Uppercase OTL is bowed in supplication, lowercase otl is on their back desperately scrabbling at the sky.
every so often i see someone arguing that the concept of the mary sue is a sexist response to female power fantasies. i have now found the simplest refutation: this fic. in which xander harris gets favors and backpats from various godlike characters, and then suddenly goes horribly off the rails in harry potter fandom and what the fuck did i just read.
Unrelated to that fic, just on Mary Sue: Yes and no. Because Mary Sue doesn´t mean the same thing to every person, so yes, Some criticism of Mary Sues is criticizing 'Superman, but a girl', or 'Batman,m but a girl' or even 'Wonderman' and that criticism of Mary Sues is pretty damn sexist. And then there´s people talking about the type of character who warps the entire narrative around them via bad writing, a problem unrelated to gender. (Although Male protags get away with it more often bc the world sucks a bit)
i mean, sexists absolutely call powerful female characters mary sues. but that's them maliciously misusing the term. i'm not interested in letting them redefine it to their tastes. it was female writers who came up with it, and just about no one but female writers knew about it for decades. i was, as far as i knew, a female writer when i first heard of it, and it was like six or seven years after that before i ever heard a male writer use it in its original sense. it's only within the past, idk, four or five years that i've seen sexist critics applying the term to canon characters. they don't even seem aware of its original meaning of 'narrative-warping author intrusion'. edit: in the 70's and 80's, when my mom was writing dr who fanfic, she would run her timelord oc past her fellow fans to make sure she wasnt a mary sue, and they were like "of course not" despite all kinds of timelord powers and interacting-with-canon-characters, because the oc was subject to the same structural limits as the canon characters. when she tried to talk the master around to the light side, for instance, she didn't inexplicably succeed, he pretended to be convinced and then betrayed her. she was moved by the story, instead of the story warping around her. i guess i'm a bit defensive because whenever i tried to discuss this on tumblr, someone would inevitably decide i was saying "sexism doesn't real" and derail the whole business. i just find 'mary sue' a very useful term, for discussing a common beginning-writer problem that needs to be something we can talk about.
Canon or non canon is irrelevant to whether a character is a Mary Sue or should be. And redefining or no, the sexist usage Exists and for a while there was pretty dominant in fact.* Unless you clarify, people are going to read posts like you made as saying the term Mary Sue is not used in a sexist manner at all. *I remember putting a male canon villain through a Mary Sue quiz for shiggles and getting the maximum score because half the qualifiers were 'is a main character of their story'
i do want someone else to read that fic tho so i don't have to be alone in the wtf pit join me in the wtf pit because wtf
mary sue tests are fun, but they don't work. a lot of my male characters get high scores on those because they're from high-magic or high-powers worlds, which the tests don't take into account. kastor being half immortals isn't a very sue-ish trait in a world where there are hundreds of immortals and tens of thousands of their offspring and descendents running around, you know? ok i hit my sitting-up limit and have to go back to bed. blargh. anyway, you know me, you know what i didn't mean.
No offense, but nope. Did not divine that from what you actually wrote, only know that now that you clarified. Do appreciate clarification. Hope you feel better!
