Comments | dubonnetcherry: a repost so this can be public.

dubonnetcherry

a repost so this can be public.

Oct 15, 2011 06:22

If You Need To Make A Tiny Cry To Feel Superior
You Are The Problem
In Defense Of Mary Sue: She's Not The Enemy

trigger warnings: misogyny, internalized misogyny, poke me if I missed something.

I'm going to assume that I don't actually need to define Mary Sue for you, and arguably it's a tough thing to clearly define for anyone at this point in ( Read more... )

allthetldr: i'm pretentious, in defense of mary sue

Comments 64

ksol1460 May 27 2012, 10:25:43 UTC

Thank you for this. This is linked from Mary Sue at Fanlore, which I have been working on for almost a year now. Still needs a lot of work.

I took on this article because I hated what Mary Sue paranoia did to a writer I know and (as I came to read about it) a lot of writers I don't know. Until about ten years ago I didn't know anything about Mary Sue other than a brief joke in an adzine. I used to read the earliest Star Trek zines, Spockanalia, T-Negative, Eridani Triad -- but stopped in the late 70s-early 80s because I didn't care for K/S and I wasn't wild about the way Kraith was going after Sondra Marshak took it over.

I had also had the great good fortune to never have run across any of Paula Smith's effusions on Mary Sue.

When I finally, just a few years ago, read what she said, I was gobsmacked. I remember those early fanzines. There were no characters like this -- and here she was asserting that every zine had them.

I came to suspect that Paula Smith didn't just start the Mary Sue ball rolling, I think she invented her ( ... )

dubonnetcherry May 27 2012, 10:41:53 UTC

This dreamwidth link might be better for a link out; this journal is largely defunct, although clearly I am still getting notifs on it! ANYWAY.

I'll have to google Paula Smith (although I'm not sure I want to, with that introduction); I remember being told about how the 'Mary Sue' concept as we ended up with it had been inspired by a particular fanfiction in the Star Trek fandom who was specifically named that? I've been running into it since I found the internet, and it's just something that has progressively been more and more infuriating, the more I look at it while, you know, not actually being a child. Which is, I guess, my main point of contention here - it's such a sick thing to perpetuate when you aren't actually a child. I thought, after writing this:

Mary Sue is the character that only her author can love; she's beautiful, intelligent, powerful, influential, and she gets the guy (usually- Mary Sue stories tend to follow fairly heteronormative patterns). Sometimes she gets multiple guys, and they fight over her! She's ( ... )

ksol1460 May 29 2012, 01:42:45 UTC

I have no idea why that's deemed unrealistic. It's as if the great heroines of the ancient tales, like Bradamante, never existed.

In the early days, fantasy and SF weren't as much of a "boys' club" as have been made out to be, but many women writers used male pen names or initials. The first strong female lead character was probably Lessa in Dragonflight who fits your description above. A serious character in 1967, she is generally considered a Mary Sue today and the series is usually assumed to be for pre-teens in a "pony" phase ( ... )