Reforming Mary Sue
Sep. 21st, 2005 05:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyThe Virtu, Chapter 5: 50 ms pgs., 11,205 wds
Running total: 239 ms pgs., 54,563 wds
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sosostris2012 made a post the other day about Mary Sues and the process by which a Mary Sue can become a real character--or at least a lens to examine the phenomenon of Mary Sues through. I commented with a link to this post of mine about Laurie R. King's The Beekeeper's Apprentice and the great Mary Sue-ness of its protagonist, and rereading that post of mine (and nattering at the ever-patient matociquala) prompted me to start thinking about Mary Sues, and Byron, and just what's at work there.
I use the term "Mary Sue" rather broadly, to indicate any protagonist1 who is clearly wish-fulfillment, whether she2 is the author thinly disguised and inserted into a daydream or whether she's a conglomeration of characteristics that the author, and the author's intended audience, are predisposed to consider "romantic." (And I use, as Cordelia says, sarcastic quote marks.) This is where Byron comes into the picture, because a lot of Mary Sues, especially in genre fantasy, are really Georgie Sues, in exactly the mode that Georgette Heyer pokes fun at in Venetia via the juxtaposition of Damerel with Oswald Denny.
The distinguishing features of this type of character, whether an uncomplicated Mary Sue or a Byronic one, go something like this (and feel free to add to my list--I don't pretend to completeness):
1. She's either extremely tall or extremely short. Height extremes are always a dead giveaway.
2. She is always thin, and usually stronger than she looks.
3. If she is in fact a she, she is very likely a tomboy. Or at least impatient with the normal lot of a girl trapped in a cod-medieval world.
4. If a he, he may be rather girly (e.g., Mercedes Lackey's Vanyel), though I don't know that this always holds true.
5. Long beautiful hair. Usually red or blonde. Or raven-wing black.
6. Tragic, guilt-ridden past. With scars. The degree of trauma depends on the inclination of the author and genre.
7. Unappreciated orphan child.
8. SPECIAL. Magic powers are good, or being especially empathic (Talia, also Lackey), or musically talented (Anne McCaffrey's Menolly). Or, you know, the long-lost heir to some kingdom or other, or the possessor of a miraculous birthright. It's not the specifics that matter; it's the Specialness.
9. Everyone who meets her either adores her or hates her. If they hate her, it's out of envy. People frequently adore her despite her acting like a spoiled bitch, because they can see the pain that causes her to lash out (see #6).
10. Drop-dead gorgeous. Often with peculiarly colored eyes.
11. A handicap or physical defect that nevertheless never impedes her in doing anything she wants. Myopia is a good one here, or some interesting illness, especially if you can finagle it to where the character coughs up blood on a more or less regular basis. (E.g. Raistlin Majere in Dragonlance, and hell YES Raistlin is a Mary Sue. And dripping Byronism all over the place with it.)
12. The more Byronic of the sisterhood frequently have borderline-psychotic tempers. Those who did not get the Curse of Georgie Sue are unfailingly gentle and sweet-natured and make friends with no provocation.
Now, it's easy to see why characters like this are appealing, especially if you're a teenager. (I loved Menolly and Raistlin in my time, so I'm not pretending to any moral high ground here.) They pander to the part of us that knows we are Special and misunderstood, and hold out hope that we will eventually, after suitable perils and suffering (which we endure bravely and from which we emerge possibly bloody but definitely unbowed), find a community or a person who will understand us and love us for what we are. Which is what we all hope for, and actually I don't have any problem with that as a plot arc.3 The problem is back there with the Special.
The message I wish The Incredibles had offered is that everyone is special, regardless of whether they have super-powers or not. Sadly, the movie only went with the inverse formation, and put it in the mouth of its villain, who wants to be sure no one is special, leaving the movie to assert that if you're special, you should be proud of it, and sure, using it to cheat is just fine, as long as you don't go overboard. Which is not a message I like very much. Being Special is a chimera, a mirage; even if you are special in some way or another, it doesn't make you a better human being or entitle you to anything more than the kid next to you. And being special in one way does not bring with it the attendant cluster of characteristics that make up a Mary Sue. That's the real problem with Mary Sues: they heap perfection upon perfection, or Byronism upon Byronism, until there's no room left for anything real.
Mary Sues also, as a species, have no sense of humor, and especially not about themselves.
