People claiming Mary Sues are automatically feminist when they're often included in writing misogynistic enough to make Reddit wince.
oh oh I don't remember if I mentioned that YOI Badfic Friend also found one where like 5 chapters in the author suddenly casually dropped in that one of the characters was a serial rapist. It was not tagged. Badfic Friend was like, "...I know I've been complaining about him being written as a weepy woobie, but this is a bit too far in the other direction."
*SLAMS FISTS ON TABLE* GIVE ME THE FUCKED UP FEMSLASH Like, don't get me wrong, I adore cute fluffy femslash, but honestly I kinda am biased because I fucking love femslash in general and am willing to tolerate a bit more stupidity in femslash fic than in slash or het? But either way, I crave the complicated shit about Fucked Up Ladies Being Gay And Fucked Up. Just. Let me have this pls. #su has so much potential there and it's so often squandered by fandom #even when the ship is uh #canonically unhealthy #lookin' at you pearlrose
I think I know at least one of the posts you're talking about, and I think my problem with it boiled down to definitions. It seemed to think "Mary Sue" = "personal power fantasy," but that's not really the essence of why people complain about them. The thing that makes them obnoxious to read is that they hog the spotlight and warp the narrative so it's always about them- everyone else's lives and all the major events are forced to revolve around the Sue. The way I see it, the issue breaks down like this: Writing the character who's your personal darling as the black hole devouring the rest of the story is a common writing mistake, especially for beginners. Female characters are more likely to have this called out, despite it being absurdly common in male characters in published media. Almost any female character who resembles a power fantasy at all and gets significant narrative attention will be accused of being a Mary Sue by misogynists who are uncomfortable with how much of the spotlight she gets. See: Rey. So it's not that writing a Mary Sue- either by the "personal power fantasy" definition or the "story-devouring void" definition- is an inherently feminist act. Nor is calling a character a Mary Sue an inherently anti-feminist act. But it is unfair that shameless male-targeted power fantasies get ignored, as do flaming Gary Stus, while equally self-indulgent garbage that's aimed at anyone who's not a cishet dude gets treated like the worst thing ever to happen, and it is unfair that non-cisdude would-be creators are far more likely to be raked over the coals for a very common amateur mistake, and there is a particular subset of people who try to use "MARY SUE" as a bludgeon against any power fantasy character that isn't packaged primarily for cishet dude enjoyment. So I've basically come to an attitude of "Everyone should have a right to write Mary Sues, but that doesn't make it good writing to do so." And that anyone who wants to complain to me about a female power fantasy character being a Mary Sue is first going to have to make a case to me about how she stacks up against a selection of comparable male characters. (That case is going to be very difficult in Star Wars. Especially if I feel justified in including this guy.)
You cannot convince me that there is anyone in the world who doesn't buy that fucking Galen Mareck is a Mary Sue of the highest order. Motherfucker is Vader's ~secret apprentice~, and also OP as fuck.
He is the single worst Mary Sue I have ever seen in a published work of fiction, yes. But like, could you see that game having any chance of being released if he was a girl?
To be completely fair, he is the protagonist of a video game. He's literally and entirely a power fantasy. It's not so much a bug as it is a feature. The feature, even.
Yes, and that excuses "he is super-ridiculously-hilariously OP," but not "and also he started the Rebellion." Point is: 1000% textbook Mary Sue. Like, his entire biography is "edgy OC from a fanfic published in 2005." Write a girl like that in a major game title, and every fanboy on Reddit would spontaneously start frothing at the mouth, but this one got decent reviews and did well enough to get a sequel.
Oh yeah, I know. But to me, that seems like an entirely separate problem from the Sue problem? Author wrote a black hole, and author also wrote a whole lot of into the story. And they might play into each other, like if the Sue constantly bashes other girls to show off how much cooler she is, but there's nothing about writing even the most godawful insufferable Sue that inevitably leads to sexist BS, except that they're both often done by people who haven't put a lot of thought into a lot of things.
Yeah. but Tumblr keeps bringing up stuff about "all Mary Sues are wonderful examples of feminism!" when... nope.
Yeeeah, I've seen a few of those where it's like, "...You've literally never read an OC/canon bashfic ever, have you."
And from that punctuation, they're chuckling their dialogue, too. (And shrugging it, and grinning it, I guess in Morse code.) Someone needs to cut the laughing gas.
That reminds me of a general gripe....this is another why won't random other people anticipate and cater to my needs thing, but... I want minor character fic. In pretty much every fandom, that is something I want. I rarely get it, and when I do it's often "thinly-veiled self-insert" but....seriously. I want to explore the backstory of the single-appearance villain! I want that teacher's outsider POV! I always want fic about the parents in an anime. And yet.... (Ravus Nox Fleuret is the latest in a long line of characters like this for me.)
TBH Lunafreya Nox Fleuret is that character for me I wish we learned anything about like. Who she actually is as a fucking person. She gets like 20 minutes of screentime total and basically none of them are about her
The Mary Sue discussion reminds me of that "I just described Batman" post, which... Yeah. He's a major Mary Sue in most continuities. Others try to subvert it to varying amounts of success. That's... Not exactly controversial.
honestly i don't like the whole mary sue thing for the fact that reading people tearing apart other children's writing and listing extensively why it was wrong and they were wrong for writing it FUCKED MY ABILITY TO WRITE UP i never felt comfortable writing fanfic because if i wrote a sue i would be Literally A Terrible Person i could barely write my OWN stuff because "oh no is this protagonist too good at this? are they too plot relevant? they have more than one love interest im an awful writer" people need to write sues. it's a part of growing up and learning to write. some people never grow out of it, and are asshole about it, but a 13 year old who wants to kiss legolas is different than a published author being a jerk to everyone around her.
