I though of batman to while reading this thread. There are fictional characters who feel like they are overpowered like some super heroes (batman has a plan even for when he doesn't have a plan). But everyone has its struggles or its dark side. Batman always stand on the brink of becoming what he fears the most, thus the rule of not killing. Not because it would be too hard to kill but too easy. He fears of becoming what he fights.
Rethinking the Mary Sue
- Thread starter Laer Carroll
- Start date
I though of batman to while reading this thread. There are fictional characters who feel like they are overpowered like some super heroes (batman has a plan even for when he doesn't have a plan). But everyone has its struggles or its dark side. Batman always stand on the brink of becoming what he fears the most, thus the rule of not killing. Not because it would be too hard to kill but too easy. He fears of becoming what he fights.
Batman is one of the many efforts to balance the perfection or near-perfection of a character by adding a negative side. He's obsessive, cruel (to bad guys only, of course), depressive, and so on. Other superlative characters may have other faults: arrogance, selfishness, lack of empathy, or whatever. Even merely ordinary good people must be given (according to many books on how to write appealing characters) SOME flaw.
In my Space Orphan trilogy Jane has no negative side. She's perfect in every way. I didn't intend this. The first book wrote itself almost literally in a seven-week almost 24/7 effort broken only by necessities such as sleeping, eating, going to the market, and spending weekends with a friend. She was designed to be perfect, by an advanced race with more than a thousand years of scientific advances in psychology as well as biology. And they were successful.
Even so as Jane wrote her story (which is how the experience felt to me) she incorporated costs into her character. Every creator knows that every product has costs. A toaster, coffee maker, automobile, building uses electrical power in this modern era. The material that goes into them has to be bought with money. And so on.
Jane (and all my other superhero characters who are stronger than ordinary humans) has to eat more than standard humans. Her muscles are several times stronger but at the cost of being denser than ordinary tissue, so she weighs more.
The women are all movie star beautiful. This has social costs as well as benefits. Too many women envy her. Too many men want her. She's denigrated as not being very smart, the blond superhumans are often called "dumb blonds." She is sometimes accused of winning something because her beauty warped the judgment of men and other women.
Crimefighters must hide their superlative nature under an ordinary persona to avoid repercussions of many sorts.
In short, a character need not have flaws, negatives. But to be convincing they must at least have costs attending each plus.
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For me, whether the character is mary sue/Gary Stu or not, doesn't really matter. The main question is how the story is written and whether or not I'm enjoying it. Take one of my favourite Japanese manga 'One-Punch Man' for example. As its name suggests, it's literally about a guy who only needs one punch to end any fight. Even the origin to his power is very shallow.
Even though he is the main character, the story never focuses too much on him. Instead, it focuses on everyone else around him, who struggle against the same foes he can end with one punch. And when they are basically beaten to the ground, he arrives like a Deus ex machina and ends the fight. It denies us the emotional gratification and is kind of like the rule of what not to do in fiction, yet it's still immensely satisfying.
Even though he is the main character, the story never focuses too much on him. Instead, it focuses on everyone else around him, who struggle against the same foes he can end with one punch. And when they are basically beaten to the ground, he arrives like a Deus ex machina and ends the fight. It denies us the emotional gratification and is kind of like the rule of what not to do in fiction, yet it's still immensely satisfying.
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This is a sentiment I believed I was wholly in agreement with from first word to last.
Believing is not the same thing as practicing.
The simple truth is in life and art, men are the ones who do and women are whom it gets done to. Same as it ever was. In such a power dynamic as, it goes down as a "win" for men that they are seemingly more effective in convincing women to support the man even when it is to the detriment of the woman or other women. Which means women must shake sense back into their own gender (hello the 53% of White women who supported Donald Trump) before they can deprogram the millions and billions of men who perpetuate the patriarchy from generation to generation.
Well, I've been reading a lot of fiction lately. That's a big change for me because my background is in hard news, politics, current events, commentaries and essays and I enjoyed the ride. Right up until it no longer interested me and after several personal issues which sent me into a depression, it's been hard to find something new and fresh and exciting to recharge my batteries.
Depending on the genre Fan fiction is mostly Female fiction or at least that's what I've found over the past three or four months and while I've found plenty of bad, what I mostly see are a lot of young, smart and talented women of differences, races, backgrounds, orientations, countries, religions, nationalities and perspectives, and it's been the most hopeful sign I've seen for the future of writing and reading.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, strong women only frighten weak men. If that includes all the strong real females, it includes many of the strong fictional females too.
