I consider the Aeneid to be (the earliest?) Mary Sue (well, Gary Stu) story still extant.
I mean, come on, Virgil takes this minor little background character from Homer's Iliad and gives him amazing adventures derivative of yet surpassing Homer's Odyssey.
Am I wrong?
This topic needs a "do not read on a full stomach" warning.
Urgh.
About half an hour ago I was exposed to a Harry Potter/LotR fanfic which I shall not specify the horror of because I know Jo Walton might come through here and read this comment and I don't want to give her an aneurysm.
This has left me with an urge to write a Legolas-gets-married fanfic that's actually consistent with how I understand the canon, which is terribly, terribly peculiar as an impulse for me, as I haven't written fanfic since I was five or six and that involved Smurfs.
Maybe one of you can explain this to me. On the one hand, we have authors of utter drivel who pay to have their work published. On the other, we have some very talented writers who choose to write fanfic that can92t be published.
Why would someone with taste and talent—and many fanfic writers have both—choose to plant their roses in someone else92s garden (lousy metaphor, but it92s late and I92m tired)?
My guess would be "Because those are the stories they want to tell."
Something I've never quite understood: How is it that characters like Vlad Taltos and King Mob aren't considered some variety of Mary Sue? (Or are they, and I just have lousy taste in literary heroes?)
In any case, "Mary Sue" is a term that's started to get thrown around so much in some writing communities that it's begun to have some of its meaning diluted; it's becoming, like "pretentious," an easy curse to throw at someone who has a higher opinion of the coolness of their work than you do. Which is a shame, because it is a great and useful term. (I'm guilty myself of this; I recently said that one of the things I liked about Hellboy was "the knowledge that you can write a hero who's a big indefuckingstructible Mary Sue and, if you play your cards right, make him [or her] so much fun that nobody gives a damn.")
Nonetheless, I find it... worrisome that it's starting to be defined, at least in some circles, as "any extraordinarily capable, likable, multitalented hero(ine) who's anything at all like their author." Because if that's the case, forget anything I've mentioned in recent threads about my literary aspirations, because I am so busted.
I don't know if anybody has posted this yet--a cartoon explaining what happens when you have too many Mary Sues converge upon a universe...in this case, the Harry Potter universe. I was tres amused.
Okay, Vlad and Steve share an ethnicity. Sorta. But, uh... I really think that if there's a Mary Sue-ism in the Taltos books, it's Loiosh.
*peers around* Steve doesn't read this, does he?
(Luckily, he doesn't know where I live.)
(Of course, he knows people who do...)
More seriously... really, it is possible for me to be serious...
I think the difference between a true Mary-Sue and something that shares things with the author is twofold: degree of similarity, and degree of idealisation.
Look at Vlad, since we're on that topic. Yeah, he's good at what he does. He's very good at what he does. And he has a hobby he's very good at. But he's not good at everything, and in fact there are some things he downright sucks at, and he messes his life up but good on a regular basis. I don't think you could really call him an "idealized" Steve by any stretch of the imagination, even if you can point to some similarities.
And that's the rest of it: some similarities. The ethnicity, albeit warped a bit for the books, sure. The tendency to crack wise, also sure (though I still, in all seriousness, think that Loiosh's sense of humor may be even closer at times). The love of good food, again, also sure. But most characters, at least most major characters, are going to draw some things from their authors... or from their author's friends.
It's when it becomes "Hey, I want this nearly-perfect version of me, whose flaws are all Tragic Angstful Flaws, to have these adventures, and always win" that it really becomes a big steaming pile of Mary Sue. When it's All About The Character, and not, say, about the stuff going on around the character, except as supports it being All About the Character. If you see what I mean.
Or, put another way: Taltos books? Plots. I see 'em. Major other characters, some of which are just as Important in their own way. Mary Sue stories? Poor, if any plot. Only other characters are there to worship Mary Sue or do vile things to her so she can come out of it shining and adored. Etc.
It's sort of like the difference between pr0n and erotica.
In my humble opinion, and all that.
(I do have humility, too. Honest!)
This Mary Sue definition is unbelievably good. If it is yours to offer, may I post it in the P&E definitions with attribution?
Vlad Taltos lacks the love life of a Mary Sue. And there are other people in the setting who are more powerful than he is; there92s never any implication that Vlad could beat Morrolan, Aleira, or Sethra in a fair fight, and a Mary Sue could, easily. (Though who knows where things may go, now that, um, some people haven92t read Issola, so no more about that.)
Same for King Mob. The story92s about more than just him.
Teresa, thanks. This topic, these links, might turn out to be very useful to me. Or they might cause me to put off starting my comic strip even longer as I muck about with the ideas.
Random comments on a fascinating, funny thread:
Isabeau--
Because getting to be a pro writer is very hard, and very unrewarding, and a good fanfic writer may well have a good job and enjoy writing for fun, as a hobby, because s/he loves it, because s/he can get instant gratification from other fans, because s/he loves those characters or those stories--and not want to get into the kind of hardcore work that going pro--including writing scripts or media tie ins--would take?
That's my guess, anyway.
Dan--
I would say that, for example, many Heinlein protags are total Mary Sues.
Vlad Taltos isn't really, I think, because he's flawed, he makes mistakes, he takes emotional damage, and he consistently gets himself deeper into trouble rather than conveniently resolving his own and everybody else's problems.
Is the recurring character that James Blish dubbed "Heinlein Son of Heinlein" a variety of Mary Sue? He certainly often enough has an exciting sex life ...
As I view it, writing a Mary Sue or Gary Stu is more than just having a character being an escapist-fantasy version of the author with amazing superhuman powers (Luke Skywalker, Gandalf, Lara Croft). It's a matter of having absolutely no tension and no plot beyond an excuse to have every beloved and amazingly powerful character in the entire fiction universe gather together and kiss up to Mary Sue.
The ultimate Mary Sue gag-fest, in my opinion, was written by L. Frank Baum, in "The Road to Oz."
A brief sample (with link):
As she stood by her throne at the head of the banquet table every eye was turned eagerly upon the lovely Princess, who was as dignified as she was bewitching, and who smiled upon all her old and new friends in a way that touched their hearts and brought an answering smile to every face.
