Thoughts about Mary Sue

[alias_sqbr]

I've read a bunch of very interesting posts recently about how Mary Sues are not actually that big of a deal (beyond being generally bad writing) and maybe telling girls not to write overly awesome female characters has some underlying misogyny. This post is not about that but is partly inspired by those posts on that subject:
Oh Mary Mary and the slash writer ponders female characters.

EDIT: Valid question: what do I mean by Mary Sue?
I personally would only call a character a Mary Sue if it fit all the major hallmarks: an original female character in a fanwork who is implausibly unique, talented, and popular, badly written, and has the canon characters and plot warp around her to fit the author's wish fulfillment.
But I have seen the accusation leveled at any original female character who is in any way cool.

So, two thoughts:

1)Why gender? Why should I, as a disabled Australian woman (to choose some of the ways I differ from the "default" of able bodied American man etc) be worried that my female characters are self insert fantasies, but not my male ones that are disabled or Australian?

For me, female characters are the default. They're who I like to read, and who I like to write (of the six prose stories I have up at AO3, four have a totally female POV, one is almost all female, and one is mostly male). So if I'm going to worry about overinvesting in a character it will be because of "non-standard" things we have in common, like being disabled. I'm currently trying to write a story about a male Australian maths postgrad and am having intense issues with over identification, figuring out how to write the situation with some distance is really hard, and this has happened every time I've tried to write Australian characters in the last few years (of course, it doesn't help with fanworks that I don't like much Australian fiction :/)

I guess the fact that fanfic fandom is majority female has a lot to do with it, all the other difference people have are too variable to make broad generalisations about. (And if people started saying "Disabled fanfic writers shouldn't write overly awesome disabled characters" it uh..probably wouldn't go down so well) EDIT: But that doesn't explain why individual female writers should worry about gender the most, and from for example the slash writer ponders female characters it would appear many do.

Anyway, do any other female writers have this issue, where gender really isn't the big stumbling block? What about writers who do not identify as female etc?

2) This section was posted to the dragon_age community first, the text is basically the same but there's a bunch of interesting (albeit spoilery and somewhat context dependent) discussion in the comments which I have summarised at the end of this post.

The protagonist of Dragon Age:Origins is a basically original character saving the day and having everyone fall in love with them, and this is reflected in much of the fic. And I'm not sure that's such a bad thing. EDIT: I'm not saying the character is a Mary Sue. I'm saying fanfic about her is, or at least could be easily read that way.

The way the game works you get to control a lot about your character: their gender, appearance, species, and social position are chosen to start and give you one of six origin stories. The choices you make can have significant effects on the plot, and since there's often no obviously "right" decision required to win the game it makes sense to just play your character with whatever personality and motivations seem fitting. The plot of the game you play is broadly the same as everyone else's so it's possible to share fic and have everyone get the references (assuming they've played all six origins :)), but I know my characters feel much more like my own creations than the main characters of say a Final Fantasy game.

People talk about "My *insert character's name*", and they can be quite different. For example, two spoilery comics dealing with the poor relationship between the dwarf noble character and her brother: Siblings (she's nice and it's all his fault) and Lady Aeducan Explains it All (she's a machiavellian back stabber)

I enjoy other people's stories and engage with the PC characters mostly as I do with canon characters rather than entirely original ones, but they're not about my PC characters, not entirely. They feel about as close as the characters in an AU fanfic do to the canon ones.

Two other things about the PC character: they have three possible romantic interests (there's four choices total but two of them are straight) who, if you play the game right, are clearly very much in love with the PC. These characters are well written and voice-acted, and attractive if you squint and use your imagination.
Also, while not a prophesised chosen one or anything the PC is canonically Made Of Awesome, while some of the origins start pretty beat down and spat upon, by the end everyone is going on about what a great, talented, special hero they are.(*)

All this combines to create a lot of stories about Totally Awesome semi-original female characters who probably fit the writer's idea of what looks cool having whoever of the romantic interests the writer finds most engaging(**) fall in love with them and saving the day from the Forces of Darkness before riding off into the sunset. EDIT: Which still doesn't make them necessarily a Mary Sue, but they certainly tick a lot of the boxes.