Tell me how you really feel about fics, Thomas Vail? I have the vaguest of suspicions you don't exactly hold the genre in particularly high regard. In fact, you seem to aggressively dismiss it out of hand.
Am I getting warmer?
Thomas Vail said:
Yep.
Definitely warmer.
Right on all of this.
I've found good fanfic, but then I had an open mind and I was actively looking for it. Yeah, there was a lot of crap. Go to your favorite bookstore and there's even more crap piled high and deep.
What I found was there certainly was some terrible writing, but most of us wasn't so terrible it couldn't eventually rise to mediocre, then okay and then better-than-okay, until finally it gets to honest-to-goodness GOOD.
Remember "good?" Nobody started out that way. That's not to say nobody ever wrote a great first book. That's to say they wrote terrible shit long before they wrote something great. Only a rare few never made trash before they made treasure. If they did, they probably died young before they started embarrassing themselves by hacking out crap for a paycheck.
So about fanfiction...
Many of these writers are women. Young women who are trying their hand at fanfic because in a safe space nobody's gonna come for their throats if they mash-up Game of Thrones with The Hunger Games over their kinda curious what a hot night of incandescent passion between Sansa Stark and Katniss Everdeen might play out? They care more about Stark and Everdeen Get Horizontal than they do Batman v. Superman For No Good Damn Reason. Only one of those two have any reflection on their lives and it's not actors in CGI suits.
Who's hurt by this? How is this in any way, shape, or form a diminishing of the loftier and more important works of fiction because somebody in the New York Review of Books says it is?
Short answer? Nobody's hurt by fanfiction. If it not somebody's cup of tea, pick a different tea. Hell, pick an entirely different drink.
Because what these inexperienced, but earnest women and girls need aren't better writers than they are looking down their noses and sniffling like they just stepped on some doggy doo. They need editors. They need proof readers. They need beta readers. They need help in writing dialogue, transitions, how to use a simple word instead of a complex one because the complex one makes you seem smarter than you really are.
They need support. Remember that? If you are any kind of writer, you got some support somewhere if it wasn't anything more than your cat snuggling up against you because it wants some attention.
They need a helping hand to get from terrible to trying hard to pretty good to pretty damn good. Which is something that will never happen when they are dismissed out of hand without so much as even the vaguest of considerations given or assistance offered. I've tried to apply in my comments more hopeful encouragement and inspiration than didactic instructions of how to conjugate a verb. There will be time and a place for that sort of thing. Right now I'm trying to throw a rope over the wall and help someone else to climb up. Not all of them will make it, but someone gave me a shot, so why not return a favor?
There are more ex-journalists in my world than working journalists. Maybe if enough of them and other seasoned writers figure out there's a place for critics, but there's a greater need for mentors.
I had to suck before I got good enough to not suck as much. Now, I hardly suck that much, but that's only because I'm not writing much at all. Well, not so much non-fiction that is. I'm writing fiction now. Fanfiction. I suck at it, but not as badly as I sucked in the beginning when I was writing for my college newspaper and a Black alternative paper. That shit is truly cringeworthy in its badness.
This may age a little better if only because once you know better you should do better. That, or I'll be dead and dust in the next forty years. Then who gives a crap?
Nighttimer, good points.
Fanfic, it seems to me, is on part of a larger phenomenon. It begins with girls playing with dolls and dollhouses, boys playing with the same thing but called something different to distinguish it from GURRULL stuff: "action figures" not "dolls," etc.
Then there's adult fanfic of a sort such as Fantasy Football.
To me fanfiction is like a sandbox where we can build sandcastles and the like. Which we can then tear down and build into more sandcastles.
A fair number of pro writers played with fanfiction before they became serious about their writing. For us the fanfic was practice. Because it wasn't SERIOUS we could experiment, make mistakes, turn out stories and story fragments which occasionally surprised us with its brilliance, all the more bright by contrast with most of our not-very-good material.
At first it is just play. Then, for some of us, it becomes something more serious. Something we, eventually, have no choice to treat as a profession. To graduate from the sandbox to the architectural college of Absolute Write then into daily and weekly work.
Fanfic, it seems to me, is on part of a larger phenomenon. It begins with girls playing with dolls and dollhouses, boys playing with the same thing but called something different to distinguish it from GURRULL stuff: "action figures" not "dolls," etc.
