Let's beat dead horses with sticks. Or dead topics with baguettes. I'm not picky.
Actually, I would say Sailor Moon isn't even necessarily Sailor Moon--there are vast differences between the english dubbed episodes shown in the US and the episodes as originally shown in Japan, and even vaster differences between the anime versions and the manga.
But I do agree; The Lord of the Rings in manga or anime probably wouldn't have been hugely different. It's a format and a point of origin, not a sweeping broad style, and while certain characteristics--the eyes, for example--tend to be common, they are not definitively universal. And Record of Lodoss War if nothing else shows the fields are not entirely unfamiliar with the epic quest thing.
It's a lack of understanding of form that continues to mean that people think of things like Sailor Moon (english), Dragon Ball Z, and Ranma 1/2 (if even that) as exemplary of the entire thing rather than simply one portion of it. After all, Ghost in the Shell, Hellsing, and Spirited Away are anime too (grabbing titles at random here).
(And aren't topic mutations fascinating? Look where we started and look where we are now!)
My favorite 'What are you on?' moment for extreme Christianity (no relation to extreme sports) came courtesy of OBJECTIVE: 4 Kidz, and stated with authority that T-Rexes were herbivores. I suppose it wasn't entirely the assertation, as I'm willing to at least listen to theories even when they make me spontaniously create odd faces, as the way they immediately followed the fact up with, "The Ark's passengers were safe from harm!" (And then there's considering this in the context of the rest of the page.)
Some friends and I once spent a long while debating whether or not that site was real or a parody. We eventually gave up the discussion sometime around the thousandth time we moused over the kanga-jew's ears to make them wiggle. Put beside a disembodied spinning lamb's head, what is authenticity, really?
I propose trskdkphbphobia, which is fear of a badly typoing Pointy Haired Boss.
Kate Nepveu: I'm trying to think now if there's *anything* that can't be forgiven if the writing's good enough.
Pairing stripes and spots? Or the writerly equivalent thereof?
Dan Layman-Kennedy: (Busted. But quite nice to see yet another NaNoer hereabouts.)
It's rapidly becoming impossible to encounter a fairly large body of prospective writers without tripping over at least one WriMo. And it's still spreading; I'm faintly fascinated to see how far it can go, both in terms of population and spin-offs, like WriYe.
Kevin Andrew Murphy: Another way to keep a Mary Sue from being a Mary Sue if viewpoint. Consider Mary "Practically Perfect in Every Way" Poppins, especially the P.L. Travers incarnation. She is the star of her own books, and just about godlike in the scope of her powers, but the story is not told from her viewpoint, it's told from the viewpoint of the kids, for whom she's a great source of wonder and mystery.
I really do believe there's no quick and easy way to keep a Mary Sue from being a Mary Sue. This method might work some of the time, but I can think of plenty of examples where the POV isn't from the Mary Sue but from a normal character--but this doesn't make the character any less of a Mary Sue. In some cases, really, it only accentuates it--if you've got a character who is in other ways sane and sensible gushing over the uberwonderfulness of this one character, isn't that going to just make matters worse?
The reason Mary Poppins works has more to do with the nature of the world and characters set up around her--in other words, she's not a Mary Sue because the writing isn't bad.
Mitch Wagner: As a reader and wannabe fiction writer myself, I hate to think of up-and-coming writers who might be scared off of writing idealized versions of themselves because they're afraid of committing Mary Sue.
Unfortunately, I gather it's so: Writing the Non-Mary-Sue Female Protagonist. There are five pages there discussing the problem of, well, writing the Non-Mary-Sue female protagonist, and that's just one of the threads which bring the concern up--and these days, NaNoWriMo is a broad enough cross-spectrum of future writers so you can figure if it's got that much of a discussion there, it's a problem elsewhere, as well.
I have no idea if other genres besides sf/f/h have a problem with it, but I suspect they don't; it does seem to be an issue more of a problem with those particular genres than anything else. It's not to say you can't have a Mary Sue in, say, a mystery, but I'd just guess they're less common there.. The article I linked to by Rhiannon Shaw points out one of the issues it's causing in fanfiction, as less and less people write original characters for fear of getting accused of Mary Sue-ing, and given that writing original characters is a good way to transition from fanfiction to original fiction, we can assume the issue spreads forward that way.
Merlin Missy: So people who read the rants and took them to heart found brand new (sort of) ways of writing badly.
