A Very Long Entry About Mary Sues
So apparently, there's this huge back-and-forth going on in fandom at the moment about Mary Sues and whether they are evil, good, bad, harmless, harmful, sent from the Pit to devour us all, or whatever. I should probably put a disclaimer here saying that I usually look at metafandom only to the extent of reading the little copy-and-pasted paragraphs they put in the link collection posts--those usually give you the gist of the post they're linking to. But this isn't really a response to the discussion that's been going on in fandom. It's just my thoughts on Mary Sue--as a fanfic writer and role player, of course I have them, and since it's raining and I don't want to think about my uni work, I will type them up.
The big thing that seems to be going around on metafandom at the moment is that hey, Mary Sues don't harm anyone, Mary Sues are how every writer starts out, and actually, Mary Sues are totally feminist, because hey, there are enough perfect and flawless male characters out there who are 100% accepted, so why not accept the female ones as well?
I do think that the term Mary Sue is overused. I don't like your character, I'm going to call her a Mary Sue. I want to see my favorite character shipped with my other favorite character, so I'm going to call that OC you're shipping them with a Mary Sue as well. I don't like your writing style, I will call all your characters Mary Sues. It gets old, and writers get paranoid about it--because you need to do some self-insertion when you're writing; not just original characters, but also canonical characters.
Say I want to write the Doctor in a sex scene. I've never seen the Doctor in a sex scene, so I can't refer to canon as a source. I will have to make his reaction up referring to my own experiences. I picture myself in the situation I'm putting my character in, figure out how I would react, and then I apply that to my character, taking into account their history and canonical backstory. If I'm good, the reaction I come up with will sync up with the character's usual behavioral patters, and people won't tell me I wrote the character OOC or as a Mary Sue.
With OCs, you don't have any canon to refer to. All you have is yourself, your first-hand experiences (your life up to that point), your second-hand experiences (things you read about, things other people told you about, things you saw on television/in movies/in other media), and what I'm going to call your third-hand experiences--things you've imagined going on conclusions drawn from your first- and second-hand experiences.
Now, if you're a female writer writing an original female protagonist, chances are that female OC is going to end up having some similarities to you. A protagonist is constantly present in your story, thinking and talking and making decisions basically in every scene--and they're drawing on your first-, second- and third-hand experiences, just like you are in every moment of your life. You're never going to get a good flow going if you're trying to put a filter between your character and the experiences they're drawing on--every relay station you're putting in takes another edge off your character, meaning that a character drawing on third-hand experiences already had three edges taken off. If you muddy the waters further by trying to re-interpret these experiences in a way you didn't interpret them, you're eventually going to end up with a very blurry picture of a very general character who has no real, distinct feel to them. And that's not how you draw your reader's sympathy. Nobody wants to sympathize with a person who doesn't even feel real.
And here's the thing--that kind of similarity is not a bad thing. At least in my opinion it isn't. Every writer does it. Have you ever read a Stephen King novel? Most of his protagonists are writers; they're Stephen King with a different name having grown up under different circumstances. In an interview about the original Queer as Folk, RTD said that the three protagonists, Stuart, Vince and Nathan (Brian, Michael and Justin in the US version), are three aspects of one person--the person he felt he was during his time in the Manchester gay scene. Look at all the different characters that David Tennant has played over the years--Peter Carlisle, Bartie Crouch Jr, the tenth Doctor. They're very different characters--Peter is a bit of an immoral sleazeball, BCJ is a fanatic maniac, and the tenth Doctor is, well, the tenth Doctor--but they are all recognizably David Tennant, and I don't mean that they look alike. They have similar mannerisms, similar ways of expressing themselves, similar ways of interacting with their environment. What these artists are doing is they're drawing on their own experiences and then amplifying the aspects of their own personality that they think fit the character they're trying to write/play.
Fictional characters are much more defined than real people, because they are part of a story--the circumstances you find them in are usually the same, or similar, eliciting the same or similar reaction over and over. House is always in the same environment, solving medical mysteries in the halls of PPTH. Mulder is always chasing aliens or supernatural occurrences. Dean is driving around in his Impala and killing demons. The Doctor is saving a planet, or the universe, or his companion. Same situation, same reaction, over and over. Fictional characters have a purpose, and therefore, their personalities are more defined than real people's. Which means they can be very inflexible, but it also means that you can turn yourself into an unlimited number of different characters--every single aspect of yourself, taken from any random point in your life, makes for its own individual character.
