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

[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.