And while Sturgeon's Law applies, the stories aren't bad. I don't read everything that comes through the comms I'm on but I would say that the "Female PC + canon romantic interest" stuff is about as good as everything else on average and I have enjoyed quite a few of them. They're certainly not all Mary Sues in the sense of being nothing but wish fulfillment. (nb there's plenty of "Male PC + canon romance", "Female PC gen", "Fic about NPCs" etc as well) Personally I prefer "Female PC has canon romance go horribly wrong", and have written a whole series of them, but my id is odd :D (it also alas reflects the way my games have tended to go)

I was thinking about what other canons would create this sort of semi-original main character. There's other computer RPGs: the Final Fantasy ones I've played the main character's personality and arc is pretty set in stone, and with what little I played of Neverwinter Nights I didn't feel like my character was a real person at all. Apparently other Bioware games like Mass Effect and Knights of the Old Republic work like Dragon Age: Origins and have similar fic. People get very invested in their tabletop roleplaying characters of course, but those are genuinely original characters and those outside your roleplaying group won't care about them any more than they will any other original character.

Some things people pointed out when I cross posted this to dragon_age:

• There are no unambiguously happy endings to this game, so totally fluffy romantic happy endings require a moderate amount of handwaving and OOCness. Most of the origins are an oppressed minority in some way, and that oppression doesn't magically vanish by the end of the game. The one exception is the human noble (who still goes through a lot of crap and has to make some murky unpleasant decisions) and fics with that character as a protagonist are the most likely to be Mary Sue-ish.
  
• There's a difference between the game handing fanwriters a character who fits a lot of the markers of a Mary Sue as a protagonist who they can choose to make 3D and flawed or not, and a writer choosing to insert an OFC for no good reason.
  
• There's a specific subgenre of fanwriting which deliberately obscures all the details of the PC so that the player can mentally insert their own PC. See for example the comic Master and Protege by aimo. (I love this fandom, so many humourous meta-ish fancomics :))
  

EDIT: I have no deep thoughts, but it's interesting to commare to dating sims, see for example Starry Sky. Do people write fic for them I wonder?

Anyway, those are my two thoughts! I have no final conclusion, beyond thinking people shouldn't be so locked into rigid anti-Mary Sue dogma. I guess the two things I'd like people's opinions on are the fact that individual female fanfic authors are expected to worry more about their female characters being self inserts than the ones with whom they share other significant traits, and the Mary Sue-ishness (or not) of fanfic based on particular types of canon characters (eg the protagonist of Dragon Age)

(*)An aside: it's weird for me watching ads for the game which (as well not being a very accurate representation any actual scene of the game nor it's appearance) are clearly aiming this message at Manly Male Characters played by Manly Male Gamers. They felt rather odd aimed at my characters, who really aren't very manly. Especially the guys :)
(**)Though it's important to note that this may change for different characters with the same player, I know it did for me.

Comments

[tattered-pinion.livejournal.com]

I would say gender is a big hurdle for most immature writers (ie fan fiction writers) because they have either hugely self-inflated views of their own worldliness or are painfully naive. Having said that though, it isn't at all unreasonable when you're a white, western female to presume that another white, western (Or maybe exotically asian!) female character of your creation is similar to you except for any differences you care to specify. That sort of 'fill in the blanks, where the blanks are what I think and feel' type of presumption and lack of imagination is probably what causes it?
This is generally because they are young and ignorant though, so it isn't particularly surprising.

It is a purely demographic thing. Most of your bad fan fiction writers that write self-insert characters are female and they generally make female characters.

As for dragon age, I think I don't agree with your definition of a mary sue character. If you play a female in dragon age you are powerful and awesome etc but that isn't what defines a mary sue. The path of becoming a powerful character and fighting the dragon at the end is just a textbook hero's journey type affair.
The Warden in dragon age isn't particularly mary sue-ish in my mind, they are just a powerful hero who is exceptional but is just a magnified version of whatever archetype (mage, fighter, thief) you pick. You do the same things as other people, you just happen to be better through experience and skill. Someone has to be the best, after all! It seems reasonable.

