Try Premium. Log in Sign Up. I have read all the books and watched all the movies. I need to get this These are just some dumb moments in books I've picked up. His mask fell at her feet, cracks evident of its soon-to-be short lifespan, but its structure still in one piece.
With unsteady hands, she picked up the mask he always s Just fill out the application, and we will OC reviews! Welcome to my Mary Sue book! While you may believe a work fits here, and you might be right, people tend to have rather vocal, differing opinions about this subject. Please keep these off of the work's page. Mary Sue is a derogatory term primarily used in Fan Fic circles to describe a particular type of character.
This much everyone can agree on. What that character type is, exactly, differs wildly from circle to circle, and often from person to person. TV Tropes doesn't get to set what the term means; the best we can do is capture the way it is used. Since there's no consensus on a precise definition, the best way to describe the phenomenon is by example of the kind of character pretty much everyone could agree to be a Mary Sue. These traits usually reference the character's perceived importance in the story, their physical design and an irrelevantly over-skilled or over-idealized nature.
Originally written as a parody of the standard Self-Insert Fic of the time as opposed to any particular traits , the name was quickly adopted by the Star Trek fanfiction community.
Its original meaning mostly held that it was an Always Female Author Avatar , regardless of character role or perceived quality. Often, the characters would get in a relationship with either Kirk or Spock, turn out to have a familial bond with a crew member, be a Half-Human Hybrid masquerading as a human, and die in a graceful, beautiful way to reinforce that the character was Too Good for This Sinful Earth. Or space , as the case may be. Even back then, there wasn't a total consensus on what was or wasn't Mary Sue, since it's not always immediately obvious which character is an Author Avatar.
As this essay reveals , suspiciously Mary Sue-like characters were noted in subscriber-submitted articles for 19th-century childrens' magazines, making this trope Older Than You Think. The prototypical Mary Sue is an original female character in a fanfic who obviously serves as an idealized version of the author mainly for the purpose of Wish-Fulfillment.
She's exotically beautiful, often having an unusual hair or eye color, and has a similarly cool and exotic name. She's exceptionally talented in an implausibly wide variety of areas, and may possess skills that are rare or nonexistent in the canon setting. She also lacks any realistic, or at least story-relevant, character flaws — either that or her "flaws" are obviously meant to be endearing.
She has an unusual and dramatic Back Story. The canon protagonists are all overwhelmed with admiration for her beauty, wit, courage and other virtues, and are quick to adopt her as one of their True Companions , even characters who are usually antisocial and untrusting; if any character doesn't love her, that character gets an extremely unsympathetic portrayal.
She has some sort of especially close relationship to the author's favorite canon character — their love interest, illegitimate child, never-before-mentioned sister, etc. Other than that, the canon characters are quickly reduced to awestruck cheerleaders, watching from the sidelines as Mary Sue outstrips them in their areas of expertise and solves problems that have stymied them for the entire series.
This in turn prompted an exasperated reaction and a bit of history from a long-time fan:. Many fans, if aware of the term and the trope, have made statements that their original female characters were NOT Mary Sues because their fanworks did not fit the definition of the term.
Examples Wanted : Editors are encouraged to add more examples or a wider variety of examples. Sometimes fans notice when the writing staff steps over the fictional line and moves a character out of believability and into the Mary Sue realm.
This is occasionally referred to as a Canon Sue. Bacon-Smith points out that James T. Kirk himself could qualify as a Marty Stu. A female hero who seems overly competent or appears to exhibit new skills as the plot calls for them James H. Heinlein's concept of the competent man doesn't seem to extend to include competent women.
Or, as a fan in said: "My essential problem with the Mary Sue phenomenon: when you have Dr. Daniel "I speak 23 languages and married the alien princess" Jackson on your show, and you call Sam Carter an unealistically talented Mary Sue, you have issues.
Screenwriter Max Landis has said that the character fits this description, [31] claiming that Rey is excessively gifted at a variety of skills. Caroline Framke of Vox and Erik Kain in Forbes contended that Rey did not fit the Mary Sue profile, since the storyline explains and contextualizes her many skills from the beginning.
Perhaps no term or concept in fandom has managed to stir up the amount of emotion evoked by the words "Mary Sue". Amateur editor Edith Cantor once remarked that "in terms of their impact on those whom they affect, those words [Mary Sue] have got to rank right up there with the Selective Service Act. The "Mary Sue" concept has drawn criticism from amateur and professional authors.
Many such criticisms are brushed off as coming from writers who create "Mary Sues" and are thus beneath notice. However, the onus of wishing to avoid being condemned as a "Suethor" "Mary Sue" author apparently weighs heavily even on professional authors and sophisticated amateurs, particularly women.