*plants flag in ground, adjusts soapbox, raises megaphone* Mary Sue Litmus Tests are a doomed endeavor because they attempt to quantify the window dressing instead of the fundamental writing problem, which is the authorial expectation of investment in a character without doing the narrative legwork to get that investment from the audience. It's an extremely common amateur writing mistake that happens to be particularly apparent in OC fanfiction, where the audience, by default, comes to the story already more invested in literally everything but the OC. This is also why it's a deeply subjective term, and why sexists will accuse any female lead of being a Mary Sue; to someone unwilling to extend empathy or respect to a character due to bigotry, any narrative expectation of empathy or respect is seen as an unearned intrusion. Thus, while I consider it a useful term in describing a particular failure mode of storytelling, both the term and the concept it describes will always be indelibly haunted by the specter of the idea that some types of characters/people are more worthy of having their stories told than others, and how this must, inevitably, interact with various forms of prejudice. *stops to wheeze* I can attest that when I first really started exploring the internet in the mid-aughts, its use already often carried a heavy baggage of misogyny, even in female-dominated spaces, and there was an active "canon-sues" Livejournal community, so neither of these were developments within the last five years. Personally, I would theorize that the push to see it more positively in some fandom spaces is at least in part due to 1) a sharp decline in the universality and acceptance of open misogyny within those spaces and 2) a sharp decline in the proportion of Baby's First Power Fantasy OC fic (where the author expects your investment because they piled every single thing they think is awesome onto one character) in popular fanfic spaces, especially with the advent of AO3 and its better search functions and older-on-average userbase.
Even with attempts to use it more positively I honestly can't use the term myself because like. Even now a lot of people I know who use it use it misogynistically. Leaves a really poor taste in my mouth. It's a weapon leveled by men against characters I like. Like the people I hear it from most are dudes bitching about characters like Rey.
@LadyNighteyes your analysis is brilliant. i'd disagree that it's entirely a demand for unearned investment, though; imo the more common mary sue error is the author disinvesting, if you will, in every character but the sue. for instance, in the fic i linked, dumbledore was arrested for child endangerment simply because sue!xander said harry was abused. it didn't matter what any character would've thought or done, because they weren't interesting to the author. it's beyond making them ooc, it's making them n0t-a-c.
I can't use it positively because to me, the term automatically implies a poorly-written character. An Author's Darling. A character the creator is under the impression is so self-evidently fascinating that you'll be as excited to see them do all the cool things and get all the accolades and be the center of everything as the creator was to write them doing that. I think attempts to reclaim it For Feminism(TM) as a symbol of female power fantasy are always going to have problems because they forget the rather important detail that a lot of the reason the term exists is because Mary Sues are, for a lot of people, incredibly annoying. The closest thing I have to another term for it is the aforesaid "Author's Darling," which still doesn't have the same broad applicability (e.g., doesn't feel quite as appropriate for those boring all-powerful villains who are always 12 steps ahead and everything's always part of their plans and the heroes only win by deus ex machina as "Villain Sue"). And, like I said, I think even any less-gendered replacement is always going to eventually run into the same problems, because a sin of narrative attention is always going to get entangled with the desire for whole groups of people to have no stories and not be seen. In general I settle for copiously using it and the various genderbent derivatives for male characters, because Starkiller from The Force Unleashed is one of the worst Mary Sues I've literally ever seen, and I didn't see dudebros writing screeds about how he was so terrible it ruined Star Wars forever.
This isn't precisely fanfic, but an imagine blog produced another very obvious direction to take an idea which no one has, specifically imagining your fave as a merperson recuperating in someone's bathtub. My first thought on seeing that was "because that ended so well in 'Mermaid in a Manhole'", but no one writes fanfics based on weird Japanese horror movies, apparently. Now I have to do it some time, and I already have way too much to do >:(
From my perspective, Mary Sue is a real and common amateur writing problem, and an overused term tinged with misogyny, and my biggest issue with it is when it's both those things at the same time. There are so many ways in which popular culture disseminates mocking terms for what pretty much amounts to being a developmentally normal preteen or teenage girl. If Mary Sue is a phase you need to go through to work through your shit and become a better author, then it's still not good writing and nobody is obligated to like it, but I feel like it shouldn't have that level of derision attached to it. I don't know if changing the term really addresses the problem, though.
I also feel like at the time the term first came about it was mostly adult women referencing the work of other adult women- I don't think there were many 13 year olds submitting to Star Trek zines back then
i think that writing error is only attached to women because transformative fandom is attached to women. you know what i mean? the prevalence of male canon sues proves that there'd be hella sues in boys' fic if boys didn't tend toward curative fandom.
