I hear of Mary Sue everywhere...

[rj_anderson]

With all this talk about Mary Sues, I've been struck by a new thought.

Some people have mentioned seeing MS characters in published fiction -- Anita Blake is frequently mentioned, and of course there are other plausible candidates like Amelia Peabody, Mary Russell, and Anne of Green Gables (come on -- she's a spunky orphan with a tragic past, an unusual hair colour, and she wins the heart of everybody she meets! How can she not be a Mary Sue?*).

However, I haven't heard anybody mention an even more serious and irritating problem -- Mary Sues in real life!

Think about it. Alexander the Great? So a Gary Stu. Elizabeth Taylor? I mean, she has violet eyes**! And let's not even get started on Gwyneth Paltrow...

But that's just a tiny sample. So step right up, folks! Nominate your favorite RL Mary Sues and Gary Stus. We might even start a new genre -- RPMS fic!

--
*This is, by the way, mostly facetious. I like Anne just fine.
**Yes, I do know they aren't really violet. Tell that to the press, though.

Comments

[shellebelle93.livejournal.com]

Gwyneth Paltrow.


Come on, *you* don't think she's unreal?




(actually, I like her. but she's too pretty to be real sometimes...)

[drmm.livejournal.com]

Leonardo Dicaprio. He has blonde hair, blue eyes and a weird name. How more Gary Stu can you get.

[peacockharpy.livejournal.com]

Most figure skaters. Especially the ones from former Soviet countries who rose above their challenges to take the gold. Classic Mary Sue/Gary Stu. :)

- Darice

[ex-ajhalluk585.livejournal.com]

Actually, I was going to say in response to your earlier post that I wonder more people haven't commented about how sexist the whole idea of a Mary Sue is. I mean, as I believe I've commented earlier, I think the whole concept lacks any validity because of the total lack of a consensus about what a Mary Sue is (it's all too frequently used as shorthand for "any female OC" and, indeed, I was congratulated recently for not making the original female OC in The Mark of The Beast a Mary Sue, which I found rather disturbing because she's a serial killer). It also lacks validity because it means the critic is presuming what the author's motives were in creating a particular character, which must be definition be obscure, rather than looking critically at the character and seeing whether the character works or not. But the sexism comes in because male authors are not presumed to be creating Mary Sues, even if the characters they create have all the flaws attributed, classically, to Mary Sues - David Weber's Honor Harrington springs resolutely to mind as having every attribute of a Mary Sue except that of being written by a woman, whereas Hermione has comparatively few such attributes but is frequently been referred to as Rowling's Mary Sue.

Re:

[rj-anderson.livejournal.com]

Actually, I was going to say in response to your earlier post that I wonder more people haven't commented about how sexist the whole idea of a Mary Sue is.

Well, some people give lip service to the idea of male authors writing MS characters -- for instance, I've heard Sherlock Holmes accused of being Conan Doyle's Marty Stu, and Wesley Crusher of being Gene Roddenberry's -- but even at that, it's generally assumed that male authors really don't do that kind of thing very often, and that it's female authors and female characters who are the most frequent, and the worst, offenders. Sp yes, I think you're right.

the critic is presuming what the author's motives were in creating a particular character, which must be definition be obscure, rather than looking critically at the character and seeing whether the character works or not.

Exactly. It seems that in most cases, the term "Mary Sue" is used as shorthand for "I don't like something (or several somethings) about this character, and therefore she must be an unwarranted self-insertion and/or authorial wish-fulfillment" -- the latter of which is automatically assumed to invalidate the character's existence, without need for further proof. And once you're convinced that any OFC you don't like is an MS by default, it's easy to produce the necessary "evidence" to back up the claim. I could do it for TQW in a second, for instance -- and I don't even think Quinn is a Mary Sue.

More later -- I'm off to my birthday dinner.

[ex-ajhalluk585.livejournal.com]

Well, I think the term "Mary-Sue" is a completely useless critical tool because it can be twisted to mean practically anything the writer wants it to do. But then, I think part of the problem is that the critics don't necessarily know what the critical function should be in fanfic. Are they applauding imaginative springboards from canon, or the degree of accuracy of the pastiche one generates? Or something else entirely? I'm sure you've read (and I certainly have) fanfics where the characters are simply using canon characters names, and could be anyone else, and probably are. But they get less criticised as Mary Sues or Gary Stus than if an OC is introduced with a credible canon-derived history.