While not denying that such characters exist, and going into considerable detail as to just why fans write them, she observes that fear of creating a "Mary Sue" may be restricting and even silencing pro as well as fan authors. She cites "Mary Sue" paranoia as one of the sources for the lack of what Johanna Cantor called "believable, competent, and identifiable-with" female characters in today's fan fiction. Bacon-Smith also quotes Edith Cantor describing a story she received from a neofan in In the cover letter, the fan said "I don't know if I ought to be sending this to you.
I'm afraid it's a Mary Sue. Only I don't know what that is. Amateur writers respond to the emphasis on avoiding Mary Sue in several ways. Some continue to create original characters , but make them as dull, unattractive and colorless as possible. Some do not create original characters at all. Fan critics are liable to judge an original character as Mary Sue unless she is plain looking, has many faults or flaws, and never has any traumatic experiences or distinguishing characteristics.
In , when asked why she hadn't written any fan fiction subsequent to her novella The Mind-Sifter , published in Sharon Emily 's Star Trek Showcase in , Shirley Maiewski said that along with the editing hatchet job by Sondra Marshak for Star Trek: The New Voyages , she'd received sniping fan critiques by "experts" who called her work "poorly written, lacking character development" and containing a Mary Sue.
At Clippercon a Star Trek fan convention , Bacon-Smith interviewed a panel of women authors who say they do not include female characters in their stories at all. She quoted one as saying "Every time I've tried to put a woman in any story I've ever written, everyone immediately says, this is a Mary Sue.
And, God forbid, if a woman had a large, positive role in a story, then the story was sneered at for being a "Mary Sue" story So, to not be viewed with disgust, one had to make original, positive characters in a story male. Which meant, if they were going to be any female characters at all, they needed to be bad ones. Several other writers quoted by Bacon-Smith point out that James T. Kirk could be seen as a Canon Sue , and that the label seems to be used more indiscriminately on female characters who do not behave in accordance with the dominant culture's images and expectations for females as opposed to males.
In recent years, since the Internet became available to the general public, and particularly the creation of fanfiction. The amount of obsession and dire warnings associated with "Mary Sue" amount to a moral panic within fandom.
The appearance of a character deemed Mary Sue is viewed as a license to ridicule and humiliate the character and the author. The presence of any character identified as Mary Sue now elicits expressions of murderous rage among fan critics. I know of some fans who automatically label a story a "Mary Sue" if it contains a major female character, no matter how intelligently that character may be written.
In , Christine Scodari, a researcher in media studies from gender perspective, noticed a tendency within slash fandom to label major canon female characters eg. Nyota Uhura in the Star Trek: Alternate Original Series film reboot as "Mary Sues" because the slash fans "begrudged" how the development of the female character takes away screen time from slashable male characters.
In a discussion page at TV Tropes , one commenter questioned the practice of flaming young writers who created Mary Sues, suggesting that offering constructive criticism might be better. Her analysis was labeled a "brainfart" and she was told that Mary Sue was "the literary equivalent of publicly soiling yourself.
Groups such as PPC and self-proclaimed " Sueslayers " [note 19] now appear in online communities. Choosing stories that they judge as containing Mary Sue characters, they proceed to rewrite them, inserting characters based on themselves into the plot for the express purpose of killing the character they have decided is Mary Sue.
For these and other reasons, the "Mary Sue" concept is facing growing criticism within fandom. It began as, but was not limited to, a comment on the practices of the PPC. This essay set off a tidal wave of discussion and inspired many other fans to speak up. Boosette subsequently removed the essay citing inability to cope with the massive flood of comments.
The core points have been quoted many times online:. Dreamwidth user majoline, writing in response to boosette's essay, observes that the type of fanfiction criticism culture boosette describes made her ashamed to write or even to think certain things, including about her personal life, and that she's sure she is not alone: "This is probably the story of quite a few people out there.
I don't write fic or really participate. I was too ashamed of what I liked and wanted to write. And now I write nothing at all. A post to the Livejournal community Fanficrants called out the Mary Sue hunts, feeling that dismissing original characters as Sues or Stus was harmful and not supportive. Yes, badly-constructed and badly-written characters are a thing. Many new writers don't realize that what's fun for them to write isn't always fun for someone else to read.
This often results in stories featuring over-idealized protagonists who fall into the center of things and get everything they want way too easily. Back in the early days of the Star Trek fandom, these stories were so numerous that a writer named Paula Smith wrote a single-page story titled A Trekkie's Tale to poke fun at them. The protagonist's name was Mary Sue, and her name became a label for any character perceived as being like this.
In the 90s and s, writers began making Mary Sue tests to help writers mainly fanfiction writers gauge whether their characters were Mary Sues. These test were at least usually made in good faith to help new writers improve the quality of their work, but they weren't perfect. The message that many writers took from them is that certain character traits and plot elements are always bad no matter what, when the reality is that whether something is "bad" or not depends heavily on context and framing.