I have noticed that, and thought about it. Really, the worst Mary Sue offenders simply don't give a damn. No matter how many tests you make, no matter how many rants there are, no matter how much fun you poke at their stories afterwards, they aren't going to care, because they believe utterly and completely in the sanctity of their painful character(s). At best, with fanfiction, you might get an "I'm doing this for fun, so why should I care?"
So what you get, basically, is an effect on two kinds of people. One group contains people who, yes, might have written a Mary Sue if they hadn't seen this sort of thing, and went back and rethought their characters and as a result got something with better depth. The other group is full of people who wouldn't have written a Mary Sue--but they think they could have. They also think of not for grammar guides they'd have misused a semicolon, and if not for a class on plot structure they'd have had a novel that went nowhere. And so they go back and rethink their characters too, and start carefully sanding away certain bits of them, because they'd hate to give offense or do something as horrible as writing a Mary Sue. (That's one reason I love the Mary Sue Appreciation Society; they help take away some of the horror, by rightly pointing out that so long as you know you’re self-inserting, it really is all in fun.) If this sanding gets taken to extremes, what they end up with is, I suppose, a sort of anti-Mary Sue--a character so unremarkable you can't care about her at all.
(I wonder what would happen if you combined the Anti-Mary Sue and the Mary Sue in one story? Would they just cancel each other out, or would they explode?)
Now mind you, all of this is not to say I am in favor of Mary Sues--I just think matters concerning them are a bit out of balance right now.
Mitch Wagner: beginning writers should be carded before they read it, and anybody who hasn't written at least 21 stories should only be allowed to read it with adult supervision.
I've had the same thought regarding the 'three golden rules' of writing. It would make a lot more sense if we only gave beginning writers one rule: write well. How you get there is up to you.
The best two pieces of advice I've seen for beginning writers came from Joe Haldeman: write it as if you are the only person who is ever going to read it and bear in mind that nobody's ever been hurt by bad fiction.
Those work, too. I’m going to have to pass them on.
Mary Kay (on Nero Wolfe): I'd recommend them to you, but, um, as you've probably noticed I seem to have committed them to memory and so discard my recommendation for obvious bias.
I only started reading them last year and my recommendation is probably biased too. I recommend them anyway. Although, if you start with the first book and dislike it, don't necessarily judge the others by that; Fer-de-Lance is one of the ones that shows its age the most.
Paul A.: Author-insertions are more likely to become Mary Sues, because there's the obvious temptation to make one's self more good-looking, proficient, and well-liked - and on the other side of the coin, it's easy to assume that as the explanation for any unusually good-looking, proficient, and well-liked character one encounters - but does that make them the only characters that can become Mary Sues?
Well, going back to the definition the Blogmistress used before the term Mary Sue came along....
"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?"
That doesn't specify in the slightest that it has to be an author self-insertion. And given that you can have self-insertions that aren't really Mary Sues (there's an interesting example of one in a Star Trek fic who actually tells the regular characters she's the author's stand in, which gets a lot of blank stares), probably you can have a Mary Sue who isn't a self-insertion. If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck....
Dan Layman-Kennedy/Kate Nepveu/anna/etc/etc--
(I can't believe I read the whole page.)
Actually, this raises an interesting point I see brought up too seldom, and that is something along the lines of 'the pendulum has swung the other way'. A prime example of this would be the way one of the biggest discussions on the SF/F section of this years NaNoWriMo forums was pages and pages of people agonizing over somehow not writing a Mary Sue in their stories--because, as we all should know by now, it's such a very easy thing to do, and those cursed evil Mary Sues are just lurking out of sight, waiting to creep into your writing as soon as your female character turns out to be the best at anything at all or wins a true victory. As far as I could tell, the result of all this was at least half of them ended up with characters who were a lot less interesting than the people they started out as. In fact, as I work my way down the page of comments, I'm starting to see the issue crop of here as well.
A better article on the negative impacts of anti-Mary-Sue actions on fandom would probably Rhiannon Shaw's In Defense of Original Characters, where she comes up with what I think is the most useable definition of a Mary Sue: "What a Mary Sue is, folks, is bad writing." Which isn't to say you can't have a well-written author self-insertion character--but if you do, nobody is really going to care that much. The point of calling something a Mary Sue isn't so much that she's got all that power and everybody loves her--it's that reading her gives most people an "Ew" feeling. There's no quick and easy fix for that, either, no, "If you make the character this pretty she's a Mary Sue but if she's only this pretty, she's fine." It's all a matter of writing well enough to sell your characters (sell them to the reader, that is).
"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 just narrowly avoided a spittake. I suppose repeatedly exposing my nasal passages to them is one way to get off sugared, carbonated beverages....
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