An answer to some accusations.

[araeph]

Hello, there, canon-defenders and other curious people!

It's happened again. One Boosette has ranted against the PPC and its canon-defending affiliates. This is a little different than your average Suethor rant, in that 1) it is articulate, and 2) it brings up specific, serious charges of bullying and misogyny, rather than just spewing aimless vitriol. (Not accurate charges, mind you, but serious ones.) And so, with this expanded version of what I posted on the Board, I give you: entertainment! Hopefully.

The original rant

I have exerpted the most pertinent parts of her post in order to respond to them. My comments to her essay are in roman. I hope you'll pardon the long entry; there was a lot to say.

Hope you like!

Edit: I forgot this community doesn't allow non-members to comment. Since I was the one who posted this, you can comment on my LJ here.

Edit the Second: I've added to my discussion of Mary Sues here.


The PPC Responds

There's this OFC I like. She's friends with the best con man in the world even though she's married to the FBI agent who sent him to prison. She's stubborn and emotional and sharp as a whip, and even though she could do anything in the world she has a job where she makes things pretty because she loves it. Sometimes she gets hysterical and her husband leaves his job to come home and fix the things that are making her hysterical. And she once had her office torn apart by the bad guys! And then her straight-laced husband PUNCHED THE BAD GUY IN THE FACE and it was awesome and he got suspended for it. Also she's gorgeous and she's shaped kindof like me, ie: round. Which might have something to do with her actress being pregnant, but a girl can wallow in vicariously sized awesome for as long as it's available, right?

Her name is Elizabeth Burke. She's the best thing about White Collar.

There's this OFC I like. She's kindof inappropriately in love with her boss and doesn't really know what to do about it, and doesn't know that she can do anything about it.

Um, about right here is where you should have read up on your definitions of Mary Sue.

She's also the best damned helmswoman in the galaxy (otherwise she wouldn't be piloting the flagship space-vehicle), and when her captain is stupid and gets himself roofied and kidnapped and almost turned out to pasture as a stud, as it were, she takes a team down to the planet and BLOWS THE TOP OFF THE MOUNTAIN where the bad guys are keeping him. And when that appears to not work, she takes a small team inside the mountain (well: this doesn't work either,

Here would be good, too.

since all they guys on the team get left back at home, and it's just her and this other chick, and you can see where this is going, right?). So the bad guys try to make her captain choose a mate from the available females! And they tell him all about her private fantasies about him! And even though she's pretty MORTIFIED ABOUT IT,

Oh, definitely here. Mary Sues and mortification do not go hand in hand.

she helps take one of the bad guys hostage so they can escape! But then when the bad guys are twirling their collective mustaches and talking about breeding a race of artisans and stuff, she OVERLOADS HER SIDEARM TO KILL EVERYONE THERE rather than let her descendants live as genetically engineered slaves. Word of God has that she's the most beautiful, smartest, capable person on her planet for the year she was born, and that she was designed to be that way. She has lots and lots of Issues and an interpersonal inferiority complex because of this.

Her name is Number One. She's from the Star Trek Pilot film The Cage and unless you've been living under a rock these past six months you know she is my FAVORITE thing about the Star Trek franchise.

There's this OFC I like. She really wanted to be a knight all her life, and she was raised in Japanalogue so she's not good at expressing her feelings, and her parents are TOTALLY BEHIND HER in becoming a knight. But the training master isn't! He doesn't believe women SHOULD be knights cause they're weak and hysterical and easily frightened! So she works REALLY HARD and makes friends and lives with people who don't like her and has a dog and birds even though pages aren't allowed to have pets. The training master even loves her dog! And she has a secret rich benefactor who equips her with the best weaponry EVER and turns out to be her childhood hero - the only other female knight in the land! And she gets crushes on all her BFFs (okay well, just the one BFF and then the BFF's cousin) and then then the commander of this really awesome division of elite soldiers PICKS HER AS HIS SQUIRE. He is hilarious and snarky and like a grown up version of Our Heroine and that's awesome. On her first mission with him she adopts a baby griffin and it's pretty much a disaster until its parents show up and DON'T ACTUALLY KILL her even though griffins always kill anyone who touches their babies! And then when she finally gets her shield, she gets handed the command of a refugee camp! But it's okay because her old training master, the one who didn't believe in her? HE'S CHANGED HIS MIND. She's the only one he TRUSTS enough for the job! Nobody else would be able to do it RIGHT! And at the end after lots of action and kidnappings and questing to slay the bad guy, she comes home and she's not hanged as a traitor even though she committed treason by disobeying a direct order from her liege during wartime!

