Perfect, Charming, Adorable, Delightfully Klutzy

I’ve been enjoying myself this morning.

A few weeks ago, I ran across a term I hadn’t heard of in the one-star Amazon.com reviews of Twilight, a term used to describe Bella Swan, the heroine of the series: “Mary Sue.” Okay, bias alert time: because the series is notable for its chaste longing (and absence of sex), I assumed wrongly that the term “Mary Sue” meant something like, “Prissy, nonsexual, goodie-two-shoes heroine who is a perfect exemplar of 1950’s-era femininity.”

Wrongo. Damn those preconceptions, anyway.

The term “Mary Sue,” according to Wikipedia, source of all wisdom (well, all of MY very dubious wisdom, anyway), is vastly more entertaining and useful than my original misunderstanding:

Mary Sue, sometimes shortened simply to Sue, is a pejorative term used to describe a fictional character who plays a major role in the plot on such a scale that suspension of disbelief fails due to the character’s traits, skills and abilities being tenuously or inadequately justified. Such a character is particularly characterized by overly idealized and clichéd mannerisms, lacking noteworthy flaws, and primarily functioning as wish-fulfillment fantasies for their authors.

I admit, I had never heard that term before, although it’s apparently been floating around for, oh, the last twenty years or so, give or take. The problem is, it’s been floating around in the weird and often wonderful (or sometimes freakish in a sex-at-the-car-accident kinda way) world of fan fiction, a world with which I’m only passingly familiar, and mostly because of my friend Michelle, who was the kind of person who would go to the Star Trek convention dressed in a custom-made outfit.  HARD CORE.

For those of you who are basically clueless, like me, fan fiction is the writing of noncanonical stories or longer works of fiction starring the characters from a television series, film, or book. The great green granddaddy greatspawn of fanfic is probably Star Trek, but X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Harry Potter, and a host of others have engendered their own sources of fan-written fiction, some of which is awesome and some of which is positively dreadful. The virtue of fan fiction is that it allows fans to explore possibilities inherent in the characters or the basic setup of the story that the writers themselves didn’t choose to explore, didn’t think of, or just plain couldn’t explore given the limitations of television or film censorship.  Of those, my personal favorite is surely the fanfic exploration of this eternal question: What would happen if Kirk and Spock were abandoned by the Enterprise on an alien planet and Spock went into Pon Farr, the Vulcan urge to mate that must end in sexual satisfaction or death?

Um…interesting question. If you were Kirk, what would you do?

And therein lies the problem, at least for many people, with fan fiction: in asking the question “If you were in the Star Trek (or Buffy or X-Files or Lost or Vampire Chronicles) universe, what would you do?” the answer is too often, “Create a placeholder character in which I can insert myself!”

Enter Mary Sue.

From the Wikipedia article, I stumbled upon the delightful essay, “150 Years of Mary Sue” by Pat Pflieger in which Pflieger sets out the essence of what makes a Mary Sue character so incredibly annoying:

She’s amazingly intelligent, outrageously beautiful, adored by all around her — and absolutely detested by most reading her adventures. She’s Mary Sue, the most reviled character type in media fan fiction. Basically, she’s a character representing the author of the story, an avatar, the writer’s projection into an interesting world full of interesting people whom she watches weekly and thinks about daily. Sometimes the projections get processed into interesting characters, themselves. Usually, though, they don’t.

Many hate her, but she is alive in every fandom. She fences with Methos and Duncan MacLeod; she saves the Enterprise, the Voyager, or the fabric of time and space; she fights with Jim Ellison in defense of Cascade; she battles evil in Sunnydale alongside Buffy Sommers. She impresses the heroes of both The Girl and The Man from U.N.C.L.E.; she makes Ben Stone and Mike Logan of Law & Order go weak at the knees; Ham Tyler of V marvels at her strength; Jasper Jax of General Hospital is captivated by her; Benton Fraser of Due South palpitates when she is near; she rules the night of the Vampire Chronicles.

Though she doesn’t mention Bella Swan — the essay was written long before Twilight — Pflieger’s description not only fits Meyer’s heroine precisely, but encapsulates so neatly a quality that I’ve found grating for years.

(At this point, I can hear some Gentle Readers banging their heads on the keyboard, thinking I’m about to excoriate young adult fiction again and hold up Pride and Prejudice as the symbol of All That Is Better, but I swear I’m not.  Oh, FWIW, I’m sure there’s Pride and Prejudice fanfic out there too.  Naturally, I’m sure that otherwise straitlaced Austen fans indulge their fantasies involving some — ahem — persuasion between Darcy and Elizabeth, or, more entertainingly, between Darcy and Mr. Bingley.  The one I really, REALLY want to read, though, is Collins and Lady Catherine.)

I was just amused as heck with the Pflieger essay because as I read her description, I kept thinking of all the Mary Sues I’ve encountered in “mainstream” fiction over the years. Here are some of my favorites:

1. “I am Ayla, Hear Me Roar”

Okay, I loved Clan of the Cave Bear, and seriously, I must have read that book a zillion times from adolescence until a few years ago. Rich in its research, unpredictable in its plot, and haunting in its ending, it’s a book that keeps grabbing me even now…and I cannot say earnestly enough that Jean M. Auel should have STOPPED THERE and never written one single word more.