So how do Mary Sues happen? Because yes, I do think they happen, and I do think that calling a character a Mary Sue is valid criticism--as long as the term is not used in an emotive, you-wrote-a-character-I-disliked-so-I-will-call-them-a-Mary-Sue way. I think Mary Sues happen when a writer is unwilling to look at themselves and their first-, second- and third-hand experiences in their entirety. Let me explain--if every character ever written is an aspect of the writer's personality amplified and dressed up to look like a person, then some people have some seriously weird aspects to their personality. Norman Bates, anyone? Hannibal Lecter? Somewhere, deep down in his subconscious, Thomas Harris must think that cutting someone's skull open and eating their brain while they're still alive is a really neat idea. (And I agree. It is a neat idea.)
I think that someone writing a Mary Sue doesn't want to look at the "darker" aspects of their own personality. They create their characters entirely from aspects of their own personality that they like, or that they would like to think they had, and, most importantly, that they imagine would appeal to others. This is why usually, Mary Sues show up in "badfic"--a piece of writing that seems to have no depth, no thought, whose ambiguity seems to rely entirely on contrived conflict that offers very clear-cut choices: the "good" choice, and the "bad" choice. A Mary Sue's character goal is to endear themselves to the audience, and a Mary Sue's choices are made not based on what is most appropriate to the situation, but on what the writer thinks would charm the reader most. A Mary Sue is constantly asking for validation, not their fellow characters, but the reader--which is what makes them so annoying. Especially in fiction, people look for characters who can rely on themselves and their own judgment--leadership characters. A character whose only goal seems to be to win the reader's sympathy and approval is not a self-reliant, strong character, and will usually be dismissed by the reader as two-dimensional and flat.
I don't actually think Mary Sues have to necessarily be self-inserts. As I said above, self-inserts, per se, are not a bad thing. Otherwise every autobiography would be horrible to read. Mary Sues are, however, characters who were shaped not from within, but from the outside--carefully molded to appeal to everybody. One size fits all; you're going to love this character because they don't do anything. They don't act, they only react--to society's expectations, to their antagonist's/love interest's expectations, to the reader's presumed expectations. Which is also why I think that female Mary Sues are anything but feminist--we're trying for active female characters, aren't we? Not for characters who were carefully shaped to charm and endear themselves to the readership.
Not to say that there aren't any male Mary Sues. Or Gary Stus, if you prefer that term. It's just that in fandom, the female ones show up more often, simply because the writers in fandom are predominantly female. If you're reading published fiction in a field with a lot of male writers, you are inadvertently going to come across male characters whose only purpose is to appeal to the audience. However, it must be said, I think, that Gary Stus usually go for a different kind of appeal--society's image of the perfect man differs from society's image of the perfect woman, so if a character is trying to appeal to a broad audience's presumed expectations, they are going to go for different personality aspects depending on their sex and gender. But this is going into gender roles and the fact that no matter how hard everyone tries, society is still horridly sexist, which is not what I'm talking about in this entry.
So how do I avoid writing a Mary Sue? That's easy. Don't write what you think people want to hear. Don't put your audience above your story. Don't try to make people happy with your writing. I think the best writing makes people respond, usually emotively. It doesn't have to be a happy emotion. It can be rage, or sadness. Children of Earth made a lot of people very sad, and a lot of people very angry, and I think it's one of the best television series ever written, featuring some of the most honest characters I've ever come across on TV.
Honesty. That's really what's at the heart of this ridiculously long entry. If I want to avoid writing a Mary Sue, I have to be honest. If I want to write Norman Bates, I need to look for that dark part in myself that wants to stab young women in the shower. If I don't, what I'm going to end up writing is a boring stereotype. I think to avoid writing a Mary Sue, you have to self-insert. You have to look at your own experiences and go, okay, how would I react in this situation? Not "how should I react", but "how would I react". And then you apply that to your character, and you write it down, and it's going to feel honest.
It might also mean that you find out things about yourself that you never wanted to know. I know I've found out things about myself, through writing, that surprised and shocked me. I really liked what RTD said in his book The Writer's Tale, about how writing is looking at yourself, hard, all day. It's very introverted, and can be scary sometimes, but I think the harder a writer is willing to look at themselves, the better their fiction will end up being.
Which doesn't mean that people aren't still going to label characters a Mary Sue when all they meant was "I had some problems with this character's actions and/or development". Because being honest while you're writing doesn't mean that your writing is automatically going to be perfect. You still need to figure out how to channel all that honesty onto the page, and things might get lost along the way, or distorted so they're unrecognizable in the end result. But I do think that the huge, irrational fear of writing a Mary Sue can be quite easily overcome by asking yourself, was I honest when I came up with this character's reactions, or was I trying to impress my readers? If you were honest, and someone still calls your character a Mary Sue, then they're wrong. It is, however, an indication that you may have messed up somewhere else along the way.