Her name is Keladry of Mindelan, from Tamora Pierce's Protector of the Small, and I LOVE HER LOTS.

I love Keladry of Mindelan to the ends of the earth. She’s one wonderful character, not least because she worked her ass off every waking moment to achieve all that she did and had a crippling fear of heights that almost prevented her from rising to knighthood. What’s ironic is that, in a recent discussion, another PPCer and I agreed that Kel is not, in fact, a Mary Sue.

Is it possible that it is our definitions which are in conflict, more so than our ideas? Either way, at least we have some common ground!

*

Gene Roddenberry married Number One's actress. Tamora Pierce is on-record as having said that Kel is her favorite character to write.

May I ask why all of your “Mary Sue” examples come from original fiction but all of the Sue-mockers you name just mock fanfiction? I’m pointing this out because Mary Sueism in original fiction is a lot more subjective and a lot harder to define than it is in fanfic. I’d truly like to see a few examples of fanfiction Mary Sues of whom you are particularly fond. (My agents won’t use them for target practice, promise.)

You can see where I'm going with this.

Yes, and good old trodden ground it is, too: the unfortunate misconception that because we don’t share your opinion that Mary Sues are awesome and cool characters, that we automatically MUST dislike all female characters who actually ARE awesome and cool!

Writing these women as they appear in canon would constitute writing them as "Mary Sues" -- They're special. They're competent, they're attractive, they have weaknesses and insecurities

From Wikipedia: “A Mary Sue (sometimes just Sue), in literary criticism and particularly in fanfiction, is a fictional character with overly idealized and hackneyed mannerisms, lacking noteworthy flaws, and primarily functioning as a wish-fulfillment fantasy for the author or reader.” *sigh* It baffles me why anyone would post a long rant in support of Mary Sues without knowing exactly what a Mary Sue is.

and by virtue of being protagonists and first-string supporting characters, they warp plots and universes and other characters to their needs.

To “warp” something is to give it a shape that it did not originally have. Your so-called Sues are all from original fiction, and all play important roles in canon in the first place. So unless the plot belonged to someone else at the beginning, and the OCs suddenly and inexplicably swooped in and hijacked it for themselves, I’m afraid I can’t agree that they are “warping” anything.

Elizabeth is Peter Burke's greatest weakness; Kel talks to the king and gets him to rescind a law she doesn't like; Number One is executive officer of the Federation Starfleet flagship despite being only a lieutenant and is "the most experienced officer on the ship," second to Pike himself, to boot.

These characters are awesome. No really, look at these characters: how awesome are they?

I’m not familiar with the other two characters, but they sound a helluva lot better than Marty Stu Eragon or what’s-his-face from Twilight.

*

Once upon a time, the term "Mary Sue" was a value-neutral genre descriptor:

It was? I’d like to see sources for that, please.

Original

Now there’s a misnomer if ever there was one!

(female, let's be real here)

Yes, denying Marty Stu’s existence is always a good idea.

characters who entered the story, won the admiration of all the canon characters around her, who won the day and maybe developed a romantic relationship with one or more of said canon characters (usually the author's favorite).

You’ve left out some key features (see the above definition).

Pat Pflieger writes her paper, 150 Years of Mary Sue:
The Cinderella portrayed by Drew Barrymore in the movie Ever After, especially, is everything that defines the Mary Sue -- intelligent, funny, beautiful, physically strong, competent, lovable -- but there isn't the hint of self-deprecation we see in some of the Mary Sues cited above. From Schumann's paper, we get a sense that young teenaged girls now aren't as willing to abdicate their natural powers as were girls of previous generations; it's their right to be competent and strong, and to carry off the occasional prince over their shoulders.