[callistra.livejournal.com]

I write female POVs by default, and these days I read female POV by default too, which can be very disorienting, and also very annoying. I find it hard to empathise with male characters any more; I genuinely just don't care. I want to read women's voices! And I'm not even saying it's women *authors*, I just want stories that have female leads.

*shrug*

I thought I was over it, but I tried to read another fantasy with a male protag, and once again I had the urge to go and read something I like after a page or two.

[http://users.livejournal.com/peasant_/]

I stopped reading the Oh Mary, Mary blog because it was tl and the white on black was making my eyes hurt, but I've probably got the drift of what she was saying. And I suspect she is wrong about why people rail against Mary Sues - I think the reason is because it's easy to do.

A lot of amateur (and pro for that matter) writers get to a stage where they want to teach. There is nothing wrong with that, and if nothing else it's what fuels the beta trade, but a lot of them unfortunately start a little early. So they are trying to teach when they don't actually have all that much to teach, because they haven't the experience to have worked out anything very new and shiny yet, so a lot of what they try to teach is just regurgitated twaddle. All those meta posts about how to avoid adverbs and common homophones and where to stick your apostrophes are examples of the problem. And the anti-Mary Sue posts are generally pretty much the same thing.

Someone, somewhere decided that overly perfect characters were a bad thing - which is true, they are - and so invented the concept of a Mary Sue to try to teach new writers what not to do, and the example has become a dictum that gets warped and twisted and less useful with every reiteration, until we are no longer even that sure what a Mary Sue is, let alone why they matter so much.

Personally I've been fighting the 'don't Mary Sue' statements for years, because fear of Mary Suing seriously limits the number of OCs found in fic and I reckon that is a very bad thing indeed. I've made anti-anti Mary Sue rants and had grateful writers thank me for giving them the courage to try OCs, which is something I'm very proud of.

It is important that writers learn about how to create balanced characters, but most Mary Sue rants are not the way to go about it. Teaching how to write balanced characters is sadly a great deal harder than that.

As for myself, I do indeed worry about creating balanced characters. I spit out OCs all the time and have had to develop a lot of tricks for presenting characters quickly that are still, I hope, believable, recognisable and people that other people care about. Those tricks aren't gender specific, although some of the traits I use to make quick and easy recognisable types obviously are gender dependent. (And race and every other stereotype you can imagine dependent - the stereotypes are very useful tools for just this reason. But that's a different conversation.) So I wouldn't say I worried more about balancing a character when the character happened to be female. Balancing is just as tricky regardless of who the character is.

Do I self insert and identify? Yes, a lot. I self insert and identify with every character I have ever written in any detail. It's at the heart of writing and I couldn't write without it. When I've had to self-insert into and identify with a murderous, abusive paedophile the experience has been less than pleasant, but that's how I write. I essentially method. That's also one reason why I have more difficulty writing female than male characters, but again that is probably a different conversation.

Has the 'writing womenz is hard' kerfuffle started up again? Bother. I've been sitting for moths now on a promised post about how I taught myself to write women, but I can't post it if they're still kerfuffling. (Yes, I admit it, I suffer from the desire to teach - that's why I recognise it in others. Fortunately my more embarrassing early attempts were deleted years ago.)

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

There's nothing wrong with Mary Sues per se, and I'd even go so far as to say it's a recognisable stage on many writers' paths of improvement. I think the largest backlash comes when they're trotted out en masse in front of an internet which is looking for something more advanced.

Part of the issue may be that there's really no simple way to wean the advanced storytelling from the equivalent of stick-figure scribbles on the internet. Following known good writers is sometimes the best compromise, but then there's the issue of finding them in the first places without wading through an ocean of, uh, less experienced prose.

[furikku.livejournal.com]

I think the debate would be a lot easier if we had a more standardised definition of "Mary Sue." Right now, it seems there are several that are covered by the same term:

"Author-insert character"
"Idealised character"
"Horrible black hole that warps canon and reality for the purpose of stroking the author's ego"

I tend to go by the third, but a lot of people seem to include all under the one term, and (the important part!) assume they are all interchangeable.

