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So, apparently it’s time to discuss Mary Sues again in fandom. Fair enough, it’s one of those evergreen discussion topics, right up there with “So why DO women write slash?” and “Western pop culture has issues with race and gender vs. NUH-UH, it doesnt!”
Anyway, thought I’d throw in my two cents. The thing that confuses me is when did Mary Sue become such an exclusively female concept? I don’t remember when I first encountered the term – it must have been when I first got online, maybe ten or more years ago – but I’m pretty sure I first heard it used to describe Wesley Crusher. And I thought it was a useful concept, and quickly recognised the same sort of bad writing at work in the Star Wars EU’s Corran Horn or in Peter David’s Captain Calhoun.
Of course now ‘female’ seems to be a key element of Mary Sue’s definition – often, seemingly more so than ‘being a smug boring jack-ass who dominates the story and who is hated by everyone save the author who's got too much of their ego invested into the character’. Now, to a degree, that’s understandable – one’s a lot more likely to encounter female Sues in fanfiction than male ones. (Men do write plenty of Sues, of course – check any video game category on fanfiction.net and you’ll unearth swarms of them. But the authors of those stories tend not to interact much with the larger fanfic community. I don’t know if they have their own little communities, or if the stories just sit there alone and ignored forever…)
Anyway. The main point I’m trying to make is that I find the Mary Sue concept an extremely useful way of succinctly describing a particular style of bad writing, and I would like to see the term survive. I don’t think efforts to celebrate Mary Sue are a good idea – they only reinforce the misidentification of Mary Sue as being a synonym for OFC. On the other hand, unless people in fandom do start to remember that Mary Sue comes in all genders and genres, and that being a woman is not an essential part of Sue’s description – well, then maybe it is time to retire the term as useless.
Anyway, thought I’d throw in my two cents. The thing that confuses me is when did Mary Sue become such an exclusively female concept? I don’t remember when I first encountered the term – it must have been when I first got online, maybe ten or more years ago – but I’m pretty sure I first heard it used to describe Wesley Crusher. And I thought it was a useful concept, and quickly recognised the same sort of bad writing at work in the Star Wars EU’s Corran Horn or in Peter David’s Captain Calhoun.
Of course now ‘female’ seems to be a key element of Mary Sue’s definition – often, seemingly more so than ‘being a smug boring jack-ass who dominates the story and who is hated by everyone save the author who's got too much of their ego invested into the character’. Now, to a degree, that’s understandable – one’s a lot more likely to encounter female Sues in fanfiction than male ones. (Men do write plenty of Sues, of course – check any video game category on fanfiction.net and you’ll unearth swarms of them. But the authors of those stories tend not to interact much with the larger fanfic community. I don’t know if they have their own little communities, or if the stories just sit there alone and ignored forever…)
Anyway. The main point I’m trying to make is that I find the Mary Sue concept an extremely useful way of succinctly describing a particular style of bad writing, and I would like to see the term survive. I don’t think efforts to celebrate Mary Sue are a good idea – they only reinforce the misidentification of Mary Sue as being a synonym for OFC. On the other hand, unless people in fandom do start to remember that Mary Sue comes in all genders and genres, and that being a woman is not an essential part of Sue’s description – well, then maybe it is time to retire the term as useless.