The term was coined in 1974. It is not the value-neutral term it once was, and you only have to look so far as Protectors of the Plot Continuum (PPC) to see this for yourself. Or Godawful Fanfiction. Or marysues, or deleterius, or ...

Let's look at PPC. The website intro reads:

But changing the *main plotline* of the canon story is ridiculous. (Except in speculative AU "what-if" type stories.) And Mary Sues upstage the canonical main characters, which really should not happen. If you want to be the main character, try doing original fiction. Then you can even publish it without breaking copyright laws, maybe even get rich. But if you do that, please knock your character down a few notches from "angel".

*grins* Jay and Acacia. Gotta love ’em.

The Fanlore description of PPC reads:

Protectors of the Plot Continuum, often abreviated PPC, is a cross between sporking and an RPG. The PPC is an organisation dedicated to the elimination of badfic. It is divided into various departments such as the Department of Mary Sues and the Department of Bad Slash. Writers create characters called Agents who go into badfic, spork the story, and fix it by killing Mary Sues, exorcising OOC characters, and otherwise restoring the story universe back to its original state.

Translated, roughly:

If by “roughly” you mean “like Babelfish on 40 proof,” then yes, your explanation of what the PPC does is indeed a translation.

PPC goes around bullying tweens, teens, young women and yes: older women, too -

You could have just said “PPC goes around bullying people who write Sues”; the fact that you didn’t, coupled with your choice to list “tweens” first, suggests that you are making age a factor in your “bully” argument.

Funnily enough, “Tweens, teens, young women, and yes: older women, too-” is exactly how I would describe the members of the PPC themselves. We have some younger members, and some older members; almost all of us are young women. When we started out, the average age of a PPCer was a whopping sixteen years old. It has since gone up to *gasp* twenty and a half. We’re almost old enough to drink, we are!

For the most part, Suethors actually share our gender and youth, so there is really no need to imply that we deliberately victimize young female writers. We are flattered, however, by your argument’s other implication: that you have mistaken the maturity and skill of our writing for a huge age gap between us and the Suethors!

for daring to write fanfiction not up to their (dubious) standards.

Hoo boy, there’s a lot of ground to cover with that one phrase.

Let’s start with:

1. Please explain to me how writers are “daring” anything when creating a fanfic Mary Sue. Yes, PPC and GAFF and the like make fun of Mary Sues, but if you look at any major fandom-LotR, HP, PotC, Star Trek-and calculate the ratio of Mary Sue authors to Mary Sue mockers…I’m afraid we are badly, badly, outnumbered. In fact, having one’s Suefic mocked by the PPC is akin to being struck by lightning in its rarity. Heck, if you want to write what everyone else in fandom is writing, get lots of reviews from like-minded writers, and have fellow writers come to your defense for any criticism whatsoever of your beloved fic, Mary Sue is the way to go! She’s not defying convention. She IS the convention.

2. We set the standards for good and bad fanfiction? We did no such thing.

The original story, the canon, set all those standards far better than we ever could. All we do is remind fans what those standards are.

And yes, writing fanfic that’s as good as canon is still a bar most fans can’t hope to reach. But you see, Boosette, the PPC doesn’t look for fic to mock near the bar. It looks past the bar beneath that bar, and the bar under that, and finally peels back the mat underneath the lowest bar and boggles at the grime found underneath. The stories by supposed fans who seem to have forgotten that the high bar even exists.

3. Please explain to me which of our standards you find to be dubious, and why.

For writing original female characters, minor canon characters and major canon characters in a manner that is empowering to them.

Again, we seem to have so much in common! We too write original female characters, minor canon characters, and major canon characters in a manner that is empowering to us. But unlike the Suethors, we understand that just giving a character heaps and heaps of power for no reason isn’t empowering. Neither is treading on the personality of a well-developed canon character just to puff up Sue’s ego. It doesn’t make the Mary Sue better, or as special as the author thinks she is. After all, any author can rain a golden shower of gifts on a pet character; why does that make the character great?