I mean, I picked up a ref in a newsgroup where someone was asking for recs, and then gave a shopping list of their likes and dislikes which went as follows:

>>What else don't I like? Stuff that speculates too
> much about the
> future of HP & co. Let JK TELL us what will happen
> later, that's her
> job. I think FanFics should be ideas and
> elaborations on stuff that
> has already happened. I.E. If you want to write
> about school days,
> stick to MWPP because then you probably won't be
> contradicted by JK,
> and you won't be critized too badly for going out of
> character. Also
> adding stuff to HP's past is great with me.
> Basically anything that
> ain't slash and doesn't try to tell the future.

This seems to me like an appallingly limited canvas on which to work - "ideas and elaborations on stuff that has already happened" becuase, for me, if it's already happened, what on earth is the point of having it happen again, slightly differently? But if a body of the readership think like that - and I suspect your reviewer is not a million minds away from that sort of mindset - then creating any OC is by definition wrong.

Actually, I have to say that for me Darkness and Light worked because you were in some respects doing a high-wire act - and if you didn't see it like that, then even more credit for not coming off the wire. We've both agreed that the term Mary-Sue is useless and loaded, but I think there were dangers which you were running with Maud that you successfully avoided, and a large part of the pleasure in reading the trilogy is watching the skill with which you did it. But you could produce a summary of the elements of the story (in the way the negative reviewers you've highlighted have indeed produced a summary) which would make someone who read the summary but not the work believe that it would be impossible for you to stay on the wire at all. And I speak from a very definite bias since I regard Canon!Snape as a nasty bully with almost no redeeming features except for not working for Voldemort, and I dislike on principle teacher/pupil ships, even where, as in yours, the relationship is not consummated until well after the end of schooldays. Actually, I suspect that one of the negatives that the reviewers seized on - Maud as transfer student - I saw as a positive within the dynamic, and did a lot to dissipate my initial unease at the teacher/student premise(ie, he did not meet her as possible love interest until she was near-adult).

Re:

[rj-anderson.livejournal.com]

Are they applauding imaginative springboards from canon, or the degree of accuracy of the pastiche one generates? Or something else entirely?

Well, this seems to vary as widely as the individual critic. The example you quoted baffles me just as much as it did you, but fortunately I haven't run into too many people who are quite so extreme or unreasonable in their views. (Or maybe they're just extreme in ways that I find easier to understand.)

But yes, I certainly agree that there seem to be a large number of people to whom OC's are anathema. They prefer to read only about canon characters, and assume that the existence of an OC in a story (except in a very minor or negative role) indicates some creative failure or weakness on the author's part.

I'm sure you've read (and I certainly have) fanfics where the characters are simply using canon characters names, and could be anyone else, and probably are. But they get less criticised as Mary Sues or Gary Stus than if an OC is introduced with a credible canon-derived history.

I've read many fanfics like that, on the basis that they'd come highly (and widely) recommended. And I found the excessive glorification and radical alteration of the supposed "canon characters" in those fics to be far more frustrating (to me, anyway) than any number of flat or implausible OC's.

Thanks for the kind words about D&L. I actually wasn't aware that there were so many pitfalls when I was writing it, or at least imagined the pitfalls to be different ones -- largely I think because there were very few romantic Snapefics in existence at the time, and I had only read a very few HP fics at all. So I had no idea what cliches I might be tripping over, and no opportunity to feel self-conscious about them.

Interestingly, though, the principle that worked for me still seems to apply: the best Snapefics I've read in the last half-year were all written by people who had very little acquaintance with existing fic, and were coming pretty much straight from canon.

And now I have to run off again...

[edithmatilda.livejournal.com]

Um, are more (un)original characters female perhaps because virtually every television programme, film or book contains Far More Men Than Women? Hence concept in fanfiction is pretty much female, hence this is what we're used to looking for and ridiculing?

Oh, and the MarySue attributes are ones that get writ about women more than men because the men get proper personalities instead. Fun, isn't it?

