Sueage, or Why I Don't Read Fanfiction.net

[ivyfic]

Can you tell I'm catching up on lj?


I know, some of y'all have seen this already, but it deserves a second look:

The Mary Sue Litmus Test

This is a test to see if your character is a Mary Sue (duh). It takes about a half an hour to get through all the questions, but it serves as a helpful reminder of all the cliches you want to avoid in creating a character. I ran an OC I was toying with for an original fic through it and came up with a score of 36 = Mary Sue. Ack! Makes you wonder what the ultimate Mary Sue would be if my little ol' imperfect character still rates as one.

To this test, I add my own Mary Sue correlary. If the point of your story is for __________ (media character) to ___________ (respect, admire, love, envy, pity, comfort, etc.) your character or see your character's amazing talent at _________(music, combat, computers, etc.), it doesn't matter how you dress it up, it's a Mary Sue.

Now that some writers are getting more aware of Mary Sues, they'll create an OC for the purpose stated above and then try to pretend it's not a Mary Sue by giving it flaws. But let's face it. The underlying impulse is to make the characters in a world worship your character. Grafting a plot onto it won't change that.

What I find is that if I'm creating something that's turning into a Mary Sue, plot, character, world-building, description - they all get subsumed by my Mary Sue. She literally blots everything else out, like an eclipse. That's what makes it unreadable. It's not the OC, it's that there's simply nothing else to the story.

Mary Sues have their place (as is pointed out in the fantastic article Too Good to Be True). Sometimes I love a Mary Sue. Hey, if you can't get some TLC in real life, why not make up a story where you do? Mary Sues are deeply satisfying in the way only fantasies can be. But I would never be foolhardy enough to write one down. Because that takes effort, and who in their right mind would want to read it?

The problem is confusing the other characters' interest in your Mary Sue (which you create) with other readers' interest in it. You can make Wesley fall madly in love with your Buffy clone, but that doesn't mean anybody else will. This is why, I think, Mary Sues are so annoying. It's not just that they're badly written, because bad writing can often be quite entertaining. It's that the author's stubborn lack of self-awareness shines through in everyone sentence. Mary Sues don't just lie around to be ridiculed, they stand up and demand applause, then when you throw a tomato at them they spew venom.

I know I'm preaching to the choir here, because anybody that would even look at a Mary Sue Litmus Test is aware enough not to try to write one, but I wish all these authors would realize that Mary Sues are just literary masturbation. It may be good for you, but we ain't getting anything out here.

Comments

[chuckro.livejournal.com]

So here's a thought question: What happens when the Mary Sue is the villain? Bigger, stronger, sexier, smarter than all of the heroes and typical characters. Men want her, women want to be her. She's got all the best toys and all the clever moves that confound everyone else. Is she still Mary Sue? Or just a bitch of an enemy?

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

If the point is making all the characters respect/fear/envy her and generally prove that she is in every way superior to the other characters, then yes. If the point is to show how the other characters still manage to triumph because of their ingenuity/solidarity/whatever, then no. My point is that a Mary Sue is best identified by the psychological need it fills in the author. All of the outside indicators come as a result of that impulse. But whatever the outside, the rotten core will come across.

The article I linked to above has an interesting comparison of 19th century Mary Sues which are usually passive, adored just for being special, and 20th century Mary Sues which are usually active. A villainess Mary Sue would be typical of 20th century. And there are definitely villain Mary Sues - just flip through fanfiction.net for a while and you'll find them. Though I don't recommend that if you value your sanity.

Preaching to the converted, not the choir...

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

You know I would have something to say about this, me of the flagellation-read-the-bad-fic-and-take-the-consequences-for-my-sanity masochistic urges. But once upon a time, I was a new writer, too. I wrote plenty of Mary Sue-ish characters. Here are some of the highlights to chart my steady improvement in this category:

Elizabeth Something-Something, a mutant girl with orange eyes whose mother took in a runaway Remy Lebeau. It was dreadful, it was cliched, and Rogue showed up as her college roommate at the end, but I repeate myself, don't I? Better that she say under the shit pile.