Each guest had been served with a crystal goblet filled with lacasa, which is a sort of nectar famous in Oz and nicer to drink than soda-water or lemonade. Santa now made a pretty speech in verse, congratulating Ozma on having a birthday, and asking every one present to drink to the health and happiness of their dearly beloved hostess. This was done with great enthusiasm by those who were made so they could drink at all, and those who could not drink politely touched the rims of their goblets to their lips. All seated themselves at the tables and the servants of the Princess began serving the feast.
Baum writes fanfic for his own universe as every pleasant denizen of it kisses up to Ozma/Mary Sue. The only scene in published literature that prompts anything near this gag reflex is the part in "Prince Caspian" where CS Lewis has every greco-roman wood nymph and forest sprite imaginable come out to kiss up to Aslan, who may be Jesus in a lion suit, but sounds an awful lot more like CS Lewis in theology mode.
Elizabeth:
Yes to all of those reasons. Plus one other that is actually the number one reason I have heard from fanfic writers:
They want the characters to do things that simply will not happen in the canon. Either because it's not the direction the author is taking them with the overall story arc, or because the two heroes can't fall in love/lust on primetime network television, or because the ending was just so very wrong... Etc. The list goes on forever. Almost every fanfic writer (especially television/movie fic writers, since the "subtext" there can be even subjective than in literature) has a reason based on wanting to twist the canon subtly to see what happens, or wanting to twist the canon blatantly because that's what "should have been done in the first place."
Of course, that doesn't explain RPS writers. (Or does it? I suppose they could view, say, Elijah Wood's actual life choices as his canon, and therefore by writing a story in which he's dating Orlando Bloom, they are twisting his canon to have him make the "right" choices.)
> Something I've never quite understood: How is it
> that characters like Vlad Taltos and King Mob
> aren't considered some variety of Mary Sue?
I would nominate Cordelia Vorkosigan as a Mary-Sue. The key characteristic is that we know she is wonderful largely because the author *says* she is wonderful. Also, we usually get a report on what she's wearing that day.
To my mind, that tops Miles, even though he always wins.
I love Bujold's SF and think it's brilliantly constructed, but I can also see exactly how it will go bad if the Brain Eater ever really sinks it's fangs into her.
Hmm. Is The Scarlet Pimpernel a Mary Sue? I've just re-read it, and what a painful experience that was. I remember loving this book, when I was a kid.
Dave, sure, go ahead and use it.
Kevin, you've got to cut Ozma some slack. She starts off as a scruffy boy who has adventures, who in dubious reward for all his efforts has to undergo a nearly-on-screen sex change procedure for which he/she has no natural enthusiasm. That had a lot of resonance for me, back when I was a scruffy girl with no natural enthusiasm for the impending transformations of young ladyhood.
Y'all: "Mary Sue" is a distinctive subset of "author identification character." Gandalf, Vlad Taltos, Billy Clyde Puckett, and Heinlein son of Heinlein could all pass a Mary Sue litmus test with ease. Calantha, Ozma, and Leonie de Saint-Vire would have a little more trouble. Morgoth's Sues could not, and show why the term and the litmus test were invented in the first place.
I would guess that there are many published books that at first were Mary Sues, but the author realized the importance of subtlety: making the protagonist's progress less unimpeded, decreasing the number of subordinate characters praising the protagonist, limiting the protagonist's abilities. I've always wanted to believe that Paul Linebarger was the patient in The Fifty-Minute Hour: First he wrote a Mary Sue and filled in a background, but eventually he got healthier and used the background stuff for better stories.
RPS = Real People Slash? (Good Lord!)
I've recognized myself in some of the stories I've written over the years, but it's usually after the writing is done, and usually the character is a wretch.
I should dig out that sole piece of K/S I wrote many years ago, and see if it still holds up. (It was set at Kirk & Spock's court-martial on morals charges.)
See, this is why I should remember to bookmark this page every time my computer dies. *applauds*
Chip -- "Mirkwode." Nobody in it is blue. Of course, it only covers half the first volume. Heck, Gollum hasn't arrived yet. ("I could go into spectacular detail on the origins of that particular old school title, but I have before me two most eloquent solicitor's letters, one from Golly's and one from the frog's.")
At least if you write from Bertram's viewpoint, nobody is likely to hurl accusations of Mary Soosterism. Must ask Jeeves about that once the old gray matter clears.
Wow, thank you so much for writing this all up.
So, is Ender Wiggin (brooding loner genius wunderkind) a Mary Sue?
“Aura of Smooth” is a cool superpower.
What’s a beta reader?
Teresa: "The dress has been used but not cleaned, and appears to have last been worn during a rather sloppy romantic interlude 85" involving only one person.
Kevin: My reaction to Tip/Ozma, when I read the book in 6th grade, was utter betrayal. It's certainly one of the more left-field bits in kiddie lit.
H. Allen Smith did some Mary Sue-ing in one or more of the Rhubarb books (Rhubarb, Son of Rhubarb, and The View from Chivo) with a character he called "H. Allen Smith." This "Smith" shows up in a climactic courtroom scene and tells everybody what's what. He is described as having incredibly good looks, and everyone harkens eagerly to his wise words.
I'm thinking Clavell had a Mary Sue in one or more of his books -- King Rat and Noble House, if fading memory still serves. It's been a couple of decades now, but wasn't there this heroic writer who would sometimes explain things to the other characters?
David:
The term "beta reader" is applied to anyone the author of a fanfic sends the fanfic to before the fic is released for general consumption (usually to a livejournal, an archive, or a mailing list). In effect, the editor(s).
Helpful glossary of general fanfic terminology:
http://expressions.populli.net/dictionary.html
Slightly OT: While searching for the above link, I found the Science Fiction FanSpeak Dictionary:
http://stilyagi.org/fanspeak.html
Granted, I am not an SF fandom authority, but some of these just look weird. I've never heard, for example, the word "skiffy" used as anything but an endearment for the geekier stuff in fandom, or SMOF used instead of BNF. Or "blog" used to describe punch. Is this because I am in NY and not Ann Arbor (the AASFA compiled this dictionary)? Or is this because this dictionary is just weird or out of date?
SF folks, please enlighten me!
Thanks, Anna.
I really should be going to work, but I just ran across this passage in C.S. Lewis’ The Discarded Image, and it’s too nearly relevant not to quote:
“I doubt if [the medieval authors] would have understood our demand for originality or valued those works in their own age which were original any the more on that account. If you had asked Lazamon or Chaucer ‘Why do you not make up a brand-new story of your own?’ I think they might have replied (in effect) ‘Surely we are not yet reduced to that?’ Spin something out of one’s own head when the world teems with so many noble deeds, wholesome examples, pitiful tragedies, strange adventures, and merry jests which have never yet been set forth quite so well as they deserve? The originality which we regard as a sign of wealth might have seemed to them a confession of poverty.”
