7 Reasons the Mary Sue Witch Hunt has to Stop
1) Everyone has made a Mary Sue at some point in time. Okay, maybe not everyone, but a very healthy chunk of the population. I think that if you hand your average kid/teenager a piece of paper and tell them to write a story about Harry Potter, they will come up with something that brushes up against the traditional definition of "Sue." The thing is? Most people grow out of it. In fact, most people grow out of their silly Mary Sue characters without ever being screamed at. In sum, Mary Sues are not the rare and audacious lapse in sanity that people treat them as. They are the rule rather than the exception. Similarly, the 30-40 year olds who are still writing horrible Mary Sue fanfiction are the exception rather than the rule.
2) It follows, then, that the majority of Mary Sue writers are young and inexperienced. While there's absolutely nothing wrong with sharing a few behind-the-hand giggles with friends, I don't believe that there's truly justification in smug, mean-spirited attacks on these writers. Profile "snarks" (can I use that word in that way?) tend to be smug, mirthless and often transcend the text in order to attack the author. Again, this isn't to say that every Mystery Science Theatre-style breakdown of a profile or fanfic is mean or bad - The MST of Eye of Argon, for example, is brilliant! However, rather than approaching horrible writing with their tongues placed firmly in their cheeks, many of the most ardent Sue-hunters tend to adopt an Encyclopedia Dramatica approach to their "critique" - that is, they are often snide, cruel, 100% serious, and also very liable to miss the point and misinterpret a work of trolling genius.
3) The phrase "don't like, don't read" tends not to apply to Mary Sue fanfiction. If there is a Mary Sue in a fanfic, it is treated as an Affront To Humanity to which the only proper response is to hang the author upside-down by her toes until she learns better. However, should someone object to, for example, highschool AU Harry/Draco noncon incest smut, they are told to lighten up and get themselves a scroll bar and a back button. I'm not entirely sure how we got to the point where a Mary Sue is considered "canon rape" but everything else goes, and most people tend to agree that if you don't like a fic, you shouldn't read it. Can we start to apply this thinking to Mary Sues?
Roleplay, of course, is a different story altogether. A Sue in roleplay messing up your story might merit half the vitriol that is directed at many fanfic Sues.
4) At some point in time, it seems the symptoms of Suedom began to draw far more ire than the disease. This is problematic because not all of the commonly defined Mary Sue traits actually make for a bad or annoying character. Most canon characters, for example, are Mary Sues to some extent. It's true. They are. And if they weren't, chances are we would never watch/read about them. Throwing an attractive OC with a weird eye colour into the mix is generally not as strange as its made out to be, given the context. Along the same vein, have you ever tried running yourself through a Mary Sue test? Great fun, surprising results.
5) The indignation at the existence of a Mary Sue is ten thousand times more irritating than the Mary Sue will ever be. As I discussed above, Mary Sues are genuinely funny more often than not and so there is really no harm in having a laugh over them. However, there is nothing funny about the people who seem deeply and genuinely offended by the fact that there may be a Mary Sue in their fanfiction. Ironically, these are the people who are most likely to respond to the author with "Internet: Serious Business" macros after leaving a deadly serious review instructing said author to choke on a sack of burning excrement. That people are willing to be carelessly cruel and derisive to youngin's over something as trivial as bad fanfiction suggests to me that something has gone awry. Is it just bandwagon syndrome? Is everyone so entitled that they are greviously offended at reading a bad fic? Perhaps they are jealous of the author's lack of inhibition or number of reviews in spite of being a comparitively poor writer? I have no idea, but it's very seriously out of line. Mary Sues are not so heinous a crime that those who write them deserve to be beat down to the point where they never wish to write again.
6) The knee-jerk, venomous reaction has created a very oppressive environment for those who wish to make Original Characters. Creating an original character for a roleplay or a story, no matter how small their part, has become an exercise in paranoia. I will be optimistic for a moment and say that the panic over Mary Sues has facilitated communities such as oc_analysis, where you can get helpful feedback. On the whole, though, we do not see many OCs and the OCs we do see are often kept at arm's length. Heaven forbid one of them be paired with or related to a main character, both designations that in and of themselves are rather innocent but also loathed as signs of Suedom. Many RPs do not accept OCs for fear of Mary Sues, but ignore the possibility of canon characters being made into the flawless, attention-mongering definition of Suedom.
7) Fanfiction and roleplay are not professional writing. It's not even that they're amateur writing, really - it's that they are purely for-fun by definition. I've seen it argued that the people who write Mary Sues have delusions of grandeur, and I'm sure that this is true some of the time. However, I tend to think that the people who believe themselves to be on a Holy Crusade to End All Badfic are taking fanfic a lot more seriously than the people who are writing the offending story. I do not understand why fanfic draws so much ire and yet published works with terrible characters and horrible prose often slide under the radar, as though their being published lends them legitimacy. Shouldn't it be the other way around? If we're going to feel outrage at a poorly written character, should we not direct that rage at the people being paid and lauded for their creations? Obviously this isn't a hard-and-fast rule (See: Stephanie Meyer) and sometimes it works in reverse - the worst thing that you can call a character, it seems, is a Mary Sue, and this label tends to be unfairly applied to unpopular characters (eg. Relena Peacecraft) who are not any more Mary Sue than the rest of the cast.