As a writer, you start with Mary Sues because you have this nagging certainty that you have to make your character interesting, but you don't quite know how to do it. So you give her a shiny shiny surface and let her float through life without her feet ever quite touching the dirt. Byronism is actually a step up from that, because it grasps, however dimly, that making a character interesting has something to do with their interior life. So you go overboard, because you're still not quite sure what you're doing, and heap on the trauma in the hopes of generating sympathy.
And then one day you wake up and realize you've overloaded your poor suffering protagonist with attributes and traumas to the point that neither he nor you can keep the story moving for all the weight bearing it down, and you realize, blushing hotly, just what a little idiot you've been.
And you start over.
Which brings us to the idea of reforming Mary Sue. Because Mary Sues frequently do have an interesting character trapped somewhere inside them; it's just a matter of getting rid of the baggage. Or of letting the baggage be identified for what it is. Admit that your charismatic and beautiful character is an asshole. Admit that a Byronic past more often leads to PTSD than to romance. Like I said in my earlier post today, think things through. Let the consequences play out. Let go of the idea that Special equals worthy. Let Mary Sue get dirty; let Georgie Sue be laughed at. They won't thank you, but, you know, you're not in this business to make your characters happy.
Letting characters be real means letting them not be perfect. It means opening the carapace of Mary Sue and letting them come out. It means letting yourself breathe.
---
1Let's stick to protagonists for this post, although secondary characters can certainly also be Mary Sues.
2I also refuse the masculine back-formations such as Gary Stu or Marty Stu. A Mary Sue is a Mary Sue, regardless of the character's sexual equipment.
3Actually, I think that's one of the best plot arcs there is.
Running total: 239 ms pgs., 54,563 wds
sosostris2012 made a post the other day about Mary Sues and the process by which a Mary Sue can become a real character--or at least a lens to examine the phenomenon of Mary Sues through. I commented with a link to this post of mine about Laurie R. King's The Beekeeper's Apprentice and the great Mary Sue-ness of its protagonist, and rereading that post of mine (and nattering at the ever-patient matociquala) prompted me to start thinking about Mary Sues, and Byron, and just what's at work there.I use the term "Mary Sue" rather broadly, to indicate any protagonist1 who is clearly wish-fulfillment, whether she2 is the author thinly disguised and inserted into a daydream or whether she's a conglomeration of characteristics that the author, and the author's intended audience, are predisposed to consider "romantic." (And I use, as Cordelia says, sarcastic quote marks.) This is where Byron comes into the picture, because a lot of Mary Sues, especially in genre fantasy, are really Georgie Sues, in exactly the mode that Georgette Heyer pokes fun at in Venetia via the juxtaposition of Damerel with Oswald Denny.
The distinguishing features of this type of character, whether an uncomplicated Mary Sue or a Byronic one, go something like this (and feel free to add to my list--I don't pretend to completeness):
1. She's either extremely tall or extremely short. Height extremes are always a dead giveaway.
2. She is always thin, and usually stronger than she looks.
3. If she is in fact a she, she is very likely a tomboy. Or at least impatient with the normal lot of a girl trapped in a cod-medieval world.
4. If a he, he may be rather girly (e.g., Mercedes Lackey's Vanyel), though I don't know that this always holds true.
5. Long beautiful hair. Usually red or blonde. Or raven-wing black.
6. Tragic, guilt-ridden past. With scars. The degree of trauma depends on the inclination of the author and genre.
7. Unappreciated orphan child.
8. SPECIAL. Magic powers are good, or being especially empathic (Talia, also Lackey), or musically talented (Anne McCaffrey's Menolly). Or, you know, the long-lost heir to some kingdom or other, or the possessor of a miraculous birthright. It's not the specifics that matter; it's the Specialness.
9. Everyone who meets her either adores her or hates her. If they hate her, it's out of envy. People frequently adore her despite her acting like a spoiled bitch, because they can see the pain that causes her to lash out (see #6).
10. Drop-dead gorgeous. Often with peculiarly colored eyes.
11. A handicap or physical defect that nevertheless never impedes her in doing anything she wants. Myopia is a good one here, or some interesting illness, especially if you can finagle it to where the character coughs up blood on a more or less regular basis. (E.g. Raistlin Majere in Dragonlance, and hell YES Raistlin is a Mary Sue. And dripping Byronism all over the place with it.)
12. The more Byronic of the sisterhood frequently have borderline-psychotic tempers. Those who did not get the Curse of Georgie Sue are unfailingly gentle and sweet-natured and make friends with no provocation.
