Monthly Archives: January 2006

A plague of Mary Sues upon thine head!

Anyone here heard of James Frey? He wrote an autobiographical account of his life as an alcoholic and drug addict in a “downward spiral of violence and destitution”. Oprah thought he was wonderful and promoted his book on her show. She wept over it, apparently. Frey appeared on her show giving a message of hope to all the viewers who “shared his pain”. Look at me now, I came good! Turns out it didn’t quite happen like James Frey said it did. He kinda exaggerated the truth. A lot. And maybe made some stuff up. A lot. Maybe.

Anyone here heard of J.T. Leroy? “He” is an autobiographical author who wrote a book about his life as a teenage boy prostitute. Hollywood stars practically fell over themselves in order to help the poor boy. Turns out “he” is actually a middle aged woman named Laura Albert, who also calls herself “Emily Fraiser”. Susie Bright wasn’t very happy about this whole thing as J.T. Leroy had fooled her too. She explains Laura Albert’s antics by comparing them to slash fiction: yet another female author living out the dream of being a gay man…

Slash fiction, if you really want to know, is a form of erotic fan fiction that is written probably ninety percent of the time by heterosexual women, and there to indulge the fantasy of famous male icons getting it together. It all began with Star Trek. For some reason female Star Trek fans get off on the idea of Captain James T. Kirk and Mr. Spock in, well, ummm, bed together. The slash or “/” is the way it’s described on the page and depends on the particular coupling. Kirk/Spock “slash” fiction. Or Picard/Riker “slash” fiction. See? It’s by no means restricted to Star Trek. Highlander, Star Wars and Lord of the Rings are apparently popular subjects too. In fact, Legolas appears to be extremely popular with the girls and the boys. But damn, he is nice to look at, isn’t he?

According to the Mary Sue Purity Test, Rickey is a borderline Mary Sue (he scored 46). I will not allow myself to find this discouraging, given that characters like Eugene Gant (Look Homeward, Angel) and Jack Torrance (The Shining) are probably also “Mary Sues” by this test’s standards.

PzB wailed defensively on her blog a couple of days ago. I’m amused by the thought that she may not have caught on to the fact that she’s spent her whole career writing original slash fiction. Mary Sue is an integral and inevitable part of slash and other forms of fan fiction. Mary Sue is all about wish fulfillment.

You see, there is a very special kind of character that’s sometimes written by a young slash writer, still on her training wheels. This is usually an original character, who becomes the star of the show. This character is beautiful (but in an unusual way), wise, kind, magical, creative – she may even have color-changing eyes or violet hair. She usually has a dramatic and traumatic past, but it has only made her stronger. She does marvelous things, saving the Starship Enterprise from blowing up, getting Methos to finally make a move on Duncan MacLeod. She is referred to, not terribly fondly, as Mary Sue.

Explains a helpful commenter Susie Bright’s blog. Mary Sue is so popular she has several fan sites of her very own.

Although storytellers have been rehashing Mary Sue since the dawn of time, she did not receive her current name until the early 1970s. The original was Lieutenant Mary Sue (“the youngest Lieutenant in the fleet — only fifteen and a half years old”) as immortalized in Paula Smith’s “A Trekkie’s Tale,” which she wrote and published in her 1974 fanzine Menagerie #2. (According to Katherine Langley: “Paula is still active in fandom and, to be sure, suitably bemused that Mary Sue lives on.”)

