Wottaguy vs. Mary Sue

[rahirah]

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

Comments

[dharma_slut]

ONe thing that we keep pointing out in this discussion, really.

Xander turns into a surrogate Mary Sue for an awful lot of girls, because everyone knows that Mary Sue is a GIRL, and male charas don't get accused a tenth as much.

On a side note, Elfquest, yay!

[rahirah]

Some day I need to go through my old EQ fic and put it up on AO3 or something. Though I'd probably have to post the holt histories as well for people to make any sense of it!

[dharma_slut]

oh man that would be so worth archiving!

[rahirah]

I still have the entire Tower Mountain (a holt based loosely on Blue Mountain) website on my hard drive, with the timelines, maps, character lists, essays on technology/culture/art etc. Along with the entire run of print fanzines and subsidiary publications.

It's a horribly designed site (I can say that because I designed it) and there would probably be problems of ownership because a lot of the individual components were contributed by people I'm no longer in contact with. Some of whom left the club in a huff, demanding that no one use their creations ever again. But it's a little-known piece of fannish history that may not exist anywhere else.

[dharma_slut]

well, two things;
1) I hope you also have it backed up on a cd or something, and
2) if you wanted to put it back on the web, I would be glad to host it at probablepossible.com

I don't think rehosting it is anything like 'using their creations' although I have gotten in trouble with someone who did think so...

[rahirah]

Oh, I could slap it up on sleepingjaguars.com. I've just never gotten around to cleaning it up. I think I'd have to make some changes to make it clear that it was an historical archive rather a going project.

Yeah, people got really touchy about that stuff back in the day. It was especially troublesome because we were doing a shared world, and if someone decided to take their characters and go home, what could we do? Kill them off or write them out, sure, but what about past issues of the fanzine that might need to be reprinted? And some people got really unreasonable and demanded that their characters be removed completely, as if they'd never existed, which was just not feasible in many cases.

[melvh]

Actually, since the current Powers That Be have decided the club was unable to afford the cost of the Website and let it lapse --and the hard drive to which I saved all the records ate itself-- if I could get you to save all that info to CD/DVD/other media, I'd really, REALLY appreciate it.

[rahirah]

Sure - I'll see what I can do!

[dinpik]

Same here! I can reimburse for dvd/shipping. :D