Wottaguy vs. Mary Sue
I've been reading all the recent posts about Mary Sues and going 'hmmm.'
I have what is possibly an oddball perspective on the issue. My first fandom (my first participatory fandom, anyway) was for the independent comic series ElfQuest, back in the 80s. EQ fandom was mostly organized into collaborative writing groups called 'holts' after the name of the comic characters' original woodland home. Each holt would generally have an editor/coordinator, who would create a tribe of elves, give them a history and a culture, and create a few characters. They'd publish a brief blurb in the official fanclub newsletter, something like "Sandrunner Holt is a tribe of desert-dwelling hunter-gatherer elves who bond with coyotes. Contact Jane Fan at blah blah etc. and join the adventures of the Sandrunners!"
If you thought that sounded like an interesting scenario, you wrote to Jane Fan and got a more detailed tribal history, maybe a timeline, and a list of adoptable characters and guidelines for creating new ones. You'd write up the description of your character, get it approved by the editor, contact other members of the club to find out more about their characters, get the fanzine which collected previously written stories, and then start writing your own.
The guidelines for character creation were intended to minimize the occurrence of character types we called "Wottaguy/Wottagal." Keep in mind that all our characters were OCs, and the male/female ratio for characters was about 50/50. (I'm not sure what it was for fans, but EQ fandom definitely had a lot more guys in it than I've run across in other Western media fandoms.) Plus purple eyes were canon. But Wottaguy was nonetheless universally loathed, except for the people who wrote him.
So who was Wottaguy? Well, we could make a list of attributes - Wottaguy was the son of a chief and the last survivor of a tribe which had been destroyed by mean humans/nasty trolls/rampaging lava weasels. Wottaguy was a better leader than Cutter, a stronger healer than Leetah, a better shot than Strongbow. Wottaguy was either breathtakingly gorgeous or scarred in some tragic yet sexy way. Wottaguy had a Tragic Past which made him a complete asshole bitter and saracastic but deeply wounded inside. Wottaguy had a bond animal that was cooler and fiercer than yours. But as a number of previous posts on the subject have noted, it's not really a list of attributes that make a Wottaguy.
What really makes a Wottaguy is the attitude of the writer towards the characters. If a writer is fond of lot of different characters in a given setting, and finds them equally interesting and fun to write about, then the odds that they'll spawn a Wottaguy are pretty low. If a writer has one character who's the teacher's pet, so to speak, then it doesn't matter if the character is an OC or a canon character, male or female, tanked up on special powers or ordinary as dirt. That character runs a high risk of turning into Wottaguy.
Wottaguy is always right, you see. If something bad happens to Wottaguy, it's never really his fault. If Wottaguy does something wrong, there are always extenuating circumstances. Other characters don't matter save in how they relate to Wottaguy. Anyone who disagrees with Wottaguy is, by definition, wrong, and probably a bad person to boot. It's not just that Wottaguy is a protagonist in search of a story. Wottaguy is not content to be the protagonist of his own story. Wottaguy demands that every story be All About Him.
There are some differences between the situation in EQ fandom, where Wottaguy throwing his weight around meant that other people's own personal OCs got squashed, and the situation in most fandoms, where it's canon characters that don't really 'belong' to us getting squashed. But I think that most fans do feel a certain sense of proprietary affection for canon characters, and so feel aggrieved when we think they're being done wrong by, whether by an OC who swoops in to be aggressively better and cooler and more powerful than they are, or by another canon character who seems to be hogging more than their fair share of the story action.
The bottom line is that any character, no matter how well-balanced and cleverly designed, can become Wottaguy in the hands of a writer who's a little too fond of them. Which is probably something we should all keep in mind when we try to pin him down - we have seen the enemy, and he is us.
I have what is possibly an oddball perspective on the issue. My first fandom (my first participatory fandom, anyway) was for the independent comic series ElfQuest, back in the 80s. EQ fandom was mostly organized into collaborative writing groups called 'holts' after the name of the comic characters' original woodland home. Each holt would generally have an editor/coordinator, who would create a tribe of elves, give them a history and a culture, and create a few characters. They'd publish a brief blurb in the official fanclub newsletter, something like "Sandrunner Holt is a tribe of desert-dwelling hunter-gatherer elves who bond with coyotes. Contact Jane Fan at blah blah etc. and join the adventures of the Sandrunners!"
If you thought that sounded like an interesting scenario, you wrote to Jane Fan and got a more detailed tribal history, maybe a timeline, and a list of adoptable characters and guidelines for creating new ones. You'd write up the description of your character, get it approved by the editor, contact other members of the club to find out more about their characters, get the fanzine which collected previously written stories, and then start writing your own.
The guidelines for character creation were intended to minimize the occurrence of character types we called "Wottaguy/Wottagal." Keep in mind that all our characters were OCs, and the male/female ratio for characters was about 50/50. (I'm not sure what it was for fans, but EQ fandom definitely had a lot more guys in it than I've run across in other Western media fandoms.) Plus purple eyes were canon. But Wottaguy was nonetheless universally loathed, except for the people who wrote him.
So who was Wottaguy? Well, we could make a list of attributes - Wottaguy was the son of a chief and the last survivor of a tribe which had been destroyed by mean humans/nasty trolls/rampaging lava weasels. Wottaguy was a better leader than Cutter, a stronger healer than Leetah, a better shot than Strongbow. Wottaguy was either breathtakingly gorgeous or scarred in some tragic yet sexy way. Wottaguy had a Tragic Past which made him a complete asshole bitter and saracastic but deeply wounded inside. Wottaguy had a bond animal that was cooler and fiercer than yours. But as a number of previous posts on the subject have noted, it's not really a list of attributes that make a Wottaguy.
What really makes a Wottaguy is the attitude of the writer towards the characters. If a writer is fond of lot of different characters in a given setting, and finds them equally interesting and fun to write about, then the odds that they'll spawn a Wottaguy are pretty low. If a writer has one character who's the teacher's pet, so to speak, then it doesn't matter if the character is an OC or a canon character, male or female, tanked up on special powers or ordinary as dirt. That character runs a high risk of turning into Wottaguy.
Wottaguy is always right, you see. If something bad happens to Wottaguy, it's never really his fault. If Wottaguy does something wrong, there are always extenuating circumstances. Other characters don't matter save in how they relate to Wottaguy. Anyone who disagrees with Wottaguy is, by definition, wrong, and probably a bad person to boot. It's not just that Wottaguy is a protagonist in search of a story. Wottaguy is not content to be the protagonist of his own story. Wottaguy demands that every story be All About Him.
There are some differences between the situation in EQ fandom, where Wottaguy throwing his weight around meant that other people's own personal OCs got squashed, and the situation in most fandoms, where it's canon characters that don't really 'belong' to us getting squashed. But I think that most fans do feel a certain sense of proprietary affection for canon characters, and so feel aggrieved when we think they're being done wrong by, whether by an OC who swoops in to be aggressively better and cooler and more powerful than they are, or by another canon character who seems to be hogging more than their fair share of the story action.
The bottom line is that any character, no matter how well-balanced and cleverly designed, can become Wottaguy in the hands of a writer who's a little too fond of them. Which is probably something we should all keep in mind when we try to pin him down - we have seen the enemy, and he is us.