Although of course people write themselves into things. Your own head's the only one you can begin to understand, and you project it onto other people all the bloody time anyway.

what the author's motives were in creating a particular character, which must be definition be obscure

Um, I think that sometimes they are rather painfully less than obscure. There's only so deconstructionalist you can be before the screaming obviousness gets to you...


I neither read nor write fanfiction, by the way. This is random essay-avoiding speculation. Why does it matter so much anyway? You get quite good MarySues, surely? And usually a glaring one will just be one of half a million glaring disasters in the same piece.

It scares me, also, that Internet fiction has its own set of critical terms to such an extent. Why?

[brightfame.livejournal.com]

It feels a bit wrong to say this, but my tongue in cheek nomination goes to...

Princess Diana.

More seriously, I think people went off the rails when they took the idea of Mary Sue out of fanfic and started splashing it all over. Charles Dickens wouldn't have had any luck with those hypercritical readers.

Any female character I write, people who don't know me assume she must be a MS. Ironically, I'm usually standing in the shoes of one of the male characters.

[lizbee.livejournal.com]

Not only is Miranda Otto a blatant Mary Sue (auburn hair? Green eyes? The daughter of a legendary Australian actor? Rises to international fame playing a feisty, sword-weilding princess?), but she is clearly a rip-off of that other blatant Mary Sue, Cate Blanchett.

And don't even get me started on Nicole Kidman...

[bookaholicgirl.livejournal.com]

Hmm...I'm finding myself wondering if Emily Starr is more of a Mary Sue than Anne Shirley. Emily has the black hair and violet eyes that Anne dreams of, is a writer (and a good one!). Not only does she end up with Teddy, who is also a fellow artist, Dean Priest falls for her as well, plus various other smitten swains in the Blair Water vicinity. Although, Emily does have her faults (the Murray pride and all that). So perhaps she doesn't quite fit the pattern.

(And this was also mildy facetious, although I believe that Emily is the most autobiographical of all of LMM's characters.)

Real-life Mary Sues...I've been sitting here trying to think of one, but my mind does not seem to be working in that direction. If I think of one, I'll come back and post it.

[ex-ajhalluk585.livejournal.com]

JK Rowling. Obviously. I mean, from the moment you start at "blonde, blue-eyed, self-made millionairess, who once had to write in cafes to save the heating bills...." there is simply no answer to it.

Anne, yes, but Amelia?

[thegreenquill.livejournal.com]

ooooo, Amelia Peabody has some Mary Sueisms, but is she really a Mary Sue? Sure she always knows what to say and likes to hit people with her parasol, but she has her flaws as well.

Personally, I think she and Mary Russel should go out for tea. They could really get along well.

thegreenquill

ps. love the Irina/Snape icon. I have a Syd/Snape one.

Re: Anne, yes, but Amelia?

[rj-anderson.livejournal.com]

I adore your Irina icon. And I'm working on a Syd & Snape fic (though not Syd/Snape, to be sure -- but then it's not Snape/Irina either, for all that the latter two insist on having ridiculous amounts of chemistry whenever I put them in a scene together), so your other icon amused me, too.

Anyway, back to the actual topic -- yes, Amelia Peabody has her flaws, but they're pretty negligible and indeed only intended to make her more endearing to the reader. I don't go hunting for Mary Sues as a rule, particularly in published fiction, but I can see why some people like to pick on Peabody as an example.

Which is not to say I haven't read all the Peters books, because I have. :) But that's more in spite of Amelia, especially lately, than because of her.

And I am not at all sure Russell and Peabody would get along, in spite of their common interests in detecting and feminism. Possibly the only way to make that tea party more potentially volatile would be to throw in Carole Nelson Douglas's Irene Adler. :)

Re: Anne, yes, but Amelia?

[thegreenquill.livejournal.com]

OOOOOOO that would be an interesting party, by all means.

Also, it's always nice to find another Elizabeth Peters fan!

I can't wait to read Syd and Snape in the same fic. As of yet, I have not found any Harry Potter/Alias crossovers. Do you know any good ones?

thegreenquill

Re: Anne, yes, but Amelia?

[rj-anderson.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen any HP/ALIAS crossovers, no, which is of course one of the reasons I'm writing one. If you're interested in seeing some of what I've written so far, check this entry in my LJ (http://www.livejournal.com/users/synaesthete7/15408.html).