What is empowering is allowing a character to earn power for herself by virtue of the conflicts that arise in a story. Even having a character try to earn power and fail honorably is more empowering than just imbuing a character with incredible abilities and watching her take out ridiculously enervated villains.

Ultimately, Mary Sue is bowling-with-bumpers safe as a way to experience a story. She is unrealistically beautiful, inhumanly powerful, and always gets rewarded for everything she does with only the barest of struggles. She can’t fail. She can’t get humiliated. The story itself will dutifully remove all real obstacles from her shining path. And a character who needs her author to do all that work for her is not a character who has any sort of power. On the contrary, that character is weak.

For writing Tenth Walkers, for writing fourth members of the Harry Potter trio, for making Christine Chapel an Olympic-level figure skater before she entered nursing. For empowering themselves through their writing.

…

You do know that the number of Mary Sues who force their way into the main plotline by humiliating or killing off strong female characters who were already there far exceeds the number of Mary Sues who actually support the female canon characters’ agency and right to their own love interests, don’t you?

You do know that the strong female canon characters who are warped into Mary Sues in fanfiction almost always get, not just sooper speshul abilities, but physical transformations to make them more physically appealing to men?

You do know, surely, that regardless of canon genre, regardless of the Sue’s mad fighting skillz, regardless of her extraordinary powers and supposed intelligence, the sole reason for her existence in fanfiction is to force a hot guy to fall in love with her?

You are mistaken if you think that Mary Sue cares about female empowerment. Mary Sue only cares about empowering Mary Sue. Her incessant need to hog the spotlight means she tramples over characters, timelines, plots, romances, deaths, and births, just so she can exist. And her treatment of strong canon females is particularly shabby. At least the male love interest for the Sue only gets a fanfic lobotomy. But the unfortunate female canon characters who were originally paired with the canon males…well, it’s probably best just to continue with my response, rather than think of some of the things I’ve seen done to get a strong female canon character out of the way of a Sue.

The Call of Mary Sue isn't just limited to PPC, of course, nor is the mission directive: Check out deleterius's userinfo page:

If you find your story here and are upset about it, try to relax.
There are reasons you should try to relax:
1. Throwing a tempter tantrum will only serve to amuse us further.
2. Amusing us further will cause us to sink our claws and teeth in deeper.
3. Throwing a temper tantrum will not incite me to remove your fic. So long as no LJ TOS issues are being violated, it will stay posted. Don't like it? Sucks to be you.
4. "But it's fanFICTION, I can do whatever I want!" No, you can't. Move along.

And from the linked rant, by magdaleina (in 2005, I will grant you: ancient internet history, back before we talked about why this sort of thing was even discussed, before anyone had bothered questioning whether this behavior was bullying, was harassment, was anything other than okay.).

I’m not sure why you think that people weren’t questioning us in 2005. People have been ranting against the PPC and its allies since its inception in 2001! As for the LJ comms, a Suethor whose work was featured on Marysues waaay back in 2003 very kindly (and in such a feminist way!) called the community “a world full of bitches and lesbos”. We’ve taken it all in stride, really.

However, criticizing a story and criticizing a person are two very different things. I hope you have noticed that, whatever I have said so far about Mary Sues, I have refrained from insulting anything about the Suethors except their writing. It’s PPC policy to do the same on missions.

Anyone has been welcome, at any time, to critique the PPC’s own writing style as harshly as we critique the Suethors’. (We would hope, of course, for it to be a well-written, funny, and entertaining piece of criticism.) In fact, someone did that once, a long time ago. The result? We hosted that story on our own website. Yep, we sure are evil and oppressive.

What those intimidated by criticism fail to realize is that they needn't remind anyone -- specifically not a fan of a book who actually read it -- that their work is fiction (because half the time, the reviewer would rather not believe the story was ever written, much less whether it's real or not). What a reviewer is actually questioning is the merit of the writer's fandom; whether or not they are a true fan.

Instead of, "write to the best of your ability", the message is: Don't you dare write characters who are too perfect! Don't you dare write characters who are too flawed! Don't you dare make your characters too forthright or too timid, too connected to canon characters or not connected enough!

