Leave Mary Sue Alone!
Dec. 15th, 2012 10:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ljwritesIt's past time for Mary Sue to go into retirement. The concept isn't helpful, and in fact distracts from more than it sheds light on the larger problem of crappy writing and storytelling. A character perceived to be Suish inspires such knee-jerk dislike, people start thinking the character is what's wrong with the story when the real problem is much deeper. Mary Sue is just the merest surface of the problem, an easy target and not the source of the issues.
The term "Mary Sue" as a collection of traits is pretty much conceptually bankrupt as a means of understanding, critiquing, and improving fiction. It can't even keep from contradicting itself. She is either brave and cheerful or unnecessarily mopey or distressed. Being too incorruptible makes her a Purity Sue, but if she's too bad-tempered and bitter she's a Jerk Sue. Being too perfect is an obvious sign of Suishness, but inverting all the common Sue traits still won't save her because she just might be an Anti-Sue. It's gone past the point where anyone can make sense of it beyond "knows it when I sees it."
It's easy to see how this ridiculous state of affairs came about. People who didn't like a certain type of character decreed that X, Y, and Z made a Mary Sue and should be avoided. Other people started picking up on that message and avoiding X, Y, and Z, making their characters evil instead of good, depressed instead of perky, ordinary people instead of genetically engineered unicorn-phoenix mutant hybrids.
How many problems did this Sue-evasion solve? Exactly zero. Commentators, assuming there were more Sue traits they hadn't nailed down, simply expanded the list to include A, B, and C, even if they completely contradicted the earlier X, Y, and Z, until the very idea of the Mary Sue became hopelessly jumbled.
These efforts were entirely wrongheaded because they focused on the symptom and not the disease. The audience, convinced the Mary Sue character was the problem because they didn't like her, thought nailing down the precise Suish traits and getting rid of them would make stories better. I think it's clear that the effort was an unqualified failure. Attempts to run the elusive Mary Sue to the ground won't do a lick of good, because she was never the real problem in the first place. She was just one manifestation of the problem.
Show me just one really well-written story in any medium that has a genuine hateable Mary Sue. I'm not talking about a character that just has so-called Mary Sue traits, but one that ruins the enjoyment of the story, whose terrible behavior neither the author nor any of the "good" characters ever calls out, who distorts the reality field of the story for the cause of his/her awesomeness.
Chances are, if there is a genuinely annoying character like that she is only possible because the writing presents a dishonest view of what the characters (including established canon characters, in case of fanfic) and the world are like. Even if the story is pretty good overall it is likely to be flawed in proportion to these qualities. If the writing is really good, it's likely that the Suish traits won't harm the enjoyment of the story at all.
Particular character traits, in other words, have no bearing on the enjoyment of story. When we're complaining about Mary Sue we're really talking about bad writing. What matters is the writer's willingness stay true to her own premises and explore the implications of the character traits, character actions, and the world.
George Elliot's classic piece on what we would call Mary Sue fiction today, Silly Novels by Lady Novelists, is both useful and entertaining precisely because it's not all about Mary Sue. Of its roughly 10,000 words, less than 1,500 are directly devoted to the heroine's traits in hilarious passages making fun of the conventional heroines that populate these novels. The other 8,500 words are takedowns of the contrived plot, frivolous settings, failure to be true to life, implausible dialogue, heavy-handed characterization, cliched diction, Author Filibusters, breathless melodrama, and other aspects of shoddy craft that make these novels so awful. The title is Silly Novels, not Silly Heroines, because Elliot had an actual understanding of the craft and knew the heroine and her traits are only parts of a story. The real proof of the pudding is not in whether the heroine is a beautiful tragic heiress or not but in how truthful, genuine, and lively the story itself is.