Now, it's easy to see why characters like this are appealing, especially if you're a teenager. (I loved Menolly and Raistlin in my time, so I'm not pretending to any moral high ground here.) They pander to the part of us that knows we are Special and misunderstood, and hold out hope that we will eventually, after suitable perils and suffering (which we endure bravely and from which we emerge possibly bloody but definitely unbowed), find a community or a person who will understand us and love us for what we are. Which is what we all hope for, and actually I don't have any problem with that as a plot arc.3 The problem is back there with the Special.
The message I wish The Incredibles had offered is that everyone is special, regardless of whether they have super-powers or not. Sadly, the movie only went with the inverse formation, and put it in the mouth of its villain, who wants to be sure no one is special, leaving the movie to assert that if you're special, you should be proud of it, and sure, using it to cheat is just fine, as long as you don't go overboard. Which is not a message I like very much. Being Special is a chimera, a mirage; even if you are special in some way or another, it doesn't make you a better human being or entitle you to anything more than the kid next to you. And being special in one way does not bring with it the attendant cluster of characteristics that make up a Mary Sue. That's the real problem with Mary Sues: they heap perfection upon perfection, or Byronism upon Byronism, until there's no room left for anything real.
Mary Sues also, as a species, have no sense of humor, and especially not about themselves.
As a writer, you start with Mary Sues because you have this nagging certainty that you have to make your character interesting, but you don't quite know how to do it. So you give her a shiny shiny surface and let her float through life without her feet ever quite touching the dirt. Byronism is actually a step up from that, because it grasps, however dimly, that making a character interesting has something to do with their interior life. So you go overboard, because you're still not quite sure what you're doing, and heap on the trauma in the hopes of generating sympathy.
And then one day you wake up and realize you've overloaded your poor suffering protagonist with attributes and traumas to the point that neither he nor you can keep the story moving for all the weight bearing it down, and you realize, blushing hotly, just what a little idiot you've been.
And you start over.
Which brings us to the idea of reforming Mary Sue. Because Mary Sues frequently do have an interesting character trapped somewhere inside them; it's just a matter of getting rid of the baggage. Or of letting the baggage be identified for what it is. Admit that your charismatic and beautiful character is an asshole. Admit that a Byronic past more often leads to PTSD than to romance. Like I said in my earlier post today, think things through. Let the consequences play out. Let go of the idea that Special equals worthy. Let Mary Sue get dirty; let Georgie Sue be laughed at. They won't thank you, but, you know, you're not in this business to make your characters happy.
Letting characters be real means letting them not be perfect. It means opening the carapace of Mary Sue and letting them come out. It means letting yourself breathe.
---
1Let's stick to protagonists for this post, although secondary characters can certainly also be Mary Sues.
2I also refuse the masculine back-formations such as Gary Stu or Marty Stu. A Mary Sue is a Mary Sue, regardless of the character's sexual equipment.
3Actually, I think that's one of the best plot arcs there is.
Mary Sue Reform School Dropout
Date: 2005-09-22 03:12 am (UTC)Eventually, you learn that there are ways to use all of these things effectively, and you start to understand why critters jumped all over your first attempts.
But your average beginning writer doesn't think those rules apply to him, anyway. And is going to do it anyway, and fail utterly, and in the process learn how to do it right.
I personally don't believe in "rules." I believe in tools that work and tools that don't work in a given situation. And, you know, good characterization is a process.
And, you know, one of the delights of a forum like livejournal is that you have time to think through what you're about to say, rather than knee-jerking.
378567
Date: 2005-09-22 04:42 am (UTC)Only isn't 'write what you know' also a 'rule' that can be misinterpreted by young writers and cause them to be neurotic? That one you seem to be saying is fine, becaue you're using it (wrongly in my opinion) to justify author intrusion.
Having read your lengthy comment I'm left with the idea that you feel experienced writers shouldn't discuss their craft in public because impressionable young writers really need to be treated like mushrooms... grown in the dark and fed on manure.
Yes, writers in the various stages of learning will misinterpret what experienced writers say -- experienced writers will misunderstand each other. But every piece of writing will be misunderstood by some of those who read it -- it doesn't seem like a reason for not trying to communicate one's thoughts.
The other aspect of your knee-jerk appears to be that you like a certain kind of heroic fantasy where a hero can be viewed as entirely admirable and never wrong (and my reading of Robinton clearly differs from yours... which is kind of interesting and confirms a theory of mine about reader rection). I, on the other hand, would very much like to drown at birth every one of those insufferable good guys who are right because they are the hero... whose murders are less murderous, whose rapes aren't rape, whose lies aren't bad lies, who only torture with the best of intentions and yanno it's not real torture if the hero does it... Yeah... a couple of generations without those guys... please.