I would really like to know where it is said or implied in any of our archives that a Suethor’s character might be too flawed. But to get back to the point…Suethors can write self-inserts who are as perfect as they like. Their avatars can be as all-powerful and cool and rebellious and beautiful as the midnight stars, with no argument from us at all.

They just can’t do it with someone else’s characters.

There’s a reason the PPC doesn’t go after original fiction. Without wishing to speak for the entire PPC, I would sum up our message as: “If you’re going to borrow other people’s stories without permission, at least make sure the characters and plotlines are treated with respect and returned in recognizable condition.”

You’d think that wouldn’t be too hard…ah, well.

Don't you dare put any of yourself into your characters, lest you commit the crime of pepper jack cheese!

Pepper Jack Cheese, from the Godawful Fanfiction Dictionary, linked above:
Pepper Jack Cheese = Where a badfic author includes silly little details that have nothing to do with the plot, for his/her own amusement. Well known sporker Pottersues came up with the term from a Harry Potter fanfic where the author repeatedly mentioned that Hermione liked pepper jack cheese (which isn't available in the UK) just because it was the author's favourite cheese.

Every author puts some of him/herself into a character; to pretend otherwise would be foolish. But there’s a difference between putting some of yourself into a character and making a self-insertion. And if you don't know the difference between those two things, you really have no business posting an essay on Mary Sues.

And if you do, if you dare: we'll make fun of you for it, we'll mock you for it, we'll question your worth as a writer and as a person

Show me the place where we have questioned a Suethor’s worth as a human being, and I’ll show you Napoleon bungee-jumping off Mount Everest.

behind your back!

Ah, so you think we should mock their stories to their faces? Well, believe me, we’ve tried. It never ends well…for either us or them. What ends up happening is:
1. Suethor throws a temper tantrum.
2. All her friends join in. They resort to personal attacks first, not the other way around.
3. Since we don’t really care what Suethors think of us, instead of being contrite or angry, we are heartily amused. Sometimes, we’ll try to explain what we were trying to do, to no avail.
4. Inevitably, the Suethor gets even more upset that we aren’t mending our vile ways, and resorts to sockpuppetry so she may defend her shoddy writing more vocally.
5. When this doesn’t work, she will take things a step further and try to get the PPCing or sporking removed from whatever site it’s hosted on.

And that last one is the clincher, really. We never...ever…ever try to get a Suefic taken off fanfiction.net unless is it blatantly violating the Terms of Service. But Suethors will try to get our mockery removed for no reason other than that they want it gone. Since this has often worked even though we are careful not to violate posting rules, it’s enough of a hassle that we have learned to keep the mockery among those who will actually appreciate it.

(Of course, even if we offer up constructive criticism in a polite review with no mockery or mention of the PPC , 1. and 2. will usually happen anyway. Bless fandom and its huge sense of entitlement about positive feedback!)

We'll dogpile you and we'll get all of our friends to tell you you're wrong-wrong-wrong for daring to question us,

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

*wipes away tears of laughter*

I can see it now. “Shh, don’t question the PPC…or else!”

Boosette, the Suethors aren’t questioning us when they write their stories. Most of them don’t even know we exist-thanks to the mocking-behind-their-backs policy that you so derided, the vast majority live on in blissful ignorance that a single bad word has been said about their idealized, emerald-eyed creations.

We’re the ones questioning their writing. They’re just typing up whatever they jolly well feel like no matter how terrible it is, posting it in a public place for all to see, demanding feedback for this very poor fanfiction, and then complaining if the feedback is negative.

to defend yourself, and if we're feeling really ambitious we'll make you cry and then laugh about it!

And yeah, this bears a remarkable resemblance to the bullying a goodly number of us experienced as geeky misfits, growing up.

Geeky misfits. Again, an epithet most members of the PPC would proudly say applied to them-much more than the Suethors, in this case, because geeks are actually familiar with and have a respect for the source material(s) that they claim to be fans of.

This is the environment of Mary Sue. This is the context and the history, today, of Mary Sue.