The first usage of "skiffy" that I recall (which may or may not mean anything significant) was in a comment by damon knight (my, aren't we being multiple-a fannish?), something about sci-fi*, with the footnote reading *pronounced "skiffy." At the time, "sci-fi" was mainly used by people who had never actually read any of the stuff but wanted to disparage it anyway, so the misreading became an ironic reference to bad attempts at genre by people like, oh, Glen A. Larson and Herman Wouk. (That is not a joke.)
Now, "sci-fi" has been more-or-less assimilated, mostly through its heavy-to-exclusive use by people who weren't around (in the most literal sense -- of "hi-fi" they know not) during those days, grew up with it, and (often on first encounters with older fans) became defensive-to-angry at being told that it was insulting; it wasn't insulting to -them.- I suspect, but am too busy quarrelling with my brother Sherlock to investigate, that "sci-fi" is now accepted, if sometimes wincingly, provided it is used in an affectionate fashion, and "skiffy" gets used in tighter company to refer to the kind of stuff that got the word its bad rep to start, including but not limited to big-bug movies, novels "written" by former starship captains, and TV series about cops with inexpensive mental powers.
John Clute's job is certainly safe, isn't it?
Teresa,
I do cut Ozma some slack, but in other books and other scenes. Those three "Birthday Party" chapters really drag, which is why Ruth Plumly Thompson uses another of Ozma's birthday parties to start "The Wishing Horse of Oz" with a wonderful mystery twist of Ozma disappearing and no one but Dorothy realizing reality has just been warped.
Now here's a question: Is Buckaroo Banzai a Gary Stu? Half Caucasian/Half Japanese brain surgeon/transdimensional physicist/race-car driver/rockstar? Or does this not count, because everything in the movie is meant to be over-the-top and silly?
In any case, "Mary Sue" is a term that's started to get thrown around so much in some writing communities that it's begun to have some of its meaning diluted
Here's an interesting LiveJournal thread on this topic, with specific reference to Harry Potter fandom, by the author of _Lust Over Pendle_, a fanfic previously mentioned favorably here:
Is It Time For A Moratorium On Mary-Sue Hunting?
(I've not yet looked at the links in T.'s post, being at work, but your comment strongly reminded me of that thread, so--)
I know the definition has gotten very loose, but to me marysues have to be, at least in root, autotuckerizations. Banzai is an omnicompetent superhero obviously modeled on Doc Savage (who was not modeled on any of the Kenneth Robesons) -- in fact, the novelization is written in an almost unreadable parody of the Robeson style, and the writer clearly doesn't have any kind of personal commitment to his hero. Or to anything else, really.
Tip changing to Ozma was one of those things which squicked me right out when I was a child. I think that was the last Oz book I read, so I never really got very far in the series.
These days I think I might regard it with dubiousness for other reasons--it smacks of "It was all just a dream". Tip is NOT Ozma. He never acts like Ozma before his change and once he changes to Ozma, he never really acts like Tip again, except that his friendships remain intact. It's like he had the Ozma lobotomy. Poof! Good-bye, Tip!
. . . and in fact, by mousing over "legally unpublishable", I see that they're links to A.J. Hall's _LOP_ and sequel (novel-length both). Should've done that before, sorry.
Lis: I suspect that my best friend, a Homer scholar, would agree with you. And then we get _Son of Gary Stu: Virgil vs. Dante_.
A good distinction; but I'll agree with Anna that "skiffy" is an affectionate term, and "sci fi" is not.
That Stilyagi Air Corps page of "fan slang" is by and large okay. There seem to be a few idiosyncratic local terms. My basic problem with these lexicons is that they provide a distorted picture of what the SF fandom subculture is actually like--as if people sit around saying Gafia Pub Smof Harry Warner Jr. to one another constantly. In fact, SF fans emit copious quantities of gibberish, but it's not mostly this gibberish.
A very dated but highly authoritative encyclopedia of primeval fandom is Richard Eney's Fancyclopedia 2, originally published in the year I was born. Like Harry Warner's magisterial history of 1940s SF fandom, All Our Yesterdays, it actually gets across the atmosphere better than any list of slangy terms.
Villette is somewhere on the list of my favourite novels (when I had to pack up my entire library bar ten books and pack it away in boxes for several years my May Sarton edition of Villette was one of the ten) and I've read a good deal about the novel, because, well, when you like a novel and people write about it you read what they write. Or I do.
Lucy Snowe is a Mary Sue. She's just a perfect example of how a Mary Sue can be written exceedingly well... ;-)
Interesting discussion on the topic. I thought that Ardath Rekha had some good insights in "Thoughts on Good Ol' Mary Sue":
http://www.livejournal.com/users/ardath_rekha/16091.html
Thanks for this, by far the most comprehensive and funniest explanation of Mary Sue I've seen in a long time.
As to Isabeau's question: maybe for the same reason people are still retelling Cinderella, Gone With the Wind, King Arthur, etc.? Because storytelling is a conversation, and while making the new is an important part, especially in SF, talking back is a big piece too.
My favorite quote to explain the appeal of fanfic wasn't about fanfic at all. Gregory Macguire said it in The Green Man: Tales From the Mythic Forest.
"The appetite to retell stories, to ring changes on them, is a huge and unslakable one. On either side of any story 97 including the personal narrative of one's own life 97 looms the uncharted terrain of the unknown. I think that writers revisit favorite material and embellish what the canonical text has reported in order to distract themselves from that urge to see on either side of their own blinkered existence, an urge that can never be satisfied."
Query: Is sci-fi really such an offensive term? I've been using it forever, and nobody has ever corrected me or taken offense. I use it and SF frequently and interchangeably. Would it be best to use some other term? *curious*
(For a second, I had this picture of me writing in to Miss Manners about the proper way to discuss speculative fiction. Miss Manners would reply, "Gentle reader, Miss Manners is delighted to hear that nobody has thus so far embarrassed you publicly by revealing your faux pas, but...")
Teresa, has anyone told you you are wonderful?