But then, that's writing. The day I get a story 100% right, I'm going to stop writing, because apparently, I've said all I ever had to say.
comment on LJ | read comments on LJ
this entry on dreamwidth ||
comments on dw || comment on dw
The big thing that seems to be going around on metafandom at the moment is that hey, Mary Sues don't harm anyone, Mary Sues are how every writer starts out, and actually, Mary Sues are totally feminist, because hey, there are enough perfect and flawless male characters out there who are 100% accepted, so why not accept the female ones as well?
I do think that the term Mary Sue is overused. I don't like your character, I'm going to call her a Mary Sue. I want to see my favorite character shipped with my other favorite character, so I'm going to call that OC you're shipping them with a Mary Sue as well. I don't like your writing style, I will call all your characters Mary Sues. It gets old, and writers get paranoid about it--because you need to do some self-insertion when you're writing; not just original characters, but also canonical characters.
Say I want to write the Doctor in a sex scene. I've never seen the Doctor in a sex scene, so I can't refer to canon as a source. I will have to make his reaction up referring to my own experiences. I picture myself in the situation I'm putting my character in, figure out how I would react, and then I apply that to my character, taking into account their history and canonical backstory. If I'm good, the reaction I come up with will sync up with the character's usual behavioral patters, and people won't tell me I wrote the character OOC or as a Mary Sue.
With OCs, you don't have any canon to refer to. All you have is yourself, your first-hand experiences (your life up to that point), your second-hand experiences (things you read about, things other people told you about, things you saw on television/in movies/in other media), and what I'm going to call your third-hand experiences--things you've imagined going on conclusions drawn from your first- and second-hand experiences.
Now, if you're a female writer writing an original female protagonist, chances are that female OC is going to end up having some similarities to you. A protagonist is constantly present in your story, thinking and talking and making decisions basically in every scene--and they're drawing on your first-, second- and third-hand experiences, just like you are in every moment of your life. You're never going to get a good flow going if you're trying to put a filter between your character and the experiences they're drawing on--every relay station you're putting in takes another edge off your character, meaning that a character drawing on third-hand experiences already had three edges taken off. If you muddy the waters further by trying to re-interpret these experiences in a way you didn't interpret them, you're eventually going to end up with a very blurry picture of a very general character who has no real, distinct feel to them. And that's not how you draw your reader's sympathy. Nobody wants to sympathize with a person who doesn't even feel real.
And here's the thing--that kind of similarity is not a bad thing. At least in my opinion it isn't. Every writer does it. Have you ever read a Stephen King novel? Most of his protagonists are writers; they're Stephen King with a different name having grown up under different circumstances. In an interview about the original Queer as Folk, RTD said that the three protagonists, Stuart, Vince and Nathan (Brian, Michael and Justin in the US version), are three aspects of one person--the person he felt he was during his time in the Manchester gay scene. Look at all the different characters that David Tennant has played over the years--Peter Carlisle, Bartie Crouch Jr, the tenth Doctor. They're very different characters--Peter is a bit of an immoral sleazeball, BCJ is a fanatic maniac, and the tenth Doctor is, well, the tenth Doctor--but they are all recognizably David Tennant, and I don't mean that they look alike. They have similar mannerisms, similar ways of expressing themselves, similar ways of interacting with their environment. What these artists are doing is they're drawing on their own experiences and then amplifying the aspects of their own personality that they think fit the character they're trying to write/play.
Fictional characters are much more defined than real people, because they are part of a story--the circumstances you find them in are usually the same, or similar, eliciting the same or similar reaction over and over. House is always in the same environment, solving medical mysteries in the halls of PPTH. Mulder is always chasing aliens or supernatural occurrences. Dean is driving around in his Impala and killing demons. The Doctor is saving a planet, or the universe, or his companion. Same situation, same reaction, over and over. Fictional characters have a purpose, and therefore, their personalities are more defined than real people's. Which means they can be very inflexible, but it also means that you can turn yourself into an unlimited number of different characters--every single aspect of yourself, taken from any random point in your life, makes for its own individual character.
So how do Mary Sues happen? Because yes, I do think they happen, and I do think that calling a character a Mary Sue is valid criticism--as long as the term is not used in an emotive, you-wrote-a-character-I-disliked-so-I-will-call-them-a-Mary-Sue way. I think Mary Sues happen when a writer is unwilling to look at themselves and their first-, second- and third-hand experiences in their entirety. Let me explain--if every character ever written is an aspect of the writer's personality amplified and dressed up to look like a person, then some people have some seriously weird aspects to their personality. Norman Bates, anyone? Hannibal Lecter? Somewhere, deep down in his subconscious, Thomas Harris must think that cutting someone's skull open and eating their brain while they're still alive is a really neat idea. (And I agree. It is a neat idea.)