Did I miss anything?
2) It follows, then, that the majority of Mary Sue writers are young and inexperienced. While there's absolutely nothing wrong with sharing a few behind-the-hand giggles with friends, I don't believe that there's truly justification in smug, mean-spirited attacks on these writers. Profile "snarks" (can I use that word in that way?) tend to be smug, mirthless and often transcend the text in order to attack the author. Again, this isn't to say that every Mystery Science Theatre-style breakdown of a profile or fanfic is mean or bad - The MST of Eye of Argon, for example, is brilliant! However, rather than approaching horrible writing with their tongues placed firmly in their cheeks, many of the most ardent Sue-hunters tend to adopt an Encyclopedia Dramatica approach to their "critique" - that is, they are often snide, cruel, 100% serious, and also very liable to miss the point and misinterpret a work of trolling genius.
3) The phrase "don't like, don't read" tends not to apply to Mary Sue fanfiction. If there is a Mary Sue in a fanfic, it is treated as an Affront To Humanity to which the only proper response is to hang the author upside-down by her toes until she learns better. However, should someone object to, for example, highschool AU Harry/Draco noncon incest smut, they are told to lighten up and get themselves a scroll bar and a back button. I'm not entirely sure how we got to the point where a Mary Sue is considered "canon rape" but everything else goes, and most people tend to agree that if you don't like a fic, you shouldn't read it. Can we start to apply this thinking to Mary Sues?
Roleplay, of course, is a different story altogether. A Sue in roleplay messing up your story might merit half the vitriol that is directed at many fanfic Sues.
4) At some point in time, it seems the symptoms of Suedom began to draw far more ire than the disease. This is problematic because not all of the commonly defined Mary Sue traits actually make for a bad or annoying character. Most canon characters, for example, are Mary Sues to some extent. It's true. They are. And if they weren't, chances are we would never watch/read about them. Throwing an attractive OC with a weird eye colour into the mix is generally not as strange as its made out to be, given the context. Along the same vein, have you ever tried running yourself through a Mary Sue test? Great fun, surprising results.
5) The indignation at the existence of a Mary Sue is ten thousand times more irritating than the Mary Sue will ever be. As I discussed above, Mary Sues are genuinely funny more often than not and so there is really no harm in having a laugh over them. However, there is nothing funny about the people who seem deeply and genuinely offended by the fact that there may be a Mary Sue in their fanfiction. Ironically, these are the people who are most likely to respond to the author with "Internet: Serious Business" macros after leaving a deadly serious review instructing said author to choke on a sack of burning excrement. That people are willing to be carelessly cruel and derisive to youngin's over something as trivial as bad fanfiction suggests to me that something has gone awry. Is it just bandwagon syndrome? Is everyone so entitled that they are greviously offended at reading a bad fic? Perhaps they are jealous of the author's lack of inhibition or number of reviews in spite of being a comparitively poor writer? I have no idea, but it's very seriously out of line. Mary Sues are not so heinous a crime that those who write them deserve to be beat down to the point where they never wish to write again.
6) The knee-jerk, venomous reaction has created a very oppressive environment for those who wish to make Original Characters. Creating an original character for a roleplay or a story, no matter how small their part, has become an exercise in paranoia. I will be optimistic for a moment and say that the panic over Mary Sues has facilitated communities such as oc_analysis, where you can get helpful feedback. On the whole, though, we do not see many OCs and the OCs we do see are often kept at arm's length. Heaven forbid one of them be paired with or related to a main character, both designations that in and of themselves are rather innocent but also loathed as signs of Suedom. Many RPs do not accept OCs for fear of Mary Sues, but ignore the possibility of canon characters being made into the flawless, attention-mongering definition of Suedom.
7) Fanfiction and roleplay are not professional writing. It's not even that they're amateur writing, really - it's that they are purely for-fun by definition. I've seen it argued that the people who write Mary Sues have delusions of grandeur, and I'm sure that this is true some of the time. However, I tend to think that the people who believe themselves to be on a Holy Crusade to End All Badfic are taking fanfic a lot more seriously than the people who are writing the offending story. I do not understand why fanfic draws so much ire and yet published works with terrible characters and horrible prose often slide under the radar, as though their being published lends them legitimacy. Shouldn't it be the other way around? If we're going to feel outrage at a poorly written character, should we not direct that rage at the people being paid and lauded for their creations? Obviously this isn't a hard-and-fast rule (See: Stephanie Meyer) and sometimes it works in reverse - the worst thing that you can call a character, it seems, is a Mary Sue, and this label tends to be unfairly applied to unpopular characters (eg. Relena Peacecraft) who are not any more Mary Sue than the rest of the cast.
Did I miss anything?