On the other, we have some very talented writers who choose to write fanfic that can92t be published. Why would someone with taste and talent97and many fanfic writers have both97choose to plant their roses in someone else92s garden?
Because there are times when one can't let the story go.
Peter David refers to this as "Useless Stories", ideas that come up because ideas happen to writers even when they don't want them to (quoting "City of Angels").
For all writers (well, almost all) there are stories which literally write themselves-- that spring full-blown into one's mind with a kind of "Eureka" finality, there-it-is, game-set-and-match.
But the simple act of writing a story down isn't sufficient, because the purpose of writing is communication. Putting the story down is only one half of a writer's job-- the rest is to get it out to an audience, to share the ideas.
So you have to find a marketplace or a means by which to get the story to readers. In my case, I have a number of directions I can explore-- comics, novels, short stories, screenplays-- all of these are avenues I can pursue, with varying degrees of success, in getting stories told. And every so often, I come up with a Useless Story. This is a story which, by its very nature, cannot possibly appear in any of the media stated above. It doesn't mean it's a bad story. It's just that no one could possibly buy it. But if it's a story that I like enough, it sits in my head and shouts at me, and I can't shut it up until I tell it to someone.
This is a big problem for anybody who writes tie-in work and who comes up with stories that are bounced by the powers that be-- Teresa has praised my take on the Marvel Universe before. A non-negligible percentage of fan fiction is written by pros under other names.
There is a considerable amount of "Fools! Look at me! I'll show you how to fix your puny universe! Ah-hah-hah-hah-hah-hah!" in these works, precisely because the editor took it in a different direction. And there's a large hunk of trying to unjump-the-shark as well, sometimes requiring you to bring in other characters from other places to fix the problem-- Dr. Sam Beckett gets a lot of work doing this, as seen here:
Al was busily tapping into the computer back at the Quantum Leap project. He studied the readout on the hand unit. "According to Ziggy," he said briskly, "there was a series of slayings in Manhattan in the late '80s-- you're in 1989, by the way-- that involved various underworld types being ripped to shreds by something like a wild beast."
"Wild beast," murmured Sam. He stared at his claws in the mirror.
"Newspapers drew a link between those killings to a woman in the D.A.'s office named Catherine Chandler. The problem is, she was eventually found dead, as well."
Sam felt his gorge rising. "Ripped apart?"
"Poisoned," said Al. "Found in her apartment, poisoned. According to Ziggy, that's apparently why you're here. There's a 97% probability," Al looked up, "that you're supposed to save Catherine Chandler."
Me, I'm waiting for the day when Christopher Walken takes a shot at President Bartlett...
Pray do not assume that pro writers do not themselves write fanfic, for all that Ray Feist rages.
Without even mentioning the professionally-published works which make A Lot More Sense if you do a global search-and-replace to put "Spock," "Kirk," and "Enterprise" or "Starbuck," "Apollo," and "Commander Cain" back in, others even now have recent Star Trek (classic Trek, dammit!)/ Holmes crossovers in various archives under very deep pseudonyms.
(Note: Using the holodeck in order to make Tasha Yar fall in love with the protagonist for Just One Night is cheating. Tasha has to do it all on her own because I'm just plain loveable. Alas! It can never be consummated, for I am sworn to another. There, there, dry your tears.)
Meredith: I like that, both the quote and the thought that storytelling is a conversation. There's always a different direction to take the characters, etc. I found myself musing on this very thing a few weeks ago while browsing through Harry Potter fan fiction. I thought to myself, "Haven't all the stories one could possibly tell about these characters already been told?" and then I realized that of course they have, but that won't stop them from being told again and again in different (okay, sometimes the same, but sometimes different) ways by different people -- just like the Arthurian stories, etc.
Patrick: Thank you for the link (and the conversation in your office).
Kate: I think that asking for a moratorium on Mary Sue hunting is kind of like asking for a moratorium on using the period to mark the end of the sentence; it may work sometimes, and some people may be able to overlook it, but it will always cause pain to the Tor editorial department slush readers. The thread makes a lot of good points, but ultimately when a character is called Naramanthiza, has naturally curly (but never frizzy) pink and purple streaked hair and color-changing eyes, is good at everything, can communicate with animals using only the powers of her heart, and immediately causes Kirk, Harry, Picard, Neo, Draco, Giles, Spike, and King Arthur to all fall in love with her, everyone familiar with the term will point and said "Eeeeeew, Mary Sue!" in almost automatic reflex -- whether it's fanfic, a manuscript from the slush pile, or the newest novel by A Big Name Author.
Teresa: I love the word skiffy; it's possibly my favorite word that I have been introduced to so far in my (one month short of) four years at Tor. Therefore I will automatically come down on the side of using it affectionately, just so I can say it and not feel bad.
Kevin Andrew Murphy: Gandalf is "an escapist-fantasy version of the author with amazing superhuman powers"? Oh, my. Especially as Gandalf spends most of his time hiding his powers, something Tolkien imitators haven't quite figured out.
Also, if a Mary Sue requires "having absolutely no tension and no plot beyond an excuse to have every beloved and amazingly powerful character in the entire fiction universe gather together and kiss up to Mary Sue," then Ozma doesn't qualify either, because there's lots of other good stuff in the Ozma books, although more in -Land of Oz- than -Road-.
But in that case, there are definitely some Mary Sues in Heinlein.
Anna: I suspect that hunting Mary Sues in the Tor slush pile is a different thing that a fanfic fandom hunting them, which is more what that link was about. I agree that in its more restrictive sense, the term is too useful to do without--but it's accumulating a lot of baggage and unpleasant overtones in fandoms.
Kate: I'm on the fringes of several fandoms, and I have indeed noticed this. I think what fandoms are overlooking is that (a) a lot of things criticized as being Mary Sue are, in fact, Mary Sue -- although perhaps a higher level of it than your most base "The Night the Ship Blew Up and They All Did It" sort of thing, and (b) criticizing something as Mary Sue is an easy way to get out of actually having to think about the story critically -- which is something many readers don't want to take the time to do.
Also: To assume that a story set in a specific fandom with an OC is automatically a Mary Sue is a failing of the readers -- and of fan fiction "purists" (said with tongue only slightly in cheek, as I do take fandoms and fan fiction quite seriously) who would rather see the tertiary characters (i.e., Seamus or Dean in Harry Potter) brought into fuller focus than see the fanon/canon/fandom diluted by OC.