That is your history of Mary Sue. Here’s my preferred version, from PotCverse:

Once upon a time, there was a movie. It was fun, witty, and thoroughly enjoyable. Many people loved this movie, for various reasons. Some loved it for the scathing one-liners, some for the fact that it was a pirate movie, and some loved it for its technical aspects, such as costumes and sea battles, and whatnot.

And there were those who loved this movie for two (and sometimes three) reasons. These reasons had nothing to do with the movie, not really. They mainly had to do with how H0TT!!!1! the three male leads were. Now, these reasons, while decent reasons when compiled with others, were very shallow on their own. But many ignored this fact, and focused on the hormone induced lusting of t3h h0ttn355 of the leads.

Some lusted after these men in the quiet of their own minds, and it was good. Everyone has fantasies, after all. But there were others who decided they absolutely HAD to share these idle daydreams with the rest of the world. So, they wrote down these fantasies, and posted them on a notorious website known as fanfiction.net.

In all fairness, there were some fantasies that were very well done. They were cohesive, and enriched the original plot of the movie. And the fans who read these stories were very, very happy. And then there were other fantasies. These stories were crude, poorly crafted, and irritating. And the fans wept with rage and sadness, seeing their beloved movie being turned into a playground for pubescent teenagers.

The fans watched as the main character of the movie fell in love again and again with a girl named Mary Sue. Mary Sue came in many shapes and sizes, but it was she the entire time. Each time Mary Sue made someone fall in love with her, something was lost. A little bit of the magic that made everyone adore this movie died. The more Mary Sue appeared, the more the magic died. Pretty soon, the universe the movie took place in was unrecognizable. And the true fans wept.

Moral of the story? Your Mary Sue kills canon.

So to abandon for a moment my quasi-professional tone:

Your tone was quasi-professional?

If you think that you can use "Mary Sue" as a value-neutral term in this environment, and with this history, you are contributing to the environment which approves and encourages the bullying and harassment of women for the sin of daring -- daring! -- to write characters in such a way that is empowering to them.

Mary Sue is not defined in any dictionary as “empowered/strong female character.” Mary Sue is only a fantasy of what her author wants to be, and all too often what the author thinks men want her to be. In fanfiction in particular, this often involves:

- An obscene emphasis on stylized and conventional beauty.
-The idea that romantic love is a) superior to all other relationships, and b) the highest goal that a woman should strive for.
-The obligatory male-rescues-female-from-rape-and-she-falls-for-him scenes that populate at least half of her stories. (Or worse, the obligatory male-rapes-female-and-she-falls-for-him stories! Bleaugh.)
-The cheap way her author portrays sensitive issues like abuse, abandonment, and prostitution-as simply devices to get a quick pity-fix for her heroine.
-A penchant for manufacturing misogyny in an otherwise egalitarian universe in order to “prove” that Sue is as good or better than men.
- A disturbingly high tolerance for controlling, tyrannical love interests as long as those love interests are hawt.

*looks back at list* Hmm, perhaps I was hasty in saying that Suefic “often” involves these things. Clearly, that was an understatement. The fact is, I’m not sure I can recall a single Suefic that did not involve at least one.

None of these has anything to do with real empowerment. But all of them have to do with the fundamental selfishness that defines Mary Sue-the fundamental idea that she is better than everyone, that only she can be better than everyone, that the whole rest of the world had better stand back in awe at her awesomeness…and most of all, that anyone in the story who doesn’t respect her will fear her. Because if they don’t, they will suffer the author’s, I mean her, swift and terrible retribution.

Writing "Mary Sues" is empowering. Writing them being awesome is empowering. Calling Mary Sue, and contributing to an environment such as the above, which encourages the denigration of female awesomeness in fiction,

As a GAFFer once said...Mary Sue is not a hero. She usually doesn't have one single thing going for her that makes me respect and adore her, the way that the author OBVIOUSLY expects me to do. I don't find these supposedly perfect people who get all good things without so much as struggling for it interesting. I never got anything for free, why should they?

A reward, or a victory, is so much sweeter when you've fought for it - I know this from my own, personal experience - and THAT'S the sort of feel-good entertainment that I want! I want to see the long struggle. I want to be inside the character's head as he's overcoming all his difficulties... at the end of the book, I want to cry with happiness. I want to feel that all that hard work, all that suffering and struggling, PAID OFF!