Mary Sue, as this archetype became known, was at first any brilliant, beautiful young Starfleet officer who joined the Enterprise crew to be the center of attention, set everything right, make off with the main male canon character’s heart (or several of them!), and/or die dramatically in someone’s arms. I’m sure you can make a similar analogy within your own fannish experiences. Mary Sues exist in every fanficdom:

  • the pretty new Immortal who stumbles into MacLeod’s (or Methos’) arms
  • the uberpowered kid who joins Generation X
  • the female bronzerider with her firelizard flock
  • the kitchen-drudge-cum-HeraldMage out on her first circuit
  • the notorious Marrissa Amber Flores Picard Gordon…

I’m sure you can think of more. And of course there are non-fanfic Mary Sues, characters who only exist in their creators’ minds, on well-worn RPG character sheets or in secret notebooks. There are even actual canon Mary Sues, though that gets hard to judge because they are canon. Good examples include Jean M. Auel’s Ayla, Michael Moorcock’s Elric, Anne McCaffery’s Menolly, and Anne Rice’s, well, anyone…

Says Kielle, author of The Official Mary Sue Society Avatar Appreciation Site. Did somebody mention Anne Rice’s name there? Well, that fits very well because not only does Rice have an irritating habit of creating new far-too-perfect characters (whom we all hate) that steal the show and the cannon character’s hearts in every book, her cannon characters are terrible Mary Sues too. Original fiction Mary Sues are all about wish-fulfillment and acting out your fantasies. They are about creating characters who are too perfect and beautiful, with tortured, secret pasts and particularly special psychic or physical powers. The author may have a Cinderella complex. The character usually has lavishly described outfits, and may even be based on someone that the author knows. Hmmm. Who does that sound like? And did you know Lestat’s character was based on Rice’s husband? Oh dear.

Anne Rice. PzB. Tanith Lee (her heroines are always wildly attractive, and they always suffer). Buffy (like a cheerleader and a vampire slayer?). Lisa from The Simpsons? All those Star Wars characters inserted into books since the start of Star Wars books. I’m thinking Mara Jade. Hey! Wikipedia list her as a Mary Sue too! Oh, and Alice from Resident Evil (and speaking of the gorgeous Milla Jovovich, who was LeeLoo if not the ultimate original fiction Mary Sue?). Let’s face it, the Brontes and Austen have also been guilty of some serious original fiction Mary Sueism.

The male version of the Mary Sue is frequently called the Gary Stu. The original fiction Gary Stu has spread himself around so much he’s invisibly common. Superman, James Bond, Luke Skywalker, every young Charles Dickens hero you ever heard of…

Suspension of Disbelief

[A]nyone who says “She’s so pretty that it’s like a disability because everyone hates her or wants to have sex with her” will be summarily keelhauled. – (The (Original) Mary Sue Litmus Test (for Gargoyles fan fiction))

If we contain Mary Sue to the fan fiction genre, she’s easy to define. But when we start talking about original fiction Mary Sues, we shortly discover that virtually every hero and heroine anywhere is a bit of a Mary Sue. Writers have a tendency to draw their heroes and heroines far too perfectly in order to impress their specialness upon others and fulfill their own private fantasies. Heroes rarely make mistakes, they are not human. That’s why Superman and James Bond can never be anything but clichés. Creating a Mary Sue is known as authorial intrusion. Authorial intrusion is when the author intrudes into their own fictional world to the point where the reader can no-longer suspend their disbelief. The whole house of cards collapses and the reader ends up laughing at the author’s poor writing.

The Plague of Mary

According to The Original Fiction Mary Sue Litmus Test, my deliberately hot-headed, selfish, self-involved, extremely flawed Lead Character actually has a number of very Mary Sue-like qualities. So does my Loveable Villain (even though he does some very bad things). I’ve also discovered that my main Romantic Interest (designed to be beautiful, obsessive, arrogant, hot-and-cold, and occasionally nasty), is so much a Mary Sue that I’m wondering whether I need to make her slightly more psychotic than she already is. But I guess this comes with the territory when one is writing gothic fantasy fiction about immortal witches and all. It’s all very illuminating.

Mary Sue Links

What cars do

The date was the ninth of December 2004, a little over a year ago. At the time we lived in Nottingham city centre above a main road, Upper Parliament Street, criss-crossed with a complicated and impractical network of pedestrian crossings.