I both agree and disagree with what's in that thread, and I do think that people are too quick to point the Mary Sue finger at times -- but I also think that fandom in general needs to loosen up.
And then there's the Well-Versed Skiffy movement ("Good stories, good meter, good speculative fiction" is, I think, the current tag-line).
---L.
Here's an interesting LiveJournal thread on this topic, with specific reference to Harry Potter fandom, by the author of _Lust Over Pendle_, a fanfic previously mentioned favorably here:
Is It Time For A Moratorium On Mary-Sue Hunting?
Great discussion. The two points that really hit home for me were the reminder that characters in genre fiction get superpowers because that's fun (*sound of palm striking forehead*), and that now beginning authors of all stripes are starting to worry more about not writing Mary Sues than just being plain good, and that's sort of a shame.
Y'all: "Mary Sue" is a distinctive subset of "author identification character." Gandalf, Vlad Taltos, Billy Clyde Puckett, and Heinlein son of Heinlein could all pass a Mary Sue litmus test with ease. Calantha, Ozma, and Leonie de Saint-Vire would have a little more trouble. Morgoth's Sues could not, and show why the term and the litmus test were invented in the first place.
Which is pretty much what I thought, in regards to my question upthread. Sadly, lots of self-appointed critics have not bothered to learn this distinction, and will more or less assert that Author ID Character + Kewl Powers = Mary Sue = Cardinal Sin of Fiction, and I start to feel that I should just stick to poetry and folksongs and save myself the trouble.
(I mentioned Vlad Taltos in particular because I recall reading that Steve Brust deliberately made him a kind of dark-reflection wish-fulfillment character - he grew up being liked but not respected and thought it would be fun to write a character who was just the opposite. That could be apocryphal, of course. And the point that this all by itself isn't a Mary Sue qualification is well made.)
Anyway, it's a subject that's on my mind from time to time, as I contemplate some work-in-progress or other, and find my quasidivine urban mage heroine being given the secrets of lost Atlantis by the Comte de Saint-Germain, and I hear the voice of Jim Carrey as the Riddler in the back of my head, saying "Was that over the top? I can never tell."
Howdy, Piscus. As you wrote:
Query: Is sci-fi really such an offensive term? I've been using it forever, and nobody has ever corrected me or taken offense. I use it and SF frequently and interchangeably. Would it be best to use some other term? *curious*
If you say "sci-fi" around Harlan Ellison, he takes a baby seal out of his pocket and beats it to death while forcing you to watch. He keeps a little club chained to his belt for just this purpose.
I don't know anyone personally who gets livid at the use of "sci-fi;" but I think Teresa's right about the relatively more genial connotation/origin of "skiffy;" it hasn't yet been "befouled" by non-Slan appropriation. Also, I do know a great many people who vomit blood at the very mention of the Sci-Fi Channel.
K.A.M, I think Buckaroo Banzai (like Hiro Protagonist) is so gratuitously over the top that Mary Sue-ism can be ruled out; for a character to qualify as a proper Mary Sue, the author has to take the wonderfulness/awesomeness/sexiness/etc. of the character so seriously that their feelings leak out onto the page, unguardedly and ham-fistedly enough that they get in the way of everything else.
I had a long conversation on this subject with a guy at this year's Convergence (though I didn't know the term "Mary Sue" then and he didn't use it); he said that as a rule of thumb, a story is in trouble if the main character spends more pages being praised for his actions than he previously spent taking those actions.
Cheers,
SL
P.S. "Heinlein, Son of Heinlein" is hilarious.
What about when a series character turns *into* a Mary Sue? I'm thinking of Laurell Hamilton's 'Anita Blake, Vampire Executioner' novels. They started off as rather nifty fantasy/mystery novels, and have degraded to where every male character either is in love with the heroine or is killed by her?
The editorial process failed, but why? Was the author too popular for the editors to have any control, or what?
If you say “sci-fi” around Harlan Ellison, he takes a baby seal out of his pocket and beats it to death while forcing you to watch. He keeps a little club chained to his belt for just this purpose.
Keep in mind, however, that Mr. Ellison has been known to do things like this for all sorts of reasons, and just because he doesn’t like what you’re doing doesn’t necessarily mean you should stop.
I read Herman Wouk's attempt at skiffy. Made me want to commit unlubricated auto-insertion just to end the pain.
A stopped clock is right twice a day, David. In this case, Ellison is right: "sci-fi" is regarded as offensive in the SF community.
I second PiscusFiche: Is 'sci fi' really offensive?
I have heard both my husband and father who read science fiction, refer to it as such. And I think the guy at the bookstore does so as well. (In fact, I believe the handwritten sign over the used section says "Sci-Fi/Fantasy")
How did I miss this?
I think "sci fi" is old-guard offensive, but we've got a new generation coming up seeing all the cool "I am Sci Fi" commercials on the Sci Fi channel before they read the classics or even encounter fandom. Teaching people to view a term as offensive when they've grown up using it in a non-pejorative sense? Difficult, and ultimately pointless.
I suppose the "sci fi" battle was lost with the inauguration of the Sci Fi Channel.
This year I was innocently reading along in a LiveJournal essay about what and what doesn't constitute a Mary Sue story, when much to my amazement (and pleasure) an old fanfic story of mine was specifically cited as an example of an original character viewpoint story (set in the X-Men universe) where the character has many of the attributes of a Mary Sue without indeed being one. In some ways that gave me more pleasure than any sale I've ever made.
I'm going to chime in as "new guard," then. I've been involved pretty heavily in one of SF fandom's sub-groups for about a decade, now, and until I saw mention of it on this site recently, never heard of "Sci-Fi" as being pejorative. Ever.
Mind you, Texas' little fandom population is sort of isolated, and jargon like this tends towards the regional in its implications and usage...but still...
David Moles wrote:
and just because he doesn92t like what you92re doing doesn92t necessarily mean you should stop.
Hey, I love Harlan (and his work), but I never said he was the framer of my philosophical constitution. It's just that he's the most vocal member of the "Sci-Fi Is An Insult" faction I could think of.
Neotoma wrote:
The editorial process failed, but why? Was the author too popular for the editors to have any control, or what?
That's a great question... I've often wondered about Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, in that respect. The Hunt For Red October was an excellent thriller in general, but its highlight I thought, was Ryan... an anti-Bond, and an anti-Dirk Pitt, a bookish fortysomething with a thickening waistline, a competent but ordinary married guy who just wants to accomplish his mission so he can bring his daughter her Christmas present.