I think that someone writing a Mary Sue doesn't want to look at the "darker" aspects of their own personality. They create their characters entirely from aspects of their own personality that they like, or that they would like to think they had, and, most importantly, that they imagine would appeal to others. This is why usually, Mary Sues show up in "badfic"--a piece of writing that seems to have no depth, no thought, whose ambiguity seems to rely entirely on contrived conflict that offers very clear-cut choices: the "good" choice, and the "bad" choice. A Mary Sue's character goal is to endear themselves to the audience, and a Mary Sue's choices are made not based on what is most appropriate to the situation, but on what the writer thinks would charm the reader most. A Mary Sue is constantly asking for validation, not their fellow characters, but the reader--which is what makes them so annoying. Especially in fiction, people look for characters who can rely on themselves and their own judgment--leadership characters. A character whose only goal seems to be to win the reader's sympathy and approval is not a self-reliant, strong character, and will usually be dismissed by the reader as two-dimensional and flat.
I don't actually think Mary Sues have to necessarily be self-inserts. As I said above, self-inserts, per se, are not a bad thing. Otherwise every autobiography would be horrible to read. Mary Sues are, however, characters who were shaped not from within, but from the outside--carefully molded to appeal to everybody. One size fits all; you're going to love this character because they don't do anything. They don't act, they only react--to society's expectations, to their antagonist's/love interest's expectations, to the reader's presumed expectations. Which is also why I think that female Mary Sues are anything but feminist--we're trying for active female characters, aren't we? Not for characters who were carefully shaped to charm and endear themselves to the readership.
Not to say that there aren't any male Mary Sues. Or Gary Stus, if you prefer that term. It's just that in fandom, the female ones show up more often, simply because the writers in fandom are predominantly female. If you're reading published fiction in a field with a lot of male writers, you are inadvertently going to come across male characters whose only purpose is to appeal to the audience. However, it must be said, I think, that Gary Stus usually go for a different kind of appeal--society's image of the perfect man differs from society's image of the perfect woman, so if a character is trying to appeal to a broad audience's presumed expectations, they are going to go for different personality aspects depending on their sex and gender. But this is going into gender roles and the fact that no matter how hard everyone tries, society is still horridly sexist, which is not what I'm talking about in this entry.
So how do I avoid writing a Mary Sue? That's easy. Don't write what you think people want to hear. Don't put your audience above your story. Don't try to make people happy with your writing. I think the best writing makes people respond, usually emotively. It doesn't have to be a happy emotion. It can be rage, or sadness. Children of Earth made a lot of people very sad, and a lot of people very angry, and I think it's one of the best television series ever written, featuring some of the most honest characters I've ever come across on TV.
Honesty. That's really what's at the heart of this ridiculously long entry. If I want to avoid writing a Mary Sue, I have to be honest. If I want to write Norman Bates, I need to look for that dark part in myself that wants to stab young women in the shower. If I don't, what I'm going to end up writing is a boring stereotype. I think to avoid writing a Mary Sue, you have to self-insert. You have to look at your own experiences and go, okay, how would I react in this situation? Not "how should I react", but "how would I react". And then you apply that to your character, and you write it down, and it's going to feel honest.
It might also mean that you find out things about yourself that you never wanted to know. I know I've found out things about myself, through writing, that surprised and shocked me. I really liked what RTD said in his book The Writer's Tale, about how writing is looking at yourself, hard, all day. It's very introverted, and can be scary sometimes, but I think the harder a writer is willing to look at themselves, the better their fiction will end up being.
Which doesn't mean that people aren't still going to label characters a Mary Sue when all they meant was "I had some problems with this character's actions and/or development". Because being honest while you're writing doesn't mean that your writing is automatically going to be perfect. You still need to figure out how to channel all that honesty onto the page, and things might get lost along the way, or distorted so they're unrecognizable in the end result. But I do think that the huge, irrational fear of writing a Mary Sue can be quite easily overcome by asking yourself, was I honest when I came up with this character's reactions, or was I trying to impress my readers? If you were honest, and someone still calls your character a Mary Sue, then they're wrong. It is, however, an indication that you may have messed up somewhere else along the way.
But then, that's writing. The day I get a story 100% right, I'm going to stop writing, because apparently, I've said all I ever had to say.
comment on LJ | read comments on LJ
this entry on dreamwidth ||
comments on dw || comment on dw