Mary-Sue has too easy a time - as much as I might LIKE to identify with her, I can't. I want my heroes to EARN their feel-good, like I've done, because that's an INFINITELY greater feeling than just getting everything for free... like Mary Sue does.

which encourages the bullying and harassment of participants in female awesome, is participating in that culture.

Calling "Mary Sue" in this environment is shaming women for empowering themselves.

Then our environments are very different. Calling “Mary Sue” in the PPC is telling a flat, unrealistic, stereotypical character exactly what she is, so that a three-dimensional character (the Agent)-who is usually female herself, I might add-can get rid of Mary Sue and her canon-warping ways and enjoy a good fandom in peace.

Maybe you should come over to our environment. It’s climate-controlled and story-centric.

There is no substantive harm in writing a "Mary Sue" -- there is no substantive harm in creating a character, original or otherwise, who "warps the world around them", who is "adored by all for no particular reason", who wins the day.

Even if the character perpetuates all the most damaging Harlequin romance novel clichés?

Even if the character insults and degrades a beloved canon character? (And if you say to me, “It’s only a story,” I will say to you, “Then why are you so upset about us mocking only stories”?)

Even if all the female OCs in a fandom are lily-white, silky-haired, green- or blue-eyed, and anorexic-thin with huge breasts, because the Suethors honestly can’t imagine that their real selves would be attractive to a male hero, so they give themselves imaginary extreme makeovers to win their idol’s heart?

Sue-mocking isn’t about female characters being too powerful, Boosette. It’s about any character being too powerful and too perfect with too few negative consequences. The nature of the medium (fanfiction) means that most Suethors happen to be female, not that the PPC is specifically out to get female Suethors.

But here’s some real harm, if you want it: Mary Sue, in all her super special glory, continues the very wrong idea that superb female achievement can only be won in an exaggerated, fictional scenario.

Who cares, really, if fantastic SuperPunkRockGoddess triumphed over Persephone and won Hades’ heart? There was never any doubt! What does it matter if Riellanaiëlvaniela defeated ten legions of orcs in your fanfic? It doesn’t say a thing, good or bad, about what a real woman, a real person, could actually do or not do! All it says is that someone wanted it to be true, but didn’t really believe it could be, because the scenario itself is not believable in the context of that particular universe. And worse, it implies that an ordinary woman-a woman who gets a man she loves but sweats and smells during training, a woman who is not as physically strong as an orc but wins the fight through sheer determination, a woman who achieved greatness but learned the cost was high, as all great people do-simply could not measure up, so a super-powered one had to do.

Truth is, without authorial interference, a Sue divested of all her special attributes would be just a cardboard cut-out that a realistic woman could crush beneath her feet.

There is substantive harm in bullying and shaming real people for empowering themselves through their writing.

If Mary Sue truly “empowered” these authors, then wouldn’t the Suethors as whole act more empowered? Wouldn’t the authors be mature enough not to be flustered and go into shrieking conniptions when some stranger on the Internet happened not to like their story? Wouldn’t the authors say, “Hey, my heroine can do anything regardless of what all those people think…and so can I”? Wouldn’t they say, “My character is so awesome, she can take any attacks thrown at her from obnoxious reviewers”? Or even, heaven forbid, “Maybe they have a point, and I can write better”?

But no. Instead of becoming more tolerant of criticism, Suethors become more sensitive to it. Instead of being content with praise, Suethors feel entitled to it. Instead of being confident in their characters’ merits, Suethors defend their Sues loudly and overprotectively at every turn. The reason? Mary Sue is so much the author’s darling, so much the author’s insertion and avatar, that the author has trouble separating her Sue from herself. She starts to take all criticism and praise for her story personally, which ends up hindering her willingness to improve either the character or her writing.