Later, he became a Shining Symbol of Fundamental American Goodness, Dammit. When that happened, his uniqueness was sent to sleep with the fishes.
I think Teresa can shed more light (no pun intended, honestly) on this subject, though I'm sure circumstances must differ from author to author. And the thing we have to remember is that if the books keep selling well, removing "Mary Sue" tropes might not exactly be very high on any editorial list of priorities. Editors have a duty to bring saleable work to press even if they have an inclination toward highfalutin' literary standards; in some cases, a bit of Mary Sue-ism might just be part of a reader-winning formula.
It seems to me that the very essence of literature is fanfiction, of a sort.
Wait, bear with me. (Groan) By which I mean, I'm not sure it's possible to discuss genre (or Lit'ra'CHUR, for that matter) without also discussing the folk process and what I've heard referred to as the 'genre conversation.'
Fanfiction is just a more obviously tightly linked (and unpaid) sort of dialogue--but it's not all that different in type from Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" vs. Ralegh's "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd" vs. Donne's "The Bait."
Or, you know, some of the great, ongoing SFF conversations--the canonical one being the Earthling Space War Vs. The Incomprehensible Aliens (usually Buggy Things, But Not Always).
I find this discussion fascinating. My dad adores the Dirk Pitt books, which I find unspeakably Mary Sueish (do they still have pictures with the author and Dirk's car on the back, I wonder?). Are some kinds of Mary Sues appreciable by others? Or is Dirk not really Mary Sue like?
I've always equated "sci-fi" vs "SF" (and lately "skiffy") as parallel to "Trekkie" vs "Trekker" -- it's offensive to a significant subset of the group, but not all. But to those whom it offends, it indicates ignorance and arrogant disregard along the lines of using a nickname one has been asked to avoid.
I think also that there are those who grow past this distinction, and some who hold tightly to it as a reminder of a time when fandom really was a smaller, tightly knit group of which they were a part (while having not fit anywhere else). My opinion, alone, of course, based solely on the folks I know and converse with. I'd be interested in more datapoints, of course.
That was one of the most interesting blog posts I've ever read. I've never gotten such a strong thrill of recognition. I feel like I know myself better because now I understand all those crazy stories I create!! Long live Marty Stus!
Thanks, Theresa.
Thinking about this over lunch, I realized I've developed a sure-fire mechanism for blocking self-insertion as a character: self-insertion as omniscient narrator. Well, sure-fire for me.
ObCurrentReading: Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell by Pat Murphy, for a (loopy) example of non-Mary-Sue self-insertion.
---L.
I love Ellison's writing, but I think he's bugfuck. "Sci-fi" simply sounds better than, and is easier to say, than "ess eff", or "spec fic" or "science fiction" or "speculative fiction" or any other variation I've ever heard. (I've been around long enough for the nod to "hi-fi" to make sense, too.) If "sci-fi" was at one time mainly used by those wishing to disparage the genre, and acquired thus the animus of the old guard, what were the old guard calling it amongst themselves at the time? Surely the first thing anyone ever did, when coming across the term "science fiction", was to abbreviate it mentally to "sci-fi"?
I realized I've developed a sure-fire mechanism for blocking self-insertion as a character: self-insertion as omniscient narrator.
I *love* it.
Laurell Hamilton! I'd seen those books all over the place, so I actually picked one up a few weeks ago...and read the first couple of chapters, in which the characters never got out of a motel room, and the heroine spent most of her time languidly admiring the muscular young men (or elves or something) lying about in her bed. I bailed when the cute cuddly baby-talking goblin started feeling her up.
This "Mary Sue" concept is a wonderfully powerful tool that neatly crystallizes what I was thinking.
I also thought that Laurell Hamilton reminded me of someone else: John Norman. The Gor stories. I could never stomach those enough to get more than a chapter or two in, either. And I had the same feeling that I was getting more of a look into the author's seamy daydreams than I wanted.
Dan's got a point related to the one I was about to make. When I was working on my dissertation, moaning about some particularly wretched modern Arthuriana where various characters become the authors' Mary Sues, Manny Jacobowitz noted that this works so badly because Arthur -is- a Mary Sue, the kid who's really a king. He added that Kirk is also a Mary Sue.
Mary Sue qua Mary Sue may not necessarily make for a bad piece of fiction, at least, given good writing. But you can only have so many in one work. So, sure, Vlad Taltos may have started out as a Mary Sue, but he's not bumping into more Mary Sues with each book.
OTOH, in the Arthurian cannon, there is a tradition of each new knight being added to the saga kicking the ass of the previous top guy.
OTOH, this didn't stop those books I gagged on from being crap.
-Lisa
This whole discussion is great, because while as a sometime reader of slush I recognize the concept, I never had a name for it.
What about when a series character turns *into* a Mary Sue?
I think what sometimes happens when an author writes a popular series over decades, when he or she never initially envisioned such a gigantic undertaking, or especially when h/s atempts to link up complex sagas and fill in previous gaps, is that what results is a sort of auto-fanfic, if you will. Clancy and Card have been mentioned, Cetainly the later Heinlein has aspects of this, as do the later Perry Mason books. And thus Mary Sue rears her lovely, talented, charming, multilingual, witty, and deeply caring head.
Also, I do know a great many people who vomit blood at the very mention of the Sci-Fi Channel.
I'm thinking of writing them with a rebranding proposal. No, not that it's current ownership/management should be burned with hot irons, much as that idea has merit. Just a little name change.
They should call themselves "The Dumbass Horror Movie Channel."
Much more accurate, and more likely to attract the kind of audience they appear to be courting. They still have Stargate SG1 (a guilty pleasure of mine, despite the fact that even their MATH doesn't work), or I'd never watch them at all.
I'd really like to see someone start a Science Fiction channel with an HBO- or Showtime-like business model. Fans are older now, and more of us can afford to pay directly for our entertainment. More Farscape, less Tremors. And classic movies like Forbidden Planet, hello.
A stopped clock is right twice a day, David. In this case, Ellison is right: “sci-fi” is regarded as offensive in the SF community.
This is one of those times when I’m reminded that being an SF writer, a lifelong SF reader and the child of two lifelong SF readers doesn’t automatically make you part of the SF community. Bit like being a second-generation expatriate forcibly repatriated to your ancestral homeland, I expect.