Possibly a good rule of thumb would be to ask oneself, "Would this look out of place if I swapped the genders?" If the potential "Mary Sue" would pretty much turn into James Bond or something, then there is probably not a big problem. (Unless you have a problem with James Bond, which OK, that's fine, too.)

But yeah really I only see a problem when a character (of whatever gender) doesn't have to confront any real challenges to get what they want. And that's just bad writing.

[capnoblivious.livejournal.com]

*blink*

You know, this is the first time I've come across the idea that Mary-Sue-ishness is a particularly female fault/tendency/thing. I mean, there's the name, but that has a particularly long fannish history, and (to me, it seems like) saying it's a girl thing is like saying that if it's not Kirk/Spock, it's not slash.

[angriest.livejournal.com]

I was going to post something similar myself: my biggest problem with Mary Sues these days is that no one seems to understand what the term means any more. Dragon Age: Origins, as a wholly original story, can't really be a Mary Sue because the protagonist you play is integral to the storyline. And that's a long way beyond a fanfic where Ensign Grant saves Kirk, Spock and McCoy and defeats the Romulans, etc. I think it's only Mary Sue if a new character is being forced into an existing narrative, that not only visibly represents the writer's ideal of themselves but also winds up being the most critical and useful character in the story.

[tattered-pinion.livejournal.com]

It is a girl thing because, well, they are pretty much all written by girls. It is due to the fan fiction demographic I suppose.

[capnoblivious.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but if you go on that definition then you'd be saying that everything to do with fan-fiction, good or bad, is inherently a girl thing, which seems like a bit of a flawed argument.

Seriously, men don't write fanfiction? (My POV is as an original fiction writer, though I've long since kicked the habit.)

[tattered-pinion.livejournal.com]

I'm not so convinced it is that flawed! If you talk about absolutes then, yes, certainly, but I would say that more or less everything to do with fan-fiction is more or less a girl thing.

Men do write fanfiction, though they generally stop when they leave high school. I imagine the percentage of males who write fanfiction is hilariously low and the number of straight males would be even less.

[tattered-pinion.livejournal.com]

A quick google search sees the statistic "90% of fanfiction is written by females" thrown around. Which seems reasonable to me. In certain categories you'd definitely have more males writing than females but by and large, yes, it is a girl thing.

[alias_sqbr]

Crap, that was a stupid choice of cut text *edits*. I don't think a female Dragon Age PC is a Mary Sue, but I do think fic written about her very easily comes across as one (and sometimes is).

It is a purely demographic thing. Most of your bad fan fiction writers that write self-insert characters are female and they generally make female characters

The thing is, one could say the same thing about the other things many immature fanfic writers have in common, eg if you're inserting an American teenaged OC into a fic (especially one for say Dragon Age :D) the likelyhood that they suck is moderately high :)

[alias_sqbr]

I can read a moderate amount of male POV stuff, but if ALL the characters are male, or I can't identify with any of the female characters because they're so poorly written then I get very quickly turned off.

[alias_sqbr]

Well, I think there's multiple reasons behind the problem. I do think the "look at me, I know all about fanfic writing, let me tell you about it" thing helps perpetuate these ideas and make them more rigid once they get going, but that doesn't explain why this particular criticism has more weight than many others.

(And I totally suffer from teacher mode myself. Price I pay for doing a Phd where I got into the habit of writing up everything I learned as an essay and then working for ten years on and off in science communication :D)

[alias_sqbr]

Yes, I think writers need space to be crap while they get the hang of the craft, but that does make it hard on readers who understandably would prefer to read the good stuff.

[tattered-pinion.livejournal.com]

It depends how you write it though. The Warden fails to meet a lot of the criteria for a Mary Sue. Whilst they are an individual, they don't have many truly unique traits, they don't have unique powers and a lot of things go wrong for them. Unless you're playing a human noble as well, your romances can end up pretty flawed.

It isn't the same though. There is a male version, the Gary Stu, that is less common because, well, generally speaking guys don't write about the Weasley twins having sex or Zevram and Morrigan or whatever. You were asking why Mary Sue characters had that defining characteristic of gender and the answer is "because girls write them" and the slightly more complicated answer is "because they are immature writers and writing a self-insert character of a different gender is too hard".