[I'm one of those chicks who wonders about whether the whole guy winning the princess and half the kingdom doesn't have the unpleasant cloud of marital rape over that happy ending.]
And I don't tend to get into lit discussions on this lj because everyone here knows a lot more about it than me... but I thought one of the classic hero archetypes was always flawed... like Hercules having a temper and Orpheus looking back... and that heroes tended to be defined by their having to make a sacrifice to save others/the world rather than their purty features or their special gifts.
Re: 378567
Date: 2005-09-22 08:07 am (UTC)Well see here's the thing, I read the definition being used by the person who made the post that I assumed you were replying to -- the author thinly disguised and inserted into a daydream. You then took that definition and named it "author insertion" and said... that a character can do all the things the writer would do if inserted into a daydream and be a character... But at that point the character would fail to meet the terms of the definition given... So... no.
Inserting information the author has is not inserting a character based on the author into a daydream... The insertion of telling details which arise from an author having experienced some activity or event first hand... is not inserting a character based on the author into a daydream.
[and frankly daydreams seldom work out so well as a substitute for world-building without a little extra effort, unless you have daydreams where people insist on telling you how their goddam language reflects important concepts in their society ::sobs quietly::]
No, I don't think writers should be grown in the dark and fed BS. Not at all, I'm sorry if you understood me that way....I never said someone should not communicate their thoughts. Where'd you figure that one?
You said "I think it would be much more beneficial for young writers if this Mary Sue paranoia wasn't swarming around." etc
How can young writers not be exposed to what you consider to be harmful discussions without either locking them away from the discourse of experienced writers, or censoring that discourse to what cannot possibly harm a new writer? (which would be a pretty narrow range of topics)
I see "bad things" listed a lot without the flip side, of how they can be done successfully.
Well that would be because there are no magic buttons... and few easily passed on solutions. Much easier to tell someone how not to fall in the pit than how to free-climb out of it once they've jumped in.
Most things I think can be done successfully in writing...there's not really any rule you can't bend or outright break.
Yes, there is. There is the one rule, the god of rules, the only commandment a writer need worry about (except all the others) -- make it work. And it's a lot harder taskmaster than most new writers believe it to be.
But... to be a rule-breaker doesn't one first have to acknowledge that there are rules?
I think you're prejudging me a bit, I think you think I fit into some type of reader category you have in mind that you already dislike...?
"And also, there's the "hero" archetype. Sometimes as a reader you WANT a character that is really talented, and that you can look up to. You want a hero." "So in this world of gritty and "realistic" characters, there is this pseudo-pressure to leave the heroes behind with the Mary Sues." "It makes me afraid that we're going to lose our Hero-type characters for a few generations of books, and everyone will be gritty and overly flawed and "realistic"."
One type of character doesn't have to be forgotten in lieu of the other type. Why can't they co-exist? There's lots of different people in the real life world...some people are genuinely nice people, others are genuine jerks and people who majorly messed up, and the rest (majority, I'd think) are in between. I like both types.
Err... you didn't list two types there, you listed a spectrum of realistic types... probably not a single one of whom could be mistaken for a "Mary Sue". I know some really nice people, and some jerks, and the jerks can do nice things and the really nice people can be wrong. I know a bunch of talented people, and smart people, but none of that makes them... oh wait, I've pretty much drifted into what was being said by our hostess... only she said it much better than I can.
Re: 378567
Date: 2005-09-22 03:39 pm (UTC)Then don't you think it's a bit forward to come in and lecture
Re: 378567
Date: 2005-09-26 10:10 pm (UTC)I usually just lurk on
Yes, there is. There is the one rule, the god of rules, the only commandment a writer need worry about (except all the others) -- make it work. And it's a lot harder taskmaster than most new writers believe it to be.
was so apt that I had to delurk. I am the aforementioned new writer. Journalistically published, fictionally - not yet. It's nice to hear work, graft and technique, affirmed. One can be inspired and 1,000 words can spill out easily, but not all those words are worth keeping and not all will seed others.
My point? Not much of one. Just that I like what you wrote and it currently resonates. Sometimes the real graft is in figuring out why it almost works but doesn't.
Re: 378567
Date: 2005-09-27 06:21 am (UTC)Sometimes the real graft is in figuring out why it almost works but doesn't.
Absofragginlutely :o)