But I’ll try not to use “sci-fi” around you, Alan.
I do think that it’s about time the SF community reclaimed the word, though.
The office is closing early on account of snow, so I'll write a bit now and maybe more later. You're getting the abbreviated version.
Failures of the editorial process are hard to diagnose from a distance. They get even more inscrutable when you're talking about a bestselling series. When the sales numbers go up with each new title, it's hard to tell the author they're doing something wrong. Meanwhile, no editor wants to be fingered as the ogre whose mishandling caused Lotta Lucrative to look for a new publisher.
There's also the problem of delivery times. This isn't a universal thing, but increasingly successful authors have a tendency to deliver their books later and later. This is especially evident when they're writing a very popular series, where the sales campaign may have gone into motion months before the manuscript was due to be delivered. If a little book by a beginning author runs late, it'll get bumped to a later month or moved to the next season. If the author runs late on a tremendously important book that's expected to bring in a significant fraction of the house's annual income, editorial and production time get cut short in order to make the original pubdate -- and production's claims on the remaining time have built-in non-negotiable minimums.
Consider also that the fifth book in a very popular series has a different audience than the first one. When they read the first book, the readers wanted to hear a good story. By the fifth book, they have more tolerance or desire for non-plot-driven time spent hanging around with familiar characters in familiar settings -- though it's way too easy to overdo this, IMO.
Finally, it may be getting harder for the author to write the books. Not every author has an infinite number of stories to tell, and not every series can accommodate an infinite number of episodes. The characters, situations, plot mechanics, and language may just be getting ground down. It's like the teeth wearing away on gears, only what gets worn down is story logic and causality. True Mary Sue writers omit to demonstrate why their character is *wonderful* because to them it's self-evident. Series novels that are suffering causal collapse may have similar omissions, but it's more a matter of fatigue than culpable obliviousness.
Well, I once wrote some fan-fic, and the Mary Sues were around then and seemed pretty obvious, but if I'd wanted to write one I could have written a Trek story with Kirk as PoV character. The boundaries are fuzzy, but I reckon the female fanfic writers have to be more obvious because there are still few strong female characters who can kick ass and get laid.
On the other hand, in the pro-published stuff I've read, some writers do get close to the edge. Maybe it's a bad idea to have a cover illo were the female lead could be plausibly played by the author in a convention masquerade?
Surely the first thing anyone ever did, when coming across the term "science fiction", was to abbreviate it mentally to "sci-fi"?
Not as I understand our history. I believe that Forrey Ackerman coined the phrase. How it came to be a pejorative, I don't know, but I would guess that there's a fan feud in there, or at very least fannish politics. 4E was very involved in Hollywood, and I don't know how that played out with LA fandom, or the rest of the world, come to think of it.
I hit fandom in 1980, at the age of 18. I was firmly told that sci fi was a rude term, and that people 'round here preferred sf. I'd never heard the abbreviation sf before, but I also had zero interest in offending anyone, so I just started saying sf. No huhu.
This is one of those times when I'm reminded that being an SF writer, a lifelong SF reader and the child of two lifelong SF readers doesn?t automatically make you part of the SF community. Bit like being a second-generation expatriate forcibly repatriated to your ancestral homeland, I expect.
Of course, the biggest problem with this conversation is that there isn't, and probably hasn't ever been, a single SF community. Fandom is built of lots of overlapping and connected communities. There's a lump of them over there that really, really prefer SF to sci fi. They don't have a monopoly on fandom, and life would be much easier if people who aren't part of that lot stopped acting like they did. Oh, it'd be useful if the bunch that hate the word sci fi didn't have occasional buttheads that make ridiculous assertions about Trufandom, I agree. As far as that goes, it'd be nice if the sci fi people didn't have buttheads that sound forth on occasion about how anyone who hates the word sci fi obviously is an elitist snob and hates all good fen everywhere.
I wonder what would happen if we could trade buttheads. Trufen screaming about people who watch television and movies and like to game are trying to exclude readers, and sci fi enthusiasts denouncing anyone who isn't intimately familiar with every movie and tv series that has been called sci fi as hopelessly ignorant and obviously not a true fan? Hell, I can think of examples of both already. Nevermind. Buttheads are buttheads wherever you go.
They don't have a monopoly on fandom, and life would be much easier if people who aren't part of that lot stopped acting like they did.
I’m sorry — I think I got lost trying to dereference a pronoun. People who aren’t part of which lot?
Excellent post. I'd never heard the term Mary Sue before, but I've long noticed the wish-fulfillment aspect of fiction. The first time it really hit me was while reading John Fowles's Mantissa.
I'm suspecting some sexism in some applications of this concept, because it seems to me that there's a fine and mighty tradition of male authors writing heroic characters who influence the world beyond what seems likely for most people, and people seem to accept that as normal. But now that we have women writing such things (e.g., Laurell Hamilton), it's a bit more eyebrow-raising, eh? (I'm not suggesting that's the only angle on the Mary Sue phenomenon, but...)
When I was working on my dissertation, moaning about some particularly wretched modern Arthuriana where various characters become the authors' Mary Sues, Manny Jacobowitz noted that this works so badly because Arthur -is- a Mary Sue, the kid who's really a king. He added that Kirk is also a Mary Sue.
Well, there it is, isn't it? That's why she stands out so painfully in fanfic - she has to out-Arthur Arthur, and the town, as they say, ain't big enough.
But at the same time, we fans of adventure fiction come to the table in expectation of seeing extraordinary people doing outrageous things. The leap from your common or garden variety superhero to Mary Sue is all too brief. It's like the difference between Motley Crue and Spinal Tap - a tiny adjustment in the direction of outrageous is enough to send it over the edge to ridiculous. (With the notable difference, of course, that Spinal Tap know they're Spinal Tap.)
See, it's fun to watch Odysseus outsmart and utterly destroy his enemies; to see Legolas and his bow-fu take out a legion of Uruks; to know that John Constantine's going to beat the devil every time. This is one of the reasons we love this stuff. It's simply the leap ahead to assume that it must threfore be fun to watch a character beat everyone at absolutely everything that makes it fail - but it's all too easy a trap to fall into.
Mary Sue qua Mary Sue may not necessarily make for a bad piece of fiction, at least, given good writing. But you can only have so many in one work. So, sure, Vlad Taltos may have started out as a Mary Sue, but he's not bumping into more Mary Sues with each book.
