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.
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Re:
Date: 2003-03-22 12:57 pm (UTC)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.