I was just getting changed into my gym clothes to do a workout on my rebounder when I heard a crack like an egg being split open into a pan. The crack was followed immediately by the screech of tires as a driver slammed hard on his brakes, and then shouts and screams of horror from passers-by.

Sticking my head out of the window I could see that a car had braked in the middle of the busy junction, blocking the traffic. The windscreen of the car was undamaged. A boy – he couldn’t have even been twenty – got out of the car. At the front of the vehicle sprawled on the road was a balding, middle-aged man who might have been someone’s father. The man wasn’t moving.

He had been crossing the road where he shouldn’t have been crossing, where there were normally railings to stop the pedestrians from going. Currently there were no railings and instead an inadequate temporary fence because of the road works that were taking place at the junction. A hundred other people must have made the same sprint across two lanes of traffic the same day. People made this journey all the time because the pedestrian crossings were so badly designed that to follow the proper route took you a hundred yards out of your way. Indeed I was to give my boyfriend a sound dressing-down only two hours later when he automatically tried to take the same path.

It must have been twenty five minutes before an ambulance arrived. The ambulance station is only around the corner. I had my head stuck out of the window all of that time, on the verge of tears. “Where the HELL is the ambulance?” I kept exclaiming. I have been at the scene of a traffic accident before, and the ambulance took a similar amount of time. In the time it took for the ambulance to arrive, I heard sirens on at least three occasions and believed they were finally on their way. I even saw an ambulance drive past the scene without its emergency lights on. The whole of the time, nobody tended the man. Two men stood over him, talking, and someone who must have been a traffic conductor beckoned the traffic around the car. I thought I saw the man fitting, but the men who stood over him didn’t bend down. The boy leaned against the pedestrian railing with his mate, looking pale. Eventually he was taken away by a couple of police officers. When the ambulance did arrive, the paramedics loaded the man onboard and the ambulance didn’t move for another twenty minutes, and then it took off without putting its sirens on. My feeling was that the man was dead, though I can never truly be certain. There were never any signs put up or flowers laid out.

I had once held the hand of a boy who had been in a hit-and-run motorbike accident. They (presumably) got the guy who did it because he left most of his number plate at the scene. They also got the guy who killed my cousin, but he got off.

My cousin R. was killed as she sat in the back of a car after a night out partying. One of the other girls in the car was ill, so they pulled over onto the hard shoulder of the motorway so she could puke. A drag queen at the wheel of a van fell asleep and drove into the back of the car. R. had a brain haemorrhage and died in hospital a couple of days later. She had been a beautiful girl; willowy, attractive, popular, intelligent. She was a straight-A student and she was going to University. She was only nineteen. Yeah, we all still get upset about it now and then.

I wasn’t in the UK when my cousin died, I was in America, going through a bad time, without much money and no real chance of getting a flight, and I was an emotional wreck of a human being before I even got the news. I didn’t want to go home into this scene of grief and despair, so I cried myself out in Baltimore. I was desperately lonely and I did irrational things for weeks. Selfish, I know, and I’ve always regretted it, but always known what it would have done to me.

Now every time I see a car pulled over on the hard shoulder I shout at them, I get angry to the point that other people in the car think I’ve gone mental. If you break down and pull onto the hard shoulder and stay in your car, you have a one in eight hundred chance of being hit. You will be struck, on average, within ten minutes of pulling over. Two hundred and fifty people die each year. Frequently these deaths are caused by lorry drivers veering onto the hard shoulder and clipping parked vehicles. Motoring surveys repeatedly find that people still think staying inside their vehicle is the best thing to do. It is not.

On average, every person has a serious car accident every forty years of their life. I almost lost my best friend to two separate car accidents. That’s how frequent they are. My mother reminds me now and then that I almost didn’t get to grow up. When I was a baby, my parents were travelling in their car behind a lorry carrying planks of wood. Then one of the planks slid off. It went through our windscreen and stabbed the back seat, less than six inches from my head. I still sport a small white scar on my forehead from fragments of glass. My mother had to have her face reconstructed.