I'm not sure what you're arguing in that last bit. Yes, if you're inserting an American teenaged OC into a fic the likelyhood that you suck is moderately high (I'd probably just cut out most of that and say if you're writing fan fiction the likelyhood that you suck is very high) and that is true, it is just statistics!

[alias_sqbr]

Agreed on all counts.

*edits post to explain what I mean by Mary Sue*

[alias_sqbr]

Fanfiction writing is definitely a female dominated hobby, though there are some fandoms that have lots of male writers. I would say it's significantly more female-as-default than sf fandom is male-as-default, at least the circles I move in.

Mary Sue is definitely a gendered term, thus Gary Stu/Marty Stu as the male equivalent. Where I disagree with tattered_pinion is on whether or not it should be quite so much :)

[alias_sqbr]

I didn't mean that the protagonist of the game is a Mary Sue (I know I said it, but I didn't mean it *thaps self for making glib cut text*) but that the fic written about them can easily be very Sue-ish. Anyway, I agree that the term is used too broadly.

[kadeton.livejournal.com]

People shouldn't be locked into any sort of rigid dogma that defines for them what is 'good fiction' and what is 'bad fiction'.

A lot of people, particularly geeks and particularly on the internet, fall into the mindset of establishing a set of objective criteria for the quality of fiction. Since fiction is inherently subjective, such checklists (including 'Is the main character a Mary Sue?', by whatever distorted definition they choose to consider) lead inevitably to the presentation of opinion as fact, and hence to endless semantic flame wars.

I would consider a character a Mary Sue if their exaggerated awesomeness broke my willing suspension of disbelief and thus prevented me from enjoying the text. The important thing is that this is a subjective opinion, and not everyone might agree with it (presumably the author would disagree, at the very least).

[alias_sqbr]

Hmm. Ok:

I agree that since most fanfic is written by women, and Mary Sue type characters will have a lot in common with their writers, most Mary Sue type characters will be female. Thus from a statistical POV it makes sense to think of it as a gendered term, and if you see an original female character they are statistically more likely to be Mary Sue-ish than a male one.

But the idea I react against is that individual writers should worry more about their female OCs than their OCs who have other stuff in common with them, which I have seen around the place eg the slash writer ponders female characters.

Also I think that while the statistical genderedness of the term makes sense it can still got to bad place to only think of crappy author self inserts as a female thing, the same way that treating "mother" as a synonym for "primary child caretaker" perpetuates assumptions around parenthood.

[alias_sqbr]

Yep, I agree with all that :)

[capnoblivious.livejournal.com]

I... Hrm.

Yes, obviously can't dispute that it's a gendered term. I guess I never thought of it as a gendered quality or tendency - Tim Pratt's Impossible Dreams won the Hugo a couple of years back, and I found it such a horrid (and obvious) film-nerd wish-fulfilment piece that all I could think was "Hey, Mary Sue goes to the Hugos!"

[capnoblivious.livejournal.com]

Sorry - wasn't really doubting the demographics of fanfic, just the conclusion. As in, if all of fan-fic is a "girl thing", then it follows that Mary-Sueishness-in-fan-fic is a "girl thing", but in that case it doesn't seem a meaningful distinction because creditably-avoiding-Mary-Sueishness-in-fanfic is equally a "girl thing".

[hlbr.livejournal.com]

Say, I think it's not accurate to define a Mary Sue by the protagonist of an original fiction (it's even weirder that that fiction is a game--games' characters are even more superpowered in general than protagonists everywhere). Even if zie's superpowered, or the center of the universe, or whatever, that's what the protagonists are in adventure fiction. They have a Destiny, or Win Everything In The End, or Are Awesome, or All Of The Above, etc. Every reduction on this is a purposeful play in the part of the author, generally to make it or more sympathetic, or the adventure more suspenseful, or give it realism or whatever.

There are no canon Mary Sues (despite what Twilight would have us think--that's a different issue). Mary Sue is a exclusively fanfiction phenomenon. The problem is how it warps the previously unwarped characters and story around herself when the people reading fanfiction in general want to read about those characters and that setting.