"Mary Sue" is a convenient shorthand for that twinge of annoyance we feel when we realize the fictional reality is being warped or broken for an author agenda. Real conversation about storytelling and writing, however, won't happen while we just brush past bad writing in pursuit of the irritating character. Let's talk about the disease of bad writing in general, and not just its face and symptom: our much-maligned, cheerful or depressed, pure or evil, special or ordinary, but ultimately tragically overblown Mary Sue.
The term "Mary Sue" as a collection of traits is pretty much conceptually bankrupt as a means of understanding, critiquing, and improving fiction. It can't even keep from contradicting itself. She is either brave and cheerful or unnecessarily mopey or distressed. Being too incorruptible makes her a Purity Sue, but if she's too bad-tempered and bitter she's a Jerk Sue. Being too perfect is an obvious sign of Suishness, but inverting all the common Sue traits still won't save her because she just might be an Anti-Sue. It's gone past the point where anyone can make sense of it beyond "knows it when I sees it."
It's easy to see how this ridiculous state of affairs came about. People who didn't like a certain type of character decreed that X, Y, and Z made a Mary Sue and should be avoided. Other people started picking up on that message and avoiding X, Y, and Z, making their characters evil instead of good, depressed instead of perky, ordinary people instead of genetically engineered unicorn-phoenix mutant hybrids.
How many problems did this Sue-evasion solve? Exactly zero. Commentators, assuming there were more Sue traits they hadn't nailed down, simply expanded the list to include A, B, and C, even if they completely contradicted the earlier X, Y, and Z, until the very idea of the Mary Sue became hopelessly jumbled.
These efforts were entirely wrongheaded because they focused on the symptom and not the disease. The audience, convinced the Mary Sue character was the problem because they didn't like her, thought nailing down the precise Suish traits and getting rid of them would make stories better. I think it's clear that the effort was an unqualified failure. Attempts to run the elusive Mary Sue to the ground won't do a lick of good, because she was never the real problem in the first place. She was just one manifestation of the problem.
Show me just one really well-written story in any medium that has a genuine hateable Mary Sue. I'm not talking about a character that just has so-called Mary Sue traits, but one that ruins the enjoyment of the story, whose terrible behavior neither the author nor any of the "good" characters ever calls out, who distorts the reality field of the story for the cause of his/her awesomeness.
Chances are, if there is a genuinely annoying character like that she is only possible because the writing presents a dishonest view of what the characters (including established canon characters, in case of fanfic) and the world are like. Even if the story is pretty good overall it is likely to be flawed in proportion to these qualities. If the writing is really good, it's likely that the Suish traits won't harm the enjoyment of the story at all.
Particular character traits, in other words, have no bearing on the enjoyment of story. When we're complaining about Mary Sue we're really talking about bad writing. What matters is the writer's willingness stay true to her own premises and explore the implications of the character traits, character actions, and the world.
George Elliot's classic piece on what we would call Mary Sue fiction today, Silly Novels by Lady Novelists, is both useful and entertaining precisely because it's not all about Mary Sue. Of its roughly 10,000 words, less than 1,500 are directly devoted to the heroine's traits in hilarious passages making fun of the conventional heroines that populate these novels. The other 8,500 words are takedowns of the contrived plot, frivolous settings, failure to be true to life, implausible dialogue, heavy-handed characterization, cliched diction, Author Filibusters, breathless melodrama, and other aspects of shoddy craft that make these novels so awful. The title is Silly Novels, not Silly Heroines, because Elliot had an actual understanding of the craft and knew the heroine and her traits are only parts of a story. The real proof of the pudding is not in whether the heroine is a beautiful tragic heiress or not but in how truthful, genuine, and lively the story itself is.
"Mary Sue" is a convenient shorthand for that twinge of annoyance we feel when we realize the fictional reality is being warped or broken for an author agenda. Real conversation about storytelling and writing, however, won't happen while we just brush past bad writing in pursuit of the irritating character. Let's talk about the disease of bad writing in general, and not just its face and symptom: our much-maligned, cheerful or depressed, pure or evil, special or ordinary, but ultimately tragically overblown Mary Sue.