Oh, I don't know; part of what makes that series fun is that it's full of characters who are over-the-top powerful. (Just imagine what an overeager crossover-writer would make of, say, Sethra Lavode at Hogwarts...)
Here I plug Mary Sue Whipple's Harry Potter and the Horrid Pain of the Artiste, which, along with many other virtues, is a meta-fiction on fan fiction.
Trouble is, there are so many different physical body types that certain individuals are going to look like somebody's Mary Sue or Marty Stu.
I remember one of the most flattering, enlightening and somewhat disturbing moments I had in college when I joined my roommate's weekly champions game. I walked into a room and was introduced to six other guys, all of whom were 5'7" or under. Everyone described their characters, and with the exception of the beautiful red-haired sorceress, all the descriptions were the same: young, handsome, male, 6'4", with rich chestnut brown hair.
Then came me. I, myself, am 6'4", with dark brown hair of the shade I'd describe as chestnut, and had done some modeling in high school. "Umm...well, my guy has also got brown hair, is slightly better than average looking, but not particularly, and is 5'10 but says he's 5'11"..."
The game ended up being fun, but there was still a deeply weird and awkward first half-hour during which I talked mostly with the player of the beautiful titian-haired sorceress.
On a related note, I played a vampire game recently where the storyteller said, "and in walks an ordinary, unremarkable guy, kind of like me" at which point I broke character and said, "Daven, you're six-foot-six with blue hair."
Sometimes the Mary Sue physical trait of the character looking like the author's slightly prettier sister or brother is a quick way to not have to rethink viewpoint and descriptions. I have to rewind my mind back to junior high to remember what it was like to walk through a crowd and be looking other guys in the chest, and someone's who's short writing a tall character doesn't even have that memory and has to extrapolate, and very often gets it wrong.
I remember reading one of Carole Nelson Douglas's books where her 6'10" male lead has this line of description: "As a tall man, he was not accustomed to ducking." Pause. Blink. Um, he's a heck of a lot more accustomed to it than short guys are.
When I met the author, she was quite short herself.
Heh.
The Litmus Tests are kind of neat, but they don't tell you if your Mary Sue fic sucks or not. I've read Mary Sues that I really liked. There are exceptions to every "rule", and it seems to me that the most egregious offender would assume s/he was the exception.
Do you remember role-playing as a kid - before RPGs with 17-sided dice and hit-points, and endless parades of expensive Modules? You know, getting together with a bunch of other neighborhood kids and trying to be the first to call out "Han Solo", where adventures were always improvised by common consent, and how there was always one Wilma Deering/Starbuck/Daisy Duke/Miss Piggy/ who constantly was the one who Found Things/ Did Things/ Saved Things? That Deus Ex Machina in WonderWoman Underoos. I hate that kid.
That's my Mary Sue Litmus Test.
David, I think what Lydia is saying in the sentence you quoted is that the pro-"sci-fi" faction have no more claim to represent the whole of fandom than the anti-"sci-fi" folks. After that, though, I got lost too. I am not sure, but I may have just been called a butthead. :-)
Lydia, I'm not really pro or anti (and I've never been part of fandom per se, although I'm a lifelong fan of the genre, whatever we call it). I just like the sound of "sci-fi", and Ellisonoids who call me an idiot without explaining howandwhy the term fell out of favour get up my nose. I am sorry, though, if I got up yours.
Melisa Michaels of the SFWA has an article on this issue here, and Google allows one to take a poll from Eternal Night interviews. I'm tallying that up right now...
Stef-
That's a good point about the possible sexism of Mary Sue accusations. And if I may talk out of my butt for a minute, I'll give you my Theory (which is completely non-scientific, and fully reliant on my own narrow observations):
It seems to me that Mary Sue recognition started within Fanfic, which I've observed to be awfully Female-Centric, being overwhelmingly authored by those who identify themselves as female (not to get into the transgender debate!). When we expand Mary Sue Identification to Pro-fic, I think everyone's observations are more gender-neutral.
For instance, I think James Bond has a whiff of the Mary Sue about him, and I have gotten 20 pages into numerous High Fantasy Quest (written by men) and tossed them aside as soon as I realize the Young Man Who Does Not Realize His Own Wondrous Destiny is not going to get any more interesting.
I appreciate Kevin's observations from RPGs, which is probably where you find more male Mary Sues.
As far as Laurell K Hamilton, I am currently reading the 3rd in her series, and while I understand they get progressively lamer, I'm still finding her Anita Blake a far more entertaining Mary Sue than I found Jane Austen's Emma.
My dad adores the Dirk Pitt books, which I find unspeakably Mary Sueish
Oh, fart. I forgot about those. I think those could properly be categorized as being beyond the Mary Sue horizon... we need an all-new term for a series in which the author repeatedly has himself show up to pull his hero out of a jam.
I mean, damn. That's chutzpah.
I don't mind switching to SF or skiffy, particularly as I don't want to unnecessarily alienate anybody, but here's a few thoughts on some statements made:
I think "sci fi" is old-guard offensive, but we've got a new generation coming up seeing all the cool "I am Sci Fi" commercials on the Sci Fi channel before they read the classics or even encounter fandom.
*wince wince wince*
Why brand all the new generation with that tar brush? I was using "sci-fi" long before I ever heard of the Sci-Fi channel. My parents STILL don't have cable. They had it once a long time ago, and we had TNT, the Disney Channel, and a handful of others, but really didn't get along with the TV too well. I use sci-fi because that's what it says in bookstores I frequented or what I've heard other people say. (Blame the parents again.)
Secondly, I think you aren't taking into account that until the somewhat recent interweb boom, that a lot of the younger fandom was hopelessly disconnected from the professional and more serious fans. We READ the classics--we just didn't have the money or the wherewithall to attend conventions. (Even though Life, The Universe, and Everything seems to happen a lot at BYU, I never seemed to have the money to go.)
If you say "sci-fi" around Harlan Ellison, he takes a baby seal out of his pocket and beats it to death while forcing you to watch. He keeps a little club chained to his belt for just this purpose.
*wide-eyed*
Is that what you might call a skiffy fit?
*ducks and runs*
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I guess I'll go with skiffy--it sounds more like a me-sort-of-word. And SF always just sticks a little when I try to say it. Typing or writing--not a problem, but my tongue tends trip up when I go with SF.
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