a repost so this can be public.
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... )
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 unique - she's special - and she'll probably save the day with a little-known fact (or made up fact) that her aforementioned unique history has been uniquely tailored just so that she'll know just the right thing at just the right moment.
Why is this unrealistic? For fuck's sake.
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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.
Paula Smith is the one who came up with "Mary Sue" in the first place. The story you were told about was a parody she wrote. There's a great deal more about her and all this in the Mary Sue article at Fanlore.
From the little I know of Paula she could be a MS herself. Extremely forceful, charismatic, intelligent person with a massive ego. Inserted herself into every fandom there was. She was prolific as hell, writing literally hundreds of letters to fanzines along with editorials in her own publication, Menagerie (not to be confused with the jocular Menagerie published by STAR San Diego). She wanted to leave her "calling card" everywhere and anywhere, and she did.
I think the whole thing started in '73 when Kraith was up for a Hugo (got Honorable Mention). Paula Smith wrote "Trekkie's Tale" in '74 in response to what she said (I have no evidence) was a preponderance of badly written "teen Lt. gets Kirk/Spock/Whoever" stories in all fanzines. In '75, Star Trek fans proposed creating a new award specifically for ST-related achievements including fan fiction. Her response to this suggestion (scroll down) has to be read to be believed. She was constantly on message about "good writing". She never seemed to consider that most fans were just there to have fun and that very few, like J. Lichtenberg or Dorothy Jones Heydt, wanted to be on the track to become serious, published, career authors.
While there was always some misogyny in fandom, Paula Smith is the one who turned it into an industry. She went from fandom to fandom, spreading the same 'gospel' wherever she went. She managed to completely derail the most popular letterzine for Starsky & Hutch, among other things. (That letter in issue 16 about "it stinks" is very likely a fan's response to the way Paula treated most amateur writers who didn't come up to her standards.)
This is back when it was considered very controversial for fans to review or critique other fans' work. Paula was a zealot at this.
So that's some of the history....
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