Sueage, or Why I Don't Read Fanfiction.net
May. 3rd, 2005 11:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ivyficCan 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.
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.
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Re: Preaching to the converted, not the choir...
Date: 2005-05-05 03:09 am (UTC)