Additionally, the term "Mary Sue" became a snarl word to describe almost any character, especially female, that somebody just didn't like for some reason. Both of these are still major problems today. Some fans who write original female characters feel that these characters will always be labeled as Mary Sues, no matter how well written or characterized, and see the obsession with the Mary Sue label as evidence of misogyny in fandom.
There is misogyny inherent in the practice of labeling characters Mary Sues, but it stems from a larger vein of misogyny that encompasses fandom and media as a whole. And you know why? It comes from the knee-jerk response to labelling any character written by women for other women as a Mary Sue. For a lot of writers, these criticisms would come without justification or evidence for improvement. When authors were criticized for doing it wrong, they tried their damndest to do better, only to be criticized for doing the exact same thing all over again.
The common denominator was not any quality, or even any set of qualities. The only common denominator was that it came from a place dominated by women. The expression " competence porn ", coined by Leverage creator John Rogers, describes narratives in which a group of people work together using cleverness and hard work to solve difficulties and challenges, or a single person is shown doing this, as in Andy Weir's The Martian.
In a discussion on "books in which nothing bad happens," John C. Bunnell brings up competence porn and suggests that Mary Sue "can arise from competence porn done badly. In mainstream literature, many of the most memorable and successful characters are based on their authors, are the center and focus of the tales, and are portrayed sympathetically. Clearly there is a way to create such characters without eliciting a "Mary Sue" reaction in readers.
Paula Smith herself specifically states that characters based on oneself, even if they have a romantic relationship with a canon hero, are not necessarily Mary Sue in the sense that she meant it: "For example, by , we were seeing Paula Block's Sadie Faulwell in the " Landing Party" series in the Warped Space zine.
Luke picks up a lightsaber, hears about the Force, and 26 minutes later he is angry at Han for not believing in it As she stands over Kylo Ren at the end of their lightsaber battle, having won the upper hand, she has to fight the voice within her that's telling her to kill him — a conflict Luke Skywalker would intimately understand. Herein lies the main issue. If fans like Landis want to accuse The Force Awakens of creating a character who's too good at what she does, too quickly, they need to face up to the fact that the Star Wars franchise was already brimming over with similar moments.
In The Force Awakens , Rey, a young scavenger with mysterious origins, becomes entangled with the Rebellion, flies the Millennium Falcon without prior experience, discovers that she can tap into The Force, and uses it to her advantage to best a more experienced Jedi.
Any additional skills Rey has — mechanical work, hand-to-hand combat, climbing — are explained when we first meet her. She's been fending for herself on Jakku for years. If she hadn't picked up those skills, she'd probably be dead. In A New Hope , Luke Skywalker, a teenage farmhand with mysterious origins, becomes entangled with the Rebel Alliance, discovers he can tap into The Force, and gets a couple days of training to focus his ability.
He then leads a squadron into the trenches of the Death Star before blowing the whole thing up, despite having no established prior pilot experience. The question of how easily Rey wields The Force is a key point of the arguments against her. She gets a Stormtrooper to release her, then fights back and almost wins in a lightsaber duel with the more experienced Kylo Ren. Luke, at least, had some training. The Washington Post 's Sonny Bunch, in a piece that he calls "sympathetic" to Landis's Mary Sue accusations, writes that Rey knows how to use the Force because The Force Awakens is "the greatest, most expensive piece of fan fiction that has ever been created," and so of course she knows what a Jedi mind trick is.
The Star Wars universe grapples with the idea that everyone has a "dark side," but its vague definitions of The Force and who wields it make for heroes with equally vague justifications. What Bunch and Landis's arguments both ignore is the fact that The Force is an incredibly convenient story device in and of itself. An argument of "because genetics" doesn't even work here, because while Leia has some knowledge of the Force, her natural talent for it doesn't match Luke's — and they're twins.
The Force is one of the most prominent uses of "because I said so" in modern storytelling. In that case, who's to say Rey can't be just as powerful as Luke?
Thus, the most logical conclusion is this: Their stories aren't exactly the same, but Rey's sudden realization of her powers isn't necessarily more impressive than Luke's. If Rey is a Mary Sue, then so is Luke. In an excellent essay over at The Verge , Tasha Robinson pointed out the hypocrisy of a fandom that isn't quick to call out its male heroes for having the same issues:. Are they all getting the same level of suspicion and dismissal? Back in , were we wringing our hands over whether Han Solo was too suave and funny and cool, or whether Luke's access to the "powerful ally" of an all-connecting, all-seeing, all-powerful Force that "binds the galaxy together" made him way too overpowered?
We wouldn't be worrying about Rey's excessive coolness if she were Ray, standard-issue white male hero with all the skills and all the luck.
At IndieWire, Samuel Adams argued that people calling Rey hyper-competent are resting on a "sloppy reading" of The Force Awakens , as they fail to acknowledge how surprised and delighted Rey herself is at said hypercompetence.
0コメント