You know what characters are really empowering? PPC agents. They’re intelligent assassins who don’t fit into a traditional female role (notice we are not called “Nurturers of the Plot Continuum”), they don’t need their looks described every paragraph because their personalities are enough, and they don’t need a love interest to validate themselves. If we poke fun at our agents, as we so often do, they’re strong enough to stand it. If they get into real danger, they’ll triumph often as not, and the “as not” part keeps them on their toes and interesting. Now, we Sue-mockers have been flamed, trolled, parodied, subject to barrages of righteous indignation, and even criticized in a particularly obtuse academic paper. But we’re still here, having fun, not because we get off on making people miserable, but because we love humor and good writing, and with fandom’s scarcity of both, we have to supply our own.

And sometimes, we get the chance to empower other authors, the ones who actually want to improve their writing. Helping other people to write better (sh, don’t tell anyone!) makes us feel all warm and squishy inside.

Words have power. Words cause harm. Words hurt, and the wounds they leave are deeper and longer-lasting than many physical wounds.

We know that words have power. That’s why we don’t like Mary Sue messing with the words of stories that we love.

I nearly stopped writing entirely, as a teen, after having my work and my OC called "Mary Sue". I have friends who did stop writing because of it.

Do you know how many of us PPCers have written Mary Sues in the past? Almost all of us. The only reasons we stopped creating them were: we grew out of it, or someone actually had the honesty to call us on it. (Option B being the more frequent occurrence.)

You know, when I was looking through some of my younger writings, I had several of my cherished OCs called “Mary Sue.” By me. But also indirectly by my dad, who years ago tried to hammer into my skull the fact that my “kickass” femmes weren’t really so kickass if I had to write all the male characters and antagonists as lumbering, bumbling idiots in order to make my Sues seem that superior. (If there’s one thing a Mary Sue can’t stand, it’s a real, true, honest-to-goodness challenge at which there’s a chance she’ll get bested.) Back then, I didn’t understand what he meant. I wish I had.

I’m so glad that I found the PPC and realized that I was creating Mary Sues before I shipped off the unfortunate darlings to try and get a wider audience! It hurt, realizing how much work my daydreams needed before everyone else could enjoy them as much as I did, but it would have hurt a lot worse if I had written Suefic well into my twenties, then gotten a scathing rejection letter from a real editor as opposed to an anonymous online snarker.

My point being, I am sure that calling a character a Mary Sue-when it is one-has caused fanfic authors pain in fandom. But I think it helped avoid pain and disappointment in many cases, too.

Before anyone says: "Oh, they/you should just have sucked it up and grown a thicker skin! Learn to accept criticism!"

Actually, what I was going to say was, “If you don’t think there is actually anything wrong with creating a Mary Sue, why are you so upset when people call it one?”

Think.

You are blaming the victims of bullying for their bullies' behavior.

I don’t think there has ever been an occasion where a bullying victim chose to go to school with hair a mass of snarls, a shirt fished out of the garbage, shoes made out of bubble wrap, and vibrantly pink clown make-up; stood in the center of the schoolyard, yelled out for all to hear, “PLS REVUE MY APEARENCE!!!”; and expected-nay, demanded-that no one laugh.

And that is exactly what Suefic writers, with their needless plot contortions to shoehorn the Sue in, the carbon-copy characterization of “rebellious princess” or “pure flower”, their blatant refusal to let their self-inserts fail at anything, their zealous worship of the supermodel physique, and of course their endless demands for positive reviews, have done.

That is Not. Okay. Ever.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, this is the baggage the term "Mary Sue" comes with. This is the context. This is the culture and the environment and the experience of many, and it cannot be divorced from the term itself.

When someone says, "your semantic choices are hurting me" the decent human being response is to access how you can stop hurting people with your semantic choices, not to throw up your hands and go:

"BUT I DON'T WANNA! I LIKE MY HURTFUL WORDS!! YOU'RE JUST BEING OVERSENSITIVE!!!"

So, it’s not a decent response to call a Mary Sue (who is a fictional character) a Mary Sue, but it is decent and humane to use loaded words like “bullying”, “misogyny”, and “denigration of female awesomeness” on real people whose only crime is mocking flat fanfiction characters?

*tips her hat cordially*

Thank you, Boosette, for being a sterling example of not using cruel semantic choices on real people! You have truly shown me how not to insult the misfit geeks of fandom.

Happy ’Sueing,
~Araeph