Then there's adult fanfic of a sort such as Fantasy Football.
To me fanfiction is like a sandbox where we can build sandcastles and the like. Which we can then tear down and build into more sandcastles.
A fair number of pro writers played with fanfiction before they became serious about their writing. For us the fanfic was practice. Because it wasn't SERIOUS we could experiment, make mistakes, turn out stories and story fragments which occasionally surprised us with its brilliance, all the more bright by contrast with most of our not-very-good material.
At first it is just play. Then, for some of us, it becomes something more serious. Something we, eventually, have no choice to treat as a profession. To graduate from the sandbox to the architectural college of Absolute Write then into daily and weekly work.
I have some reservations about these "costs."
You say that Jane has to eat more to keep up her superhuman strength. That's fine, but doesn't that make her sexier to a lot of people? I know I've heard a lot of comments about how much sexier women are that can really pack away the food (especially meat) and not show it. As truly subjective evidence, I point to the many Carl's Jr/Hardee's ads that feature sexy women eating huge burgers.
Also, I'm not sure that the social costs of being beautiful outweigh the benefits. I'm by no means suggesting there aren't social costs to being very attractive, far from it. But the whole "woe is me, I'm too beautiful" complaint falls flat for me.
It just seems to me like you've chosen specific "costs" that conveniently make your characters more hot.
I remember reading somewhere (and I wish I remembered the context) that when a character is a Mary Sue, it’s not a problem with the character, it’s a problem with the plot.
Like (and forgive me for this), the Homestuck trolls each have traits that would make all of them Mary Sues if looked at individually. Feferi is the princess with the amazing heart and life powers, Sollux is in the lowest classes yet he still winds up dating the princess, Karkat has the Super Special Blood nobody else has seen for centuries, etc. But because all these colorful characters are in the same story — and the author allows them to get in some deep trouble — they work.
I don’t know if that is the case for Laer’s Jane, but if the readers like her, then he must be doing something right with her story.
Like (and forgive me for this), the Homestuck trolls each have traits that would make all of them Mary Sues if looked at individually. Feferi is the princess with the amazing heart and life powers, Sollux is in the lowest classes yet he still winds up dating the princess, Karkat has the Super Special Blood nobody else has seen for centuries, etc. But because all these colorful characters are in the same story — and the author allows them to get in some deep trouble — they work.
I don’t know if that is the case for Laer’s Jane, but if the readers like her, then he must be doing something right with her story.
I'm not sure he counts as a Mary-Sue. Even though he's more powerful than anything in the known universe, he still struggles with day to day business. He's lives in a tiny apartment, has an barely scrapes by on his income, and goes uncredited for almost all of the monsters he kills. He still struggles to get what he wants, because besides his strength he's and incredibly average. It's what makes for such great comedy.
I have a suspicion that the reading public isn't adverse to Mary Sue's, but that agents and publishers are sick and tired of them (And all other common tropes they see all the time)
(And all other common tropes they see all the time)
This is such an interesting discussion--you guys have really opened my eyes.
I don't tend to use the term Mary Sue at all, but I have always thought that it is a valid criticism of certain characters. However, after reading through this thread, I'm going to have to think again!
I don't tend to use the term Mary Sue at all, but I have always thought that it is a valid criticism of certain characters. However, after reading through this thread, I'm going to have to think again!
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This is an example of a concept that leaped the rails and went far beyond whatever it's original intent was.
When people accuse a character in commercial fiction of being a Mary Sue, there are generally one of two things going on:
1. A female character who is competent, independent and capable in a way many readers still find "unrealistic." even if it's a heroic epic or they don't have issues with these traits in a male character (such as people disliking the recent Star Wars protagonist, even though she was really no more "amazing" in her untutored force abilities than Luke was).
2. A type of bad characterization, where all characters save the protagonist are so devoid of goals or personality that the protagonist essentially distorts the story around themselves to make it not only implausible, but dull and predictable. Another way to put it is the amazing-ness and uniqueness of the protagonist exists without a proper context and is really the "only" focus of the story.
Sadly, the former accusation is probably made more often than the latter. Literature is filled with amazingly heroic male characters with unique and special abilities, both well and poorly constructed (who may or may not be authorial inserts--but really that is irrelevant when it's well done), but the term "Mary Sue" seems to get levied at female characters who are highly competent or likeable far more.