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.

[trobadora]

Thank you for this post! Your Wottaguy is exactly how I've always understood/used the term Mary Sue, which is why it used to baffle me that so many people thought there couldn't be Sues in original fic. (Then I realised people were using the term in a variety of different ways. *g*)

[rahirah]

The tricky thing about this definition is, perfectly reasonable characters can mutate into Wottaguy over time as their authors fall more and more in love with them. Lord knows I've probably been guilty of that myself a time or three.

[trobadora]

That's exactly why I like this definition! :)

[rahirah]

One thing EQ fandom did for me was teach me how to create good OCs, for which I will be forever grateful.

[margdean56]

And he/she almost invariably had a name with "Star" in it. Or "Blade". Or both.

[dharma_slut]

or Moon Starblade?

[rahirah]

Well, to be fair, 50% of all characters had Star or Blade in their names. :D

[margdean56]

This is true. :) And "Moon" was another favorite name element.

[elisi]

Elfquest inevitably makes me squee, and I'm deeply intrigued by the fandom/fic - thank you. Also, great Mary Sue definition. :)

[rahirah]

I need to go through my old fic. A lot of it desperately needs proofreading, and no one who's not familiar with the holts I wrote it for will be able to make heads of tails of it, but I still kinda want to post it to AO3 for posterity.

[margdean56]

I'd love to be able to reread your stuff, especially what didn't make it into print. I've been saving my Tower stories in case there turned out to be a dedicated Web archive for them, but if that doesn't pan out I may put them on FanFiction.net along with the non-Tower EQ stories.

[rahirah]

I've been thinking about AO3 (An Archive Of Our Own) because it's run by a fannish nonprofit that's salvaged a few other fan projects. They've got several advantages over trying to do it myself (the main one being that they already have the archive software up and going.)