Twice now, I've written stories featuring OTHER PEOPLE'S Mary Sues. One was X-Men related, with a twin sister for Rogue who, not surprisingly, was like better by Raven, able to control her powers, was liked better by Gambit, and wore a costume alike in design but different in ONE color from Rogues. Also, her hair stripe was silver, not white, WHICH TOTALLY MAKES HER TEH ORIGINAL. The other was a modest improvement whereby I incorporated MIchelle's role-play Matrix character into a story I never finished where Trinity got bonked on the head and woke up ten years later to find herself the same age and Neo married to this other girl. I say 'improvement' because the girl wasn't perfect, but it's not much better because it still fell prey to all the MAtrix fanfic cliches, whereby Trinity was pregnant, Morpheus used the same lines over and over and over because he has no other script, apparently, and the real world WASN'T REAL AFTER ALL! OMG! At least I can claim that the people whose mary sues I wrote thought I was a good writer, but yeah, wtf mate?

Libra (she had other names), captian of [name ship] from a Matrix mailing list. In her first incarnation, as Lynx or something, she was tough as nails and crazy as shit. I think she had a lightsabre (oh for uber geekiness of 1999!). In her next incarnation, as Libra, I got into serious fights with this one list person who ALSO had a Mary Sue, this one a villain not ingeniously named "The Adversary." Libra was crazier still, but she was easily wounded as she tended to over-extend herself. I though I scored major cool points for having her break her leg in the fight and jerk it back into place. Majorly lame. Just anoter 'oh, if you make her soooo cool people will have to like her.' wrong.

One story I wrote back in the Mary Sue days was totally about an OC, also Matrix related, whereby a guy who thought he was the One found out he wasn't and had to live with disappointment after being so sure. Like a Mary Sue, he had powers beyond those of mortal men, but I tried to make it seem like his powers weren't that great and were no more impressive than the parlor tricks pulled off by non-superhuman people/programs in the Matrix. I don't think it worked, and I did want pity for him, but not from a main character. His story ended with him pitying Neo--being the One blows, yo--so I think it was okay, but I'm probably wrong.

Since then I've used OCs sparingly, a reactionary response to my Mary Sue days and my increasing awareness and hatred of them. Most OCs are there to serve a function rather than a fantasy--in large casts of characters, they are the supporting players, in smaller casts, they are sought out for a purpose and absorbed or rebuffed. Generally, I don't like stories that feature OCs as the central character and the world built up around them. Writing about Joe Schmoe who happens to be an exorcist (to put this in language you'll appreciate, Miss Ivy) is fantastic, but are people looking for some hot Chastine (I hate you for telling me this exists, I hate you, I hate you) action going to care what the rest of the world is doing in that universe? Almost never.

Re: Preaching to the converted, not the choir...

[viridian.livejournal.com]

LOL I love that I got someone else to write a story about my Sue. I r0xx0r!!!!1111

[feiran.livejournal.com]

Here (http://www.subreality.com/marysue.htm) is the site I mentioned before, one of the earlier Mary Sue pages with explanations and appreciation for the kind of role she plays in the writer's development. The site hasn't updated in a long time, but you might look through links and essays.

Relatedly, there's also a fair amount of meta-fiction out there, Mary-Sue and otherwise, and the Subreality (http://www.subreality.com/sc.htm) phenomenon that occurred in comic book fanfiction in the late '90s. You might find it interesting.

[feiran.livejournal.com]

Also: harsh litmus test! But it's difficult to test non-fanfiction-related original characters by these critera in some ways. For example, one assumption in the test is that a Mary Sue will come in and steal the attention of major characters, make them act out of character, and generally wreak havoc on the roles established for them in canon. In original work, you have to build those relationships in the first place, so questions like how many major characters your character is attracted to, how many are attracted to him/her, how your character interacts with the hero, and so forth, can turn up as false positives. Some are Sueish anywhere, others only in fanfiction.

An original character cliche litmus test that weeds out or rephrases the fanfiction-centric questions or a more generalized version might be more helpful for OC work. I've seen several, actually. :-)