Thoughts about Mary Sue
So I'm writing Mary Sue Buffyfic, squicking myself out, and contemplating the Evolution of My Fanficcing Destiny. And this is what I come up with.
I started writing fanfic before I could, strictly speaking, write. The first fascination I had was with an LP musical story called "Nathaniel the Grublet." Did I identify with Nathaniel, the good one who learns his lesson? No! I identified with Tails, the leader of the gang of thieves. A curtain rod was my walking stick, and my imagination clothed me in the ragged tailcoat of my gallant and wicked hero. I moved from that to The Black Hole; and from that to Voltron. My sister and I made up stories together about the characters of that show, sometimes inserting ourselves as OCs. I even went so far once as to make a list of stories we'd made up and told each other over and over again, and some that really existed only in title form (such as "The Time Keith got the bwack-bwack-bwack pox"). Most of these stories were in the humor genre; we weren't ready to do angst.
Then when I got older, to satisfy my growing thirst for angst I dreamed stories about speaking with such tragic figures as Christa McAuliffe, Billy the Kid, and John F. Kennedy. I learned by trial and error to write original stories. I practiced writing, now and then, on fandoms. And then a few years ago I got online to discover a whole world of people who had been doing exactly the same thing, on any number of subjects...fics on TV shows, songs, books, movies, even real life, I discover. And I have come to draw two conclusions from this experience of fannishness.
1) It's humbling, not to say humiliating, to find out not only that one is not the only one who writes fannish stories, but that hundreds of thousands of regular people do too. And whether their writing is bad or good, the state of consciousness it all comes from tends to vary very little. And here I was congratulating myself on being fannish in a vacuum!
2) Being humbled is salutary, but it can lead to another form of pride: I miss the days in which I had no shame or self-consciousness at the idea of writing myself as a character in a fan story. It's a fan story: it's fantasizing, it's indulging your consciousness in the mythos of another person's creation, and though it may be other things as well, it's usually a vehicle for expressing your own personal life-preoccupations through characters you either identify with or want to know more about. Why be ashamed of taking it that one little step further and putting yourself into the story as an OC?
Recently Rebecca, in her "fannish" LJ, linked to someone (I forget who) who described a Mary Sue as a story in which the OC distorted the weave of the fandom's universe, obscuring or morphing the canon characters, and thereby misusing the canon's mythos altogether. (I could be remembering it wrong, so blame me if it's not right.)
But even without inserting an OC, the line between writing a brilliant story in a fandom's universe and misusing the canon's mythos is so fine that there's a battle being fought between fans on all the fandom's fronts: slash, OCs, shipping in general, angsty dark noirness....And everybody's got an ego, it's just a fact of life, so everybody on some level gets that little squick about other people's fantasies. Depending on how well the story in question is written, one can to varying degrees ignore the squick and read. I say: if you can't ignore the squick, don't read it. Life is too short. By the same token, why chafe at the false sense of shame that comes from writing something -- anything -- that, rather than being its own canon, indulges a fantasy about another? Si peccas, pecca fortiter.
So God help me, I'm writing Mary Sue Buffyfic. And squicking myself out. But I think I know wherefore the squick. And other than that, I'm having fun, so I'll plow merrily on...even if I never show my story to anyone. Ever.
So I'm writing Mary Sue Buffyfic, squicking myself out, and contemplating the Evolution of My Fanficcing Destiny. And this is what I come up with.
I started writing fanfic before I could, strictly speaking, write. The first fascination I had was with an LP musical story called "Nathaniel the Grublet." Did I identify with Nathaniel, the good one who learns his lesson? No! I identified with Tails, the leader of the gang of thieves. A curtain rod was my walking stick, and my imagination clothed me in the ragged tailcoat of my gallant and wicked hero. I moved from that to The Black Hole; and from that to Voltron. My sister and I made up stories together about the characters of that show, sometimes inserting ourselves as OCs. I even went so far once as to make a list of stories we'd made up and told each other over and over again, and some that really existed only in title form (such as "The Time Keith got the bwack-bwack-bwack pox"). Most of these stories were in the humor genre; we weren't ready to do angst.
Then when I got older, to satisfy my growing thirst for angst I dreamed stories about speaking with such tragic figures as Christa McAuliffe, Billy the Kid, and John F. Kennedy. I learned by trial and error to write original stories. I practiced writing, now and then, on fandoms. And then a few years ago I got online to discover a whole world of people who had been doing exactly the same thing, on any number of subjects...fics on TV shows, songs, books, movies, even real life, I discover. And I have come to draw two conclusions from this experience of fannishness.
1) It's humbling, not to say humiliating, to find out not only that one is not the only one who writes fannish stories, but that hundreds of thousands of regular people do too. And whether their writing is bad or good, the state of consciousness it all comes from tends to vary very little. And here I was congratulating myself on being fannish in a vacuum!
2) Being humbled is salutary, but it can lead to another form of pride: I miss the days in which I had no shame or self-consciousness at the idea of writing myself as a character in a fan story. It's a fan story: it's fantasizing, it's indulging your consciousness in the mythos of another person's creation, and though it may be other things as well, it's usually a vehicle for expressing your own personal life-preoccupations through characters you either identify with or want to know more about. Why be ashamed of taking it that one little step further and putting yourself into the story as an OC?
Recently Rebecca, in her "fannish" LJ, linked to someone (I forget who) who described a Mary Sue as a story in which the OC distorted the weave of the fandom's universe, obscuring or morphing the canon characters, and thereby misusing the canon's mythos altogether. (I could be remembering it wrong, so blame me if it's not right.)
But even without inserting an OC, the line between writing a brilliant story in a fandom's universe and misusing the canon's mythos is so fine that there's a battle being fought between fans on all the fandom's fronts: slash, OCs, shipping in general, angsty dark noirness....And everybody's got an ego, it's just a fact of life, so everybody on some level gets that little squick about other people's fantasies. Depending on how well the story in question is written, one can to varying degrees ignore the squick and read. I say: if you can't ignore the squick, don't read it. Life is too short. By the same token, why chafe at the false sense of shame that comes from writing something -- anything -- that, rather than being its own canon, indulges a fantasy about another? Si peccas, pecca fortiter.
So God help me, I'm writing Mary Sue Buffyfic. And squicking myself out. But I think I know wherefore the squick. And other than that, I'm having fun, so I'll plow merrily on...even if I never show my story to anyone. Ever.
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