It’s not enough that Ayla learns survival on her own (in the first book) and teaches herself to hunt with the sling (in the first book), but Auel goes on (and on and on) in the subsequent books to have Ayla do all of the following:

• Invent the domestication of the horse, wolf, and feline
• Invent the medical practice of stitching a detached muscle
• Be co-inventor of the atlatl
• Invent rapid firestarting using iron pyrite and flint
• See into the future

2. Jennet, the Brilliant Female Scientist

This heroine of James Morrow’s The Last Witchfinder is a brilliant young scientist in the late 1600s to early 1700s, and despite the fact that she’s a girl, her equally brilliant, rich, and accomplished Aunt Isobel teaches her all about science, including how to read Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica in the original Latin. Additionally, Jennet…

• Lives with the Native Americans, whom she (of course) regards from a modern politically correct perspective before she escapes from them
• Meets a group of escaped slaves on a desert island, whom she (of course) regards them from a modern politically correct perspective before she leaves the island
• Seduces the young Ben Franklin and has a child with him
• Writes a monumental scientific treatise

Unfortunately, the book owes more than a little debt to the far more entertaining (and far funnier) novel Fanny: Being the True History of the Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones, by Erica Jong. Note: This book is…ah, well, suffice to say it’s written by Erica Jong. Don’t expect it to be a read-aloud at storytime unless your family storytime is a lot more interesting than ours is. Contains the best (and laugh-aloud funniest) catalogue of 18th-century terms for the pudenda ever written.

I know I kvetch too much about fiction, but bottom line, I guess some of my kvetching comes from the fact that I often feel cheated. I don’t have a hell of a lot of free time, so when I do, I don’t want to spend it reading about how delightfully charming someone is (when she’s not being adorably klutzy and adored by all the men — and some of the women — around her). I don’t really need my protagonists to be bland inserts for the reader or stand-ins for the author unless the author is prepared to deal with him- or herself honestly (or at least uniquely), not as an idealized tabula rasa on which both s/he and the reader write themselves.  Hell, I suspect that Philip Roth and John Irving have been doing little more than that for the entirety of their careers, and you can throw in J.D. Salinger on top of that pile as well, but what’s different about these characters is you could never call Alex Portnoy an idealized anything, nor would you confuse him with Irving’s Garp or Holden Caulfield.

Mostly, I feel deprived of a character’s unique voice in a Mary Sue story, you know? Has anyone else noticed that all too often, these characters speak with a cocky know-it-all bravado that even Will Smith would be embarrassed to read aloud? Pflieger comes up with some great examples here:

Mary Sue is the toughest character who ever lived — when she doesn’t exude whimsy. Janaris has delicate hands, but Methos has “seen deadly accurate knives thrown with this hand, necks broken with this hand, and dozens of Immortals lose their heads to a sleek, savagely swift blade gripped in this hand. … Jana was more than capable of taking care of herself.” And she has, killing “one of the best — and most treacherous — Immortals in the Game.” In Florida, Callisto has slain worse vampires than Buffy Sommers does in California: “Miami has it’s share of vampires, but they tend to be more evil.’” Rowan Michaels twice slams her dislocated shoulder back into place, each time staggering and swearing like 15 drunken sailors; she almost emasculates Methos when he calls her “girl”: “‘Never.’ she whispered in the silence of the room, as she slowly released her grip on his crotch. ‘Never call me *girl* again.’” She is all-too-familiar with “that icy cold spot she always felt just before the shit hit the fan”. Fearing that she’s “becoming terribly predictable,” she is reminded by a little nagging voice in her head that, “Predictable CAN get you dead.” Her mere presence bodes ill: seeing Rowan come into his bar, Joe Dawson cringes: “‘Ah, shit.’ he moaned under his breath and waited for her. *This is gonna be bad.* he thought.”

This is almost as wretched as the incredibly talented, born-on-a-battlefield-and-undiscovered-queen-of-the-planet Athyn Blackmantle in Blackmantle, Patricia Kennealy-Morrison’s disastrous sci-fantasy roman a clef, a heroine who declared something to the effect of, “In my culture, we don’t turn the other cheek — we snatch off both of yours.”

Reading that, I’m painfully reminded of a story told by one of my friends in the Society for Creative Anachronism.  We were sitting around one day when she told me that one of her friends had been returning from fighter practice when she was assaulted in a park. I now realize this was a Mary Sue story in the guise of an Amusing Anecdote. “Little did he know,” my SCA friend said — and I think she really did say “Little did he know” — “that this mugger was assaulting a Grand Edgemistress of the Seventh Level, a Knight of the Realm…” or whatever title she mentioned (I don’t really remember what it was; for all I know, it could be Knight of the Hollow Coconuts), “…and so Mary Sue fearlessly unsheathed her two-handed Claymore, which of course weighs something like thirty pounds, and said, ‘Have at thee, varlet!’ and he was SO AFRAID to see a Claymore — what amounts to thirty pounds of a sharpened steel bar — pointed at his chest that he ran away screaming…”

Blah, blah, blah…Your balls clank much?

I could go on, but I’d rather hear from other people. Whom should I add to this list? Who are some other notable Mary Sues in “mainstream” fiction?

Oh, and because I couldn’t resist, enjoy this picture:

---

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

• To be “Sued”
• Write What You Know
• Rant of the confused author
• Mary Jo Buttafuoco Opens Up About ’Long Island Lolita’

~ by adsoofmelk on July 6, 2008.